‘I have a salve,’ he says and he digs in his bags to produce a clay jar. He unstoppers it and the glade is filled with the scent of the infirmary. She thinks of Sister Joan and the thin blood on her downy chin. The pardoner smears a dab of the contents on Thomas’s wound, making him flinch, but after a moment Thomas says it feels numb, then warm. She watches the way the pardoner applies the salve, the way he strokes it along the wound.

‘What is it?’ she asks.

He is pleased by her interest.

‘A mixture of thirteen herbs,’ he says, ‘mixed with pig fat and elder buds.’

He holds the jar for her to see the dark paste within.

‘It cools wounds and cures almost everything,’ he says.

Then he tucks it away in a leather pack, and sets the leather pack inside another one, and this he places very carefully on the mule’s pack, as if it is valuable. Thomas stands with the giant’s pollaxe, looking uncertain what to do with it. Does he carry it? Or put it on the mule? Eventually they decide on the mule and they set out, following a path where the wood thins and out on to a broad expanse of fog-haunted marshes.

‘By the blood of Mary,’ the pardoner laughs as they walk. ‘Will you look at us? Two thieves ripe for the hanging and the third a victim of the plague. Thank the Lord for this mist or they’d have raised the cry and chased us away by now.’

To Katherine’s eye the pardoner’s clothes appear garish. He wears a long russet habit, not unlike Thomas’s, but over it a blue fur-trimmed cloak with a tightly fitting hood that has been dyed bright green. A low-crowned round hat of black-fringed felt holds the hood in place and she can see that between his hat, hood and beard, it is almost impossible to see the whorls on his neck.

Next to him Thomas looks like a crow, but she knows she is the worst: her patched cassock is crusted with mud; she has only one clog and no headgear, not even a cloth to cover her hair. She looks the sort of beggar the Prioress would turn away from the gate.

‘I will lend you my hat,’ the pardoner says, passing it to her. ‘And there’ll be a fripperer at the market from whom we might buy something more suitable. It should not be too far now.’

Ahead of them they hear the steady din of bells, and she can smell coal smoke. They join a road and as they walk, its surface improves. Stone replaces mud, and other travellers pass with loaded mules and curious looks.