A little after noon a surgeon does appear and within moments he has reorganised everything and everybody, so that a large area is set aside for the quality, while those without the appearance of means are set outside in the bitter cold. He is not a surgeon, he says, but a physician. He wears a long coat and a pointed oily fur hat that he never removes. He stands in the centre of the room next to the fire and sets Mayhew the task of bleeding those from whom they have spent all morning removing arrows.

‘It is a mercy the commons can’t afford it,’ Mayhew mutters, nodding at the poor archers and footmen who are banished to the cold.

The physician turns to Katherine, confused by her presence.

‘Who are you?’ he asks.

‘I am Lady Margaret Cornford, daughter of the late Lord Cornford, personal friend of William Hastings,’ she says, looking him in the eye. ‘I am here at the request of William Hastings, and I will not be party to the bleeding of any man, nor the cauterisation of wounds, nor to the application of any of your sow-gelder’s creams.’

Hunger makes her hands tremble, but she means it.

‘I will however wash wounds,’ she continues, ‘where I can, with warm wine and fresh urine, and I will suture them afterwards with hemp or silk, and then I will dress the wound with clean dry linen. No more. No less.’

He is taller than she by a head, with a long rough-skinned nose from which hair erupts in two damp explosions. He stares down at her, calculating her worth and so her power. After a moment he licks his thin lips. ‘Very well, my lady,’ he says. ‘But you keep your ministrations to the commons. I shall deal with the gentles.’

‘They’ll not thank you, you know, for killing them.’

The physician looks bitter and turns and walks away, his long coat a soft half-turn behind. Mayhew chuckles, watching the physician leave the barn, but he carries on with his knife and bowl, cutting into a man’s hand between his fingers and holding him while he bleeds into a clay bowl.

The boy with the arrow in his stomach dies in the early afternoon and by then Katherine is bloodied up to her elbows and across her skirts and she is nearly faint with hunger. She supposes she might have treated a hundred wounds, and she is hopeful for them all, for when he is not bleeding the gentry, and when the physician is not there, Mayhew is everywhere, making instant judgements on whether a man will live or die, and assigning them accordingly, so she finds herself treating the lightly wounded, while the friars deal with those whose grasp on life looks unsustainable.