In Leicester on a porch invaded by honeysuckle the ostler’s in-a-blue-shift daughter made a circle with her hands and brought them over her head without unclasping. Margery knew that the girl had recently acquired an acute sense of smell and was almost always aware of the scent of her own cunt. Open, blood, fold. When the girl saw her sister’s clitoris she said, “Mine’s bigger than hers.”

Eggs began drifting through fallopian wastelands. The girl liked to stroke her newly growing breasts but when she lay on her stomach they hurt. She was always tempted to run away; she got to the front gate and looked up through wild eyes at Margery, who told her she would have a lot of pleasure in life if she lasted that long.

The girl’s father, the ostler, ran up to Margery’s room and grabbed her bag. The Law was etched into his very grain. He wouldn’t let Margery finish a letter (she was asking John to take her home because traveling alone was dangerous). She had a dubious reputation. Like any fanatic, she needed to show the world what she had become. She could have avoided trouble; instead she harangued people, an unlicensed preacher, maybe subversive.

The ostler was a thin-limbed man with a potbelly and a pointed nose; he was never far from sleep. He rushed Margery to the Mayor through narrow streets that led to the guildhall. The ostler was worried about the future. It was his duty as a citizen to protect the state against heretics now that the King was away unleashing English power.

They came to an iron pole he’d used to climb; he’d gone up and slid down, gone up again and again until a kind of orgasm rushed between his thighs. He pressed his face against the metal, a steely scent, musty and gray. Death was learning to speak. Cobblers, harnessmakers, potters, glovers, gilders, spicers, smiths, and skinners—they worked harder and harder but their labor was a kind of apathy (their isolation and equivalence were the ostler’s dreams materialized).

Peasants danced in a churchyard to a hurdy-gurdy, arms and legs thrown out like swastikas. Margery could not believe her eyes; her indignation kept them dancing night and day for a whole year. Her miracle was mean spirited. They danced themselves waist deep into the ground.

The Mayor was an ash blond with perfectly chiseled features. The words hello or please cost him too much to be wasted on Margery: as soon as he saw her he cried, “Dic mihi nomen amantis.” The devil could answer difficult questions in good Latin. “How should crescite et multipli-camini be understood?” Heretics said it justified free love. Priests stood around to hear her reply and a soldier leaned on a pike with a sprocket.

“Speak English. I don’t understand what you are saying.”