‘I will,’ says Lisbet, crying in earnest now. For the first time, she believes it, all of it. That her child will be born safe, that Ida will be drowned. That the worst and the best of her life is to come.

‘Frau Wiler,’ says Karl, gently. ‘The time draws near. There is only one passage, and we will be caught.’

‘No,’ says Lisbet, panic fluttering in her chest. ‘This is not right, it is not just!’

Karl’s own voice is thick with emotion. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a small cloth pouch. ‘Look, I have poppy. It is enough for . . .’ He cannot bring himself to say it, but they all know. He weighs it in his hand. Enough for death. He places the pouch beneath the door, between them. ‘Take it all. It will help the pain.’

‘Thank you,’ says Ida softly. ‘Now go.’

‘I will not.’

‘You will,’ says Ida. She reaches through the gap and clasps Lisbet’s tear-stained cheeks. ‘You will go, and you will live, Bet. For the both of us.’

She pulls away then, takes the pouch of poppy and folds back into the shadows, as though she was never there at all.

Lisbet calls after her, but between them Sophey and Karl are hauling her to her feet. She is in the reeds of her childhood river again, her brothers peeling her fingers from cold flesh, and now as then she does not struggle, only feels a tearing, a rending of the material of her soul, as she leaves part of herself behind.

Sixteen

Lisbet has seen an execution before, the hanging of a rebel. The man had entered a church and stabbed a priest, shouting Joss Fritz’s name, damning their emperor to Hell. He repeated his sermon on the gibbet, the crowd roaring. Lisbet had shut her eyes at the moment he was hung, buried her face in her father’s side.

She has seen a drowned woman before. Her mother had been in the water a day by the time she found her, her skin green and eyes empty. Lisbet had not been able to look in them, could only wrap her body around Mutti’s. But she is determined to watch this, to be as brave as Ida.

She stands next to Frederich and Sophey on the bank facing the gaol. The stink of the river wafts between them and the platform where Ida will be drowned. It’s accessed from a scrubby, underdeveloped stretch of bank beside the gaol and overlooked by a bridge, nearby rickety buildings subsiding like herons wading out to forage.

There is even a stage set up here behind them, with about fifty women dancing and bordered by a low fence like livestock. The crowd is muted and the musicians play lazily, but it does not affect the ardour of the dancers. The spectacle is no less powerful for its familiarity: Lisbet cannot help but turn and gawp.

The whole stage is crafted of wood as in the horse guild – she can see the struts emerging and spiking the dirt – covered over with cloth of some kind, wrinkling and billowing. The stage is raised so high, Lisbet can see only heads and shoulders, sometimes an arm thrown up.