So in one thoughtless stroke, Katherine becomes Kit, and Thomas borrows the pardoner’s knife and cuts her hair, dropping the hanks on the ground around her feet. She can feel his fingers on her scalp and her skin prickles with ill ease. She can feel her back arching, her shoulders rising, as if to escape his touch. Then he sits while she takes up the knife and attempts the same with him. She starts slowly, trying not to touch him, chopping at his thick hair until she sees she will have to hold it to cut it. She can feel his discomfort too. She stops to examine the wound above his ear. She flakes away some of the pardoner’s salve and sees the wound is livid under it.

When the pardoner comes back he shouts with laughter.

‘Saints above! He looks like a madman!’

She says nothing, but she too cannot help laughing at Thomas’s piebald head. He pulls on his cap.

‘Have you found a ship, sir?’

‘I have. The carrack Mary leaves for Calais on the next tide.’

‘Calais?’

‘Yes, but have no fear. Master Cobham is happy to put in at Sandwich before he crosses the Narrow Sea. Sandwich is in Kent, scarcely a day’s walk from Canterbury. So that has fallen well, thanks be to God. Not that the Mary is as comfortable as I should like, and Master Cobham is rather brusque, but there you are: non licet omnibus adire Corinthum. It is not given to everyone to visit Corinth, you see?’

The pardoner takes Thomas back to the market to buy bread and whatever else they might find. Katherine remains alone among the baskets.

Now is her chance. She begins going through the packs on the mule’s back, looking for the one where the pardoner keeps his money. Is this it? The one with the jar of salve. Where is it? She cannot find it. She stops, sick with shame, as a boy with half an ear leads past a train of mules, and then a man follows holding a dead badger, never quite happy with the way he is carrying it.

Dear God! Where is the pack? Her fingers are numb as she struggles with the knots. There. She finds it. It is inside a rough sack, a disguise. She is pulling it out when the pardoner and Thomas return in a hurry. They’ve bought cheese, bread, a sack of apples and three wineskins apiece, and they’ve even managed to sell the mule for a good price. Now they keep glancing over their shoulders and the old man misses her returning the pack.

‘We must be quick about it,’ he says. ‘The friars are astir over something and it is more than two apostates.’

The pardoner glances at Katherine, and she looks away. He shakes his head as if to clear some thought and she knows he knows. She wonders when he will tell Thomas.