And the tears come, silently sliding down to her temples, when she thinks about how they are betraying Sir John and Richard, people who have only ever offered them kindness, and she curses herself for ever thinking to remain Margaret Cornford.

And so what is to become of her? she wonders. To what life has she condemned herself? A life that serves as its own penance? A better life than she might have expected at the priory, perhaps, but one shot through with deception and heartbreak, one in which anything she does to serve herself will wound those whom she most loves.

And it is just as she is drifting off, gripped by the sorrow of these thoughts, that her eyes fly open and she is suddenly wide awake.

She thinks she can see the way out of this. She thinks there is a way.

The next morning they are up before cockcrow. Thomas is away all morning, burying Geoffrey’s body in the churchyard, dragging the others away from the house, and it falls to Katherine to resuscitate the fire and to make soup with such supplies as remain. She knows her way around the buttery and the kitchen and she knows how to haul the bucket up from the well. She is about to start shovelling the excrement from the back, just as she used to when she was Kit, when she sees Sir John squinting at her, and she leaves the shovel where it is, and she wipes her hands on her skirts and comes to sit at the board where Richard is grinding his fists into his eye sockets.

‘Do they hurt?’ she asks.

Richard grunts.

‘Let me see,’ she says. His bandages are grubby and stained and since the bleeding must have stopped, she wonders what they are really for? She moves close. Richard stiffens but she places a hand on his shoulder and a moment later he relaxes. She is conscious that Sir John is watching as she unwinds the filthy linen.

‘Tied it myself,’ he says. ‘I wished we’d had Kit with us still. He was – well, he had a gift that one, didn’t he, Richard?’

Richard grunts.

‘He cut me,’ Sir John continues, addressing Katherine now. ‘This last autumn. Before all this. I had a fistula. You know what that is, hmmm? Nasty, anyway. Could hardly walk for the pain of the thing. Anyway. Kit learned to read, can you believe? Only a boy, but he learned to read, and then got hold of some old leech’s instructions about how to cut out a fistula, and he cut mine out. Simple as that. Bloody miracle it was, wasn’t it? Richard? A bloody miracle.’