'Apparently,' Corbett replied. 'She was a local baker's wife. Disappeared from her home. The next morning someone found her swinging by her neck from the scaffold. An innocent victim executed where murderers are usually gibbeted.' Corbett turned. 'Now, who would do that, Ranulf? Who would murder a poor woman in such a barbarous way? He stared at the scaffold, which rose at least five feet above his head.

'I suppose she was murdered at night,' Corbett continued. 'But why here?'

He looked down at the base of the scaffold and dismounted, throwing the reins at Ranulf, as something caught his attention. He knelt and picked up a bunch of decaying wild flowers from the bare ground beneath the gallows.

'What's the matter?' Ranulf asked impatiently.

'Who put these here?' Corbett asked.

'Oh, for God's sake, Master, the poor woman's husband or her family.'

Corbett shook his head. He sniffed at the brown, rotting stalks.

'No, they have been here for weeks.'

'Perhaps the relatives of an executed felon,' Ranulf hissed through clenched teeth. 'Sir Hugh, for the love of God, I am freezing! I have lost all feeling in my legs and balls!'

Corbett threw the flowers down, wiped his hands on his robe, grasped his reins and remounted. 'Well, well, we can't have that, can we, Ranulf? What a loss to the ladies of London,eh?'

He urged his horse on. Ranulf stuck his tongue out at him and quietly moaned to himself about the buxom little widow – brown-haired and merry-faced, with the sweetest eyes and softest arms he had ever known – left behind in London. He'd had to give her up just because old Master.Long Face, riding in front of him now, had been ordered north by King Edward.

'Whose balls,' Ranulf muttered to himself, 'I hope are as cold as mine!'

He followed his master, who had now slowed his horse to a trot, fearful that it might slip or lose direction. The mist had thickened and the angry sea still rumbled and crashed belowthem. The ruins of the old Hermitage came into sight, mostly hidden by a high sandstone curtain-wall. Corbett caught the smell of wood smoke and the sweeter scent of roasting beef, which made his stomach growl and wetted his dry mouth.