When they had disappeared, Glynis stared at all his neighbours still working in the devastated beauty of the day, waiting for his breathing to calm. Beyond them was the sparkling of the lake’s water, dancing white. A swallow darted by him at elbow height, and he saw in the field four or five more swallows flying low over the wheat, weaving amongst the workers faster than the eye could follow as though they were all playing together. A calf lowed, edging towards the water, its front hooves sinking in mud, its eyes wide in fear. It plunged into the lake with an enormous splash, and someone cheered. Glynis put his scythe on his shoulder and began to walk home.

A little along the way, as he was climbing over a stile, someone touched his shoulder; he turned round and saw Joseph Toqville.

‘You do not feel well?’ Joseph asked him.

Joseph was daubing his own forehead with a dock leaf, his bare chest glimmering with salt. Glynis squinted up at him. It was just like Joseph, he thought, to supply him with the most generous excuse to save him from his own disgrace.

‘I do not.’

‘You know it will not be well thought of for you to leave so early,’ Joseph said.

Behind Joseph, all the men Glynis had known his whole life were working, and from this distance, they seemed inconsequential, already dead.

‘I will tell them that the sun has laid low your head,’ Joseph said. ‘Your hair is thin, so there will be no shame in it.’

‘I do not care what you tell those toiling corpses,’ he replied. ‘You may tell them the sickness has returned, if it serves any purpose to know such a thing.’

He went home, ignored his wife’s cries of outrage at his laziness and sat on the stool. He said nothing to anyone; spent his days looking out the window, drinking from his jug of warm ale.

Several days after that, still at the window, he saw, or rather made out, because he was almost blind with drink by then, two of the infected stumbling into town. They had come all the way from Kells. Within moments all doors had been closed and the infected, two tradesmen, wandered alone about the street, screaming for food.

‘I cannot stand that noise,’ Aethelburga had said. ‘Throw them something.’