The man circles it carefully, cleaver held aloft, and then the horse sidesteps, and in this motion entangles a loop of its own intestines round its front fetlocks. It trips on its side, collapsing, raising a panoply of dust. The man leaps on the toppled beast straight away, hacking at its throat with long swings. The horse’s whinnies grow weaker. An artery is severed, and a vermillion spray cascades from its neck, a single spurt whose film is so thin that, for a moment, rainbows flash within it.

The man stands over the dead horse, gulping in air.

‘She was the only horse from here to Drogheda,’ he says. ‘And she was a good-tempered one. There is no way out of this damned town.’

Mary scrambles to her feet.

‘If I am trapped here, so are thee,’ she says.

She runs to the other side of the fountain, as though hiding from him. He knows he should restrain her, but he would not know what to do with her even if he could catch her.

‘What happened to you?’ he asks.

Mary looks at a bloomed waterlily in the fountain, and leans over, delicately removing the cloying creeping jenny that tries to strangle it.

‘You never give me flowers any more,’ she says. ‘You never give me any favours. Do I not merit them, lover?’

This sudden softness in her brings quick tears to the man’s throat.

She had never used to be this way. Once, when she was fourteen, she had kicked an elderly fruit vendor she thought had tried to cheat her out of some pears until that woman was unconscious, her stall overturned on top of her. He had thought it was just foul-temperedness; but then, a little over a year ago, her thoughts had become scattered. She began forgetting little things, inventing fanciful stories to explain her own lack of memory, but the stories became more absurd until she was trying to convince everybody she came across that he had abused some daughter she had never had.

Still, all this he could have put up with, if it weren’t for her violence, and it is becoming more constant; but this is the first time she has been violent twice in one day.

‘Where is that girl I fell in love with?’ he asks. ‘Where is my companion?’

She covers her lips with her forefinger, hushing him. ‘Who is that knocking on my door?’ she says.

She points to the sky, but the cloud that was previously above her head has crumbled under the heat and her fingers point at nothing.

‘I don’t understand,’ the man says.