It is on Thomas’s tongue to remind her that Joan of Arc was burned not for being a witch, but for disguising her sex under a man’s clothes, against the strictures of Deuteronomy. Does she even know who Joan is? He doubts it suddenly. And whatever will they do to her when they do? He thinks of the man hanging in the tree outside Boston, or the wretch quartered in the marketplace in Calais, with his head sent elsewhere, or the pardoner’s story of the man with his ear nailed to a post, and the whore with her broken arm. There seem to be any number of ways to punish a man, or a woman.

‘Besides,’ she goes on, ‘Walter only calls me that to hurt me. It seems that is how he is.’

Thomas nods. He supposes she is right.

‘He is like a dog my father once had,’ he says. ‘He used to nip the sheep’s heels, and we lost more than one lamb because of it, so in the end my brother took him out and drowned him. After he’d done it, we regretted it.’

Katherine glances at him, but says nothing, and Thomas wonders why he has told her the story. He has never talked of home to anyone since he left. He does not often think of the place now. He had been happy to leave the farm. It was a harsh life, always cold, usually dark, and every day mutton. His brother too, and his brother’s wife, pregnant with their first child, always looking at him. He knew that being away, being in cloister, was the best thing that could have happened to him.

They walk on until they find some women willing to sell them ale and bread. By the time they return to the tent a cauldron of beans hangs over the fire.

Geoffrey has also spent money on new-made clothes. He hands Thomas and Katherine each a linen shirt, two hoods – one blue, one red – two pairs of blue hose that look as if they might fit Thomas but not Katherine, a travelling cloak such as the other men wear, and a thick quilted jacket each.

‘Won’t stop an arrow or a blade,’ he says as Thomas shrugs his on, ‘but then almost nothing does. Leastways, nothing we can afford.’

Thomas has never had new clothes before. The jack hangs stiffly from his body while Katherine’s reaches below her thighs and she pulls it tight about her, so that it becomes more like a long coat than a jacket. Geoffrey hands Thomas the giant’s pollaxe.

‘Keep it somewhere safe,’ he says.

Just then Richard Fakenham comes into the clearing by the fire.

‘Any news?’ Geoffrey asks.