When he sees him, something in Thomas lurches. He has been so long at sea that he has almost forgotten his state as an apostate. Now it comes back to him. He ducks his head and hurries to the other side of the cart. Katherine is already there, her eyes wide with anxiety. Her hands still shake long after the priest has gone.

The sooner they see the Prior of All, he thinks, the happier she will be.

‘I think we’ll head around there,’ Geoffrey says and urges the carters off the road and across a sodden compression towards where the armourers and arrow-makers have set up their stalls. The acrid smoke from their fires does something to mask the smell of the camp, but the din of their hammers is insistent.

‘You’ll soon get used to that right enough,’ Walter says, ‘and, anyway, they can’t work after sunset.’

There are long hovels where the horses, oxen and asses are kept and there are more boys in cast-off clothes bringing hay from the barns. There are pens for geese and sheep and sties for pigs and efforts have been made to make a road using willow hurdles laid across the mud. Some boys are piling up slender logs for the fires and thick-armed women are trying to wash clothes in water that has never been clean. Every now and then a Watch rides past, back from one of the other castles in the Pale, their horses’ hocks yellow with mud.

‘Not much of a place,’ the other Thomas points out, shaking his head so that the line of water drips scatters from the fringe of his cap. He is a quietly spoken boy, about Thomas’s age.

‘It’ll be better when we’ve had something to eat,’ Geoffrey asserts. The rest of the men begin unloading the wagon while the carters look on and Geoffrey shows them how to set the battens and canvas and tie the loops off to keep the tents upright. They use broken arrows as tent pegs, hammering them into the mud with mauls that might properly have been used to stave in a man’s skull.

Two of the Johns return with a pile of sticks and lumps of coal, which they light with some baked linen, a good black flint and a steel, and they soon produce a new source of discomfort as foul black smoke fills the tent.

Geoffrey then gives Thomas five silver coins, a sack and four jugs and sends him with Katherine to buy bread and ale.

‘Don’t spend it on pretty clothes, Girly,’ Walter calls as they leave.

When they are away Thomas asks her how long she thinks it will be before her sex is discovered.

‘I don’t know,’ she admits. ‘But what else can I do but keep up the pretence? Besides, if you are right that God has a special purpose in mind for us, well, we shall see.’