The first carter tries to protest, but his whip is quickly wrestled from his hands and the other seven are glad to leave him to it, and while they unload their carts on the road, one of the men swings his axe and kills the animal and the noise reminds Thomas of the Dean’s murder. Before they can butcher the ox or break up the carts to set them alight, there are more trumpets, the sound curiously thin in the cold grey air, as if it might break at any moment.

It is one of Fauconberg’s captains and a group of his household men, about twenty of them. There is no sign of Sir John. Thomas wonders where he can have got to. He hopes he is warm, in any event. They pull up in front of the dead ox, their horses shying from the brassy smell of the blood, and begin shouting orders.

Every eye is on the ox, its fat tongue lolling, but the men are driven away, shuffling, stiff and grey-faced and it only gets worse as they leave the shelter of the village and begin the slog up through the furlongs where the wind scours the land in urgent flurries. Every man walks with one eye on the flags that are stiff in the breeze, like pointers, stretched southwards, telling each one to return whence they’d come.

Thomas picks his way among the men William Hastings has assigned to his command, checking each has his bow, at least one spare string and a bag of shafts apiece. Most wear tight-fitting helmets, pitted with rust now, and each man has some other weapon hanging from his belt: a maul, a dagger, something like that. They smell damp and fungal.

They stop again, huddled in the road. The snow starts, tiny balls of it, like hail.

‘Will there be many?’ one of his men asks. He is younger than Thomas, with a bow of yellow yew. He reminds Thomas of the boy Hugh, who ran away before Canterbury. He has not thought about him since.

‘A few,’ Thomas says. ‘Enough, anyway.’

He tries to see himself through their eyes, as someone who’s been in battle, who fought at Sandwich, and at Northampton, the man who’d killed the Earl of Shrewsbury, then fought through the rout at Mortimer’s Cross. They look at him as if he knows what he is about, as if he is supposed to lead them, when all he’s done so far is ignore them and leave them to their own devices while he wallows in his own misery.

‘What’s your name?’ he asks.

‘John,’ the boy answers. ‘John Perers, of Kent.’

Thomas nods. Another John.

‘Well, John,’ he says. ‘You got good eyes?’

‘All right. I can pick out a target all right.’

‘No, I’m looking for a flag. Six ravens, like this.’