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even had women sharing their blankets, had their arms wrapped around them like war booty, and he knew that this was a sure way to make yourself unpopular with those who had all but forgotten the feel of a woman’s soft flesh.
    Then he passed a horse picket and some of the animals looked up at his mare, tossing their heads and snorting steam into the cold air, and for a heartbeat the loss of Achilles hit him like a thin blade in the gut. But the horse they had let him ride from Shear House was a fine animal too. The bay mare had Arab’s blood in her, that much was obvious from her refined, wedge-shaped head, the good arch to her neck, the long, level croupand a high tail carriage. But Tom recognized the Hackney in her too, in the high knee and hock action that gave her a gait that appeared effortless and made her a pleasure to ride, and in her powerful shoulders and large expressive eyes. She had speed, endurance and was strong of bone, and Tom knew he had done the creature a disservice by not yet having given her a new name to get used to. He resolved to remedy this and just then the mare snorted, which sounded like derision, as though she knew her new master’s thoughts. Then Tom recognized the man ahead taking his leave of a well-fed, fur-swathed quartermaster: the long face with its great livid stain.
    ‘Here he is, sir, the lad who says he’s back from the dead. I’ll bet the King’s quaking in ’is boots,’ the corporal said, a snort escaping his nose as he gave Tom one last look up and down before the officer dismissed him with a curt nod.
    Tom rubbed his mare’s poll but she was not in the mood and tossed her head and dragged a foot through the grass.
    ‘Sir, my name is Thomas Rivers. I fought with you at Kineton Fight.’
    Captain Clement, who all knew was a dour man, spread his lips in what would have been a smile on anyone else.
    ‘I heard tales of spirits walking the plain after that bloody day,’ he said, face tight as a good knot, chin jutting. ‘They say that ghosts of the slain have contested that fight many times since. I put it down to nothing but the idle prattle of superstitious fools. And yet here you are, Thomas Rivers, an apparition before my eyes.’
    The captain wore a simple montero-cap like those of his men and a cheap russet cloak tied at the neck over his buff-coat, so that on first appearances his rank would not be in the slightest bit obvious. But his religion came off him in waves and with it a cold authority that, if not beheld, was certainly felt.
    ‘I was wounded,’ Tom said. ‘But I am hale enough now.’
    ‘You spent that night on the field?’ Clement’s eyes were slits.
    Tom nodded.
    ‘And looters took your finger for the ring on it.’
    Tom was not aware he had even revealed his mutilated hand. ‘I was unconscious,’ he said, ashamed for what he had let be done to him. Clement’s face, half of it stained the deep burgundy of strong wine, was gripped by an almost zealous scrutiny.
    ‘Your friends saw you fall. They said you were shot. Will Trencher said you were beaten to death.’
    ‘I
was
shot, sir.’ Tom shrugged. ‘But the ball passed through the flesh. Achilles my horse was killed. In the morning they carted me off with the dead bound for a hole full of corpses. But that’s when I …’ he paused, holding Clement’s eye for a long cold moment, ‘came back.’
    ‘I remember that night well enough, Rivers,’ the captain said. ‘It was a cruel cold.’ He looked up to the smoke-filled night sky. ‘Colder than this. You spent the night with the dead. And yet you did not become one of them. I would know how you survived.’
    ‘God didn’t want me,’ Tom said. ‘Neither did the Devil.’
    Clement’s lip curled at that. ‘Where have you been? Kineton Fight was last October.’
    ‘A family from the village took me in. Stitched my wounds and hid me from a troop of the King’s horse. Good people,’ he said, thinking of Anne Dunne, the pretty daughter