‘Come on,’ he says, and they hurry to find this Master Cobham, who is standing with his hands on his hips watching a long-beaked hand crane swing a bale of something heavy on to the deck of a three-masted ship.

This is the carrack Mary, about twenty paces long, and low in the water. Cobham turns when he sees them and watches them approach without a change of expression. Up close he is solid, with sandy hair and the sort of face that mottles in the wind. He touches his hat in an ironic salute.

‘Day to you,’ he says.

His glance lingers on Katherine, and she feels herself warm under it, but after a moment he turns and shouts to the men on the crane to load the pardoner’s bags. The pardoner is especially careful about the pack with the salve in, and he will not trust it to anyone else. She sees Cobham’s pale eyebrow cock and her doubts about the man harden to mistrust.

‘Yours, my boy,’ the pardoner says, handing Thomas the pollaxe. ‘Best not let it stray.’

Then the horse-dealer’s boy arrives with a bag of coins and when everything is aboard, the pardoner turns and strokes the mule’s nose. There are tears in his eyes, though the animal stares back without emotion.

‘Goodbye, old friend,’ he says. ‘Perhaps we shall meet again when I come back through this way, a new man?’

As the boy leads the unprotesting mule away, Katherine follows the pardoner across to the carrack via a gangplank. She does not think to let Thomas take her hand even though it is offered and after a moment she steps down into a curious world that shifts beneath her feet.

Hardly an inch of the ship’s planking can be seen for sacks and barrels and bales and all manner of wooden spars. There are coils of rope, canvas sheets and two huge and badly rusted anchors. In one corner a dark-skinned man sits on an upturned bucket and warms his hands on a fire that smoulders in the middle of a broad slab of stone. Other men linger in the ropes, staring at the newcomers. There must be about seven or eight of them, each as wiry and wild-looking as the next.

‘You’ll be stopping in there, if you’ve a mind,’ Cobham says, nodding to a plank door below the raised deck at the stern of the ship.

‘Very good,’ the pardoner says and he picks his way across the deck to prise open the door. An insistent stink billows out, stronger even than that of the sea: an unholy combination of vomit and the privy.

‘Gets mighty cold out here at night,’ Cobham continues with a smirk.