The letter from the monk had arrived in a pile of business correspondence. At his home in Oxford, Harry Wooler had read the letter, from a Franciscan called Geoffrey Cotesford, with a sinking heart, for it concerned a matter of conscience. Harry didn’t regard himself as a sinful man, but he preferred to stick to commerce, and leave the affairs of the soul to others. But he could scarcely ignore this summons, for it had concerned his sister, Agnes, lost since Harry was a boy.

The church’s heavy wooden door was open. Harry stepped inside. The church was cold, its heavy stone walls sucking out the heat, and the air was thick with incense. A man swept the floor with a cane broom, a portly fellow in a loose black robe, but otherwise the church was empty. Harry knelt at a pew, crossed himself, and uttered brief prayers. Then he walked up the church’s central aisle to the altar.

He paused by an elaborate tomb that had been set against one wall, cut from some black stone. It was on two levels. Above rested the figure of a man of about fifty, handsome in life, well-dressed in a robe like a Roman toga, with his hands clasped in prayer. But on the level below lay the same man given up to decay, his clothes rotted to rags, his skin peeled back to reveal a cage of ribs, those praying fingers reduced to bone.

Harry didn’t like transi tombs. The hideously realistic corpses always reminded him of his own father’s death, and his final morbid mutterings.

But Harry was twenty-five now. He was a merchant, as his father had been before him, and his grandfather too - his family as far back as anybody cared to mention. As their name implied, the Woolers sold prime wool from the heart of England to the continent. Trade was what interested Harry - trade, and stories of exploration, of Prince Henry and his school of navigation in Portugal, of new routes to India and China and perhaps even to countries nobody had even heard of yet. Harry didn’t like transi tombs and chantries. He didn’t even much like churches, he admitted. Give him Cheapside any day, rather than this!

‘You don’t seem comfortable.’

The man who had been sweeping was resting on his broom, studying Harry. Harry saw that he had a crucifix on a chain around his neck, and that his black robe looked like a habit.

‘I’m sorry, brother. I didn’t realise - I would have paid my respects—’