Colca is looking at his mother, but there is no recognition, no fear, just a sullen acceptance; it is something weaker than anger, yet akin to it. There is no love in his face. She averts her gaze, cannot look at him; he is too cold. Their life together has been a failure.

‘We have no choice,’ Genevieve says. ‘I just want it to be already done. I am so tired.’

Raghnailt, below them, still on her knees, wishes she did not recognise all their faces, know them so intimately, but she has known them all since birth. They are also, though more distant to her, her family. I can see their genealogies in their mouths, their eyes, their noses; can trace their likenesses in their stances. I can remember the stories my father told me of their grandparents. This town is too small; the world is too small. I know everyone in it.

‘He is my son,’ Raghnailt says. ‘You will not kill him. He is mine.’

Áoife steps forward and kicks her in the gut. The crowd stirs, closes about her. Raghnailt collapses down, breathless. She is under a communal act of suffocation, but what irks her most is the burning sensation on her neck, the clamminess of her clothes. It has been a long time since heat this great has come upon her.

Eoin Preston is breaking through the crowd. He helps her up. His face is dusty, beautiful in its plainness. He could do anything, Raghnailt thinks, if he had been tamed properly, but he is too trapped in his emotions. Nothing restrains him long enough to mature him. He, also, she thinks, was the great disappointment of his mother’s life.

‘No one touch this fine woman,’ Eoin says. ‘Her father and herself did us many years of service; she suckled my aunt. She has not brought this on us, only her son.’

Albus, a winded peasant, steps forward, his face covered in his hands, yet he is still distinct; still plump like all the Feagans have always been.

‘How can we respect any tragedy?’ Albus shouts. ‘My two sons are dead, my mother also; my wife. The sun blazes through the heavens and yet I freeze. No one hears my cries any more. I am alone in a house stuffed full of corpses, and you say a life can be respected?’

Eoin draws himself up to his full height. ‘My mother is dead, too,’ he says, whipped into a quick outrage. ‘And you will respect her in death as you will respect her former life.’

Albus retreats, diminishes himself amongst the other bodies that press close. His uncle once courted her; Raghnailt remembers him. Still fat as a fool, he died in the midst of the last famine, thirty or so years hence. She had been twenty-two then, and shy.