Again Katherine wonders why Alice is there. Not standing by the river and holding a bucket of the Prioress’s slops, but in the priory at all. She is too young and too pretty to have come here to wait to die like the other sisters. She is too thin, that is true, but so is everybody these days, except perhaps the Prioress and Sister Joan. Nevertheless, even standing there holding that bucket of shit, even with that dew drop on the tip of her pink nose, Alice seems other-worldly, more than merely one of the sisters. Her clothes have no patches or stains and her rosary beads are finely wrought from ivory – a gift from a loving relative perhaps – and there is a lightness about her, as if she barely touches the ground at all.

‘Why are you here, Sister Alice?’ Katherine asks.

‘I told you,’ Alice says. ‘I want to help.’

‘No, no,’ Katherine goes on. ‘I mean here. Here at the priory.’

Alice smiles.

‘Oh,’ she says. ‘I am a bride of Christ.’

She even holds up her hand to show the gold ring on her finger.

‘What about you? Are you not a bride of Christ too?’

Katherine cannot tell if Alice is making a joke, but she thinks of herself: left at the almonry as an infant, with only a purse and some letters, and now the one to empty the Prioress’s slop bucket every morning.

‘Me?’ she says at length. ‘I am like this.’

And she pours the slops into the barrel, careful to keep back the solids for the dung heap. After she has done it, she empties the heavy bucket on to the heap, three or four very brown turds on the snow. The two nuns step back and Alice shivers.

Then they turn and begin their walk back across the fields towards the priory.

‘Why is it always you who empties the Prioress’s night bucket?’ Alice asks.

‘It just is,’ Katherine says.

Alice opens her mouth to ask something more but then closes it. Perhaps she has too many questions and cannot choose the right one. They walk on in silence, listening to their footsteps, and the click of Alice’s rosary, and their ragged breathing; Katherine is lost in thought, and so it is that she doesn’t hear the horses on the road above them until it is too late.

When she does, she stops mid-stride. Her heart lurches.

Men on horseback. More than one. More than two.

‘Quick,’ she whispers.

She gestures to Alice, and they lift their skirts and run. She hears a man shout. Dear God. They’ve been seen. She keeps running. The men are urging their horses off the road, cutting down across the frozen river, aiming to meet them before they reach the beggars’ gate.