‘He seems to know you.’

Before the old man can say anything more, the men behind him seize him and force him to his knees and the executioner – a butcher by trade – hacks off his head just as if he is killing a turtle.

Katherine turns away and Grylle laughs and tries to put an arm around her.

Afterwards someone sets the old man’s head on the steps of the butter cross to general laughter. It is done in revenge, someone says, for the execution of the Earl of Salisbury, and the head is canted around so that it faces the city of York to the northeast, ‘so that they can look one another in the eye’. Later someone tampers with it, a madwoman who washes his face and brushes his hair and lights more than a hundred candles around the base of the cross. No one knows where she’s come by the candles, and since they are expensive, they are quickly stolen, and soon the birds are squabbling over what remains unburied of the late Queen’s husband.

Over the following days Katherine cannot stop thinking about him, but nor, it seems, can Grylle stop thinking about her. He is around the inn all the time, usually bringing messages summoning Thomas to the castle where William Hastings and the new Duke of York are plotting their next move.

To escape Grylle’s company Katherine has resorted to assisting with the wounded, who lie in the guildhall and in the hall of the inn. The surgeons are doing what they can for the wounded men of rank whom they think may live, but for the others less fortunate, it is the women who’ve traipsed around the country after them who are called into service, and Katherine assists an elderly, broad-waisted woman who’s followed the army to France, she says, and had to repair her man after a fight more than once. She has a wen on her chin, and she says she knows how to concoct all the cures and salves she needs from hedgerow plants, and those such as yarrow, camomile or lavender. It is February, though, and none of these are available, and in their absence she pours hot wine on smaller wounds and then seals them with dry bindings and prayers.

‘Sometimes seems to work,’ she says.

But other wounds are too serious.

‘I have seen surgeons stitch flesh together as a wife might mend her man’s hose,’ the old woman tells Katherine, ‘but I lack the art and these fingers are not so dainty as once they were.’

She holds them up: they are lumpen and gnarled like tree roots.

‘You have a go,’ she tells Katherine and so Katherine tries her hand, stitching together the lips of a wound an archer has made in his own thigh with his knife while drunk.