Daniel could not at first comprehend Gabriel’s meaning, could not recognise the piece of black cloth that was waved in his face. Soft. Bloodstained.

He could barely speak the words. ‘The parson’s hat.’

Gabriel sneered, fumbling to place it back in his pocket. ‘Aye. And I keep it about me all the while, so I may have a reminder that I do whatever I please.’

Gabriel. Not Sarah’s brother. No demon.

She had told him as much. He had not stopped to listen.

‘And you said she pressed against you, was that—?’

‘Oh, yes. I pressed her against me, I laid my lips on hers. Felt her.’ He made a drunken attempt to mime his actions.

Daniel swallowed, swallowed again. Mouth still full.

‘Oh, she squeaked and struggled a bit but she wanted it, the little whore, I was not the first to make his mark, eh? Only because the parson saw did she protest, and I was forced to stop. But I made him pay.’

Daniel’s jaw clenched.

No demon. No enchantment. She had not betrayed him.

He was a bigger, weaker fool than he had known.

‘We should have been wed,’ he said.

Gabriel swayed. ‘What?’

‘We would have been wed, and away by now. In another life. The life we said, it was real, we would be living it now.’

‘What?’

Fury as he had never known surged through him. ‘You took it away. You took it all away.’

As Gabriel opened his mouth to speak again, Daniel gave way to his anger, shoved him off his unsteady feet and sent him tumbling to the ground.

Tomorrow, he would visit Magistrate Wright. Tell all he had seen and heard. Gabriel would be found with his own guilt carried in his pocket.

Daniel turned back towards the river. Didn’t know why.

Breadcrumb

I watch the lights gather into a line and weave their way down the hill.

John’s blanket has fallen to the floor, and I pull it back over Mam as she sleeps, curled on her side like a child, and crawl at last to my bed, as dawn begins to make itself known. The ring of ash is unbroken around the mat. Sleep overcomes me at last.

I jerk awake, dazed from the first full sleep for days, feared that something dreadful has happened in the time that’s passed.

‘Annie,’ I call. ‘Annie, come here, where are you?’

Rise from the bed, not yet fully woken, stagger with the blanket wrapped around me to the door. Annie is at the table, spooning milk into Mam’s mouth as she sits on a stool, empty stare seeing another, happier day perhaps.

Annie’s eyes small and brown like a spadger’s behind her mop of hair. ‘What are you shouting for?’ she asks.

‘I didn’t know where you were. I was worried.’

‘You stayed in bed all day. Mammy was hungry.’