She thinks instead of Ilse in Ida’s arms, Rolf at Ida’s breast. Why has her friend not visited her? She longs to throw open the windows but they must be closed until she is churched, to avoid her bloods rising.

This and other things are ordered by an empiric, who comes at some indeterminate time of the day or night to pull Sophey’s tooth and stitch Lisbet together, wash her with more vinegar, check the baby is rightly swaddled. Lisbet is still so weak she faints through his visit. She wakes to hear Sophey and Nethe arguing, knows it is because of her somehow, and she cannot muster the energy to care.

Her mind is addled. Lisbet does not know how to sort through all the bliss and pain of it, pleasure and agony set sharp and jagged against each other, both with teeth, both violent and tearing. The love is exhausting, closer to fear in its intensity. It is days before she can do more than just feel it, before she can speak or do anything but take her son’s weight and feed him, but it is enough. It is enough to breathe him in and forget for minutes at a time all that occurred.

Nethe barely speaks either. There is some deep stillness, some deep quiet to her. For the first few days Lisbet finds it soothing, but as she comes more and more to herself, she notices how Nethe watches her as she feeds, looking away as soon as Lisbet tries to return her gaze. Nethe has come back from the spring grey-skinned and serious-eyed, her hair grown enough to brush the tips of her ears. It is astonishing to Lisbet how recently she came to know Nethe, how quickly she came to love her. She wants to reach across the silence and tell her it is all right, that her son is born and there can be nothing more important. But Nethe’s quiet gives her pause. It takes all her courage, on the fourth day of her son’s life, to catch her sister’s wrist as she passes her the baby.

‘Sit here,’ she says, and Nethe perches on the bed. Lisbet manoeuvres herself closer to the wall, and shrugs her shift over her shoulder. She stretches out her arm as her son begins to suckle. ‘Come.’

But Nethe does not move. Her eyes are fixed on the closed door, beyond which Sophey scrubs and scrubs at the table, the bench, the floor, as though to scour all traces of recent events from history.

‘Nethe,’ says Lisbet softly. ‘Whatever it is, you do not have to carry it alone. What has happened? Are you . . . are you still condemned?’

‘Pardoned,’ she says on an exhale. ‘The Twenty-One offered clemency to all the dancers, and to all who falsified dancing. It came by Papal decree, that the dance was penance enough. And Plater never named us sodomites. He made sure no one knew him to be a cuckold.’