Thomas uses the pole as a rudder, guiding them towards a small hamlet dominated by a church tower, but as they approach a handful of boys leave off throwing stones at a cockerel and start trying to hit them in their sinking boat. By now they are standing up to their ankles in water and the boat is slipping away under them. There is nothing for it though: Thomas leans on the pole and the boat slews towards the river’s western bank. Just as its bows dip under the water for the last time, it noses into a broad stand of reeds and Thomas jumps out to drop up to his thighs in the icy water. He holds the boat still for the sister, but by now she can hardly move. She inches across the prow and half falls into the brown water. Thomas hurries around, his clogs lost in the mud. He takes her arm, hesitating at first to touch her, but when she shows no sign of resistance, he helps her out of the boat and up the bank. He goes back for the pollaxe, just as the boat is tugged backwards by the current.

At the top of the bank he twists the water from the skirts of his cassock and looks around. There is nothing: only a broad stretch of reeds and mudflats. In the distance, a wood. Is there smoke in the air beyond? A village perhaps.

‘We’ll have to walk,’ he says, gesturing downriver. ‘We will surely come to something that way. We can ask the way to Canterbury from there.’

The sister looks doubtful. He sees she has wounds on her wrists and ankles. She has lost a clog too, and they both know they will never be able to walk far.

‘We could say we are travelling on monastic business.’

‘Together?’

Thomas frowns. She is right. They ought to part. He looks away upriver. A single swan comes towards them. He watches it for a moment. Then another appears from the rushes and joins the first and together they sail past and on out of sight. Thomas recalls words that he has written on parchment.

‘“Two are better than one,”’ he says, ‘“because they have a good reward for their labour. For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow.”’

‘“But woe to him that is alone when he falls,”’ the sister continues, ‘“for he has not another to help him up.”’

He looks at the sister properly for the first time. She is sharp and fierce-looking, all angles.

‘Ecclesiastes,’ she says. ‘I don’t know the verse.’

He manages a smile.

‘Nor me,’ he says. ‘But we should walk together, at least for a little while.’