‘The Queen’s army is pillaging the north,’ he tells her. ‘A man has come from an abbey south of Lincoln, near Boston, where he says the monks have buried all their valuables, including their vestments and plate.’

‘They are looting churches?’

‘And every beggar and pauper in the land has joined them, he says, like rats from their holes, and they’ve been raping women and torturing men to reveal the whereabouts of their valuables. He says they have cut a swathe through the country thirty miles wide in which everything is burned or dead or worse.’

She thinks of Marton Hall.

‘But what of the Earl of Warwick?’ she asks. ‘Where is he while all this is happening?’

‘He is raising troops, they say, and is supposed to be keeping London.’

Keeping London. That is typical of the Earl of Warwick, Katherine thinks.

‘But I don’t understand why we are languishing here,’ she asks, ‘instead of moving to stop the northerners?’

‘There are provisions to be got,’ Thomas supposes. ‘And men need time to heal.’

Katherine thinks about it.

‘Perhaps if people hear how bad the northerners are, they will be more eager to join Warwick? Or lend him money at any rate. Perhaps he is waiting until word spreads.’

Thomas is impressed. They walk on through the streets – Katherine is slowly becoming used to the pattens she has bought – and across the marketplace to their inn. Once more she thinks of Owen Tudor’s death, and Thomas is just as preoccupied.

‘Katherine,’ he begins. ‘I mean, of course, Margaret. What are you going to do?’

She shakes her head. Her headdress is weighty, awkward, always threatening to come off. Her dress hampers her movement too, and she has no idea how to behave in front of others, and is aware of their gaze, all the time, raking her body, judging her clothes, the way she walks, moves, tilts her head. Even Thomas judges her, she realises when she catches his all-too-rare glances, and she feels she is somehow failing him, and so a distance has opened up between them. She would dearly love to cast aside the dress and find some hose and a jacket and go about as Kit once more.

‘I just don’t know,’ she says. ‘I just don’t know. It depends on so many different things. And on what you are going to do.’

Thomas shrugs.

‘William Hastings—’ he begins and then sees her expression and falters.

They let a cart rumble by.

‘I know what you make of him,’ he goes on, ‘and I cannot say I approve of everything that he does, but he has been a good friend to me. To us. Without him, where would we be now?’