Walter has turned back to the men and Thomas watches as they strap on their bracers and slip their fingers into the leather tabs that protect their drawing fingers. There is something timeworn and easy about this routine, the manner in which they joke together and mock one another, and he can easily imagine them back at the village butts. But then instead of taking turns to loose their arrows down the range, as they did at home, the men form a loose harrow formation, standing in three ranks, so that each has just enough room to shoot. They have arrows stuck in the ground and in their belts and some wear their bags on their belts. They stand waiting for Walter’s command.

‘Nock,’ Walter says, and they nock their arrows on to the bowstrings.

‘Draw.’

They haul the strings back as they lift their great bows into the pale sky.

‘And loose!’

They send their arrows off with a roll of thrums, each shaft oddly elegant as it whips sighing out of sight. As he lets fly, each archer grunts, as if in satisfaction, and staggers a pace or two forward.

Then they pick up another arrow each. Walter repeats the command.

‘Nock, draw, loose!’ he snaps, quicker this time. ‘Nock, draw, loose.’

After they’ve shot about a dozen shafts each Walter stops them.

‘All right,’ he says. ‘Time for a laugh. Thomas here is going to have a go.’

The men let Thomas through.

‘I have not shot for some time,’ he says, preparing them for the worst.

‘Just get on with it,’ Walter grumbles. There is a low murmur of well-meant mockery. Thomas cannot help but smile.

He picks an arrow, nocks it on the cord and places it on the shelf the knuckles of his left hand make where he grips the bow. It is a bodkin head: a war arrow. He begins the draw, but the bow now seems horribly stiff. He knows he has to get his body into the bow, so that his back muscles take the weight, not his arms, but still, after so many years in the priory attending to not much more than his psalter, his muscles have withered, and though he has the technique, he has lost the strength. He can hardly get the string to his left shoulder. Sweat breaks out on his brow, his arms begin shaking and the string cuts into the soft fingers of his right hand. He cannot hold the string any longer. He looses it with a twang and the arrow shoots forward about a hundred paces to land in the mud.

Walter cackles.

‘I reckon young Girly can do better than that,’ he says.

Richard is watching and gestures that Katherine is not to be put to the test.

‘All right,’ Richard says. ‘You’ve had your fun. Now let’s stop messing about. Collect your arrows and then we’ll have a sheaf each. Fast as you can.’