‘Remember your foot.’

There is a long moment. The dead seem to be letting slip some kind of miasma, thick, like breath, but cold.

‘All right,’ he says. ‘A little bit along.’

She gathers her cloak around her and they make their way along a pathway that has been made between the corpses. Mayhew is reduced to silence. Her shoes are letting in liquid. She does not want to think what. Richard stumbles and someone cries out in the darkness.

‘Hurry,’ she says.

‘All right, all right. My foot. It’s hurting.’

‘It will only get worse.’

‘Christ.’

They go on. At one point Katherine trips and steadies herself by clutching a man’s face. It is cold and gelid. She wipes her hand on a man’s tunic, but it comes away even darker with gritty blood.

‘Where is he?’

They have moved beyond some trees where the land slopes sharply and, over the lip of the dale, dead bodies are piled in acres, three or four deep, and in among them, walking above them, are parties of looters, crouching over the corpses, each one lit by a boy holding a flaming torch as they burrow among the dead. She watches a man twisting at something and chopping at it with a hatchet and she feels a great sorrow.

‘May God forgive us,’ Mayhew whispers.

Beyond is a river, emitting mist, and there is a weir down there over which the water flares and seethes. Bodies choke the valley. It is unbelievable. They stare so long that they do not notice the archer slip away.

When she does so she can think of nothing good to say.

‘We will never find him now,’ Richard laments.

‘No,’ she says. ‘He is here. He is not dead. I know it.’

There is a long silence. All they can hear are the furtive rustlings of the looters and the sighing of the dead, the rush of the beck below, and the wind luffing across the dale.

‘He is here,’ she says, but her voice is no more than a whisper.

‘Come,’ Richard says. ‘Come.’

‘No.’

‘My lady,’ Richard says. He fumbles for her arm. She tries to resist but he is firm.

‘He must be gone, my lady,’ Mayhew says. ‘No man would willingly stay out here if he could leave.’

‘I know he is here.’

‘Then he must be dead,’ Mayhew says.

She cannot believe it. She cannot believe this is what the Lord had in mind for Thomas when he survived all that came his way before.

‘Come,’ Mayhew says. ‘We cannot stay here. The miasma—’

‘He is not dead,’ she says.

She pulls free, grabs the torch from Mayhew and holds it high above her. She illuminates only more corpses.

‘Thomas!’ she calls. ‘Thomas Everingham!’

There is nothing. Only the wind and a flurry of blows in the distance, short and sharp, where the looters are finishing off yet one more.

‘Thomas!’ she cries again. ‘Thomas! Thomas Everingham!’