Peace, Nethe had said. I want only peace. There, amidst the chaos with Ida at her side, she seems to have found it.

But now Sophey is pushing roughly past. ‘Nethe,’ she moans. ‘Ida. Agnethe, no.’

She mounts the stairs, pushing through the dancers, and wrenches Nethe’s arm down from where it flutters skywards. Nethe’s eyelids shift: it is exactly as though she is asleep, being roused before she is ready. But she doesn’t stop dancing. She buffets away from her mother, but Sophey has her hands outstretched, arms flapping as though to shoo the chickens into their coop, and both of them are moving close, too close, to the edge, and the men with their sticks.

‘Careful,’ cries Lisbet, uselessly. The crowd jeers as one as Nethe slips off the edge, Ida following close behind. Nethe’s eyes snap open. Her whole body changes, her dance no longer lingering and light, but heavy and fast, until she is slapping her body, her joints making cracking sounds like twigs. Beside her, Ida begins to fit too, eyes rolling back in her skull. Frederich grasps for her, and Lisbet snatches at her legs.

‘Help us,’ calls Lisbet, and Sophey comes forward, pressing down Nethe’s shoulders.

Lisbet moves closer to Ida, and remembers dimly something about tongues, about how you must stop them from rolling back and choking, but she can no more reach into Ida’s mouth than stop her from bucking.

She lies bodily across her, her stomach feeling too soft to bear her weight, wonders if babies can be crushed inside. She hears a clicking sound, a grinding. Lisbet concentrates on being a mercy. She is a rock, a boulder, heavy and ancient and still.

‘Ida,’ she murmurs, as Ida’s hand escapes and flails. ‘Ida, hush.’

But Ida is moaning, crying now, and her breath is stale and reeking of poppy. Ida’s eyes are stretched wide, and all the calm, the placidity with which she went to face her death, is gone.

‘Put her back,’ says a watching woman. ‘She must dance.’

‘We will not,’ shouts Sophey, her voice hoarse with fear.

The guards are coming now, Plater screaming orders to take charge of the situation once more. He is searching the crowd, has not seen them.

‘They must be on the stage, or at the shrine,’ says the woman. ‘They will take them else.’

‘The shrine then,’ says Frederich, and he scoops up Nethe with great effort. Sophey and Lisbet follow after with Ida, whose legs hop and drag by turns.

They reach the cart and lower the women onto the remaining sacks of flour, swaddling them like wax and tying them gently with ropes. They are still moving in the limited way they can, rhythmically, to the inescapable sound of drums. It is indecent, and Lisbet’s own cheeks colour as Nethe tips back her head and moans as though in ecstasy, the sound she drew from Ida the night before.

‘And mine!’ A man is behind them, holding a bucking girl younger than Nethe, little more than a child. A woman dithers at his shoulder, a mirror of the girl with worry lines furrowed deep into her forehead, a badger stripe of grey at her temple.