All around them are ranged men in full harness, some of it field armour perhaps – the mismatched bits and pieces they’ve scrounged, looted or had adapted for their own purposes – but armour nonetheless. Every man has steel gloves, a helmet, a staff weapon, a hammer of some sort, a sword. Thomas has nothing save a scruffy travelling coat and a blunt sword.

‘It is all I have,’ Thomas explains.

Hastings nods.

‘Take my horse,’ he says, gesturing to the squire, a skinny boy whose livery tabard hangs to his knees.

‘Won’t you need it?’ Thomas asks.

‘Not if we triumph,’ Hastings replied. ‘And if we don’t . . . well, I am in no mood for flight. If we lose today, I’d have nothing to fly to, in any case.’

‘But what will I do with it?’

‘I want you to act as my eyes on the field. Indulge me, Thomas. March and I have come to think of you as our good-luck talisman. Since that time at Newnham – do you remember? – he will not go happily into battle without you.’

Thomas nods. Is this normal? He has no idea. He is pleased to lift himself up into the saddle of the horse though, to separate himself from the fighting men. To feel the warmth between his knees. Over their steaming heads he can see the water meadows, still in shadows, all the way down to the marshy acres and the two willows.

‘Ride forward and tell His Grace we are in position now, will you?’

There are trumpeters to do that, Thomas knows, and heralds already riding to and fro, and it would hardly take a moment of Edward’s time to turn his head and look to see where Hastings’s flag is held aloft by a bearded man-at-arms. But Thomas sees this task is extended as a favour, and he thanks Hastings for his unexpected solicitousness.

‘Not a bit of it. Not a bit of it. As I say, my lord of March will want to know you are with us.’

Thomas leaves him and rides forward. Men glance up at him as he goes. Are they envious? He supposes so. He knows he would be. But then these are grim-faced men, shuffling forward as if keen not to miss the chance to swing an axe at another man. He turns the horse southwards just as the sun comes up over the eastern hills, setting the mist that billows among the trees aglow as if on fire.