The brother brushed that away. He might have been about forty with a tonsure, a tonsure neatly cut into greying hair. He looked sleek and comfortable, but his brown eyes showed a sharp intelligence. ‘And I should not have crept up on you - not before a tomb like this, at any rate! But I don’t apologise for reading your soul, for it’s written on your face.’

Harry felt resentful. ‘I’m not here to pray but to meet a man.’

‘Geoffrey Cotesford from York?’

‘You know him?’

‘Only too well.’ The friar stuck out his hand. ‘I’m Geoffrey. I am glad to meet you, Harry Wooler.’

Harry shook the hand uncertainly.

‘I was early.’ The friar held up his broom. ‘The door was unlocked - careless, that - and I saw the broom resting against a wall, and I thought I should make myself useful. You have a businesslike look about you - I expected that. I’m here on business myself, in fact.’

‘I thought you Franciscans were contemplative.’

‘Well, we are, some of us. But we have other vocations. I always had too restless a mind to be bothering God with my fragmentary prayers. So I became involved in my house’s business affairs. We Carthusians make a bit of a living from the wool trade too, in fact. And I have always been more interested in the souls of others than in my own, a disadvantage for a contemplative! Your soul is as transparently displayed as this poor old fellow’s desiccated heart, Harry.’

‘It’s just so gloomy,’ Harry admitted. ‘Transi tombs and chantries, monks murmuring your name long after you are dead. The priests say we must all long for the afterlife. Fair enough. But why long for death?’

Geoffrey studied him. ‘Ah, but death sometimes longs for us. You’re a young man, Harry, and like all old fools I envy you your youth. But as you grow older you’ll develop a sense of the past. And our past contains a great calamity, a time when the dead invaded the shore of the living.’

‘You mean the Mortality.’

‘The Great Mortality, yes. The Big Death. My own grandfather told me tales of what his grandfather, who lived through it, saw for himself. England used to be crowded, you know! But everybody was stirred around by war, and the cities were brimming with filth . . . Well. We were ripe for the plague. In London, half the population died off in a few years. Think of how it was for the living, Harry, as all those faces around you melted away. The shock left scars in their souls, I think. No wonder they carved these transi tombs, memorials of a world become a vast boneyard.’

Harry was restless, feeling he was being preached at. ‘You wrote to me about Agnes. Where is my sister?’