She looks back at him, is close enough to count his eyelashes, spot a small scar almost hidden by his beard to the side of his mouth. He let Frederich leave without him, his dearest friend. He stayed, for her.

‘Forgive me,’ he says. ‘I did not wish to alarm you. I only wanted you to be safe. So that if you were in danger, you would have help nearby.’

‘I can help myself,’ she says, weakly.

‘I know it, Lisbet.’

Kiss me, she thinks. Put your lips on mine. But instead he steps back, and she wipes the last of her tears from her face. ‘Do you wish me to walk you home?’

‘No,’ she says, too suddenly, with too much force.

‘You can go alone, I know.’

‘No,’ she says again, more steadily. ‘I’ll stay a while, if I may. Ulf has already made himself comfortable.’

They look at the dog, lying on his side with his tongue lolling, softly snoring. Eren snorts. ‘If you wish.’

•

It is simple as breath, to stay. They sit together by the dying fire and talk. There is plenty to speak of: more on Frederich, more on Nethe and Ida, more on the monstrous parade of the wax saint that will be the saving of them all. They circle the natural question to ask, of what he will do and where he will go next. Lisbet does not want to know. Surely he will not stay here, where people shrink away or strike him. Perhaps he will wait long enough for Henne to return, and then be gone, and she will never see him again. She holds this thought like a cloud at the corner of her mind’s scudding sky.

‘You think it will be over?’ she asks.

‘It must,’ says Eren. ‘Manias are like boils – they must be lanced and poulticed, the poison squeezed out, but then they are in the past.’

‘I know something of manias,’ she says, soft. ‘And it is true they pass. But sometimes they take people with them when they go.’

‘You have knowledge first-hand?’

She opens her mouth, already full of Mutti, of her swollen feet. How Lisbet soothed her with her hands when in her heart she prayed for her to die, to be released from her agony. But what if he recoils from her? What if he, a man who can tolerate a sodomite as a best friend, who is himself a sin in the eyes of the Church, judges she alone is worthy of his disgust, his condemnation?

‘My mother . . .’ she starts. ‘She lost her mind. She died, just before I married Henne.’

Because she wanted to escape, and marrying Henne offered that. A vice tightens around her heart and squeezes. The awful fact of her fault. The awful fact of her.

‘That’s a terrible loss to bear.’

Everything about him suggests a safe haven to share in, and everything in her wants to tell him. But these are the darkest things, the deepest places. She recoils, diverts.