She cannot imagine what her punishment might have been had he been seen, for since the day she had joined the Priory, all those years ago, the Prioress had forever been inflicting ever crueller punishments. Katherine had still been warm with the memories of her mother’s love when she had come, or so she now imagined, and the sudden change in her life had seemed almost unendurably hard, but as the years passed, she’d come to see that the cloistered life needn’t be so harsh, only that the Prioress went out of her way to make it so.

In the early years she had spent weeks at a stretch alone in her cell subsisting only on rye bread and lentils. If she were lucky: salted fish. She passed the hours on her knees, praying for she knew not what, to a God of whom she was unsure, but as her life progressed from one hardship to another, each visited upon her for something she did not understand or did not do, she began to wonder if God was the merciful deity that the priests espoused. She began to wonder whether He was not an absent God, or perhaps a powerless one, for she could not believe he was a vengeful one, who wished her to suffer this way.

When she spoke of her thoughts to one of the other sisters, a girl to whom she believed herself close, the Prioress heard within the hour and that evening the whole community was called to witness Sister Joan holding her down while the Prioress thrashed her with a scourge, grunting at each stroke. The sin of Pride was deadly, the Prioress had gasped, and it needed eradicating. This was the first of many beatings Katherine received over the years and now, more than a decade later, the skin on her back and legs is capped by a hardened matt of needle-fine scars.

Only later was she entrusted with the daily task of taking out the Prioress’s nightly soil and her pisspot, but when Katherine had complained of it, had suggested the lay sisters should deal with it as they did the rest of the nuns’ excrement, she was beaten, and made to carry the bucket away while the blood dried against her cassock.

Now she leans forward to gain a view down the line of the sisters to where the Prioress kneels in profile, her heavy hands resting on the prie-dieu in an effigy of piety. She is not a pleasure to look upon, with a big jaw and heavy brows that glower even in prayer. She is immensely strong though, with a man’s shoulders, and when inflamed it is possible to see the blood of her Viking forefathers running through her veins.