He retches again and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. In the night he has pulled a muscle from all the vomiting and now his face is yellow, his eyeballs bloodshot, and his beard slimed with something not even the rain can wash away.

By the evening he is too weak to sit and, with the help of Katherine and the ship’s boy, Thomas carries him back into the cabin and hoists him into a stained canvas hammock.

‘By all the saints,’ the old man murmurs when he is settled, ‘have I not suffered enough? They said take a medicinal bath. They said that would suffice. So I sent a servant, a good girl, to drown a litter of puppies for me: fox terriers. Then I had her gut the little things, Jesu Christe, and boil them up to make a soup. Yes. A soup. Dog soup. Enough to fill a bath. In which I sat for four hours with two—’

He retches again, a long fruitless spasm.

‘Two newly cut goat-kid skins – one on my head and the other on my chest – so that I shouldn’t catch a chill. They told me that would be enough, that that would cure me, but no. No. God wants to kill me this way. With seasickness.’

The ship’s boy is lingering in the cabin door, glad to be out of the rain for a moment.

‘Master Cobham says no one ever died of seasickness,’ he pipes.

‘The thought of dying is the only thing that keeps me alive,’ the pardoner groans.

The boy laughs and hurries off, balancing against the slant of the deck, letting the door bang behind him.

‘A good lad,’ the pardoner says. ‘Reminds me of my own boy.’

‘You have a son?’

The pardoner shakes his head.

‘Buried him three years ago,’ he says. ‘Plague.’

The weather lasts for two more days. They are not wrecked and when it is over, life on deck begins again. Gulls resume station, their wings snowy against the blue sky, and the sun shines, warming the skin if not the bones. The cook lights a fire on his stone and makes soup from fish the boy catches with a hook. Though the ship still dips and surges, the crew set about repairing the sails and everything wet is hung out to dry, including the pardoner.

The next day the land recedes to their right, and there are boats on the horizon. The water under the ship’s prow changes colour, becomes a choppy brew littered with broken barrels, scrubby feathers, filthy rushes, a dead dog.

‘Crossing the estuary,’ the boy explains, gesturing westwards. ‘Up there to London.’

Master Cobham is more watchful and the boy is sent to climb the ratlines and sit on a spar lashed to the mainmast’s crown.

‘Worried about pirates,’ the pardoner murmurs. ‘Something else we have to be watchful of these days.’