The footmen are starting to move out of the castle gatehouse to gather in the deer park beyond and in the confusion Thomas finds a loaf and an earthenware ewer of ale that a woman has set aside under a table, and after a moment’s consideration he gives in to temptation and takes it. As he hurries away he feels the black eyes of the woman’s girl fall on him more in sorrow than anger, and he leaves her the candle in recompense.

He finds Katherine still up in the solar and, with no maid to help her, she is wrestling with her unfamiliar clothes. He gives her the ale and bread and they sit on a chest eating until a messenger sent by Hastings appears.

‘You’re to come,’ he says. He waits while Thomas puts his head through Hastings’s fulled tabard and straightens it over his still-damp coat.

‘Goodbye,’ he says, lost for a moment as to what he should call her. She looks at him with her calm blue eyes.

‘Godspeed, Thomas,’ she says.

He cannot tell if she is putting on a performance in front of Hastings’s messenger, but then she adds:

‘I’ve no fear you’ll not come back. You are immortal. How else to explain it all?’

He wishes he were so sure.

When Thomas emerges through the doorway of the keep, the courtyard below is loud with drummer boys and clarion callers and a party of heralds in blue cloaks is gathered by the gatehouse. The Earl of March, now Duke of York, is already mounted, on a destrier. He is wearing harness of fluted plate with a white feather plume on the crown of his helmet, and in the shade of the curtain walls his harness seems to gather all the available light and distil it into something pure, something angelic almost, except that he carries a cruel beaked hammer over his shoulder and a battle axe at his hip.

Next to him is William Hastings, in less showy armour and no plume, his visor open, his handsome face pale. Behind him a man carries the fishtailed battle standard bearing the picture of a white hairy dog or some such, and behind is a line of perhaps a hundred men in plate armour under their own banners.

The horsemen move off with a tuneless timpani: clonking hooves, the scrape of iron shoes on stone and of men in harness. They pass through the gatehouse and ride out over the bridge to join the footmen waiting across the road south. Thomas walks behind the messenger. What does Hastings want of him? Whatever it is, Thomas knows he’ll not be able to provide it. His hands are shaking at the thought of what is to come.