'What is?'

Gurney laughed sourly. 'Hugh, I am your friend. Don't play your subtle games with me.'

Corbett smiled an apology and inclined his head.

'A bloody business,' Gurney repeated. 'A woman found hanging on the gallows. A servant decapitated on the beach. Graves plundered. Stories of black magic, of fires at the crossroads, of strange noises at the dead of night, of demon hags riding the air. And now the bloody Pastoureaux!'

'A time of troubles indeed, Sir Simon.'

Corbett spun round. Lavinius Monck was leaning rather languidly against the door lintel, arms folded. Corbett rose and went towards him.

'Lavinius!' He stretched out his hand. 'It's been some months.'

Monck limply took Corbett's outstretched hand and patted it.

'My dear Hugh,' he lisped, though Lavinius's obsidian eyes never moved.

Corbett stepped back. Why do I always find this man so sinister, he thought? Lavinius, dressed now in black leather, always reminded Corbett of a cruel raven, with his black, greasy hair, smooth-shaven, sour face, beak of a nose and eyes which never seemed to close. Lavinius slapped his leather riding gloves from hand to hand and walked into the room.

'Sir Simon, Lady Alice.'

'You had a good day, Master Monck?'

Gurney got to his feet. From the set of his mouth and his dour look it seemed that he too disliked the secretive, sly clerk of John de Warenne, Earl of Surrey. Monck smiled, or rather twisted his face in a grimace, took off his cloak and threw it on a bench. He took a cup of posset from a servant and sat down in the chair another had pushed up to the half-circle in front of the fire. Monck crossed his legs arrogantly, flicking flecks of mud from his knee. He stared into the fire with an infuriating smile that suggested he was the guardian of some great secret. Gurney refilled his own cup from a jug of claret on one of the aumbries and rejoined his guests, shaking off his wife's warning touch.