‘I imagine him in that castle Geoffrey is always talking about,’ she says. ‘Cornford. With his son married to that girl whose father he killed. I can almost hear her screams in the corridors, can’t you? And everyone looking away.’

Thomas looks anxious. He nods uncertainly.

‘We will have justice when we see the Prior,’ he says, missing the point. ‘When we get to Canterbury.’

Canterbury. She opens her mouth and then shuts it again. It is so pleasant to be up here in the spring sunshine. And there is always some awkwardness about Thomas whenever they approach the subject of returning to Canterbury and the Prior of All. In another person she might think his evasions are a sign of duplicity, but this is Thomas. She assumes he becomes flustered because he is anxious at the prospect of appealing to the Prior.

He has moved on to the bowstrings now, pulling them between his waxed thumb and forefinger.

‘There were no men like Riven in the priory,’ he says. ‘Or so it seemed, but out here in the world, you know, it’s as if everyone is using one another for some gain, something they do not deserve.’

She feels her mood darken. Does he mean her?

‘And yet, how much happier you seem to have left the priory so far behind,’ she says.

Thomas stops his work.

‘It seems distant now, doesn’t it?’ he says.

She nods again, but says nothing. The priory does not seem distant to her. She thinks about it almost every moment of every day: of Sister Alice and Sister Joan; of the Prioress. And all this: the plentiful food, the conversation, the days going by without the hours spent on her knees in the nave, sitting in the sun with a man in his shirt – it seems unreal, a dream, and there is a greater part of her feels the world of the priory, with its black and white certainties, that was the real world.

She has removed her hood, as she sometimes does when they are alone, and she is enjoying the sun on her face.

‘Your hair needs cutting again,’ he says, resuming his work.

‘Perhaps you can do it when you have finished that?’ She nods at the strings and the little flask of oil for the wood of his bow. He puts them aside and takes out his knife.

‘What did you make of the Earl of Warwick?’ she asks as he takes her hair in his hand.

‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘Everybody speaks so highly of him. Men seem to love him.’ He slices through a hank of hair and drops it over the edge of the wall to scatter in the breeze.

‘But that is not to say he is a good man, is it?’

‘No. That is true,’ he agrees.