‘My little Mary,’ Ambrosio continues, ‘to whom I am quite addicted like I was some drunkard and she was some cider. You see, women – all yes, but especially Mary – are merely swine in different forms, alluring and sinnish, their fat paps sins, only existing to draw God-fearing men like myself into wishes to knead them, to play on lithesome nipples with my tongue, to clamp down on them with my teeth when I should be engaging in the bureaucratic procedures that ensure my body is fed, my soul saved. I would amass a fortune and retire, but instead my every waking hour is filled with either dread or lust. That is why when it began I was delighted at the disintegration of her alcoholic flesh; I thought my temptations would be slightly less. She smelled of rotting apples; her pores exuded it. Her failed flesh made me untrusting of humanity, but is it not the reason why I am alive? She reminded me of herself through all this summer. Others fell into women’s traps, spread the disease whenever a bitch’s smell took them, but not I; but then I fell in love with her fallen state as I had fallen in love with the woman she was before she fell. —Sirs, I have the great misfortune to love her; I even love the destruction of her flesh; even the slut in her, the lunatic, the child, the demons that course through her; they were always there even from her birth. —And I cannot stop it no matter how I try, and I cannot stop this love.’

‘You have lost all control. Do not speak of women,’ William says, waving his hands. ‘I do not know them, nor do I care for them. You must return to the present matter.’

‘Women are the present matter, my friend,’ Ambrosio says. ‘The present matter and the future matter. They are the matter that expelled us from the garden and put us on this fair island. Look around you and tell me is there something more pressing than the serpent snuck into our beds? Their bodies, fat, lascivious and soft, are the shape of our future. But like the serpent, opportunity must appear for the mask to slip. Look to Kilkenny, my birthplace, and see how a disintegrating society fares. I received news but six days ago, off my master, de Fonteroy – do not let his name fool you, he is a peasant who shall be visiting us shortly, by the by – that there is a woman, who amidst all this suffering, has been awarded a trading license in Kilkenny town. A woman with a trading licence.’

He pauses and looks at the ceiling and breathes a brief, private prayer before continuing.