William stares at her in silence for a moment, and then walks over to the anvil. He drags his finger across the horn and examines the specks thereon. They are so small and light that they have crept into the thin swirling lines of his fingerprints.

‘If de Fonteroy is a gravedigger, what is his residue?’ he asks. ‘Is this it?’

He shows her his finger.

‘Do you not recognise it?’ she says, folding her arms. ‘Taste it.’

He sticks his finger in his mouth, and sucks the substance. It is sharp and dusty, but the portion on his tongue is too small to clarify the taste or categorise it.

‘I do not recognise it,’ he says. ‘Is it pollen?’

She laughs briefly. ‘I would recognise the taste if they had pulled my tongue out with tongs,’ Alannah says. ‘It fertilises the earth, and it is so strong that if you put a sprinkle of it down in the Burren it would raise the liveliest flowers such as would not even grow on Tara. If a Gael has trouble conceiving, or if her womb is too small and tight for birthing without breaking the foetus’s neck, she drinks this with spring water, and she will bear twins as easily as a cat. It had fallen out of use, but of late, my people trade well for it.’

He looks at the rolling pin, and then stands over the long jug below the anvil. It is half full of this strange powder. He points at it, and looks to her. ‘This is de Fonteroy’s residue?’

She nods, and it strikes William that he has always known the source of the noise; has always recognised the taste in his mouth.

‘The sound was the cracking of human bones,’ he says, ‘the bones of those whose families could not afford the ha’penny for burial, for those without family or property.’

He kicks off the top of the wicker basket, exposing heaps of broken bones, cracked down to shards by Colca’s mallet. Loose teeth, stripped down to the enamel, glimmer amongst the duller yellowing fragments of other bones. A lower jaw smiles out at him below half a skull that has been eaten away by grey syphilis. Inside this skull, as though hidden in a cocoon, a rotting, brown eye lies nestled, the eyelid still intact. There is a crooked femur shattered at the knee, its edge jagged, an array of small finger bones like trinkets and a large broken pelvis beneath it.

‘You will be found out,’ he says.

‘And who is there left to find it out? That dead eye, perhaps? It sees nothing. I find that there are too many opinions in this world, and not enough food.’

William covers his mouth with the back of his hand, though there is no scent off the bones; his desire for her has made him accept even this. ‘I understand.’