‘All right,’ she says. ‘We’ll afford your fox that. But later, we all have work to do first.’

I cannot help but protest. ‘But Mam, we’ve food, let’s keep away from the village awhile. They look upon us with only spite now, and it’s not safe to—’

‘We cannot live on the crumbs from your honey-sop’s table, and we mustn’t come to rely on them, for who knows when that well will dry. You and Annie can go beg a coin or two, for as you say, without protection from old Thompson we cannot be selling cures and curses. Can we?’

She pauses as we shake our heads.

‘Change into your own clothes, where did this get-up come from anyway?’ she says.

At last the acknowledgement I’ve been waiting for. ‘They came from a friend in the village.’

Mam snorts. ‘There is no friend to us in the village.’

‘They’re for the other sister,’ Annie says.

Mam’s skin becomes pale and thin as a shell. She glances around the room, fearful. ‘What?’ she asks, running over to Annie, crouching before her and grasping her arms, shaking her. ‘What other sister do you speak of? What do you see?’

Annie wipes her nose and glances at me in confusion.

‘She means me,’ I say. ‘She thinks I’m changed.’

‘She looks like Sarah but she isn’t,’ Annie says. ‘Dust see, Mammy?’

Mam slumps to her knees, head bowed, and Annie bends down, stroking her hair and peering at her with worried little eyes.

‘What did you think?’ I ask. I can hardly speak now. ‘That she sees the spirits of her dead sisters? That past deeds stalk these rooms in a form only Annie can see?’

Mam covers her face with her hands, shoulders beginning to shudder. Her grief is silent for the sake of Annie, perhaps for me too, and I wish I could snag my words from the air and swallow them again.

‘Are you sick, Mammy?’ Annie whispers. ‘Did you have greed with the buttermilk too?’

I gather my own clothes, step towards the other room. As I pass her, Mam shoots out a hand and grasps my ankle. A burst of fear in me.

‘My only wish,’ she says, looking up through the straggled hair that sticks to her wet face, ‘is that you will never suffer to know what makes a woman act as I did.’

The rap on the door is loud, even; three slow knocks. A man clears his throat on the other side. Not a voice I recognise. Mam rises to her feet, finger to her lips and eyes weighted with warning, indicates that Annie and I should go.