Mary looks up. The pigeons above are giving a warning with their patterns, she feels, or etching something impermanent into their wake, but where they wheel and shimmy there is no trace of where they have been, just a ceaseless passage of movement. She takes the jug of cider and sits in the shade of a doorway, her legs still in the light.

‘Come in out of the heat,’ the man says.

‘Why are you not gentle with me?’ she says. ‘Amn’t I only a little thing? Why are you always so mean to me?’

He lays the cleaver down beside the fountain, and moves towards her. There is nothing in him that can remain afraid of her.

‘How did this horse come to die in so public a place?’ she asks.

He stops. ‘You do not remember?’

She shakes her head.

‘It was you.’

‘You will not put this death on me,’ she says. ‘I do not even ride.’

The myriad of pigeons has alighted somewhere unseen, as though scared. The whole world is still, the air hot and sticky with some unseen threat, and he turns away from her, unable to even look at her.

He washes his face in the fountain again, this time to cover his tears. The water is fetid; he douses his forehead and under his arms.

Whatever he loved in her, he realises, is gone; it will never be how it was. He should have given her to the nuns the first time she had said she had a daughter, but he had loved her then; had even loved that madness creeping into her. He loves her still, and there is no solution to love.

Once he has stopped crying he sits on the edge of the fountain with his head in his hands.

Perhaps Colca was right – or was it de Fonteroy who said it, he does not remember – but a man is not allowed even one vice. All the violence he has meted out, all the death and confusion he has brought on undeserving souls, and, still, he cannot bring himself to send her away, even to somewhere she would be safer and he could visit her from time to time. She is the mistake I continue to make, he thinks.

He remembers their first days together; she liked to sleep with her head on his belly, to walk her fingers across his legs when she woke; her sudden tantrums would make him laugh; there were long-delayed reconciliations where she would tantalise him with silences until she could no longer stand to go without talking to him. She used to call him Big Cat, lean on his arm when they walked together.