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“You’d better come to my house. I’ll give you some bread and meat.” She noticed Aliena’s wary look, and added: “And you don’t have to do anything for it.”

Aliena believed her. “Thank you,” she said. “You’re very kind. Not many people have been kind to us. I don’t know how to thank you.

“No need,” she said. “Come with me.”

Meg’s husband was a wool merchant. At his house in the south of town, at his stall in the market on market days, and at the great annual fair held on St. Giles’s Hill, he bought fleeces brought to him by peasants from the surrounding countryside. He crammed them into great woolsacks, each holding the fleece of two hundred and forty sheep, and stored them in the barn at the back of his house. Once a year, when the Flemish weavers sent their agents to buy the soft, strong English wool, Meg’s husband would sell it all and arrange for the sacks to be shipped via Dover and Boulogne to Bruges and Ghent, where the fleece would be turned into top-quality cloth and sold all over the world at prices far too high for the peasants who kept the sheep. So Meg told Aliena and Richard over dinner, with that warm smile which said that whatever happens, there’s no need for people to be unkind to one another.

Her husband had been accused of selling short weight, a crime the city took very seriously, for its prosperity was based on a reputation for honest dealing. Judging by the way Meg spoke of it, Aliena thought he was probably guilty. His absence had made little different to the business, though. Meg had simply taken his place. In winter there was not much to do anyway: she had made a trip to Flanders; assured all her husband’s agents that the enterprise was functioning normally; and carried out repairs to the barn, enlarging it a little at the same time. When shearing began she would buy wool just as he had done. She knew how to judge its quality and set a price. She had already been admitted into the merchant’s guild of the city, despite the stain on her husband’s reputation, for there was a tradition of merchants helping each other’s families in times of trouble, and anyway he had not yet been proved guilty.

Richard and Aliena ate her food and drank her wine and sat by her fire talking until it began to get dark outside; then they went back to the priory to sleep. Aliena had nightmares again. This time she dreamed about her father. In the dream he was sitting on a throne in the prison, as tall and pale and authoritative as ever, and when she went to see him she had to bow as if he were the king. Then he spoke to her accusingly, saying she had abandoned him here in prison and gone to live in a whorehouse. She was outraged by the injustice of the charge, and said angrily that he had abandoned her. She was going to add that he had left her to the mercy of William Hamleigh, but she was reluctant to tell her father what William had done to her; then she saw that William was also in the room, sitting on a bed and eating cherries from a bowl. He spat a cherry pip at her and it hit her cheek, stinging her. Her father smiled and then William started throwing soft cherries at her. They splattered her face and dress, and she began to cry, because although the dress was old it was the only one she had, and now it was blotched all over with cherry juice like bloodstains.

She felt so unbearably sad in the dream that when she woke up and discovered it was not real she felt an enormous sense of relief, even though the reality—that she was homeless and penniless—was much worse than being pelted with soft cherries.

The light of dawn was seeping through the cracks in the walls of the guesthouse. All around her people were waking up and beginning to move around. Soon the monks came in, opened the doors and the shutters, and called everyone to breakfast.

Aliena and Richard ate hurriedly, then went to Meg’s house. She was ready to leave. She had made a spicy beef stew to warm up for her husband’s dinner, and Aliena told Richard to carry the heavy pot for her. Aliena wished they had