‘This is ridiculous.’

‘What is not?’

He turned away on his side. His face had been blackened with soot; the eyebrows had been scorched off somehow. Pale white lines, like worms stretched on muck, marked their absence.

That had been six days ago, and now the sack of grain in the corner was nearly empty. She stirs the cup in the bottom of it, but it picks up nothing. The grain is too shallow along the bottom. Thousands of tiny and brilliantly white needles grow on what remains, a fine film of evanescent, almost glowing fungus. She covers her mouth with the back of her hand so as not to inhale any of it. The water basin beside it is covered in specks of dust that float above the membrane. Stirring her finger in it, she breaks a thin yellow film on its surface, releasing a stagnant smell that sets her coughing, and she realises the water had not been covered by dust, but by many sleeping midges. Unsettled, they rise up all at once in a hazy cloud and disperse around the room. She blinks, and looks at the door, almost able to feel the heat it lets through.

‘I cannot,’ she says. ‘The child will die. I am not milking. Even the animals of the field can feed their young.’

Light seeps through a wide crack in the rotting door, and motes of energetic dust stir through it, but the rest of the house is unlit, full of a green darkness. The candles are long spent, and the firewood that remains is not dry, though everything is hot. She paces about, casting glances at her family laid out on the bed.

She goes to the door, presses her eye against the crack, but the light is too thin, and it is too bright. A sharp pain enters through her head and a second tiny headache blossoms like a flower behind her left eye. She cannot make out anything any more.

‘I care not for their curfews or the stupidity of their prohibitions,’ she says. ‘They all think me useless and ineffective, but I am good, and I shall prove my worth to those who would pass judgement on my rearing. Jacotte will be fat with food, undamaged and safe, and they will say, Oh, there goes Dervorgilla, a fine mother, and her child’s is as fine as any’s.’