‘My lord the Earl of Warwick,’ Hastings says. ‘It is a broadhead, I’m afraid. I have mine made by the same man.’

He pulls an arrow from his bag to show them. It is a typical hunting arrow, with a chested shaft and a flat head that ends in two barbs, each about a finger’s tip long and the same again wide.

‘How did it happen?’ Katherine asks.

‘I cannot say,’ Hastings says. ‘I was looking elsewhere. I was . . . distracted.’

‘We should send for a surgeon,’ the cleric tells them. He has one of those voices she’s heard countless times, floating over the wall of the nave back at the priory.

‘A surgeon?’ Hastings says, standing. ‘Saints. That will certainly do for him.’

‘His father, then,’ Geoffrey says, ‘for there is nothing we can do for him here. If we try to extract it, it will only take more flesh. It will kill him.’

‘And yet we cannot leave it in.’

Geoffrey takes his knife out and slices through the jerkin and then the blood-soaked wool of Richard’s coat and his linen around the wound. Richard’s flesh is pale, mottled, like stained marble, and the flesh around the arrow is already turning purple.

‘We can cut it out,’ Katherine says. ‘Find out which way the barbs are, and then slice the flesh ourselves, so that it does not tear.’

Hastings looks doubtful but Katherine feels a curious certainty. It takes her by surprise.

‘I have heard of this thing done,’ the cleric says. ‘But with forceps. You have nothing like that here, do you?’

Geoffrey shakes his head.

‘How can we tell where the barbs are?’ Thomas asks.

‘We can feel,’ she tells them.

Hastings shakes his head.

‘It is a hunting arrow,’ he says. ‘The barbs run along the line of the notch. Look.’ He points to the fletched end of the arrow, carved across with the notch for the bow’s string. ‘A war arrow’s notch runs the other way, across the barb.’ He shrugs. ‘Each is designed to slip through the target’s ribs, you see. A huntsman is after a stag, an archer after a man. It is the way it is.’

There is a beautiful sense to that.

‘I will do it,’ Katherine says. She bends over Richard’s body. There is a long strand of material embedded in the wound. She tugs it. Richard stirs.

‘Might be better done quickly, you know?’ Hastings offers. ‘Men asleep after a fall in the tilt yard feel no pain until they wake up.’

Geoffrey passes her his knife. She still feels entirely calm. Of course she will do it. She takes the knife. It is big, and dirty. She looks at it doubtfully.

‘Here,’ Hastings says. ‘Use mine.’