'For God's sake!' the man muttered. 'How long, master? My arse is sore, my thighs are chapped and my belly thinks my throat is slit!'

From the shadow of his cowled hood, Sir Hugh Corbett, Keeper of the king's Secret Seal and his special emissary, grinned as he blew on frozen fingers.

'Come on, Ranulf,' he urged. 'At least no snow has fallen and we'll be there within the hour!'

Corbett pulled his hood back. He looked away from his manservant, Ranulf-atte-Newgate, and stared out across the mist-shrouded sea which crashed and broke on the rocks beneath him.

'A cold, sombre place,' he muttered.

Ranulf pulled his own hood back and edged his horse alongside that of his master. 'I've told you this before, Master. I hate the bloody countryside.' He stared back across the moorland, where the mist's long, cold fingers were beginning to creep. Somewhere in the gathering gloom a dog howled as if protesting at the elements. 'I hate it!' Ranulf repeated, as if to himself. 'Where the bloody hell are we, Master?'

Corbett pointed down to the sea. 'We are on the Norfolk coast, Ranulf. In summer they say it's beautiful. Beneath us lies Hunstanton Bay.'

He pointed across the cliffs. Ranulf glimpsed a faint light winking and made out the outlines of a building.

'Mortlake Manor,' Corbett said. 'And there is the old Hermitage. Can you see it, Ranulf?'

Ranulf strained his eyes and made out the gaunt, rambling ruin, most of it hidden by a high decaying wall.

'Further inland is the village,' Corbett continued. 'And down there in the mist, probably from where that dog is barking, is Holy Cross convent.'

Ranulf looked where his master was pointing and then, beyond the convent, to the sea. If he hated the countryside, Ranulf-atte-Newgate, born in the warren of alleyways that made up Whitefriars, was terrified of the sea – its grey, cold expanse; the mist turning and swirling like a ghost, muffling and making more eerie the hungry, haunting cries of the gulls. The thunder of the waves on the deserted pebble-strewn beach; those lonely buildings, silent as death, nestling on the cliff tops.