Slowly, the man knelt, still holding his food in his hand.

Caris turned her gaze on his companion. After a moment, the second man did the same.

Caris blessed them both, then kicked Blackie and quickly trotted away. After a moment she looked back. Mair was close behind her. The two starving men stood staring at them.

Caris mulled over the incident anxiously as they rode through the afternoon. The sun shone cheerfully, as on a fine day in hell. In some places, smoke was rising fitfully from a patch of woodland or a smouldering barn. But the countryside was not totally deserted, she realized gradually. She saw a pregnant woman harvesting beans in a field that had escaped the English torches; the scared faces of two children looking out from the blackened stones of a manor house; and several small groups of men, usually flitting through the fringes of woodland, moving with the alert purposefulness of scavengers. The men worried her. They looked hungry, and hungry men were dangerous. She wondered whether she should stop fretting about speed and worry instead about safety.

Finding their way to the religious houses where they planned to stop was also going to be more difficult than Caris had thought. She had not anticipated that the English army would leave such devastation in its wake. She had assumed there would be peasants around to direct her. It could be hard enough in normal times to get such information from people who had never travelled farther than the nearest market town. Now her interlocutors would also be elusive, terrified or predatory.

She knew by the sun that she was heading east, and she thought, judging by the deep cartwheel ruts in the baked mud, that she was on the main road. Tonight’s destination was a village named, after the nunnery at its centre, Hopital-des-Soeurs. As the shadow in front of her grew longer, she looked about with increasing urgency for someone whom she could ask for directions.

Children fled from their approach in fear. Caris was not yet desperate enough to risk getting close to the hungry-looking men. She hoped to come across a woman. There were no young women anywhere, and Caris had a bleak suspicion about the fate they might have met at the hands of the marauding English. Occasionally she saw, in the far distance, a few lonely figures harvesting a field that had escaped burning; but she was reluctant to go too far from the road.

At last they found a wrinkled old woman sitting under an apple tree next to a substantial stone house. She was eating small apples wrenched from the tree long before they were ripe. She looked terrified. Caris dismounted, to seem less intimidating. The old woman tried to hide her poor meal in the folds of her dress, but she seemed not to have the strength to run away.

Caris addressed her politely. “Good evening, mother. Will this road take us to Hopital-des-Soeurs, may I ask?”

The woman seemed to pull herself together, and answered intelligently. Pointing in the direction in which they were heading, she said: “Through the woods and over the hill.”

Caris saw that she had no teeth. It must have been almost impossible to eat unripe apples with your gums, she thought with pity. “How far?” she asked.

“A long way.”

All distances were long at her age. “Can we get there by nightfall?”

“On a horse, yes.”

“Thank you, mother.”

“I had a daughter,” said the old woman. “And two grandsons. Fourteen years and sixteen. Fine boys.”

“I’m very sorry to hear that.”

“The English,” said the old woman. “May they all burn in hell.”

Evidently it did not occur to her that Caris and Mair might be English. That answered Caris’s question: local people could not tell the nationality of strangers. “What were the boys’ names, mother?”

“Giles and Jean.”

“I will pray for the souls of Giles and Jean.”

“Have you any bread?”

Caris looked around, to make sure there was no one else lurking nearby, ready to pounce, but they were alone. She nodded to Mair, who took from her saddlebag the remains of the loaf and offered it to the old woman.

The woman snatched it from her and began to gnaw it with her gums.

Caris and Mair rode away.

Mair said: “If we keep giving our food away, we’re going to starve.”

“I know,” said Caris. “But how can you refuse?”

“We can’t fulfil our mission if we’re dead.”

“But we are nuns, after all,” Caris said with asperity. “We must help the needy, and leave it to God to decide when it’s time for us to die.”

Mair was startled. “I’ve never heard you talk like that before.”

“My father hated people who preached about morality. We’re all good when it suits us, he used to say: that doesn’t count. It’s when you want so badly to do something wrong – when you’re about to make a fortune from a dishonest deal, or kiss the lovely lips of your neighbour’s wife, or tell a lie to get yourself out of terrible trouble – that’s when you need the rules. Your integrity is like a sword, he would say: you shouldn’t wave it until you’re about to put it to the test. Not that he knew anything about swords.”

Mair was silent for a while. She might have been mulling over what Caris had said, or she might simply have given up the argument: Caris was not sure.

Talk of Edmund always made Caris realize how much she missed him. After her mother died he had become the cornerstone of her life. He had always been there, standing at her shoulder, as it were, ready when she needed sympathy and understanding, or shrewd advice, or just information: he had known so much about the world. Now, when she turned in that direction, there was just an empty space.

They passed through a patch of woodland then breasted a rise, as the old woman had forecast. Looking down on a shallow valley they saw another burned village, the same as all the rest but for a cluster of stone buildings that looked like a small convent. “This must be Hôpital-des-Soeurs,” said Caris. “Thank God.”

She realized, as she approached, how used to nunnery life she had become. As they rode down the hill she found herself looking forward to the ritual washing of hands, a meal taken in silence, bed time at nightfall, even the sleepy peacefulness of Matins at three o’clock in the morning. After what she had seen today, the security of those grey stone walls was alluring, and she kicked the tired Blackie into a trot.

There was no one moving about the place, but that was not really surprising: it was a small house in a village, and you would not expect the kind of hustle and bustle seen at a major priory such as Kingsbridge. Still, at this time of day there should have been a column of smoke from a kitchen fire as the evening meal was prepared. However, as she came closer she saw further ominous signs, and a sense of dismay slowly engulfed her. The nearest building, which looked like a church, appeared to have no roof. The windows were empty sockets, lacking shutters or glass. Some of the stone walls were blackened, as if by smoke.

The place was silent: no bells, no cries of ostlers or kitchen hands. It was deserted, Caris realized despondently as she reined in. And it had been fired, like every other building in the village. Most of the stone walls were still standing, but the timber roofs had fallen in, doors and other woodwork had burned, and glass windows had shattered in the heat.

Mair said unbelievingly: “They set fire to a nunnery?”

Caris was equally shocked. She had believed that invading armies invariably left ecclesiastical buildings intact. It was an iron rule, people said. A commander would not hesitate to put to death a soldier who violated a holy place. She had accepted that without question. “So much for chivalry,” she said.

They dismounted and walked, stepping cautiously around charred beams and scorched rubble, to the domestic quarters. As they approached the kitchen door, Mair gave a shriek and said: “Oh, God, what’s that?”