He throws the lump in the fire where it sits for a moment until one of the archers hoicks it out with a broken arrow shaft and takes it for himself.

Sir John steps into the firelight.

‘It’s still Lent, man,’ he barks. ‘It’s good to be away from daily temptations. Good to be on your mettle. Now, where can we find Hastings?’

The captain stands. Sir John has that effect on some men.

‘You’ve just missed him, sir. He’s gone up to the river with Lord Fitzwalter—’

‘Fitzwalter?’ Sir John demands. ‘By God! I’ve not seen him since Rouen. What’s he doing here? Is he with Warwick?’

‘Yes, sir. He’s taken the bridge – after a bit of a scrap, I hear – and now he’s got all our carpenters and coopers trying to repair it.’

‘How far is this river?’ Sir John asks.

The Welshman shrugs.

‘Half a league? That way.’

He gestures northwards. Sir John wonders if they ought not to go up and find this Fitzwalter, but the Welshman is unsure.

‘No place for a lady,’ he says, nodding at Katherine, ‘nor a blind man, if you’ll pardon me. You can stop here by the fire, such as it is, until William Hastings returns? If it is him you want to see, my lady?’

Just then the first wounded men limp back from the mêlée at the bridge, and behind them there is a cart carrying those who cannot walk. Men get up and clear them a space, but they stare, stock-still when they have done so, and there is silence now. Arrow wounds mostly, Thomas sees, but also some men clutching their faces with blood on their hands. He can smell it, and he feels that familiar fear again. He does not want to be here.

‘Had to clear a few of Somerset’s men from the bridge,’ a blue-liveried vintenar tells them. ‘And they didn’t want to go.’

The wounded men are unloaded from the cart and placed in the mud by the fire. Some need to be carried in their cloaks.

‘What d’you want me to do with them?’ the Welsh captain asks the vintenar.

‘Haven’t you got a surgeon?’ he replied. ‘Heard you had.’

The Welshman scratches his new-grown beard.

‘We had a surgeon, all right,’ he says. ‘Lovely fellow he was, but we buried him outside Leicester.’

There is a pause. Both men look down at the wounded and Thomas can see them thinking that the sooner they die, the better.

But now Katherine is among them.

‘Are there many more to come?’ she asks.

‘That’s the lot. For the moment,’ the vintenar supposes. He stares at her with his mouth open and Thomas sees the effect she has on men. She bends over each of the wounded and makes a quick decision on each.