Conn tries to think with the irritating noise penetrating even the padding of his thumbs. He does not want to go back to shepherding; the starvation is general now. If he was still out with his flock it is likely he would have already been murdered, so as to leave no witness to the flock’s robbery. The chance curfew he fell under has, in all likelihood, saved his life.

The bishop’s many sheep are probably scattered now, over the plains. He imagines them, greatly divided, easily preyed upon, and the happy thought comes to him that maybe all sheep will be destroyed in the sickness. Gertrude told him that nearly all the cattle were wiped out twenty years ago, so it is not so unthinkable it would happen again, but amongst sheep this time.

Perhaps there will be nothing left for me to do but wander from place to place, free of duty and care, he thinks. Perhaps the human population will soon be so greatly depleted that I am made a judge, or a sheriff, and must spend my life in great sociable acts of discussion, striking bargains, rarely alone. Perhaps Tedbalt will die with the sickness, and Dervorgilla will marry me.

I can’t talk now, I must meet someone else. My wife, Dervorgilla, needs tending to, but mayhaps I will have time enough on the morrow?

He imagines himself saying these previously unimaginable words, and his chest puffs out with importance, and then the knocking stops for a moment, and the silence interrupts his reverie more than any noise ever could.

‘Why are you so eager to leave?’ Gertrude says. ‘Tell me the truth.’

‘There is no truth to the matter. The noise just annoys me. I have told you everything of my life, the little there has been of it. I have no secrets.’

‘Perhaps, that is the problem: there has been too little of it,’ Gertrude says, ‘and you are too curious.’

There has not been much to his life, it is true. Nearly all his hours, previous to the sickness, had been spent waiting to see a person. He would come into town on Sundays, and he would always be disappointed by those he had made so big in his imagination, but still, once alone again, he would long for the society of others.

Such was the pattern of his life until by fortuitous accident he found himself restrained in town while curfew was declared, having spent too long eating Gertrude’s supper, and now he has constant company for the first time since he was nine, and, for no reason he can fathom, it makes him feel guilty, restless. Once he grew insane with solitude, now he wonders if he is going insane with its opposite.