The Prioress continues, her gaze avoiding Katherine: ‘And this youth noticed the girl, too, and so it was that each watered in the other the seeds of desire, and soon their nods turned to gestures and they sought one another out in the secret darkness of night.’

The sisters gasp.

‘Block your ears, oh brides of heaven!’ the Prioress pronounces, enjoying herself, ‘for that night this girl walked out a virgin of Christ and in the next moment she was corrupted in the flesh as she had been in the spirit!’

‘Shame,’ a sister mutters. ‘For shame!’

Others agree. The Prioress lets them calm themselves before she begins again: ‘Soon the evidence of the nun’s wickedness was all too clear,’ she says, ‘and when the truth emerged that the girl was with child, the shocked virgins of the community clapped their hands together and fell on her, ripping the veil from her head. They whipped her without mercy! Some argued she should be tied to a tree and burned over charcoal. Others cried out that she should be skinned alive!’

Alice clutches her rosary to her mouth, kissing the crucified Christ.

‘But mercy prevailed,’ the Prioress soothes, ‘and the sinner was put in a cell, with her hands manacled to the wall, while chains were attached to her ankles and passed through a window to a heavy log of yew, so that all that night she was stretched by its weight.

‘The next day the sisters asked the canons to lay hands on the youth who had occasioned these ill deeds. One of the canons – a slight lad with a girlish frame – was dressed in the sister’s veil and sent to sit in the appointed place at the appointed hour for their meeting. Sure enough the corrupt youth approached her and fell on him whom he thought a sister!’

Again the sisters gasp.

‘Burning with lust, he was as a stallion brought to mare! But then those canons present, concealed in the undergrowth, jumped out and administered a bitter antidote to this lust with their staffs, beating him mightily so to extinguish his fever.’

Alice is delirious now, mumbling an endless prayer, dropping to her knees, righting herself, and all the other sisters are murmuring and chanting.

Katherine can think of nothing but escape.

The Prioress holds out a hand to calm them.

‘If it had ended there,’ she went on, raising a finger, ‘if it had ended there, then this shining example of zeal in defence of chastity might have been obscured for ever, but the virgins of the community asked the canons to hand the wretch over, as if to glean some information from him, and when they had him in their hands, such was their clamour for virtue’s reward, that they laid the youth out and, summoning their sister from her cell, they placed in her hands a knife taken from the kitchen and they forced her to unman the monster!’