‘Walter knows you are a woman?’

He seems not to believe her and it makes her angry. She turns her back on him. Later she finds a charred piece of ship’s timber, nuzzled by the tide, and she needs his help with it. They are carrying it up through the dunes, consciously not talking to one another. Thomas is leading the way, carrying his end of the spar behind his back.

‘The sooner we reach England the better,’ he says. ‘Then we can go to Canterbury.’

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Canterbury.’

They walk on. The timber is heavy and she needs a rest. He gives her some water.

‘Will you miss the world?’ he asks. ‘When you are back in the priory?’

He is making conversation, trying to apologise, but the question makes her stop. She still has not told him the truth about Sister Joan.

‘I will,’ she says cautiously. ‘All this – it has been a revelation.’

He says nothing, and his head is cocked as if waiting for her to go on. A bee bumbles in the still air. The day is already warm and sweat prickles her eyes.

‘Your people will be happy to hear you are returned at last,’ he says. He is probing for something, but what?

‘I have no people,’ she tells him. ‘Or none that I know of.’

‘But everyone knows their people,’ he says. ‘Everyone must know where they come from. You have to. It is the only way to know who you are.’

Katherine is silent. She shrugs and after a while they pick up the log and carry on up the dune. Although she does have a vague memory of something nicer – warmer anyway – she only really remembers the priory and any other thoughts as to who she might be beyond the priory walls are something she’s never had the luxury to pursue.

‘All I recall of life before the priory is a hearth, with a fire,’ she says. ‘And of being warm beside it.’

‘That’s all?’

‘I thought for a long time that the memory was just something I’d imagined, but there are odd details about it that I do not think I can have invented, such as a window filled with coloured glass. Yet I am sure I have not knowingly ever seen such a thing.’

‘Do you recall anything about your arrival at the priory?’

They are on easier terms already.

‘I can picture it so easily in my mind, that I may have invented it.’

‘How does it go?’