Around her neck, and tied to the branch above, a strip of cloth torn from a sheet. Staring blankly down at us her bloated, blackened face. Tongue swollen like a rotting fish.

Hers was not a quick death. Not merciful. She will have swung and choked before life drained away, with not even a kind soul to pull on her legs and break her neck.

Tear tracks still, on those bruised cheeks.

Mam moves slowly, weighed by the horror of what we have just seen. She wraps the neckerchief around me, as though I were a child, and presses the package of petals into my hand. Cups my face and kisses my cheek.

‘Tell only one you trust,’ she says. ‘Say nowt of us, we cannot be tied to this. And let it be known another discovered her, not you. You mustn’t be found out now.’

I embrace her briefly and bend to Annie. She’s folded herself in Mam’s petticoat, sucking her thumb. Small, brown eyes peer out at me.

I kiss her cheek. A little plumper than before.

‘Mammy will keep you safe,’ I say. ‘The lassie’s resting now.’

‘Poor thing,’ Mam says as I straighten up. ‘Her soul will tread that wood with the others.’

He is stabling the animals and I am grateful, for there’s no other here I must put on an act for. One look at my face and he frowns, steps forward and takes me in his arms.

‘Phyllis,’ I say. ‘Phyllis hanged herself in the woods.’

Crescent of the Whole

Daniel counted the tolls of the passing bell. Six for a woman, and then one for each year Phyllis lived. Fourteen.

They always offered the horse and cart for funerals, and so here he stood once again, looking into the faces of the bewildered and sorrow-stricken. Phyllis’s mother leaned forward, grasped his hand. So close, he could count the new furrows and contours marking her in the days since her daughter’s death.

‘She did not give herself to him, you know. She was not willing,’ she said.

The sight of Phyllis’s tearful face that night in the woods would plague him always. ‘I know.’

She stepped closer, cold hands gripping his. Tears flooded and fell. ‘It was when the second bleed didn’t come,’ she said. He could not tell if she nodded, or simply shook so violently in her grief.

‘Mary,’ Phyllis’s father called, frowning. He strode over, took her by the arm and led her away. He looked over his shoulder at Daniel. ‘She’s mad with the loss of her,’ he said. ‘Speaks not a word of sense.’