Katherine cannot endure it. She lunges and before Joan can raise her hands she is on her. She knocks her back over on to the mattress and her hands seek out the neck, her thumbs in the doughy throat. But Joan bucks. She arches her back and screams and after a moment the Prioress grabs Katherine’s shoulders and hauls her off and throws her across the room. Katherine lands badly, but Joan still screams. She is thrashing and scrabbling as if trying to get something off her back. And then there is blood frothing from her mouth and nose. It is staining her teeth, pouring down her chin.

The Prioress is frozen where she stands, hands clapped to her cheeks. Joan is choking on something. She rolls face down on the mattress and all three women see the shards of green glass driven into her back just as the stench of the medicine rises up and washes over them. It catches in their throats and burns their eyes and sends them coughing back up the infirmary.

This time there is no one to stop her. Katherine is through the door, down the stairs and across the yard, staggering past the very spot where she’d seen the canon, and out of the beggars’ gate. She has no plan in mind, only flight, and she no longer cares what happens to her next.

Snow remains in patches across the fens, but there is more grass and mud, and there are black fire circles on the fields, and the sweet smell of cold wood smoke and human shit hangs in the air. She limps out across the furlong, making for the hamlet at the river ford. Two lay brothers are there at the river’s edge with shovels. She turns from them to the ferryman’s lighter, on the riverbank below the mill. If she can right it and somehow get it into the water, then she might follow the river’s current wherever it will take her.

She crosses the furlong and tries to lift the boat, but it is too heavy. Vestiges of ice cement it in place. She finds the ferryman’s pole, a long staff of ash. She is about to try to use it to lever the boat upright when she sees a movement by the canons’ beggars’ gate. Someone running. A man. At first she thinks he is coming for her. She panics and looks for a place to hide in the shelter of the watermill, behind a pile of millstones. It is a canon, she sees, running desperately. Then she sees another man emerge.

‘Dear God!’ she says aloud.