‘We can pay,’ she says. ‘Please.’

Sophey is nodding even before this offer, dull-eyed and motioning for them to place their girl beside Nethe. Frederich and the girl’s father tie the writhing bodies gently, the man weeping. Lisbet looks away.

‘Will you be safe?’ says Sophey, as the parents climb up beside her. ‘Will you tell Mathias?’

‘Poppy.’ Lisbet can barely speak. Can Sophey understand her? Her head is full of the rush of water, or wind, full of everything and nothing at all. Surely she sleeps? Surely it is all of it a dream?

‘I will ensure she is, Frau Wiler,’ says Frederich, and Sophey waits no longer. She jolts the reins, without a further word of farewell to either of them. In the bed of the cart, Nethe and Ida still sway beside the child. Lisbet and Frederich stand watching until they are a toy, a speck, and round the corner and gone.

Seventeen

Frederich leads Lisbet from the crowd, which is approaching a riot as the guards break their way onto the stage, and takes her directly through a narrow gate in the city walls. They are at the opposite end of the city now, far from anything she recognises, but Frederich seems to know exactly where they are. She barely notices him disappear and re-emerge with a flagon of beer, and a man with a cart besides.

She drinks deeply, then he helps hoist her into the cart. She watches the sky as they ride, seemingly for hours, around the boundary of the walls, until finally she spies the trees beginning to crowd them, the forest on the approach to home.

As they go, she combs the strands of her memories, all of them edged with disbelief, frantic. She has again that feeling of floating, of detaching from her body and hovering above. Ida tied by the waist, eyes black with poppy. Nethe, screaming with the voice of a hundred dancers. The crowd overriding it all, overtaking Plater and his guards. Sophey’s face as she turned the horse for the shrine, her daughter and her daughter’s lover thrashing in the bed. All she has to hold is this: Ida is not drowned. Ida still lives.

Lisbet’s mind wanders on, to follow the cart bearing Nethe and Ida away. St Vitus’ shrine is two days’ ride, through thick forest that rises fast into mountainside. The road will be thronged with desperate families taking their daughters and wives and mothers to the spring, to wash them in the holy water and release them from their abandonment.

But why would they wish to return? To come back to this earth-bound, sun-baked place, this interminable summer where every priest preaches their damnation, where their husbands drag them by the hair and they must drown their children to save them from starvation?

‘Frau Wiler? You are home.’

Frederich sounds soft, unlike himself. The cart has stopped, and he helps her down, dismissing the driver with a word of thanks. Lisbet wonders dimly if the man is another of Frederich’s lovers, if every face she sees holds some dark secret frowned upon by the Church. Her own heart has trespassed, that night with Eren in the dance tree. They are all of them doomed.