‘I’d like to play too.’ She frowned slightly as she spoke, as though anticipating being told to go away. But I often longed for playmates, and decided even a girl would do. ‘All right.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Matthew.’

‘I’m Suzanne. How old’re you?’

‘Eight.’

‘So’m I.’

She knelt beside me and pointed to a boat. ‘That one’s lopsided. You ain’t folded the paper very well.’

And so, for the next few years, Suzanne became my playmate. Not all the time – sometimes months would pass when I hardly saw her and perhaps her father had told her she should not be playing with me, but sooner or later she would return and, without explanation for her absence, join in my solitary games. She would cajole me into playing at houses in a corner of her barn, serving water from puddles to her collection of raggedy dolls. She could be bossy but she was company and I felt sorry for her; I think I realized then that she was more of an outcast than I was, an outcast in her own home.

Our friendship, if it could be called that, ended abruptly when we were thirteen. I had not seen her for some months, except at church on Sunday, and then from a distance as her family had a pew on the other side of the church. Walking home after the service one summer’s day, I saw a little group of girls and boys walking ahead of me in the lane. The girls wore coifs tied under their chins and smart, full-length adult dresses, the boys proper little doublets and caps. The girls were jostling for places next to Gilbert Baldwin, a handsome lad of fourteen who had always been the leader in the boys’ games. Trailing behind the group, alone, holding a long hazel twig with which she was beating the long grasses at the side of the road, was Suzanne. I caught up with her.

‘Ho, Suzanne,’ I said.

She turned on me a face that would have been pretty had it not been red and distorted with anger. I noticed that her dress was shabby and had a tear at the hem, her hair wildly uncombed. ‘Go away!’ she hissed furiously.

I stepped back. ‘Why, Suzanne, what have I done?’

She turned round, facing me. ‘It’s all your fault!’

‘Why – why, what is?’

‘They won’t let me walk with them! They say my clothes smell, I’m dirty, I’ve no more manners than a tinker! And it’s all because I spent my time playing with you instead of learning girlish things! Gilly Baldwin tells me I should make eyes at my hunchback friend!’ Her voice rose, became tearful; her mouth was like a great angry ‘O’ in her scarlet face.

I looked up the lane. The troop of lads and girls had come to a halt and were watching the scene. The boys looked uneasy but there was a ripple of nasty laughter from the girls. ‘Suzy’s rowing with her swain,’ one called.

Suzanne rounded on them. ‘Don’t,’ she screamed. ‘He’s not! Don’t! Stop it!’ As the laughter redoubled she turned and ran off into a field, still howling, striking out at the ears of young wheat with her branch like one possessed. I looked after her for a while, then turned and walked back the way I had come. I would resume my way home once the boys and girls had gone. I had long ago learned that keeping silent and walking away was the best way to avoid mockery. Yet despite Suzanne’s own cruelty to me, despite knowing that it was her family, not me, that had made her an outcast, whenever I saw her afterwards, always alone, always giving me vicious looks when she acknowledged me at all – I felt guilty, as though I was indeed partly responsible for her fate. I left for London a few years later and never saw her again, though I heard that she had never married and in later years had become a fierce reformer, denouncing neighbours for popery. And Jennet Marlin, though she came from a different class, had that same air of being consumed by anger against a world that had done her wrong. And with her, too, I had the same odd urge to appease. I sighed and lay back on my pillow, reflecting on how strange were the ways of the mind. And then, at last, I slept.

BARAK HAD SET HIMSELF to wake at six and shortly after that he knocked softly at my door. I felt unrefreshed by such sleep as I had had, but rose and dressed in the chill damp air. I put on Wrenne’s coat again rather than my own; it would remind me to return it to him when we met at the rehearsal. We slipped out quietly so as not to wake the men sleeping all round us. Outside dawn was only just breaking and everything was deep in shadow. We took the path alongside the church, where we had found poor Oldroyd the morning before, and made our way to the gate, where young Sergeant Leacon was on duty again.

‘Up again early, sir?’ he asked me.

‘Ay, we have to go into town. You have been on night duty again?’

‘Ay, and for another two days until the King comes.’ He shook his head. ‘That was a strange business yesterday, sir, with the glazier. Sir William Maleverer questioned me about it afterwards.’

Him too, I thought. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You are right, it was a strange matter. When that horse charged out of the mist I did not know for a second what it was – something from hell perhaps.’

‘They say it was an accident, sir. Do you know?’

I could see from his sharp look that he doubted that, perhaps thinking Maleverer was taking a lot of trouble over an accidental death. ‘That is what they say.’ I changed the subject. ‘I expect you have seen a few strange things happen on the way from London.’

‘None as strange as that. Until I was sent here from Pontefract it was all walking and riding alongside the Progress, through thick mud when it rained and great clouds of dust when it didn’t.’ He smiled. ‘Though there was great to-do near Hatfield, when a monkey one of the Queen’s ladies had brought escaped and made its way to a local village.’

‘Oh, yes?’

‘The poor heathen folk there thought it was a devil, fled to the church and called the priest to go and send it back to Hell. I was sent with some men to take it. It was sitting in a cottager’s outhouse, happily working its way through his store of fruit.’

Barak laughed. ‘That must have been a sight!’ ‘It was. Sitting there in the little doublet its mistress dressed it in, its tail sticking out behind. Those villagers were all papists, I’d swear they thought the King’s Progress had its own legion of devils in attendance.’ He paused and shook his head.

‘Well, we must be on our way, we have business.’ We passed through the gate and walked to Bootham Bar. ‘Sharp young fellow, that,’ I observed.

Barak grunted. ‘Soldiers should ask no questions.’ ‘Some people cannot help asking questions.’ He gave me a sidelong look. ‘Don’t I know it?’ We arrived at the gate. It was shut, the curfew not yet lifted, and the guard was unwilling to let us through. I felt in my pocket for my commission, then cursed as I realized I had left it in my cubicle.

‘Can’t let tha in without it, sir,’ the guard said firmly. I asked Barak to go back to Sergeant Leacon and see if he could send someone to vouch for us. He returned in a few minutes with another big Kentishman, who peremptorily ordered the guard to let us through. Grumbling, the man opened the huge wooden gates and we slipped out.

We walked to Stonegate as the sun rose and the city came to life, keeping under the eaves as people opened their windows and threw the night’s piss into the streets. The shopkeepers appeared in their doorways and the noise of their shutters banging open accompanied our passage.

‘You are quiet this morning,’ I said to Barak. I wondered if he had been thinking about our conversation.

‘You too.’

‘I did not sleep well.’ I hesitated. ‘I was thinking about Broderick, among other matters.’

‘Ay?’

‘You know my instructions are to make sure he is safe and well when he is delivered to London?’

‘Is the gaoler making that difficult?’