The brother at the head of the table released a latch, and let the winch spin loose. The brothers removed the buckles and clasps. Agnes didn’t move. One brother slid his arms underneath her and lifted her. When her knees bent and her arms fell forward she was convulsed, and her screams became bestial.

But she was lowered onto the tilted ladder, with her head above her feet. Again she was strapped in place. Her head was pinned down by a metal band around her forehead. Twigs were forced into her nostrils, coated with fat so they plugged her nose.

Guards stood by, one holding a cloth and a bit of metal, the other a bucket of water.

Ferron leaned over Agnes. ‘Can you hear me, Agnes? God doesn’t want to see you suffer. If you choose to confess, after it begins, then all you have to do is look at me, as you are now. Do you understand? Is there anything you wish to say to me now?’

‘He called me his Agnes,’ she whispered. ‘His precious Agnes. I was no Agnes when he was done with me . . .’

Geoffrey’s heart broke a little more.

Ferron, baffled, irritated, turned away. ‘Do it,’ he snapped to the brothers.

The one with the cloth stepped up. With casual, brutal strength he grabbed Agnes’s cheeks, forced her jaws open and pushed his metal frame through her lips. It was like a funnel, Geoffrey saw, that kept the mouth wide open. Now the brother laid the centre of his cloth over the funnel and stepped back.

Agnes was still, save for her eyes, which flickered back and forth over distorted cheeks.

The other brother stepped up with his bucket of water. With care, he poured a bit of water onto the cloth. The water’s weight forced the cloth into Agnes’s mouth. The brother kept pouring, and Geoffrey saw that the cloth was drawn deeper into Agnes’s throat. At last she swallowed, convulsively, and she coughed and choked, but she could not get the cloth out of her throat. Still the brother poured, and again she gagged, each swallow drawing the cloth deeper down her throat. Soon Geoffrey saw that she was close to panic, her battered body fighting back, immersed in a fear of drowning, of suffocating.

Ferron leaned over her. ‘All you have to do is look at me,’ he murmured. ‘Just look at me and I’ll tell them to stop.’

But, though she jerked and thrashed her head against its metal bond, she kept her eyes closed. Ferron nodded for the brothers to continue.

As the brothers poured more water into her, bucket after bucket, and more of the cloth was drawn into her throat and belly, and her stomach began to bloat, a grotesque swelling under her gaunt ribs.