‘God damn it!’ Sir John groans. ‘Come on, help me up, my lad, and let’s get to it.’

Thomas helps Sir John into his armour. It is a snug fit. He has changed shape since the armour was made, and the straps pinch.

‘Hang on,’ Sir John says, stopping him from strapping on the gorget. He takes a last mouthful of stale ale.

‘Always get so bloody thirsty,’ he says.

Thomas straps his own plates on, foot then shin then thigh, and then the same for the left leg. Next he gathers up his bow, arrow shafts and helmet. He takes his new cloak, looks at it, knows he’ll never be able to loose his bow while wearing it, and so leaves it with the rest of his things. He is just about to leave when he turns and slings the ledger over his shoulder. He unwinds a string from his wrist and nocks his bow.

Wounded men are coming back from the river’s edge by the time they are ready, some with blade wounds, one retching blood while another clutches his handless arm in the crook of his elbow, pressing it to his chest, his eyes rolling into his skull. The spilled blood still steams in the bitter morning chill.

‘It’s the Flower of Craven,’ one says as he limps past. ‘The bloody bastard Flower of bloody Craven.’

‘Who’re they?’ Thomas asks Sir John, who is looking grim.

‘Butcher Clifford’s men,’ he says. ‘He’s the one who cut down young Rutland after the battle outside Wakefield. His household men call themselves the Flower of Craven, though not everyone else is so kind. Saints! This is going to be a long day.’

On the riverbank the bodies left overnight are invisible under a shroud of snow, but now there are new corpses under the trees and the bridge is choked with the dead and wounded. Men in Fitzwalter’s blue and Warwick’s red liveries lie entwined together, studded with arrows. Those who have not been killed have been driven off the bridge and they are now sheltering behind the trees and the spars and barrels left by the carpenters the night before.

On the other side of the river the northerners have piled up the carts and barrels and spars to make themselves a fortified wall.

‘Christ’s cross,’ is all Sir John says, and: ‘We’ll never get across now.’

Five or six billmen are wheeling a cart towards the bridge, cowering behind it as arrows boom through its timbers.

‘Not going to do them much good, that,’ Sir John says as the cart’s front right-hand wheel jams against a dead body in the road. A man behind the cart peers around to try to work out what to do next and an arrow hammers into the frame by his ear. He leaps back and looks around for guidance. There is none on offer.