‘I don’t know,’ he answers after a while. ‘I want the hall to be exactly as we left it. I want Sir John to be sitting by the fire, with Geoffrey on hand, and Goodwife Popham still fussing about her daughter’s marriage. I want to smell apple-wood smoke and that mix of roasting pork and baking bread and those herbs she used to put in the bed upstairs. I want, I suppose, everything to be the same. Something calm and orderly amidst all this. All the things we’ve seen. Everything that’s happened.’

Still he cannot tell her what he really wants.

She smiles weakly.

‘It has become what people call home, hasn’t it?’ she says.

He nods.

After a moment she asks the question he has been avoiding all through the journey.

‘And what of Richard?’ she asks. ‘What of him?’

He kicks the horse on and they ride for a moment before he feels he can control his voice.

‘I imagine him out riding,’ he says, at length. ‘I imagine him out riding with a hawk on his fist. A hobby hawk or something.’

He tries a smile too, but feels it’s more like a grimace, in keeping with the wintry landscape. He will stop at the gate, he thinks. That is what he will do. He will stop at the gate and turn and ride away, back to Hastings and the Earl of March who appreciate him, who would not expect him to stand and watch while a lie is practised.

‘They will see through me in an instant, won’t they?’ Katherine says. ‘They will see me as merely Kit in a dress.’

‘No,’ Thomas says, and he is right, for she no longer looks like Kit in a dress. She looks beautiful, and not merely to him. He saw the way other men reacted to her on the road, and in the inns. Yet half of him is hoping Sir John and Richard will see through her, and will think she is someone other than Lady Margaret Cornford, and will therefore not risk the marriage, lest someone else discovers the truth.

‘How do I look, Thomas?’ she asks. ‘Tell me.’

He looks at her again. His eyes are slow, as if he has a cold, and he cannot mask his misery.

‘You look like a lady,’ he says. ‘He will not think you are Kit in a dress. Only—’ He stops.

‘Only what?’

He takes a deep breath.

‘Only I will think that,’ he says. ‘I will think it for however long that lasts.’

She does not answer for a moment. He thinks he has said too much, or perhaps too little. Then she turns and there are tears in her eyes and she looks more awkward and more beautiful than ever and he feels his heart gripped with pain.