She takes her hands away. Katherine collapses. Joan tries again. Katherine collapses again. Joan hauls her to her useless feet and drags her from the room. As the blood begins to circulate Katherine cries out and throws herself down with pain. Sister Joan half pushes, half drags her outside into the yard.

It is dawn, and rain is falling. The snow has turned to slush.

The bell above is ringing a slow clap, like a knell, and she pulls on the well rope so slowly Sister Joan loses patience and helps with the bucket, pouring the water out into two small ones and even helping her to her feet. But then she walks behind her, cursing her, calling her a devil, a whore and worse.

The stone steps are the worst. The pain makes her dizzy. At the top Joan opens the door of the infirmary and pushes her staggering across the rushes. She has never been permitted to visit the whitewashed room above the calefactory. It is long and low, lined with two rows of six straw mattresses on each side and at the far end of the aisle, like an altar in a nave, a broad table dominated by the infirmarian’s bottles of tinctures and bags of herbs and her pestle and mortar.

At this far end of the room the Prioress stands hunched like a bird of prey over one of the mattresses. She glances up and then turns back to the mattress.

‘Here at last,’ she says.

Joan pushes Katherine, who hobbles down between the beds, the sound of her clogs softened by the rushes. Someone is lying on the mattress, covered in a linen winding cloth.

It is Alice. She is dead. Her veil is gone and her pale hair lies in a slack clot on the sheet beside her. Bruises cover her neck and her right eye is swollen. Her chin looks as if it had been rubbed with the same sand they use to clean the floors and there are what look like animal bites across her throat.

Katherine feels as if something had been pulled from inside her. Her spirit hurts as much as her body. She feels rage bloom within.

‘I told you—’ she starts, but the Prioress cuts her off.

‘If the child has come to grief it is through her own fault. She was once a fair and virginal example to us all but some corrupting malignity overcame her in the last days of her life, and she chose the devil over the Lord.’

‘No,’ Katherine says. ‘You did this. You caused this.’

‘Silence,’ the Prioress says.

Joan hits her.

‘Sister Alice was lured away from the path of righteousness by the many-horned legions of the devil.’

Joan hits her again, harder. Katherine staggers forward and puts the buckets down. The three women look at one another over Alice’s dead body.

‘It was you,’ Katherine says. ‘You did this just as much as those men.’