‘You know Giles Riven has switched sides again?’ he asks. ‘Gone back to the Queen after Wakefield. By Christ, I’d love to have one last try at him. For all that he has done to me, for all that he has done to mine, I wish he were dead and already enjoying his time with the devil in hell. Do you suppose he will be there? With the Queen, I mean?’

Of course Thomas has no idea.

‘He has cost us sorely.’ Sir John goes on. ‘Sorely. But we have taxed him too. His men came to surround the house, you know, to drive us out. As soon as we heard the news from Sandal, we knew those northern bastards’d be coming our way, so we were ready, we thought. Then they went through Newark instead, and they were so keen on plundering the south they didn’t bother to ford the river. We thought we were safe. Life was getting back to normal, or as normal as it could be.

‘And then they came. They caught Goodwife Popham. Down in the village.

‘Geoffrey and Brampton John and Little John were here in the hall, and Elizabeth, you remember her, Thomas? Geoffrey’s daughter. She came running to fetch help. I reckon now that they’d let her go just to come and get us. We snatched up whatever we could, thinking it was just a party of latecomers gone wild on their way south.

‘We didn’t bother with harness or anything, and Geoffrey, well, of course he was worried. It was his wife they had. So we ran down to the village. We could hear her screaming in one of the cottages, but there wasn’t anybody about, so, well, I suppose we should have seen it for what it was. The first arrow knocked Brampton John off his feet. The second went straight through Geoffrey’s eye. Dropped him just like a bull. Christ. He’d been with me forever, you know? And they killed him, just like that.’ He snaps his fingers. ‘Bastards,’ he says.

There is a long silence. Katherine wipes away a tear. She knows she is not supposed to know these people Sir John speaks about, but she cannot help herself.

‘I killed one,’ Sir John goes on. ‘The bowman, thank Christ, before he could loose another arrow. And Richard got another. The others rode away. Richard took the bowman’s horse, Little John the other horse. They went after them. Then I thought, too late: My God, it’s a trap. To get us out of the house. I ran back. Fast as I could.’ Sir John’s face is grey with shame and regret. ‘I got back just in time to see them riding off with Liz over a saddle. They’d set a fire in the roof and one in the stables and the horses were screaming. I had to make a choice.’