Katherine blinks away the tears that gather in her lashes. Richard says nothing. She peels away the last wrap of linen and there are his eyelids, sunken and gummed together, crusted with what looks like sand and blood. A smell rises from them, a sort of sweet fug.

Sir John sucks his teeth.

Katherine fetches the last of the wine and some fresh linen from the coffer in the room above and she washes Richard’s eyes, wiping away the crust and the traces of blood with a good pad of the material so that she does not have to feel the emptiness. When she has finished she sees that there is no real need to cover his eyes, except that it is such a terrible shock to see the empty sockets. So she cuts some dry linen with her knife and reties it around his head. She can smell Richard now and she thinks how he needs a wash, and she wonders whether it will be her task to insist on this kind of thing in the future.

‘Where did you learn your skills, my lady?’ Sir John asks.

She does not answer. She does not understand that Sir John is talking to her.

‘There,’ she says. ‘Better, I think.’

And now Sir John is looking at her through narrowed eyes, but then Thomas returns with some wood for the fire and the body of a heavy duck with a limp neck. Sir John cackles and they set to work gutting and plucking it.

‘Your swineherd is back,’ Thomas tells them. ‘And he says the others will be back soon.’

Sir John nods.

‘To my shame I sent them to Lincoln,’ he says, ‘since I could not guarantee their safety with Riven and his men in the Hundred.’

The next day Katherine catches the scent of wood smoke in the air and there are some women bent-backed in the fields and a sense that everything might return to the way it was. She gets Thomas to carry the linen up the old lane to the river, where she rolls up her skirts and sets about the washing. It is so cold she can stand it for no more than a few minutes at a time and is pleased when one of the women from the village finds her way to the riverbank and agrees to help for a cost Katherine would gladly double. At the end of the day they wring out the not very much cleaner linen and spread it on the hawthorn branches and when Katherine returns to the hall exhausted, there is soup and ale and news from the south.

The Queen’s army has not taken London, but has turned and is making its way back up north, to York, just as William Hastings had hoped.

‘Praise Jesus,’ Sir John says, ‘thought we had better ready ourselves lest they come this way.’

‘Won’t they take the shortest route?’ Thomas asks.