The terrible sights continue as they go north: a convent stripped of everything; a line of new graves under the snow in a churchyard; an ugly man’s head perched on a stone wall; three babies in the bottom of a well. Near Lichfield they see a body thrown high in the trees and Katherine asks how he thinks it came to be there. He doesn’t know.

And now everyone they meet has a story of the northerners’ cruelty, each worse than the last, each defying belief, and hatred of the Queen and her adherents is everywhere.

He wonders how the canons would have survived the Queen’s northerners. He imagines them ringing that bell, and then what? They’d probably have opened the gates just as they had with Riven. And the northerners would have come in and smashed everything, stolen what they could, burned everything else. They’d’ve burned his psalter, he supposes. Or stolen it. He hardly cares. Bloody thing. All that time he’d spent on it. He’d probably have done the same thing. He can picture his table chopped and burned for firewood. And what about the sisters? What would the northerners have made of them?

He can easily imagine.

It grows cold again. The rain turns to sleet and then snow, spindling down from a grey sky, and Katherine pulls the cloak up around her ears. They cross the River Trent at Newark where they had stayed on their way down to Wales, and from the river’s east bank they see no more burned buildings, but men still peer at them from their cottages, and everyone is armed with something, and everyone is afraid.

Lincoln has been spared, but the Watch is alert, gathered around their braziers, and when they stop Thomas and Katherine they ask questions about what the Earl of March is doing, what the Earl of Warwick is doing, and the whereabouts of the King and the Queen. Thomas and Katherine can tell them little, other than of what happened at Mortimer’s Cross, and second-hand reports of this latest fight at St Albans, which saw Warwick’s men scattered and the person of the King returned to the Queen.

‘We heard that the Queen’s army means to take London,’ one of the men says, half asking, half telling. ‘But that the city will not open her gates, and we heard the Earl of March who is now the Duke of York is hurrying from the west with his army to relieve the city?’

Thomas nods. That is most likely what is happening, he supposes.

‘Will the Queen make a fight of it down south?’ one of them asks.