‘Well, Sister Nun and Brother Monk, since you’re not going to come out then I shall have to come in. And when I do, I promise you this: I shall find you. I shall find you first, Brother Monk, and when I do, I’ll let my man Morrant here do you to death. Then I’ll come for you, Sister Nun, you and your snivelling girl. After Morrant’s done with you, I’ll nail your bodies to this very door here, see, the one you’re hiding behind, and then I’ll set a fire under you. I’ll see you beg the Almighty to take you. Do you hear me?’

Then there is a quick turn of hooves on the other side of the gate and the horsemen are gone. Katherine stares at her wet wooden clogs under the snow-thickened hem of her cassock. Alice is whimpering.

‘I must be gone,’ the canon mumbles. ‘Must go.’

She looks at him one last time. He is a big man, a half-head taller than she, with broad shoulders, the reddish hair cropped short, a disc of skin shaved bald. Apart from the horsemen beyond, he is the first man she can ever recall having seen. She almost reaches out to touch his face.

He turns and hurries across the courtyard to the wall that divides the priory and scrambles up on to the roof of the wood store. His clogs send the snow sliding, but he catches the top of the wall and hauls himself up and over. He pauses, looks back, and then is gone, back into his own world. Only then does she wish she’d thanked him.

‘We must tell the Prioress,’ Alice wails, still on the ground. ‘We must warn all the sisters.’

‘No!’ Katherine says, helping her up. ‘No. We cannot. We cannot. We must tell no one. No good can come of this.’

She is looking around them at the windows and the apertures. Has the canon been seen? She thinks not. There is no one about.

‘But what of those threats?’ Alice counters. ‘Those things said?’

‘They can do nothing,’ Katherine says, ‘so long as we remain within the priory walls. Let us thank God for that canon, whoever he was, and let us pray that he was not seen here in our quarters.

‘We will do our own penance, Sister,’ she adds. ‘A thousand Aves and two thousand Credos before the Shrine of the Virgin, and we will forgo bread until the feast of St Gilbert.’

Alice nods uncertainly. Only Katherine knows that the feast of St Gilbert is but a few days away.