The Dean signals for the gate to be opened and Brother Robert urges his horse through the gate. The Dean blesses his back with the sign of the cross, but already the gate is slammed shut and the locking bar dropped in place. Thomas watches as Robert trots away up the road, head down, shoulders hunched, vanishing into the mist.

Thomas has never been up here in the belfry before, never seen the priory from above. He sees how the whole is halved by the dividing wall, so that the canons’ cloister is kept apart from the sisters’ cloister, only touching in the window house, the octagonal brick building set in the wall that houses the turning window through which the two halves of the priory communicate. The charge of this is given to the oldest canon of the community, and it is through this screen, designed so that neither brother nor sister ever see one another, that food and laundry passes from the sisters to the canons, while in the wall bisecting the nave of the chapel is a smaller version through which the consecrated host is passed during Mass. In this way the two communities might be said to feed one another.

He watches Brother Barnaby making his way through the cloister. Barnaby waves up at him, a rude gesture of alliance. Thomas cannot help but smile. Barnaby is the closest thing he has to a friend in the priory, a good-natured boy, the son of a wool merchant, who cannot hold his ale and who will confide almost anything in anyone.

His thoughts turn to the morning. He had only heard the horsemen when they’d spurred their horses along the road and his first reaction had been to fling himself to the ground. It was only when he’d regained his feet that he saw the two sisters, and again, his first instinct had been to look away, following the Rule of St Gilbert, and so he could not then explain, even to himself, what had taken hold of him.

Why had he run at a man – at men – on horseback? He cannot understand it. It was madness. He is an illuminator, a draughtsman. He is used to working bent-backed over his psalter, pricking out the designs, shaping the gesso, applying inks and paints, burnishing shivering gold leaf. That is what he does; that is what he is.

Nevertheless he had felt some savage fury grip him and from the moment he broke cover and let that staff fly, he knew that it would hit the man on the horse, and hit hard.

Now he remembers the horseman’s threats, delivered through the gate. There is something about them, something more than merely the grisly specifics, something that made them all the more pressing. But what is it? What were the words he used? Thomas tries to reconstruct them, but finds he cannot.