It bled out by the Boyne, a little rivulet from her leading to the greater water. A sheep had drowned downstream, snagged on an upended tree. It still floated and bobbed. Its wool had come away and its bare body was a deep blue. Crows were pecking on it. They looked like growths when they stayed still. The sheep’s belly was swollen and taut, enormous.

‘Someone must forgive me,’ she says, turning round, ‘somewhere.’

Hers was the size of a finger. It looked of nothing, all blue; so small it could not be too big a sin, but she had kept bleeding. She examined it for a while wondering who it belonged to, but it was too foreign. It looked like a worm, a promise of something, but no one had made any promise.

Segnat had been following her, and she couldn’t believe Áoife had survived drinking as much as she had. She took her home, nursed her for two days.

‘Once your body returns, your feelings will be enormous for at least a month, perhaps longer. They will seem bigger than the world, but they are only feelings,’ Segnat had told her. ‘After that, I don’t know. Anything could happen, but you will live.’

Is this my life? Áoife thinks. This is all just shadows and hate.

She told Joseph the truth once she saw he was sick, thinking it would make smaller the length of time they would be in pain, but now he does not have the heart – no, the time – to forgive her. It is unbearable; she cannot stand it. She thought she would also be dead soon, but she cannot catch it. She eats corrupted food, poisoned leaves, and nothing. I will live forever with this pain.

‘I am not trying hard enough,’ she says.

She goes over to Joseph; kneels down before him and lays her arms on his lap. Joseph groans in pain.

‘You love another,’ she says. ‘You love another, I see it in your eyes; that is why you will not forgive me. If I give you a child you are not allowed to die. You must stay and mind it. We are both so young, so you will get better. Twenty-six is far too young to die; we don’t have time for it. We must live together yet, so you must forgive me.’

In her spiel her elbow brushes over a protuberance on his thigh, and his whole leg jumps, kicking her weakly in the side. Tears are running down his eyes, but his face is frozen, his mouth hanging open in a wide rictus. Every hour he looks less like her husband, and more like a shrunken corpse.

‘Is this where the pain is, my love?’ she says. ‘Is this where the sickness is kept?’