‘You have no call to speak to me thusly,’ the woman says, ‘and you have no pity for a lonely widowed woman. A gentleman, on seeing my distress, so great that I must prepare and eat my dead master’s horse, and my loveliness, would offer me marriage and protections, but you only judge me. You are a boy and I hate your boyish face; it fills me with disgust. I will retch momentarily as it would seem I am forced to regard it.’

The woman leans forward, clutching the intestines to her chest, and groans and spits in the water, heaving her chest to produce some few bits of thin vomit, but nothing much comes out her mouth. She leans back and takes another drink, slopping what she does not catch with her loose mouth into the fountain.

‘I, Emota of Nobber, was wife of a goodly man, and now this?’ she says, pointing at everything, almost knocking herself off balance with all her pointing. ‘This? I had a daughter and a big furry cat all to myself that would sleep on my knee in the mornings, before the devil came into this sinning town and took everything away from me, even myself.’

The woman puts a bloody hand to her head, trying to feign a swoon, but too drunk to accomplish one with any finesse as her arms are too heavily burdened with horse intestines.

‘Oh, I was beautiful, but no sultry slut was I at all, though they called me many ungracious names,’ she says, her words becoming steadily more high-pitched as she proceeds. ‘Not me; though I had fecund opportunities; though I had many stockings would send a soldier riding hard across the country to pass me a ribbon, to whisper things into my ear, to promise me anything, even Flemish truffles once.

‘And what is left of all that life, and all that living? Some youth with no ribcage, no chest at all, and no bearing, coming into my town, saying I am no woman. I would do well to unhand you of your own sword, wrap these guts round your neck, string you up off a tree and lynch you, and then I would fill your dead mouth with many blooming yellow flowers so something that was beautiful would issue once from your throat.’

‘Madame, good morning,’ William says. ‘I believe we have made a false beginning. May we inquire of you whereat the mayor dwells?’

‘Ripe injustice,’ she yells. ‘Frivolous interrogations assail me. What sheriff will enforce my law? Nothing but a scuttling fat sheriff who fled on an eighteen-hand horse he filched off a beekeeper the moment he smelled the disease. I cannot proceed in this woe-filled world. I will not. I refuse. There is too much injustice. Who will listen to my tale? Who will believe it?’

‘I will, madame, of course,’ William says.

‘Such gallantry,’ de Flunkl says mockingly.