‘They rejected the child,’ she says, ‘made the wrong offering. Worse than that, I fear there may have been no right one to make; that this has all been meaningless, and I have wasted the last days of the earth tripping up on mere confusions. Nothing will be born, not today or any day; the madness will spread. You must not go back there. Will you return?’

‘Never,’ Saint John whispers.

‘I will be by the stump if you see my rock,’ she says, pointing behind herself with her axe. ‘I must wait there and watch, because there is always someone coming into Nobber. I am very sorry for your friend.’

She disappears behind the trees, and soon a tapping sound comes from the crannóg on the lake. Saint John listens to it; to the lapping of the wavelets, the turning of the earth, the steady rumble of the foliage, and falls asleep.

‘Is that all?’ …

‘Is that all?’ Gertrude asks. ‘Is it finished now?’

Conn flinches, whipped out of his story by the coldness in her voice. She will never allow him to forget his cowardly rejection of her.

‘Do you not understand?’ he says. ‘This is the very first Sunday that there has been no lamb left waiting for them. Every fourth Sunday before this, for years, there was a-one; but now is the curfew, and I am trapped, my duty undone.’

‘I understand,’ Gertrude says, ‘but I do not care.’

‘Did you not like it, the story?’

‘Have you no other stories?’ she says. ‘Is that your only one?’

‘You wish to wound me because I have hurt you,’ Conn says.

‘Hurt me?’ Gertrude says. ‘Why would I be hurt?’

The knocking begins again. Somewhere during his story it had stopped, but he was so caught up in the telling he did not hear it.

‘Don’t primp yourself up in significance,’ Gertrude says, affecting nonchalance. ‘I took pity on you because you were exposed to the elements for so long. Living outdoors so much has made your skin ancient and dusty. It does not produce the oils necessary to your age. Your face is falling apart. I thought I would do you a kindness; that is all. I am sorry for it now.’

And then the door swings outwards. The room’s shade grows paler. Through the door, Conn can see a few people trudging out of their homes, their faces blank, and soft, like they have just awoken from sleep. One woman in the middle of the street stretches, yawns. The murmuring of indistinct sounds comes through this open door; there is the flicker of a fomenting crowd. Conn, outside of Dervorgilla’s marriage, and some other religious festivals, has never seen one.

‘The curfew is ended,’ he says. ‘We are free.’