He glances over, sensing a change in her, and opens his mouth and says something, but she cannot understand him, and she drifts back to sleep. She has been dreaming curious swirling dreams, intensely vivid yet bewilderingly vague, and through them all flicker the shadows of the dead: Walter, Dafydd, Owen and especially Margaret. Margaret is there often. At times she is no more substantial than a wisp of river mist at dawn, at others she acquires flesh and becomes all too real.

‘She is unwell?’ she hears the innkeeper ask Thomas.

‘A fever,’ Thomas says. ‘Nothing more. She was caught in the cold on the hills.’

The innkeeper grunts something about a nunnery being more suitable than his hall and Katherine stares past Thomas up into the roof, at the tiles and the soot-blackened rafters. She tries to stay awake, but drifts back into sleep where the shades of the dead gather about her once more.

How long she is like this she cannot say. When she is awake it is as if everything is at a remove. She sees Thomas, his face swimming towards her, sometimes obscenely large, sometimes in miniature; and she hears his voice, sometimes loud in her ears and then sometimes as a distant rattle. She knows he is asking a question, or offering help, but nothing she hears or sees has anything to do with her. It feels as if someone else is lying there drifting through consciousness.

On one of the days – she knows it is day because the shutters are open and a breeze stirs the wood smoke – she sees Thomas eating something. Every now and then a servant – a sullen, chunky girl, slow-moving, who’d never have survived long in the priory – comes in to look at her and her possessions, and Thomas looks up from his scribbling. He has placed Margaret’s bag where he can see it.

Later Katherine looks down and sees her arms encased not in the mossy, malodorous woollen jacket she’s become used to, but in fine linen, and she is surprised to find that she is dressed as Margaret Cornford now. She falls asleep again, and when she wakes it is dark and she is certain she is now Margaret, but once more she drifts off into padded slumber.