‘Proceed, my father said,’ Neasa says. ‘He shouted it at me. Keep your eyes closed, he said. I remember his voice, though I forget his face, and my hand went through the fleshy opening that was becoming more lubricated the more I went at it with my fingers. Its interior was soft, and tight, though loosening, and it gave off a smell so strong it made me giddy. A unique texture, and to me now, at least, unmistakable.’

A spark flies from the pillar, hisses out; an aborted shooting star. Samthánn has leant too heavily on the supporting beam with the rock. She looks to the straw at her feet, and sees it has not ignited. She gets to her drawing again, using less force now.

Only the hen is aware of her, out of the side of its head. It is warming two spotted eggs with the soft white down of its underside.

‘One must remember the pain of children,’ Concessa says. ‘Perhaps we are too harsh on this child. She cannot have more than nine years on her. I wish I knew how she came to this room.’

‘Are faeries evil, or just mischievous?’ Ruth asks.

There are two brief knocks on the door, sharp and insistent, and then the sound of bare feet walking away. None of the women pay any mind to this noise, nor does Samthánn.

‘Later when I was a mother, and had been much examined and played with in a matrimonial way by my beloved Tádhg,’ Neasa says, ‘I recognised the feel of it, that feel I had felt, and that knowledge that the tree was feeling it too, and I felt very dirty and wretched once I knew it. It was a woman’s insides, her part of pleasure and birth, the hollow in the tree, though I blush to say it. What was strangest though was that even though the tree had a woman’s parts, I felt it was a very mannish tree.’

‘If you set Segnat’s daughter out in the wind, her skin would crack and bleed in many places,’ Concessa says. ‘It was a very rare sickness she had. She lived till she was six, I think, and she was very quiet. Segnat never recovered her mind after that. She has been sad a long time; and she always says sadness means that when choosing between different things, you choose the least.’

‘The tree is an ash, Neasa,’ Ruth says. ‘I do not know why you say it is a hawthorn unless you have gone mad with hunger.’