‘It’s a mercy,’ one of the archers says. ‘I’d hope someone’d do the same for me in that case.’

‘Christ,’ Thomas cannot stop himself breathing.

‘I would have tried to do something for them,’ Katherine whispers, ‘if they had not spent the last days trying to kill me.’

Grylle sends a man on horseback to the camp with them to report what has happened and they take to their saddles again and follow the path through the valley. They are almost too tired to talk. They pass a hamlet and then a soldiers’ camp of tents. Men stare them as they pass. They are Hastings’s men, and March’s men, and Thomas feels dizzy with relief, but he cannot help but wonder why Katherine said she was Margaret Cornford.

She looks at him helplessly and gestures to her dress.

‘It was all I could think of,’ she says. She closes her eyes and shakes her head.

Thomas says nothing. What could she have done? Said she was someone else? Who, though? He opens his mouth to tell her that, but then stops. It wouldn’t help. Besides, what is done is done. They ride on.

Beyond the camp is a castle: a clutch of grey-stone battlemented towers bosomed with bare-branched trees, on a steep bailey a little off the road to the west. Behind it rises a line of hills.

‘Wigmore Castle,’ their guide says. When they arrive at the gatehouse he names them to the Captain of the Watch as Thomas Iverington and Lady Margaret Cornford though no one appears to care very much for anything they have to say that does not concern the whereabouts, numbers and disposition of Tudor’s army.

‘Can we see William Hastings?’ Thomas asks after he’s told the captain all he knows.

The captain grumbles something about Hastings being too busy to see anyone and takes them to the crowded inner ward where they can hear a flute being played in one of the solars above. Someone is plucking strings too, and a man is singing in a high voice. Thomas asks for news of the engagement outside Sandal Castle.

‘It was what it was,’ the captain says, scuffing his boots. ‘A disaster. Duke of York: killed in the field. Earl of Salisbury: captured then executed by that bastard the Bastard of Exeter. Earl of Rutland: murdered by that black-faced butcher Clifford. And how many men like you and me killed where we stood? Who knows? Thousands.’

‘But what about Sir John Fakenham? Do you know if he was there?’

The captain shakes his head.

‘Never heard of him,’ he says, and he leaves them in a dark corner by a doorway that leads to the castle latrine. Thomas puts the bags down and Katherine leans against him for a moment. Thomas stands stock-still; he places an arm around her, and they stand for a while, neither moving, neither needing to say a thing.