As Constable of the City of Leeds he’d made the journey many times over the years, and sat and spoken in the grand courtroom at the castle, dressed in his good periwig and best coat. Often he’d enjoyed the trips; he stayed at the Olde Starre off Stonegate, where they said the cries of men treated there for injuries during the Civil War could still be heard at night. Not that he’d ever heard them in the evenings of conversation and drinking with other travellers.

This time, though, he simply wanted to be by his own hearth, to try to shore up the world that had collapsed around him four weeks before.

It had begun early in December, when gales swept viciously from the north to batter the city, followed by the endless snow and brutal cold that stayed, day after day, week after week, until they seemed like facts of life.

At first it had been the old and the weak who died, many frozen in their unheated cellars, others, always teetering on the edge of life, fading quickly from hunger. Throughout Advent, then Christmas, the lists of the dead rose. By the middle of January 1732, with ice still thick on the streets, death was everywhere, a plague made of winter. The ground was too hard for burials, and corpses were lodged in every cool place, a village of bodies lurking in the darkness as the toll rose higher.

No one was immune. Every family, it seemed, fell prey to the unrelenting weather, although the rich, insulated by thick walls, warmth, and money, suffered less than most as they always had. And always would, he thought grimly.

Then in early February, just as the days grew longer and people began to raise their hearts and hope towards spring, Nottingham’s older daughter, Rose, barely twenty and married just the autumn before, began to cough and run a fever.