The Prior doesn’t answer but cocks his narrow head at the shuttered window. Thomas hears only the Dean’s breathing behind him and the gentle rattle of his own teeth. Then comes a distant rising shriek, pitched high, thin as a blade. It makes him shudder and he cannot help but cross himself.

The Prior laughs.

‘Only a fox,’ he says. ‘Whatever did you think it was? A lost soul, perhaps? One of the lesser devils?’

Thomas says nothing.

‘Probably caught in the copse beyond the river,’ the Dean suggests. ‘One of the lay brothers sets his snares there. John, it is.’

There is a silence. They ought to send for this John, Thomas thinks, the one who set the trap. He should be made to go and kill the fox. Put it out of its misery.

‘Quick as you can then, Brother Tom,’ the Dean says.

Thomas realises what they mean.

‘Me?’ he asks.

‘Yes,’ the Prior says. ‘Or do you think you are too good for such a thing?’

Thomas says nothing, but that is exactly what he is thinking.

‘Do it like this,’ the Dean says, miming with the staff, jerking its tip down on the skull of an imaginary fox. ‘Just above the eyes.’

The Dean has been to the wars in France, and is well known to have killed a man. Perhaps even two. He passes the staff to Thomas. It is almost as tall as him, stained at one end as if it has been used to stir a large pot.

‘And be sure to bring the body back,’ the Prior adds as the Dean guides Thomas from the cell, ‘for I shall want the fur, and the infirmarian the flesh.’

The Dean’s light leads Thomas down more stone steps into the fragrant darkness of the frater house where he is drawn to the warmth of the fire’s embers glowing under their cover, but the Dean has already crossed the room and pulled aside the door’s drawbar.

‘God’s blood!’ he exclaims as he opens the door.

Outside it is the sort of cold that stops you dead, the sort that drops birds from the sky, splits millstones.

‘Go on, young Tom,’ the Dean says. ‘The sooner it is done, the sooner it were done. Then get back here. I’ll have some hot wine for you.’

Thomas opens his mouth to say something, but the Dean shoves him out into the cold and closes the door in his face.

Dear God. One moment he is asleep, almost warm, dreaming of the summer to come even, and now: this.

The cold sticks in his throat, makes his head ache. He gathers his cloak, hesitates a moment, then turns and sets out, picking his way across the yard to the beggars’ gate, his clogs ringing on the ice.