‘I lived before with a man, my husband,’ she says, ‘who I could not please, though I tried to. I thought my love was enough to make him tarry a while, but my love only made him hate me more. Hate is a strange thing, another presence; it presses close to you in small quarters like these, a third person in a room made for two. I will not welcome it back again, and I will not welcome you again. My pride won’t allow it.’

‘But I do not hate you,’ Conn says. ‘You are my friend.’

‘You are both too old and too young to be friends with,’ she says, shaking her head. ‘In any case, our friendship provokes. They already call me a slut in town, because that was what my husband said about me when he was drinking to justify his own absence from my bed. After twenty years in this town, they still haven’t accepted me.’

‘Let me return,’ Conn pleads, inflecting his voice with a tinge of desperation that Gertrude finds disgusting.

He is like a half-trained dog that has seen a pigeon, she thinks; straining at the heel, frothing at the gob. She is disgusted. He wants to get out, but is hedging his bets, because he knows propriety will not allow Dervorgilla to receive him.

‘I must clean my house,’ Gertrude says. ‘You’re in the way.’

She turns upwards the broom and beats the cobwebs off the wooden ceiling. Strands of filaments glide down, strewing themselves across her head.

‘Goodbye.’

Though she had protested, her vanity is still greatly wounded by Conn not looking back as he races out the door.

Once her ceiling is clean, she recognises in this wounded vanity a hopeful sign. Perhaps there is enough of her left to remain strong. She plucks away the cobwebs all tangled on the edge of her broom. They are a flowing swirl of silver; gossamer thin, stirred by the faintest breath, invisible in the shade. She puts the broom in the light of the doorway. The filaments sparkle, move like hair underwater; and as she is watching them someone tosses a dead crow into her house.

It barely misses her, landing in front of her feet with a soft thump, and she screams. The crow has landed on its back; its wings are broken, twisted upwards. Its tail feathers are awry, covered in clumps of dirt; a long, rusted nail runs through its neck. Young boys are laughing down the street, and she looks towards them for a moment. She quickly sweeps the crow out and closes the door after it.

Outside, Conn, who has already forgotten her, is running. It seems like only a moment since the curfew commenced. I am a butterfly, he thinks; my cocoon split. I am in the world, in the beating heart of life. Anything will happen.