‘It is his,’ she interrupts, nodding at Thomas. Thomas glances at her, then nods and stretches his hand to take it. Richard hardly cares one way or the other, and tosses Thomas the pack. Thomas slings it over his back, and together they step up on to the gangplank. She follows him across, trying to imagine what the pack might hold that the pardoner valued above all his other possessions.

9

THOMAS SITS NEXT to Katherine on a millstone on the quayside. She is staring at the grit beneath her boot soles.

‘Did you ever think you’d come to France?’ he asks.

He stamps on the ground, as if to make sure it is real. This is the land where his father died, but it is also the land apart, where Englishmen come to make their names and their fortunes. Despite himself, he feels a slight thrill, as if the earth is communicating something to him. Katherine is less excited.

‘I did not ever think I’d leave the priory,’ she says.

He is quiet after that and together they watch Geoffrey haggling with a traventer over the cost of hiring an ox and cart to take the company to find lodgings in the Pale.

‘You’ll find no room in the town,’ the traventer says. ‘Every man in England who owes his living to the Earl of Warwick is here. More attainted traitors than you’d dare shake a fist at.’

He is an old soldier with a worm of pink scar tissue crawling across his nose. His mate, who holds the ox’s ring, is drunk and grins distantly while the archers pile their equipment into the cart. It takes five minutes. Thomas carries an iron cauldron that leaves his hands covered in black grease while Katherine has a leather bucket crammed with wooden spoons, plates and mugs, and a set of leather bellows. There is a grindstone and a massive roll of canvas that the Welsh brothers carry between them as if it is a dead body. There are tent poles, a lance, another bucket of broken arrows, a pile of grubby sheepskins imperfectly cured and there are more boxes and bales and lengths of canvas and some spare bows and some bags of arrows, a number of bills with rusted heads, three dented breastplates, a kettle helmet, a roll of rondel daggers and a falchion, as well as a collection of lead mauls kept in a broken barrel. Lastly the archers throw their own bags up.

‘Right, boys,’ Geoffrey calls, ‘that’s the lot.’