‘We should go back to Trim,’ Harold says. ‘We should recognise the strangeness of these signs, even if they are unchristian, and make reparations to the people of Trim. A spray of rats doesn’t mean nothing. It cannot. This is the foreshadowing of hell. Nobber is hell. I can see it clearly. I have fleeting recollections of the future, as though I remember it faintly. Harm will come to us, deserved harm.’

‘We cannot go back there. We will not be humoured, or our lives guaranteed, there after what happened,’ William of Roscrea remarks. ‘But soon you shall be dead or rich and, if it is the latter, then you can buy back your soul with an indulgence in any monastery by the wayside. I heard tell there was a-one in Nobber. You can buy back any soul you want.’

‘We are venturing marauders, pirates almost,’ Harold Tuite says, glancing down at Saint John, who is sitting on his hunkers, examining a blade of grass.

‘You are not,’ de Flunkl says. ‘You carry my things, the objects I either find necessitous or desirous. I am the adventurer. It pains me to think, as a noble, I must carry things in my hands, but circumstances have beleaguered me and I find myself ill served by braggarts who I protect with the strength of my vision and the sturdiness of my direction. You will not disobey me. But you will follow me, for, as luck would have it, in its strange ways, I have no time for you to do otherwise.’

Harold points at the sack. ‘In this sack,’ he says, ‘I have the papers for the most of Trim, the half of Summerhill and a part of Moynalvey. I have Fanagh, Doolinstown, Agher, Kiltale, Ardenew and where else I don’t know. On my back I have carried most of the land we have travelled through, and it is like all its earth is weighing down upon me, and it gotten at such desperate prices and in the midst of such suffering that it has breached the walls of my soul. I feel I have become some mere talking ghost that moves about the place, buttressing half a world on me. Have you not enough?’

De Flunkl shakes his head. ‘I do not understand,’ he says.