‘You will visit no one and you will do nothing,’ Colca says. ‘Gaels coming in from the south and an infectious sickness bred off sweat, and my own mother would go about gallivanting. You would have me in a place where I would have to kill my own mother out of mercy to save her the pains of that death. That is not motherly, that is not good. Will you think for even a moment of what you are saying?’

‘But I am not the sweating kind,’ she says. ‘If I have not it yet, I will not have it at all.’

‘How many have said that and died?’ he says, throwing his arms in the air. ‘Do not rise from the bed. I plead you. Do not drag me through that sadness. What I do I do out of love for you.’

Alannah lets out a brief laugh.

‘What?’ Colca says.

‘You stand in the doorway, naked as a spawn,’ she says, ‘like you are somehow proud of yourself, like you are somehow a man, and so I laugh. What you do you do not do for the love of your mother, and you do not do for the love of me; you do it for the love of a mare.’

Colca hammers the door with his fist once, letting out a shout of anger.

‘Why are unreasonable bitches always nagging at me?’ he yells. ‘I need not listen to this. I have work to do for I am the man of this house, the last man of this town. Do your duty towards me, and stay here, as quiet as is becoming of decent women.’

He leaves, pulling the door closed behind him, and after a moment of silence Alannah says, ‘You know he will not change. He cannot love; it is not in him. I was married to a violent brute, and there is no corrective for what already is.’

Alannah watches as Raghnailt’s shoulders begin to heave up and down. A great panic has overtaken her chest, and her breathing is all awry. This panic had simmered all morning inside her gut and has now been loosened by the mention of her son’s perversions. Perhaps, Raghnailt thinks, Alannah has only done this to taunt me, to impress upon me the sick reality I would rather ignore. She puts her head in her hands.

‘Free the girl,’ Raghnailt says, and her voice is muffled.

‘Are you certain of this?’ Alannah asks.

‘Once I would not have had the strength to displease my boy,’ Raghnailt says, ‘but he has grown so violent and self-serving of late, and he indulges his sickness so openly, that I do not care any more.’

‘He may use us badly,’ Alannah says.

‘Just free the girl,’ she says. ‘I would flee this place too if my legs could take it, but I fear now it is my heart that could not.’