Underfoot the snow in the yard is hard and a fat lip of ice hangs from a waterspout. Katherine feels the cold with every breath. She climbs into the side-saddle and settles herself just as she saw Margaret do, and then she waits while Thomas tips the boy for having put oil on the horses’ hooves.

After a moment she becomes aware that Thomas is gazing at her. When she turns on him he looks away, as if embarrassed to be caught staring.

‘What?” she says.

‘You look very different,’ he says.

‘I am wearing a dress,’ she points out.

‘I know,’ he says. ‘Only – only I had not realised how – I had not realised that you would look so good in it, is what I mean.’

He blurts these last words and she cannot help but smile.

They start out through the town gates and follow the road northwards, the country around them clamped in snow, silent except for the river that slides by alongside them like a rill of black silk. Immediately the road rises. The wind picks up, plucks at their hems, ruffles the horses’ manes. They ride in silence, Thomas’s shoulders hunched. Occasionally he turns to check on her.

She wonders what they will find when they return to Marton Hall.

‘What if it is already in Somerset’s hands?’ she calls. Thomas halts his horse and waits for her to draw abreast.

‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘But Sir John will have left word, and he will want to know what has happened to us. What happened to Walter. And Dafydd. And Owen.’

‘And Margaret,’ she adds.

Thomas nods.

‘Yes. And Margaret,’ he says, and they ride on, each wrapped in their own thoughts. Now all Katherine can think about is Margaret. Even her hands in these gloves remind her of Margaret. She is on Margaret’s horse, in Margaret’s clothes, and sometimes she thinks Margaret is talking to her, telling her something.

A little while later they pass a tower on a hill a short distance off the road to the south. Beyond the next rise is a mean little cottage where there is no one to be seen, not in the cottage, nor in the furlongs beyond. They get off their horses. Inside embers smoulder under pale ashes.

Thomas shouts for the owners but there is no answer.

‘Can you feel someone watching us?’ he asks.

She senses it too, and looks around, but she finds nothing. The wind soughs in the trees. They eat some of the bread they’ve brought and pour away the ale for tasting of horses’ urine, and then they mount up and carry on over a wooden bridge. Here Thomas stops and gets off his horse. He bends and traces his finger in the frost-stiffened mud.

‘Horses,’ he says. ‘About ten of them, well shod. I have been seeing their prints on the road since Brecon.’