They set their horses after the picket and join the column on the road. Companies are walking behind their carts, moving with all the speed the carters can manage, but the oxen are no longer fresh, and the road is bad. Progress is trudging slow. By the time they reach Doncaster, they are told that Hastings has already moved on to Pontefract.

‘In a hurry, isn’t he?’ Sir John asks himself. ‘Don’t suppose they can spare a day, feeding this lot.’

All around them men are pale-faced, pinched, hungry, anxious and cold. Winter is no time to fight a war.

‘We must catch him at Pomfret, then,’ Sir John says.

‘Can we make it by nightfall?’ Katherine asks. The sky above is uncertain, but Sir John is adamant and they set off riding alongside the column once more, leaving Doncaster behind, constantly having to step off the road where it is blocked, broken or flooded. Messengers pass them as best they can up and down the column’s length, carrying missives from the front to the back, a full day’s ride apart.

After two hours they raise Pontefract Castle. It towers over the surrounding countryside, the squared crenellated towers drawing the eye from distant miles, surrounded by outbuildings and pastures and paddocks, all crammed with tents, carts, flocks of sheep, lines of horses and oxen. The snow here has been churned to thick mud and there are so many men milling about looking for food, ale, anything to burn, that it is impossible to move within bowshot of the gatehouse. The gloom is banished and then made worse by a thousand smoking fires, and any peace made impossible by men talking, shouting, singing, hammering on armour, sharpening weapons, playing drums, flutes and tabors. Dogs bark incessantly.

They push their way through the throng, looking for badges they recognise, flags they know, asking for Hastings. Eventually they find men squatting by a fire under the sodden slough of Hastings’s flag. Thomas recognises their captain, another Thomas, a Welshman, who looks tired and hungry, and his men no better – worse in fact. They are sitting on their helmets in the mud around meagre fires of smoking green wood. At least the Welshman has a hunk of bread. He brightens when he sees Thomas.

‘Thomas! There you are! Haven’t got any food, have you? No? Any ale? No? Oof. Stupid question. Stupid time of year to be out in the field, this is. We should all be at home. Tucked up, like. And we aren’t allowed to take anything without paying for it, you know, are we? On pain of death. Drowning, it is. And then when you do manage to scrape together the money they’re asking for it, the bread’ – he holds up a piece of dark loaf as evidence – ‘the bread is bloody disgusting.’