She would stand before them demonstratively, take a big breath to blow up her cheeks and her skin would turn from pink to purple, until she passed out and fell to the ground. After the first few times he found he could replenish her lungs by slapping her across the back, though one day last summer, after an exceptionally mismanaged harvest, she was so angry with hunger that no amount of beatings could induce an inhalation, so he had dunked her upside down, holding her by the ankles, into a cold pail of water, and when he lifted her head out from the pail, she hung upside down, water wringing out of her ears and hair, and had giggled.

This child, this little and curly-haired creature, within a madness of pain, does not look like his daughter, but Harold wants to imagine the child does. He wants to believe that traces of her small face are still alive out there in the world.

‘I have no want to kill a sick child,’ he says.

‘Though it is much kindness?’ William of Roscrea asks, seeming genuinely curious.

‘It is the greatest of sins,’ Harold replies.

The child is still screaming.

‘Indefatigable, these peasants’ infants,’ de Flunkl says.

The child, almost imperceptibly and never stopping its screaming, makes a small smiling arc across the hamlet, fists and baby-fat arms waving up and down, through long, rustling grass. It makes its way back to the sunburnt, fat sow and lies down on it, hugging it, and stops screaming with a shocking abruptness. The crow that was resting on the sow flies away.

‘Oh,’ Saint John says.

‘I am very saddened,’ Harold Tuite says.

‘Though,’ de Flunkl declares, ‘my eardrums have been rattled, and though we have been waylaid and assailed by sodomitic Gaels with murine missiles and infectious infants, we have been saved yet again, not through timely intervention or loyalty or even preparedness, but through luck. We have been blessed, and so has our ensuing venture in Nobber, I believe. Let’s leave with promptitude and take advantage of the blessings the Lord rains, in a deserving and ceaseless manner, down upon me.’

‘That sow would eat that child if it weren’t so hot,’ William says. ‘Hopefully, it will wait until it’s dead.’

‘Or until the sun turns and the beast is invigorated by cool shade,’ de Flunkl says.

‘You sicken me,’ Harold says, spitting on the earth, ‘the both of you.’

‘Shut your mouth,’ de Flunkl says. ‘Your sadness is lies. Why are you still here? You don’t even know what it is that you want, therefore you cannot be content, and your womanly toing and froing riles me.’

No one answers and they begin, almost awkwardly, walking again. Harold Tuite now leads Saint John by the shoulders.