Behind Tedbalt’s quietness, he was articulate and astute, but how could anyone know the range of emotions that passed over her in a moment, confusing her and leaving her in a heap of jagged nerves? I never used to be like this, she had thought.

‘You are become too sensitive,’ he had said, ‘like a frayed rope that has been tautened, you will snap if there’s no give in you. Stop mithering the world for something no one can recognise, or understand, and that you can’t even name. It does not exist. You are only thinking of yourself, but through the guise of others.’

‘I am a new thing,’ she says aloud.

Unlike the other mothers, she had not named her babe. Yes, the babe was called Jacotte, but she had not been named properly, because the priest had no time for peasants’ or tradespeople’s baptisms any more, having been called to the larger towns to bless great swathes of nobles who, once the sickness broke out, suffered a great, communal and immediate fear over the state of their souls.

‘The priests make a fortune,’ Tedbalt had said. ‘And Father Unction will abandon his flock because we are not the paying sorts now that the great leaching of the tithes has impoverished us. Nobles, sent into a religious fervour by the scent of a commoner’s death if it is of the spreading sort, put a heavy demand on the church, and it is fattened, enriched. I said as much to the worm-faced bastard, and would be perhaps excommunicated if he did not have so many other affairs on his mind.’

Father Unction, shortly after Tedbalt had told her this, took the town horse and did not return, and after several weeks, the lack of him made Nobber go mad.

Unblessed bodies were dying. Widows could be seen trekking out to the woods in penitence, crying that the church had abandoned them, that deserving men, deprived of their death rites and communion, were being locked out of heaven for unknown quantities of eternity. Even from the woods, through the great oceanic noise of the wind passing through leaves, at times a keening would sound, and in the town a head would turn; a door slam shut for the final time.