‘You were hungry,’ the cookshop owner says. He is foursquare with short legs and sly eyes. His woman stares at them from the darkness of the kitchen.

Fabas indulcet fames,’ the pardoner replies, half turning. ‘We have had a long voyage, goodman, from foreign shores, much delayed by wild weather. Now that we are replete, we are bound for the fripperer and then the shoe-maker.’

‘And the barber too, I hope,’ the man says, nodding at Thomas’s tonsure. ‘There are plenty in town’d turn you in for the way you look.’

‘Quite so,’ the pardoner allows, swallowing the rest of his ale. He pays the man and hurries them on their way.

Katherine feels sick.

‘We must find our vessel,’ the pardoner announces, though this is news to her. ‘It won’t be long before the friars get about and they’ll know you’ve left your priory. First though: some clothes.’

They find the fripperer beyond the tailors’ stalls on the far side of the market, next to a man dealing in horsehides and urine. He is seated on the ground with his legs crossed, surrounded by a shin-high pile of rags of every kind of colour and cloth. He is working on some stitching, but when he sees the pardoner looming into view, he throws aside the work and is on his feet.

‘Master,’ he says, ‘may God make you prosper.’

With quick eyes he grades the value of their clothes, deducting from the total the price of every tear and abrasion, and though he is pleased at the thought of the money a man like the pardoner might possess, he grimaces when he sees Thomas and Katherine’s cassocks. The pardoner explains what he wants and the clothes-mender begins casting uncertainly through his stock, looking for something that might do.

‘I cannot furnish this chit with anything at the present,’ he says, indicating Katherine. ‘Women tend to their own clothes, see, or if they do leave me a garment, they come by to collect it. They don’t seem to get caught up in other things, as men do, or get themselves killed so often.’

‘I am not interested in anything for the girl,’ the pardoner tells him airily. ‘She can take her chances. I need clothing for him, and for my other servant. A lad smaller than this one.’

‘Much easier, that,’ the fripperer says and he begins pulling garments from different piles again, holding them up and then discarding them. Eventually he hands Thomas two piles.

‘Should sort you out,’ he says.

The pardoner pays the man and they retreat to an alley behind the marketplace.

‘You can change here,’ he says, dividing up the piles of clothing. ‘And mind where you step.’