They look at each other a long moment. He is afraid: Lisbet sees it in his flaring nostrils, the colour high in his cheeks. But he takes Frederich’s ring, and slips it onto his finger. ‘Come with me.’

•

They step into the darkened passage and turn from the wooden steps leading up into one of the towers, taking instead those leading down. Lisbet holds the courage she forced into herself outside, takes it like a bit between her teeth. She must be strong, when she sees Ida. She must not show her terror.

Karl had offered his companion some excuse to sate him, and the guard replied lewdly, eyeing Lisbet. No doubt he thinks Lisbet holds some power over Karl, has his bastard in her belly.

They reach an underground passage lit with tallow lamps. The stench of them lingers over other, worse smells as they pass barred doors concealing cells that sound crammed full. Snatches of song and shouting rise, becoming muffled as soon as they are past the narrow slats. Karl takes a lamp from a bracket as they come to yet another set of steps, these ones stone and carved into the bedrock of the river itself. Lisbet imagines the water rushing past, held back only by the walls, imagines the foul brown Rhine entering her nose, her throat.

No.

They reach a floor of packed earth. It’s cooler here, and quiet, and there is no light save the flicker from Karl’s torch. The smell is different, too. Gone is piss and sweat, and instead the murky scent of stagnant water. Something scuttles just beyond the reach of the torch.

‘She is kept apart,’ Karl says, ‘at Plater’s order.’

‘He treats his own wife like vermin,’ spits Sophey.

‘It is better perhaps,’ he says. ‘Quieter, and she shares with no one. We are overrun as you saw. This used to be a store.’ He halts before another wooden door, short and broad, the size of a barrel. ‘Here.’

‘Open it then,’ says Sophey.

‘I cannot,’ he says, indicating the lock, large and rusted. ‘Only Plater has the key.’

‘Why didn’t you say so?’

‘You cannot expect to break her from her confinement?’ says Karl. ‘You asked only to see her.’

‘And we cannot.’ Sophey gestures at the door. Karl holds the lamp closer to it, to its base. There is a gap there, a clear handspan, where the cellar has flooded and water rotted the wood away.

Lisbet lowers herself to the ground. It is cooler than anything she has felt against her skin for months. She rests her cheek against the dirt, and the river smell fills her nostrils. She can see nothing, but then Karl sets the torch down against the wall, and its light slithers beneath the door.

Lisbet can see straw, the scurrying of rats fleeing. And then, a foot, bare and filthy.

‘Ida?’

A gasp from the darkness, and suddenly there she is, crawling forward as though from the mouth of a cave.