Lisbet takes the broom uncertainly.

‘I’ll see to the loaves,’ says Sophey, already turning away. ‘Don’t forget to beat the sheets.’

Standing on the threshold, smelling the stale air, watching the dust swirl in the gaps from the shutters, it looks to Lisbet as though Agnethe has only stepped out that moment. The sheets are crumpled, the pillow indented, the stool in the corner of the room not quite aligned, as though knocked slightly as its occupant rose. Beside it, a broad bowl of the sort Sophey sent her to market to buy in the earliest months of Lisbet’s arrival. Perhaps it is all tainted by Agnethe’s sin, and each of her items must wait out the seven years’ penance, before they too can be lifted and washed clean.

The bowl has a fine skim of dust, the water long dried to vapour. But as Lisbet lifts it, she thinks she catches the ghost of a scent, herbal and sweet as Ida’s breath. Beside it is a comb of yellowed bone, still thickly matted with long blonde hairs, shining and brittle. Lisbet wipes out the bowl and sets it back in its place, pulls hair from the comb and opens the shutters to drop the coarse tangle outside. They share their view with Agnethe: true east, trees. Made bright by the light, the room loses its careless abandonment, and becomes something more maudlin.

Lisbet strips back the sheets, fingers gritty with dust, and sweeps the floor, finding small soft feathers from the blackbird, empty snail shells, their glistening trails buffed to a shine by the dry heat. She wipes them away, pockets the feathers and shells. She replaces the pillow, turning it so the indent is hidden, and as she does so something under the fabric shifts and crinkles. Lisbet searches the seams of the pillowcase, but they are sewn shut with fine stitches of the sort neither she nor Sophey can manage at the moment with their swollen fingers.

She can hear Sophey and Henne speaking in the kitchen. She slides her fingernail against the thread, but it is closed flush into the cloth. She pulls gently, then harder, and the neat thread gives. Lisbet hooks her finger inside, sifting through the straw until she feels something rough knotted through something soft. She pulls it out, and onto the sheets falls a lock of blonde hair, plaited with an undyed silk ribbon.

Lisbet holds it in the centre of her palm, sun cleaving light and shadow. It is almost weightless, rendered as coarse as the strands she pulled from the comb. But though the colour is a match for that tangle, and even for Henne’s hair, Lisbet feels certain it is neither of the Wiler siblings’. The way it is tied, kept, concealed: all of it tender and illicit as the ribbons Lisbet has arranged at the dance tree.

‘Lisbet?’

She startles, nearly dropping the token, and folds it carefully into her skirts as she turns to where Henne is leaning on the door jamb, stoppering it up as surely as a door.