“You’re still cool,” Weronika remarked with an air of sadness. “Still mistrustful and prickly. Either you’re very new here, or they’ve kept you here for a long time.”

“I’ve been held in this convent since the twentieth of May,” replied Jutta gently. “But I’ve been captive since the end of last December. Forgive me, but I don’t want to talk about it.”

The events of December 1428 were etched in Jutta’s memory as a series of violent but semantically distinct images. It had begun the day the neighing of horses, cries and the cracking of the gate being broken ruptured the sleepy calm of the Poor Clares’ convent in White Church. She had been in the refectory when the soldiers burst in, seizing her and dragging her out into the courtyard. Then the images began.

Reynevan in fetters, struggling in the arms of the soldiers. The abbess with her lips bloodied from punches, her books—her pride and joy—being consumed by fire on a huge pyre. The nuns and converses in tears.

Then Ziębice, a town she knew well, a familiar castle, the familiar knightly chamber. Duke Jan of Ziębice, whom she knew, dressed—fashionably as usual—in an embroidered doublet, mi-parti and poulaines with extremely long toes. Jan of Ziębice, regarded as an example and as the epitome of knightly virtue, once so courtly towards her mother and so generous to her father, who once honoured her with a compliment. And suddenly the epitome of knightly virtue with froth on his lips tears her clothes from her, and in front of everybody in the chamber strips her naked and gropes her, threatens her in vile fashion with shame and torture. And all in order to blackmail and intimidate Reynevan, her beloved, her lover, her Aucassin, her Lancelot, her Tristan, who is watching it all with his face contorted and as white as a fish’s belly, with eyes from which it appears any moment will spurt blood mixed with tears of fury and humiliation. And that same Reynevan, the same, but simultaneously somehow unfamiliar, agreeing to terrible, horrible, contemptible, disgraceful things in a quite unfamiliar, unnatural voice. He agrees to them in order to save her.