Then the Preston family, wild boys every last one of them, lost their mother to the sickness, and, full of grief’s insanity, they began setting fires in public places. The mayor responded with threats too vague to be effective, and the Preston boys whipped up all the locals into dissent. One evening they all approached the mayor collectively. They demanded a priest from him; a sermon that dissolved them of all their hitherto accumulated sins, and that pardoned their recent dead. They refused to die any more in such an unholy and undignified manner. They swore that they would refuse death until they achieved grace from a priest, any priest, it did not matter who, but one must be produced.

The young mothers had been sitting at the fountain when it had happened, relaxing in the late-evening light of this never-ending summer, their shadows stretched out long and thin across the walls of the houses across the street. Believing that new motherhood filled them with concoctions that bred immunity to the sickness, they had remained in public even after it had been announced, and, now, they watched the crowd gathering outside the mayor’s lodgings.

Grim faces sparkled and bounced light above arms full of burning torches and scythes. The crowd stirred, swaying slightly, and in the light of the sunset it was as though they themselves in their collective grief were a greater, more intensely orange sunset, a little sunset amidst the greater one. They had converged like some holy procession; it felt like a final moment, and above them was a new man no one could ever remember seeing before. The stranger sat on a fine, big horse of unusually high quality. His face was so flaccid it was inexpressive, and his eyes and bearing revealed nothing of his station or his intent. Though he never said anything, Dervorgilla felt he had somehow involved himself in some plot greater than the simple and profound pain of her neighbours, whose most expressive organ was the mob in which they found themselves.

Long Tedbalt, full of the peasant’s intelligence for unspoken things, could feel the violence coming, and he yelled at his wife to get back in the house, immediately. She could see him, head and shoulders above the other townsmen, only smaller than the stranger on the horse. The light was bleeding out of the town, turning them all grey, dissolving the starkness of the shadows. She obeyed her husband.

He came back a few hours later, lay down on the bed and said, with a great sigh tagged onto the end of it, ‘We, and the whole town, are now under a curfew.’

‘What happened?’

‘It is not women’s talk, but that pervert child of Raghnailt’s has told us that if an outsider does inquire we are to say we did it to ourselves, and it is to stop the intermingling of infected sweats, and that is all we are to say.’