‘But how can I do it?’ she asks. ‘I cannot go as I am, for no boy would be permitted into the cloister, and if I were to go as myself, well, you cannot have forgotten I am wanted as a murderer.’

She has dreamed about her arrival at the priory with a particular intensity in the last months. In them she’s seen the letters on the paper, felt its texture under her fingertips. There is the hint of a seal at the bottom of the page. She can hear the dull clack of coins in the oiled leather pouch, and can feel her wrist aching from its heft.

‘Perhaps you might return as a woman?’ Thomas asks. ‘Not a sister, but a normal sort of woman, such as Liz?’

Liz is Geoffrey’s daughter. She is Katherine’s own age perhaps and helps her mother and father around the hall where she is the subject of much speculation among the remaining archers. Katherine has found herself watching Liz closely, studying the way she moves, her ease in society, her clothes. Liz has caught her gaze more than once, and each time Katherine has looked away as she’s felt the heat in her cheeks. Liz has smiled knowingly. She tries to imagine herself as Liz, but cannot, though the thought remains vibrating in her mind like a strummed thread.

Now she shakes her head and they leave the pig to its own rooting.

‘There must be another way,’ she says.

They walk down past the church, both keeping an eye out for the sexton, a busy man, who’s had nothing to say to Sir John since their return. There are chickens everywhere, a dog sleeping in the road and across the way a woman is sealing up a bread oven. Katherine and Thomas are familiar figures now, and the woman raises a hand in greeting, as does a swineherd, with no pigs in tow, who turns and points back down the road towards Lincoln.

Three horsemen appear at the end of the village. Thomas instantly stiffens. She lays a hand on his arm.

‘Fournier,’ she says.

They watch the riders come on.

‘Good day to you, Master Fournier,’ Thomas calls out.

‘God speed you, sir,’ Fournier replies, taking off his hat. ‘And to you, young man. Not armed today, are you?’

Katherine shakes her head. Fournier can be very disarming, she has to admit.

‘You are sent to guide me to Marton Hall?’ Fournier asks.

They are not, but it hardly matters. Fournier is wearing a new cloak the colour of Gascony wine, and his tight-fitting cap is lined with fur. He looks to have prospered since Katherine saw him last, and he has acquired a new assistant, another gangling lad with skinny shanks but one with his ears intact. She tugs her own cap down over her ear.