Over the past two months his skin has become greasy, his arms ungainly. His voice whinnies when he speaks. Spots have swollen and spread across his face, and he has become ugly with puberty. Even the pure and sisterly affection he has always felt for Dervorgilla has become confusing, but, still he is young enough to not fully understand what he wants from that girl. He feels a violent revulsion towards the obligations Gertrude wishes to lay on him. How thin her skin is compared to Dervorgilla’s; how small her face. How thick and full are Dervorgilla’s breasts. Her small potbelly is thick like a hill, and her cheeks are fat, but this widow is thin, long, a weak sapling. Gertrude wants to keep him as her own, he feels. I will not be used this way, he thinks. I refuse. I must see Dervorgilla again.

‘Let me tell you the story again of how I struck a bargain with the Gaels,’ he says.

Gertrude’s expression does not change. After a while she crosses her legs and begins picking at the soles of her feet. The silence is painful to Conn, but he has too much pride to break it. Finally, she says, ‘I see you have become a man.’

Her voice seems like it is coming from someone he has never met.

‘You do not want me to tell it?’ he says.

It confuses him that she is showing no emotion. She clears her throat and spits in the hay.

‘Tell your story,’ she says.

The knocking begins again, and the screaming follows after it. It seems like three women are screaming now, but perhaps this is a trick of the breeze. He is staring at the door, his heart racing, but Gertrude regards him absently, picking underneath a toenail.

‘Tell your story, little boy,’ she says.

The room the …

The room the men have now come to is dank, low, narrow. It appears to have been, not so much built lower than the town, rather it is as though the town has grown up about the room, sinking it in punishment for its stillness and age. The middle of the room curves downwards and inwards, resembling some dug-out moat. There is a table scattered with many codices, scratched-out vellums, and on top of them, some newer parchments, half curled in on themselves, like dead moths. The back wall is a square mesh of half-full cubbyholes. To the left, as though waiting in a registrar’s office, three sewn sacks of differing sizes sit upright, like a family, in a procession, on chairs, slightly slouching, heavy and brown. Three bodies in unceremonious sacks, waiting for something.

‘Why are there three enshrouded dead bodies sitting in this room?’ William asks, glancing round hurriedly, looking to see if there might be more dead people crawling out of the walls and dropping from the ceiling.

‘Were they infected?’ de Flunkl asks.