As they near the shore Katherine smells the tang of coal smoke and human excrement. The archers are crowded at the ship’s rail peering over the waters towards the coast where a wavering smoke stack rises above a town.

‘Calais,’ Walter spits. ‘The last piece of France we have to call ours.’

‘Looks like a bit of a shithole,’ Dafydd says.

‘You could say that,’ Walter agrees, ‘but it’s our shithole. Or at least, it’s the Earl of Warwick’s.’

This gets a laugh. The remaining sailors start to reduce sail. They can hear the waves on the shore and the ship begins to slow.

‘That’s Fort Risban.’ Walter points, nodding across the water at a castle looming on the end of a long low spit that curves around the port. It is a squalid building, salt-stained where it is not caked in gull shit, and from its lower walls protrude three squat black barrels. There are soldiers on the castle battlements and behind them a fire is sending up smoke, as if the wood they are burning is green.

Lysson gives an order the sailors have been waiting on. A rope is thrown out to a smaller boat with oars, and the carrack is towed along a green-watered reach between Fort Risban on one side and Calais Castle on the other.

Beyond the castles the town sits behind its limestone walls, a jumble of church steeples and the gabled roofs. Along the quay is a broad skirt of lean-to shacks and fish-hangers where women and children are gutting fish and mending nets while men hurry past pushing carts laden with bales, bundles, caskets and barrels.

The Mary is brought into the murky waters of the crowded harbour beyond, finishing her voyage by grating against the weed-slimed timbers of the quay. While the sailors tie her up, the gangplank is run out and dropped with a bang. Sir John Fakenham emerges from the cabin. He looks grey, more ill now than he had when he boarded the ship, and he hangs from Geoffrey’s thick arm.

‘Let us thank St Nicholas for a safe voyage,’ he says, and then he catches sight of Thomas and Katherine and stops. ‘Though I know that not all would see it in that way,’ he admits.

Simon and Red John are lugging Sir John’s chest out on deck and Richard emerges from the cabin behind his father. He turns to Thomas and Katherine.

‘What about this?’ he asks. He holds up the pardoner’s pack, the one he had valued so highly. It is stained now, but it has been carefully tied so that its contents look to have survived the journey. She sees Thomas about to speak.