He touches the handle of the knife in his belt. Brave this time, she thinks, but then again the last time she was carrying the pollaxe. Sir John wafts a hand and lets it fall on the sheets.

‘Leave us, Kit,’ he murmurs. ‘Let the physician go about his work.’

Katherine gives Fournier one last look and then leaves the room and rejoins Thomas in the courtyard below.

‘This bleeding is barbaric,’ she says. ‘It is as bad as putting faith in bits of old bone such as the pardoner used to sell.’

‘I have been thinking about the pardoner,’ Thomas says. ‘And the ledger. Do you think his people will know why he valued it so? He had a son, he mentioned, who died, but is his wife still alive, I wonder?’

They hear a stifled cry through the window above them. Both look up to the eaves.

‘How long will he be here?’ Thomas asks.

‘A week?’ Katherine guesses. ‘He must see his patient survives, if only to collect his due.’

‘So perhaps we might journey to Lincoln, if only to avoid his company?’

She laughs. His duplicity is charming in its simplicity.

‘You imagine meeting Riven in the marketplace? In the churchyard? At a tavern perhaps?’

He looks askance. Then he too smiles and they find themselves grinning at one another and a moment later both look away. The next morning they set out at the pink-fretted dawn, Thomas on his palfrey, his axe over his saddle, Katherine on a little brown pony. She is not a natural horseman – there is something about the position, with the legs apart, that she finds to be wrong – and she knows that alongside him she looks more like his servant than his equal. But the pony is fair-tempered and often anticipates her commands, and she is fond of it.

When they emerge into the sunlight, Lincoln lies ahead, the spire of the cathedral all the taller for the flat fenland around. They ride on and all morning the sun shines in their faces, and as they pass under the castle’s pale stone walls and through the old arch, the cathedral bell rings sext.

They stop to stare at the cathedral. It is so huge as to be unearthly, beyond their understanding, and there is even something frightening about it. Eventually they can stand it no longer and they turn their backs on it and tie up their horses, handing a boy a coin to water them. Then they stop in the shade for some ale – tasting of hedgerows and bramble plants, and with a deep head – and a dish of hot buttered peascod in one of the lanes by the cathedral yard. Insects hum in air as thick as honey. Nearby a stationer is selling books and Thomas cannot resist.