‘Lucky,’ the old woman says, pointing to his inner thigh. ‘Been there and there’d be no stopping the blood.’

They wash the wound with the archer’s urine and a cup of wine warmed in a pot over the fire. It starts the bleeding again, but it cleanses the wound and then, while the old woman pinches the flesh together, Katherine uses a silver needle and a length of hemp and she stitches the separate parts of him together again. She is surprised at the feel of his flesh. It is firmer than she’d anticipated, and tougher, too, so that when she pulls on the needle the hemp does not cut through it, but rather brings it together in a neat seam.

‘Very tidy,’ the old woman says afterwards and Katherine thinks of the hours spent at needlework in the priory. She tries to imagine what she would have done had the Prioress paid her such a compliment.

But men keep on dying, long after the battle is over. It is those who seem to be drowning in their own blood who go first, those with wounds in their chests. Then the men with wounds in their stomachs follow, usually in great pain, vomiting endlessly or with their bellies horribly bloated. None survive. Then it is the men with no memory of the fight, men who’ve lost their helmets and who are dazed. For a while it seems as if they will recover, but they die anyway, later. And all the while the men with flesh wounds are succumbing, their limbs swelling, turning first purple then black, and emitting such a stink that men gag and prefer the smell of tallow; and there are others who convulse and twitch and cry out to the Lord in rigid terror of what awaits them.

It is better to be killed on the field, she thinks, and the old woman agrees.

And again, she wonders about the old man, Owen Tudor. Had he meant anything by the look he had given her? She still cannot decide, and yet she cannot forget it. Why would the old man single her out?

Some days later a physician in the mould of Fournier appears and sends the women away and turns the surgeons to adjusting the humours of those who can afford it by bleeding them, and soon the room is emptied, one way or the other.

She finds Thomas returning from the cathedral.

‘There is a room’, he tells her, ‘filled with wonderful books, each chained to a desk.’

She can see the shadow of the fighting still lying over him. There is a hesitancy in his eyes, a distance in his gaze, as if he does not want to look at anything too closely for fear of what he may find. Still, the discovery of the library has given him some way back into the light.

‘Is there any news of Sir John?’ she asks.

He shakes his head.