‘I am Robert Daud,’ the pardoner says. ‘A merchant, of Lincoln.’

The man tips his chin and stares down his broad nose.

‘Take your hood off.’

There is a moment of silence. The pardoner looks very old. He begins fiddling at the ties below his chin. His fingers are trembling. But then the mule lifts its tail and shits. A man with a sack of beets on his shoulder cheerfully sets them aside to gather the steaming lumps.

‘Hands haven’t been this warm since Martinmas,’ he calls, and gets his laugh. Someone behind shouts and all around them people urge the Captain of the Watch to get on with it, and just then the pardoner discovers the knot is tighter than he thought, and at last the captain shrugs as if in the end he could hardly care less. He gestures at the mule and rolls his finger in a circle for another coin.

‘Pontage,’ he says. ‘Another penny to cross the bridge with a mule.’

The pardoner cheerfully digs in the pouch on his belt and produces the coin. The crowd surge forward. When they’ve turned a corner, the old man slumps against a wall and runs his fingers under the band of his hood.

‘Thanks to the blessed St James for that,’ he breathes.

When he is recovered he leads them along the narrow street to the marketplace, where the ground underfoot is cobbled and houses of every shape and size tower above them, each with glazed windows, and at one end is an edifice of ash poles and scaffolding indicating that something grand is being built.

But it is the business of the people that startles Katherine most. She has never seen so many men and women or children gathered together at once, and they are all shouting. Traders proclaim the value and virtue of their wares while rivals bellow disparagement, and money is changing hands, and everyone seems to be arguing with good-natured passion. In the middle of it all is a bear, a creature at once both human and alien, sitting glumly while a man nearby eats a pie.

‘We must eat something before we go about our business,’ the pardoner is saying, tying up the mule to a rail and handing a boy a coin to tend it. He leads them down a covered street to a cookshop where he buys them each a bowl of pottage, dark stuff, much tastier than Katherine can believe, reinforced with bacon and strips of yellowing kale. Then comes a loaf of dense brown bread still warm from the oven as well as an earthenware plate on which three pasties are actually greasy with butter. The cook’s wife hands them mugs of ale and they eat and drink sitting on the step with their backs against the shop’s wall. After they’ve finished the pardoner buys each of them a baked apple with wrinkled skin, too hot to hold.