Sir John grunts to admit the possibility but the following days are spent anxiously. They have hoarded as much food as they can buy: apples, smoked mutton, dried peas and beans, three barrels of ale. Thomas has his new bow and two more sheaves of arrows and he has collected up the quarrels and the crossbow stands by the door, ready for use.

Then they wait by the damped fire and hope the smoke does not broadcast their presence and Katherine sleeps, and thinks, and prepares herself.

As the days pass, the tension slowly tightens, and they take turns at the windows and one of them is always awake through the night, but then there comes a point when nothing has happened and they begin to believe the Queen’s army has passed them by, and then, the next week, when it snows again, there is a day afterwards when the sky is clear and blue, and they gather outside to listen to distant bells, from as far away as Lincoln perhaps, sounding in the icy air.

‘Is it a warning?’ Thomas asks, his breath fogging his face.

‘Too fast,’ Richard says. It is good to hear him have an opinion on something. He looks better now that he is shaved and washed and his eyes trouble him less since Katherine washed them, and while the others cover their eyes from the sun on the snow, he stands perfectly still and faces south.

‘I think they must be to celebrate something,’ he says.

‘But what?’ Sir John asks.

They must wait until the next day to find out. It is another friar, in grey this time, garrulous and travelling south, who has met a man travelling north, a Scot, who robbed him.

‘I thank St Matthew that he did not take my beads,’ the friar says, touching the loop at his belt. ‘Though he took all I had to eat and shared my fire to cook it over.’

In exchange for the food the Scot had shared his news though, and once they set beans and ale before the friar, he divulges it as if it were worth gold.

‘Only that in London Edward of March has been proclaimed king!’

Sir John whistles.

‘Edward of March is king!’ he says. ‘So that is what the bells were for.’

‘Aye,’ the friar agrees. ‘They did not ring them sooner for fear of attracting the attention of the Queen’s army.

There is a long moment while they consider this. Katherine remembers the lanky boy with the big feet and the strange leer she could not understand at the time. What has God seen in him that he should be king? Something that Henry lacked, she supposes: some vigour, some youth. A fresh start perhaps, a new green shoot in the garden, but then what about the old growths? What will happen to all those dukes and earls and lords that fought for Henry in the past?