She bridled. “I’m the prioress of Kingsbridge, and the acting prior – nothing here is secret from me.”

“Well, if you start digging up all that old stuff, you’ll regret it, I promise you.”

It sounded like a threat, but she decided not to challenge him. She tried a different tack. “Thomas, I thought we were friends. You have no right to forbid me to do anything, and I’m disappointed that you should even try. Don’t you trust me?”

“You don’t know what you’re asking.”

“Then enlighten me. What does Queen Isabella have to do with you, me and Kingsbridge?”

“Nothing. She’s an old woman now, living in retirement.”

“She’s fifty-three. She’s deposed one king, and she could probably depose another if she had a mind to. And she has some long-hidden connection with my priory which you are determined to keep from me.”

“For your own good.”

She ignored that. “Twenty-two years ago someone was trying to kill you. Was it the same person who, having failed to do away with you, paid you off by getting you admitted to the monastery?”

“Andrew is going to go back to Lynn and tell Isabella that you’ve been asking these questions – do you realize that?”

“Why would she care? Why are people so afraid of you, Thomas?”

“Everything will be answered when I’m dead. None of it will matter then.” He turned round and walked away.

The bell rang for dinner. Caris went to the prior’s palace, deep in thought. Godwyn’s cat, Archbishop, was sitting on the doorstep. It glared at her and she shooed it away. She would not have it in the house.

She had got into the habit of dining every day with Merthin. Traditionally the prior regularly dined with the alderman, though to do so every day was unusual – but these were unusual times. That, at any rate, would have been her excuse, had anyone challenged her; but nobody did. Meanwhile they both looked out eagerly for another excuse to go on a trip so that they could again be alone together.

He came in muddy from his building site on Leper Island. He had stopped asking her to renounce her vows and leave the priory. He seemed content, at least for the moment, to see her every day and hope for future chances to be more intimate.

A priory employee brought them ham stewed with winter greens. When the servant had gone, Caris told Merthin about the charter and Thomas’s reaction. “He knows a secret that could damage the old queen if it got out.”

“I think that must be right,” Merthin said thoughtfully.

“On All Hallows’ Day in 1327, after I ran away, he caught you, didn’t he?”

“Yes. He made me help him bury a letter. I had to swear to keep it secret – until he dies, then I am to dig it up and give it to a priest.”

“He told me all my questions would be answered when he died.”

“I think the letter is the threat he holds over his enemies. They must know that its contents will be revealed when he dies. So they fear to kill him – in fact they have made sure he remains alive and well by helping him become a monk of Kingsbridge.”

“Can it matter, still?”

“Ten years after we buried the letter, I told him I hadn’t ever let the secret out, and he said: ‘If you had, you’d be dead.’ That scared me more than the vow.”

“Mother Cecilia told me that Edward II did not die naturally.”

“How would she know a thing like that?”

“My uncle Anthony told her. So I presume the secret is that Queen Isabella had her husband murdered.”

“Half the country believes that anyway. But if there were proof… Did Cecilia say how he was killed?”

Caris thought hard. “No. Now that I think of it, what she said was: ‘The old king did not die of a fall.’ I asked her if he had been murdered – but she died without answering.”

“Still, why put out a false story about his death if not to cover up foul play?”

“And Thomas’s letter must somehow prove that there was foul play, and that the queen was in on it.”

They finished their dinner in thoughtful silence. In the monastery day, the hour after dinner was for rest or reading. Caris and Merthin usually lingered for a while. Today, however, Merthin was anxious about the angles of the roof timbers being erected in the new tavern, the Bridge, that he was building on Leper Island. They kissed hungrily, but he tore himself away and hurried back to the site. Disappointed, Caris opened a book called Ars Medica, a Latin translation of a work by the ancient Greek physician Galen. It was the cornerstone of university medicine, and she was reading it to find out what priests learned at Oxford and Paris; though she had so far found little that would help her.

The maid came back and cleared the table. “Ask Brother Thomas to come and see me, please,” Caris said. She wanted to make sure they were still friends despite their abrasive conversation.

Before Thomas arrived there was a commotion outside. She heard several horses, and the kind of shouting that indicated a nobleman wanting attention. A few moments later the door was flung open and in walked Sir Ralph Fitzgerald, lord of Tench.

He looked angry, but Caris pretended not to notice that. “Hello, Ralph,” she said as amiably as she could. “This is an unexpected pleasure. Welcome to Kingsbridge.”

“Never mind all that,” he said rudely. He walked up to where she sat and stood aggressively close. “Do you realize you’re ruining the peasantry of the entire county?”

Another figure followed him in and stood by the door, a big man with a small head, and Caris recognized his long-time sidekick, Alan Fernhill. Both were armed with swords and daggers. Caris was acutely aware that she was alone in the palace. She tried to defuse the scene. “Would you like some ham, Ralph? I’ve just finished dinner.”

Ralph was not to be diverted. “You’ve been stealing my peasants!”

“Peasants, or pheasants?”

Alan Fernhill burst out laughing.

Ralph reddened and looked more dangerous, and Caris wished she had not made that joke. “If you poke fun at me you’ll be sorry,” he said.

Caris poured ale into a cup. “I’m not laughing at you,” she said. “Tell me exactly what’s on your mind.” She offered him the ale.

Her shaking hand betrayed her fear, but he ignored the cup and wagged his finger at her. “Labourers have been disappearing from my villages – and when I inquire after them, I find they have moved to villages belonging to you, where they get higher wages.”

Caris nodded. “If you were selling a horse, and two men wanted to buy it, wouldn’t you give it to the one who offered the higher price?”

“That’s not the same.”

“I think it is. Have some ale.”

With a sudden sideswipe of his hand, he knocked the cup from her grasp. It fell to the floor, the ale spilling into the straw. “They’re my labourers.”

Her hand was bruised, but she tried to ignore the pain. She bent down, picked up the cup and set it on the sideboard. “Not really,” she said. “If they’re labourers, that means you’ve never given them any land, so they have the right to go elsewhere.”

“I’m still their lord, damn it! And another thing. I offered a tenancy to a free man the other day and he refused it, saying he could get a better bargain from Kingsbridge Priory.”

“Same thing, Ralph. I need all the people I can get, so I give them what they want.”

“You’re a woman, you don’t think things through. You can’t see that it will all end with everyone paying more for the same peasants.”

“Not necessarily. Higher wages might attract some of those who at present do no work at all – outlaws, for example, or those vagabonds who go around living off what they find in plague-emptied villages. And some who are now labourers might become tenants, and work harder because they’re cultivating their own land.”

He banged the table with his fist, and she blinked at the sudden noise. “You’ve no right to change the old ways!”