‘You need a wash,’ Richard says, and nods at her legs. Her hose are sodden, baggy at the knee, heavy with the enema water and blood. She peels the wool from her thigh. Then she lets it go and tries to stifle her cry.

‘What is wrong?’ Richard demands.

‘Nothing,’ she says. ‘Nothing.’

She feels her face flame. The blood is not all Sir John’s. Some of it is Katherine’s. Her time has come to flower.

23

THE DAYS PASS slowly. To begin with they take turns to sit with Sir John, wafting the soporific under his nose whenever he begins to twitch in his sleep, taking turns to lift his sheets and smell for the signs of putrefaction. On the fourth day the soporific runs out, or he becomes immune to its effects, and he begins to surface. He babbles and murmurs and flinches in his sleep like someone in the grip of a nightmare.

Goodwife Popham brings a dwale of poppy seed, hemlock and henbane, lettuce heart and the root of a mandrake plant, bound together with the bile of the pig and sweetened with wine to mask its bitterness. It is an old recipe of her mother’s, she tells them, and her mother’s mother before her. To get Sir John to drink it, they use the same funnel with which Katherine gave him the enema and afterwards he sleeps like a dead man.

Katherine is there all the time, sleeping and eating on the bed next to him, only leaving to seek the privacy of the privy. Each time she leaves, Richard panics and tells her that she should use the pot in the room. Each time she tells him that she has eaten or drunk something that has poisoned her guts, and she makes a joke of it.

A week later they can smell winter in the air. Martinmas has been and gone, the winter wheat is planted, the pigs slaughtered and singed, and now cold winds strip the last leaves from the trees. There are flurries of snow in the sky and skeins of geese wing south. Every face Thomas meets in the village is pinched and fearful; the winter dread is on them all.

But a month passes, and it is almost Christmas before they receive the bad news from a travelling friar.