On the other side of the fountain is a young woman, covered in blood from toe to top, washing twenty feet’s worth of purple intestines, all thickly folded in on themselves, dunking and splashing them about in the water. Their eyes follow the tautened, then sagging, then tautened again intestines to where they disappear round the corner of an open-doored dwelling.

Harold takes a few steps forward and, at his newer vantage point, sees that the chain of appendages belongs to a dusty chestnut mare, dead on its side, round the side, its black tongue outstretched along the earth, unnaturally long; its blank eyes unreflective.

And then the sun dapples off the disturbed, dark water, and a spangle of light is thrown from a quick moving of water, flashing into Saint John’s eyes and he smiles at the beauty of it.

‘It is illegal to wash offal in public drinking places,’ de Flunkl calls, and Harold shakes his head at the constant stupidity of his youthful master, so wrapped up in such unseemly decorum.

‘When the lord of the manor sees it fit to provide a public drinking place that doesn’t stain my ears with the yelps of killed little swollen-bellied poisoned children I shall see it fit to acquiesce to his recommendations and laws,’ the woman says, wiping her brow with the back of her hand, but in effect only covering her face in smears of diluted blood.

She leans over and takes a tall jug off the edge of the fountain and gulps down large doses of a pulpy liquid that soon covers her face and drips messily down her front. The thick smell of fermented cider tickles de Flunkl’s nostrils and makes him sneeze.

‘This woman is drunk,’ William of Roscrea says, unable to detect her station as her inebriation has caused her to slur her words and discompose her carriage.

She is attractive, he thinks, but that is no marker of anything. Many peasants are comely; it means nothing. The lines on her face are dissolute, signifying a misled life. She is preternaturally aged, but in such a particular manner that she is somewhat alluring, maybe even slightly more so for her premature decrepitude. Her hair may be blond, but sweat and mismanagement have darkened it, frizzing it like spring’s young thistles.

‘A drunkard,’ de Flunkl cries out. ‘What pitiable world is this? Men turn their backs a moment and unprestigious, shameless whoredom rises and fornicates not only with mercenaries, but with the very appurtenances of the king’s estate. Can a good woman be found?’

Harold sighs at this. ‘There is something deeply wrong with you, boy,’ he says.

‘Maybe we should be courteous so as to gather the necessary informations that inform our venture, my lord,’ William suggests.

‘Courtliness is a misplaced strategy when dealing with filthy whores who are drowned in so much splattering blood and filled with such ciderous concoctions,’ de Flunkl proclaims loudly.