KATHERINE WAKES BEFORE dawn. Her limbs ache from her beatings over the previous days and the cold that has crept into her bones in the night. Before she can stand she has to kneel and then sit on one of the pardoner’s bales to let the pain pass. She finds herself in a small clearing in some woods, with a mule and two men gathered around a small circle of ashes where the fire has burned out. The mule regards her charitably, while the men, the canon Thomas and the pardoner, lie wrapped together in the mud under a grey travelling blanket.

This is her chance. She must get away from this canon Thomas. She can never go to Canterbury. She can never see this Prior of All, for what justice could he be expected to give to someone who has broken the fifth commandment? When she shuts her eyes Katherine sees Sister Joan in her last moments and she knows that every step she takes towards the Prior of All is a step nearer the gallows.

She stands. Her knees are agony, her feet like blocks of wood. But she must move. She can leave now, walk back the way they came. The canon will never follow her, not that way. She stretches her hands out to gather her possessions, but then realises that she has none, and that already it is too late.

Thomas is waking. He opens his eyes and looks up into the canopy of the trees, and then at her, and then he closes them again and shakes his head.

She sits back down. She will have to wait, she thinks, to seek the right moment.

‘Good morning, Sister,’ he says.

‘Good morning,’ she answers.

She takes a moment to look at him, to see the difference between him and the pardoner. Thomas is tall, broad in the shoulder and long in the arm and leg. His hands and feet seem enormous, too, and he reminds her of a young dog, a puppy, in whom one can see the size of the adult to come. Next to Thomas the pardoner, waking now, is a pinched and dried old thing, all his colours faded, his skin creased and worn.

‘God in heaven,’ the pardoner says, and he clambers slowly to his feet, huffing in the cold morning air. When they have said their prayers, they eat the last of the pottage and load the pardoner’s bales on to his mule. The pardoner notices the blood clotted in the hair above Thomas’s ear.