Conn looks around. Through the bodies, he can see the houses. Their walls are covered in scratches, loose scrawls, but they have no meaning he can discern. Beyond the town, there is some black slouched shape in the distance. Nearly all the doors of the town are open, but not Dervorgilla’s. People are moving in and out of each other’s rooms like they are common property. Faces are full of listlessness and fatigue. Every eye blinks. There is no organisation to this. This is not a gathering, Conn feels. Something bad is coming, but we couldn’t see it before; and we still don’t know what is coming towards us.

‘I must see her,’ he says.

He pulls opens the door, ignoring the crowd forming around him, and finds himself in a dark room.

‘Dervorgilla?’ he says, and begins to choke.

The stench of the house hits him like some physical force; tearing his eyes up, setting his nose running.

And then he sees her, shimmering and pale in the dark, her gown thrown low over her shoulders, exposing her breasts to him. She is giving herself to me, Conn thinks, for all the flowers I gave her over the years. At last, this is a naked woman, he thinks, but naked bodies better frame the beauty of the face. It is her face that is most beautiful. He has never seen anything so perfect.

‘Conn, my brother,’ she says, her hands stretched out to him. ‘What is happening?’

He is inflamed, growing dizzy and swollen; his cock raw against his leggings, but the stench confuses his senses; he feels as though he will faint. She takes a step towards him, and his ecstasy mingles with asphyxiation. Confusion makes him stumble; a momentary fit of blindness eclipses him, and he does not know what to feel any more.

‘The babe will not feed,’ she yells. ‘They will make fun of me. Do I not love enough? I am giving no milk. Give me some milk, Conn.’

She is pointing down at a heap on the bed. Amidst grey cloth, he sees a small, swaddled baby stretched out on its front, blue in death. Its head is enormous, and its body withered down. Dead for days its tiny lips are already black, and it lies between the legs of Tedbalt, whose putrid carcass is decomposing, sunken beneath his work clothes. Steam rises off him, blending the little light above him into a wavy mirage, and his face is covered in a blanket of sleeping flies.

‘Why amn’t I making milk?’ she asks. ‘Am I worse mother than them? Do I not love enough? What will they say?’

Tedbalt’s eyes are open. His face, cast in shadows, is waxen, inhuman. It is like he is made out of melting candles. One of his incisors is caught on his lip, giving him a stupid, evil air.