‘So on the night before the battles were supposed to meet, we said our prayers and slept in the field where we were. Next morning, even before Mass, it was clear everyone’d left. Turned out that the Calais men had gone over to the King in the night. And so, seeing as he knew our disposition, and how the enemy now had four times as many men as us, the Duke of York and the Earl of Warwick gave up hope, and to spare the bloodshed of the commons, or so they said, they fought with their heels.’

The traventers lead them into the marketplace, where the gabled houses seem to take a step back from the cobbled streets and there is glass in every window. Above them the towers of St Mary’s and St Nicholas’s rub shoulders with the Staple Inn, the stone-built hall where the Captain of Calais conducts his business. Even here Thomas can smell rotting meat.

‘God’s blood!’ Katherine mutters next to him. ‘Another one.’

She has her hand over her mouth and turns her head from the sight, but Thomas cannot help himself. Four mottled quarters of meat hang on grimy ropes from a stone cross: a man’s arm and his legs, covered in fat black flies, and the rack of his ribs where the executioner’s axe has passed.

‘Wonder where his head is?’ Dafydd asks.

They walk on, leaving the market square for a street full of taverns and cookshops, bath houses and a cock pit.

‘What I wouldn’t give for a drink,’ Walter mutters.

A woman without a headdress watches them pass from the door of an inn. Then another, from a window above, who stares down at them in a manner Thomas knows to be brazen. Walter licks his lips.

‘A harlot,’ he says, addressing Katherine, who has been pretending not to see them. ‘Better not let Sir John find you with one of them though, Girly, or you’ll lose a month’s pay.’

‘And the wench’ll have her arm broken for her troubles,’ Geoffrey adds.

Katherine moves closer to Thomas. He finds he likes it when she does that, but her proximity confuses him, muddles his mind, makes him uncertain what to do with his hands. He glances down at her. She is not looking his way. They walk on, she in his shadow.

The alleyways between the houses are dark and noisome, little better than blocked sewers. Some are choked waist-high with every kind of refuse and worse, leaving only narrow slips at the centre for men and animals to pass. Here there are stables and sties, tanneries and pelterers’ workshops, each adding their signatures to the stink and noise of the streets.

‘Gah,’ Geoffrey exclaims as they pass a dyer’s yard where a great vat of urine and dog shit simmers. ‘Right strong, isn’t it?’