He is rambling now, his inventions becoming too ridiculous and sporadic, and he doesn’t remember what the women were supposed to have listened to even if they had really existed. I am forgetting myself, but it doesn’t matter. No one can hear me.

‘The curfew will go on another day,’ he calls. ‘Adieu.’

Colca lets go a body he is dragging and rewards him a few claps, before picking it up again by the ankles. The man scowls at him and then steps down and washes his face in the fountain.

‘When you are done,’ the man says, ‘go out the town and see what that black structure is. I have work to do before de Fonteroy arrives.’

Colca nods, picks up the feet he had let drop. The man watches him leave and then goes into the shade of his room. In truth, he is disgusted at how easy all this is; how stupid these people are. He could continue making mistakes for years and they would not stir forth from their houses. They are like animals, and he hates them. So much better if he had taken a town like Drogheda, he thinks, but that place would be too big, and he knows he would be just as unhappy there. He has gone many places and spoken with many people and Mary is the only person he has met who doesn’t disgust him; the only one who gives him any joy.

He sits by a table, scratching entries into a codex with a squat nib, but he cannot concentrate; the noise of flies is too much. Pushing his inkpots and ledgers to the side, he takes his wooden rosary from round his neck and begins to pray, his head down and his eyes closed, counting off the beads between his fingers.

This is not for God, he believes in him, but he is versed enough in scripture to know that any man who makes a fortune has already been consigned to hell; he does this for the awareness that comes from the isolation of a revolution of the rosary. Usually the repetitions soothe him back to a deeper sense of reality and its consequences, but after the second decade he gives up.

‘There is nothing behind my eyes when I close them,’ he says.

The flies are too loud in his ears, his breathing is a flurried mess, his neck swelling, and he is still drunk.

‘Big Cat,’ he says, opening his eyes.

He looks at the dead family in a pile in the corner for a while, and then begins drinking again.

The retinue soon …

The retinue soon comes upon the Dee. In an opening in the growth and weeds, they see more freed cattle watering themselves lazily on its banks. Some calves are playing there, breaking occasionally into exuberant trots, straddling each other’s skinny backs with their young haunches.