A woman, unseen, behind him is crying, buried in some other shoulder. The crowd is momentarily still. Raghnailt stumbles a little, and Eoin balances her by the elbows. She is dizzy, but her vision becomes sharper. There is no pain in her gut, only a kind of hollowness; something crucial is visible in the animosity of the faces that confront her.

I must make some supreme effort, she thinks, and if I do not do it now it will forever burden me, and yet speaking has never felt so difficult. She wants to sleep, but is afraid; knowing if she sleeps now she will always wake up alone.

‘What are you accusing my son of?’ she says. ‘Justify your violence.’

‘He parcelled us up like lambs,’ Eoin says gently to her. ‘He colluded with the nameless beast, the great evil. Stole from us our freedoms; menaced us.’

She is still leaning on his arm, glances up at him. ‘You all did that,’ Raghnailt says. ‘You all slew the mayor with that devil. Colluders, every last one. You all did that, not just my boy.’

Little Pádraig collapses to his knees and groans. Two women keen, find one another through their moaning and embrace.

‘I have no priest,’ little Pádraig cries, raising a fist to the sky. ‘I have no king, no sheriff. No bread to eat, no wheat to make it with. I will be overrun by Gaels. My family is gone.’

In the midst of his speech, Raghnailt grows distracted; her attention is caught by a small girl she does not recognise; a small blond child near the end of the street, doing something to a house with both hands.

‘I will pay no tithes if I have no priest to show me my God,’ Pádraig says. ‘Why will he not answer me? Will anyone answer me when I cry?’

He rises slowly to his feet.

‘Segnat told me he ground up our bodies for money,’ Glynis says. ‘That he whittled away at our bones till they were slivers, sold them to the Gaels.’

‘I am going home,’ Pádraig says. ‘I am going drinking. I cannot mete out justice. For what? To who? I will be alone with my family of corpses. I will bless them with alcohol, make little crosses on their heads with it.’

He pushes through the crowd. They watch him go. He does not close the door after himself, and Raghnailt notices he has gone into the wrong house.

‘I await your accusation of my boy,’ she says.

The mob presses in slightly. Many eyes examine her; the sound of many frantic breaths. Eoin wraps his arm round her shoulder.

‘I say,’ Raghnailt ventures, ‘that he has protected you. The sickness came, and he put you away in your houses to separate you. He isolated you from yourselves, halted the spreading nature of the sickness. He has saved all your lives.’