‘Far from here, I’m afraid. She’s in York. And you must travel to her; she can’t come to you. You’ll see why. But she’s asking for you. Big brother Harry! And, you know, to understand your sister’s situation, you will have to think about history - I mean, your family’s. Your ancestors weren’t always wool traders. You’ll see, you’ll see . . .’

‘My business - I’ve work to do.’

‘I know,’ said Geoffrey. ‘But you’ll come with me even so, won’t you? A spark of duty is bright under that woollen merchant’s shirt. I see that in you too.’

These words made Harry feel trapped. With a mumbled apology he hurried down the aisle to the door, and drank in the reassuringly foetid air of the Strand.

III

III

Spain crushed James’s soul.

The mule train plodded across a landscape like a vast dusty table, where nothing grew but scrub grass and rough untended olive trees, nothing moved but skinny sheep, and there was no sound but the raucous singing of the muleteers echoing from ruined battlements, and the thin mewl of patient buzzards. And, James knew, the journey could only end with more strangeness. For he was travelling to Seville, where, it was said, the Anti-Christ was soon to be born.

His companion and employer, Grace Bigod, was not sympathetic. She was a formidable woman in her forties, perhaps twenty years older than James. Her face was beautiful in a strong, stern, proud way; her greying blonde hair was swept back from her brow. And, sharp, bored, she picked on James. ‘What’s the matter, Friar James? All a bit much for you?’

‘Everything’s so strange.’

‘Well, of course it’s strange. We’re a long way from England now.’ Her fine nostrils flared as she sucked in the air. ‘Smell it! That spicy dryness, the wind straight off the flats of the Maghrib. My family have roots in the Outremer, you know.’

He nodded. It was well known in James’s house in Buxton that Grace and her family were descended from a woman called Joan, who had fled Jerusalem when it fell to the Saracens more than two centuries ago.

‘Maybe the country of the Outremer is like this - hot, dry, dusty. Maybe there is something in the very air that pulls at my blood. Or maybe it’s the stink of the last Muslims in Spain, holed up in Granada. This is the crucible of the whole world, James! The place where the sword-tip of Christianity meets the scimitar-tip of the Moors, a single point of white heat. What do you think?’

James saw only a landscape wrecked by war and emptied by plague. He turned inward, trying not to see. He longed to be safely enclosed within the reassuring routines of his Franciscan monastery.