Beside all these devastations, she also knows: her son is born and safe in the world. What else? Also that the hand she felt on her skirts was Ilse trying to prevent her entering the fire. That the hand on her wrist was Daniel’s, that it was him who came to her aid and accused Eren. That he alongside Mathias tended her for a full day before Sophey and Nethe arrived and kicked him out.

‘They had him in Nethe’s room. He made a sty of it,’ sniffs Sophey, rocking the baby so violently Lisbet doubts he sleeps but is rather rendered unconscious by her ministrations. ‘Thank goodness I hid my marriage silks.’

Nethe and Lisbet exchange glances, and laugh with the hysteria of those who have encountered great disaster, and survived.

•

Henne returns when their son is a week old, bringing word the dancing plague is over. He is so tall, so broad he could block out the sun.

‘They say hundreds died, and I can believe it. The stages are dented by their feet. But never mind all that. Lisbet,’ he says, and his voice is made strange by their time apart. ‘Thank you for my boy.’

My boy, thinks Lisbet.

He comes closer to the bed, and takes her hand, and his face is so bluntly carved she almost flinches. How had she not noticed the brutish jut of his forehead before, the lasciviousness of his mouth, the ghostliness of his blond hair and beard. He let Plater beat Nethe nearly to death. He kisses her hand and she cringes, disguises it as a wince of pain.

‘I have named him Heinrich.’ He beams, and she feels already the snapping of the threads that she has been building with the boy, the gossamer times when he is suckling and she watches him, waiting for a name to arrive and fit him perfect as he fits her arms. Here Henne has come, and brushed them aside. Here Henne has come, and swallowed their child entire into his ownership.

Her husband – for this is what he is, she reminds herself – misreads her wince, squeezes her hand. She had forgot his lack of care. He is holding too tight, her fingers moths disintegrating.

‘You mustn’t worry, Lisbet. We have come to an agreement, about the bees.’ He kisses her hand again, and throws it from himself, stands to stretch. He fills the whole room until there is no space for her. She dreads the day they must share a bed again. How will she let him touch her, after Eren?

‘Heidelberg was a waste of time. They were never going to allow us to keep the bees, not with the monastery so near. Really the Moor did us a favour, clearing the land. We have a new enterprise now.’

She has faded from the room. The Moor? He must mean Eren. She stops him, speaks over him as he rattles on about his plans to turn the skep yard into a beet field, to set Sophey, Nethe, and she to furrowing the land the very next month.