‘Can you get my chest, my boy?’ he asks Fakenham, who crosses the deck and shouts down to the boat below. A moment later two more men bring up a chest – a fine red leather brass-bound trunk – and put it against the cabin wall. One of them is fat, fatter than any man Thomas can recall ever seeing, but he has powerful arms, each one like a shaved piglet, and he is as broad across as a church door. While the older man waits, breathing heavily, Richard Fakenham opens the trunk, removes a large red cushion, and shuts it again. He places the cushion carefully on the trunk and helps the old man lower himself on to it.

‘There you are, Father,’ he says.

‘Thank you, my boy,’ the old man says. ‘Thank you. What would I do without you, hmmm?’

When he is settled and has set his cap in a particular angle, the elder Fakenham looks about.

‘Not a bad little ship,’ he approves. ‘Young Warwick’ll be pleased.’

His eye falls on Thomas and Katherine, standing there.

‘Who are you?’ he asks.

‘We are servants, sir,’ Thomas begins. ‘Of Robert Daud, a pardoner, lately of Lincoln.’

‘Not old Master Daud?’ the old man says, brightening at the mention of a familiar name. He turns to his son. ‘Once tried to sell me a chrism for my ’plaint, you know? Often wondered if I should have paid its price, but when his boy died a year or so back, I thought, well, if he can’t cure that with his toe bone of St Cecilia or his scapula of whomsoever, then what chance has he of curing me?’

‘Here, Father.’

Richard Fakenham hands him a beaker that he drinks with a shudder.

‘So where is he? Master Daud?’ he asks, dabbing his mouth with a cloth.

Thomas tells him.

‘Drowned? Is he now? Poor old bugger.’

Sir John pauses a moment and looks up, his eye drifting across Thomas’s bloodied clothing.

‘But you would not go so quietly, hmm?’

‘They killed five of them,’ the younger Fakenham says, showing his father the giant’s pollaxe. ‘Five and half if you include that one.’

He nods at the sailor with the wound in his belly, still alive in the shadow of the ship’s rail.

‘Lord, Richard,’ the old man says, whistling at the axe. ‘Look at it. Lovely piece of work. I’d not like to be on the receiving end of that. Who are you?’

‘I am Thomas Everingham of— I am . . . a servant.’

There is a moment’s silence while the old man looks at them both thoughtfully.

‘A servant, eh? And yet how many men have you killed this morning? And not a scratch on you. It is almost, what? Miraculous? Don’t you think it miraculous, Richard? Geoffrey?’

He is addressing his son and the fat man. Neither says anything, but both allow for the possibility.