Ambrosio does not answer. He is shuffling along to the back of the room, humming to himself.

‘This is some strain of madness and it bodes ill. Let us leave immediately,’ William says to de Flunkl, who says nothing in reply.

‘This room is a little too crowded with death for my liking,’ Harold remarks.

‘Heed not the bodies,’ Ambrosio says, busy in the corner, swilling a mug in a barrel and drawing up some liquid, which he drains off in a gulp. ‘They came upon a death more natural than the like you have been accustomed to while travelling through this diseased land, as your well-travelled boots and tired horses do tell me.’

‘Demand the bodies’ papers,’ William says to de Flunkl, ‘or I am gone from this place.’

Ambrosio looks at Harold, wipes his wet lips with his fingers. ‘Regarding your earlier impertinence as to my willingness to let my wife fester in the Juneish midday heat,’ he says, ‘I have been thinking of my Mary, of my treatment of her, and perhaps I have been too generous for too long. You see, I, too, was once a gallant man, regarding love, learned even in its matters; but time is an unravelling. Time removes the traits and beliefs that you once believed made you what you are, so that you become, in the fullness of age, something a younger you would not recognise, would hate, even; a stranger to yourself, and full of disgust at the foreign person who occupies you in your last days. This is true of Mary, but also of myself.’

‘The papers, by God,’ William says. ‘Why do you keep bodies in such close proximity to yourself? Are you mad?’

‘I have sometimes thought,’ Ambrosio muses, ‘that my Mary is merely a purer distillation of what all women are. During times of upheaval, tumult and distress, women always return to their natural dissolution. That is why I thought that particular woman such a treasure. She insulates me from the shock of the world, because she constantly remembers me of the nonsense and sin of her sex. Nothing shocks me any more; nothing, that is, but the weakness of men.’

He takes another drink from his cup.

‘No one has asked your opinion on the generality of womanhood,’ William says to him. ‘We are asking for the bodies’ papers.’

Ambrosio’s eyes wander momentarily before they fix themselves on William of Roscrea.