‘My help?’ he says. ‘Katherine, you know I’ll do everything I can to protect you from Riven and all his kind. I’d die for you. But . . . it seems to me you are putting yourself in harm’s way and for no very good reason.’

She looks at him for a long moment.

‘If I go back to being Kit, then Margaret Cornford dies.’

He frowns. This is uncertain territory for him, but she can see he is trying.

‘She is already dead,’ he says. ‘You are not keeping her alive.’

Katherine shakes her head. She is confused and none of this is easy. It does not make complete sense, even to her, and she cannot explain it to him properly. All she knows is that she must save Margaret Cornford and to do that, she must become Margaret Cornford, with all that that entails. It is her task. This way she might redeem herself in part for the girl’s death. She had not deserved to die so harshly, so alone.

‘I am, Thomas,’ she says. ‘I am.’

‘But don’t you understand?’ he says. ‘Don’t you understand? What it means? If you are Margaret Cornford?’

He glares at her. For a moment she is frightened of him, the way he looms over her, his ferocity.

‘If Richard Fakenham is still alive,’ he spits, ‘then you must marry him.’

She takes a step back and stands silent for a moment, suddenly unable to speak, as if winded. Dear God. Why had she not thought of this?

‘Then I must marry him,’ she hears herself say, though her voice fades to nothing as she speaks.

Thomas retreats. He no longer glares. Instead there are tears in his eyes. He puts his hand to his hair, pushing back his worsted cap. His face grows pale.

‘Marry him?’ he whispers.

She can feel her own tears welling over her eyelashes. She nods and they splash her cheeks.

‘But . . .’ she starts. ‘But we must find out. We must find out if he is alive before we – before we . . . Oh God.’

But Thomas is gone. He turns and walks away without a backward glance.

And now the tears really come. They fall from her chin and though she wipes them with her sleeve she cannot help sobbing aloud and so she hardly hears the messenger, mud-flecked, fearful, on a near-dead horse that clatters past her on his way to the castle, though the news, when she hears it from the innkeeper of the White Hart, is a distraction.

The Earl of Warwick’s army has been crushed, scattered to the wind.