‘I am sorry, Thomas,’ she says. Her face has softened. Her eyes are wet with tears. ‘May God forgive me but I am sorry. Sorry that it is like this, and not as it should be. I wish we had done things differently. But we have – We have to, don’t we? For her sake. It is my – our – a – penance, I think? For all that we have done.’

‘A penance,’ he repeats. And suddenly he sees it is a penance. But it is not a penance for the death of Margaret, but for the death of the nun in the priory, the one with glass in her back, the one whom Katherine pressed down and killed; and that because of this nun’s death, Katherine has endured everything, and she will go on enduring whatever may come at her until her end.

He wants to tell her not to marry Richard, and that he does not know how he will live without her, and that God would not want her to suffer any more, nor make him suffer any more, but he finds he cannot. He cannot find the right formulation, cannot think of all the things he wants to tell her, and so instead he looks away to hide the tears that prick his own eyes, and he says:

‘The village is ahead.’

And they ride on towards a sky white with the threat of more snow, and soon they will be at the hall and then it will all start.

Only there is something wrong. Thomas pulls up his horse. There is no smoke above the village, nothing to show that anyone lives there.

Katherine feels it too.

‘Where is everyone?’ she asks.

There are no prints in the snow, as if no one has passed this way since the last fall. Thomas slips quickly from his saddle and nocks an arrow, taps his sword hilt. He passes Katherine his horse’s reins and then skirts up the road towards the butter cross. The church is intact, its windows in place, its door sound and shut, but again, there are no tracks on the steps. Where is its sexton? A cottage ahead is likewise undamaged, likewise deserted. She watches Thomas duck past the tiled bakery. He can smell something claggy and cold. A dead body. Man or animal? One or two? He follows the road up past the pen where Katherine used to stop to scratch the pigs’ backs. Empty. Still no tracks.

He crosses to another line of cottages, pushes a door open. Inside it is dark. He bends over the fire. The ashes are cold, even the earth below is cold. No one has been here for days.

Katherine is outside, holding the horses. She looks at him. He shakes his head. They both know what this means.