‘You say mania is like a boil, but hers was beneath the skin, in the blood of her. Her feet swelled so she could barely walk, and the empiric cut off all her hair.’ Tears prickle her eyes at the memory of this particular cruelty. ‘She had beautiful hair,’ she says impotently.

She does not tell him of the other remedies. The empiric Pater brought was young, unproven, his face still smooth but for whiskers beneath his jawline. He barely touched Mutti before selling them a tincture of mustard.

‘The womb floats,’ he told Pater. ‘Nooses up around the neck, bunches over the heart and lodges beneath the throat. Children fill it, weight it, return it right, but when childbearing is past we rely on mustard forced into the gullet to scare it away, or else sweets placed at the lips of the legs.’ Lisbet imagined the womb a hungry infant crawling towards the promise of delight. The mustard made Mutti’s throat blister. They had no money for sweets.

‘But still, her mind shattered. Some days she knew me, and there was still such love. But more and more, she did not. Her hands would flutter, her mouth would foam. Towards the end, she could not speak.’

Her black feet and her gaping mouth, her bad days and her worse ones. Endless, endless devotion. The language they alone spoke, how Lisbet was her only comfort, how she brought Mutti poppy when she asked for it.

‘One day, she went to the river – no.’ Lisbet catches herself. If this is to be a confession, let her tell the whole truth. ‘One night, I went to a dance. There, I met Henne. Heinrich, my . . .’ She doesn’t want to say husband. She doesn’t want to align herself to another man in front of Eren, no matter how foolish that is, when she has Henne’s baby inside her, the evidence of their trying fluttering over their heads. ‘And he asked to marry me. But marrying meant coming here, leaving Mutti, so I said no.’ Her voice breaks. Eren’s eyes are so kind she wishes he would close them. She does not deserve kindness.

‘But Mutti guessed why. She took poppy. She went to the river, the river the comet had created through our easterly field. She filled her skirts with stones.’

Eren’s hand is shockingly warm on hers, and dry. Not cool any longer, not clammy. Alive, and tender. She tells him how Mutti loved her, despite it all, and that is why Lisbet has kept living, has borne her dead babies without complaint, because she deserves it. She deserves it all.

Here, Eren holds up his hand, to stop her. He has listened with his body completely still, as though he barely breathed. But now he looks full at her, his slender brown fingers inches from her lips, his eyes fixed on hers.

‘We have known each other but a short time, Lisbet, but I feel I know you.’