‘It’s just a lucky flower,’ I say. ‘We’ve put nowt—’

Briefly, the woman opens the door a little wider to thrust out her head. ‘The new magistrate will protect we God-fearing folk and the likes of you shall be chased away. I know what you did to those poor Barton babbies, you slave of the Devil, and if you darken my step again, I shall tell Magistrate Wright every tale I’ve heard, you hear? Be gone.’

The door slams and Annie turns to me, frowning and still clutching the flowers. ‘What does she mean? What harm have we did?’

I think of the raw patches on the farmhand’s head, caused by my anger. The beating John gave Sam Finch and the clay poppet that Mam has made in his likeness. The curses she’s laid on the catches, harvests and children of those that have crossed her. ‘No harm,’ I say.

Whatever befell the Barton children, it was not my doing, that at least I know. It was three years past and I had not begun to grow into my powers, much less tried spinning curses or uttering spells.

I close my eyes: a bitter winter, ground stinging-cold and hard beneath my feet. Annie little more than a babby, spindly and listless; I’d lain awake all night with a headache and belly-wart from my own hunger, listening to her keening. Dazed and queasy, I ventured outside, determined to beg an apple or parsnip left from autumn, that we might boil up and feed her.

The Bartons’ place was the nearest, and all I had energy to reach. Standing wrapped in the blanket I’d taken from my mat, I begged the man for a coin, or if not then the smallest morsel of food for my babby sister, looking past him to a kitchen that held the warmth of the fire and the scent of dried fish. A girl not much younger than me sat at the table, bouncing a fat little babby Annie’s age on her knee, rolls of flesh tucked under its chin.

He chased me from his land, waving a pitchfork above his head. I, but a lass of fourteen.

Anger rises in me now at the memory, a flicker that, should I let it, will pound through me like the sea itself, filling my thoughts with ember eyes. I breathe deep, hold fast to Annie, battle with this fury, for it has nowhere to fall.

The village lost many that winter, mostly the youngest and oldest. The Barton children among them. Annie spared, though no thanks to him. They left the village not long after.

Whatever befell them, it was not my doing.