There is a tearing sound, and Lisbet turns to see Nethe ripping a length of cloth from the hem of her dress. She looks to Lisbet for permission, then reaches up and ties it around the branch. From her pocket she pulls the ribbon, the silken twist of Ida’s hair Lisbet had found in her pillow all those weeks ago, and loops it around the torn cloth so it hangs like an ornament.

‘For Ida.’

‘For all of us,’ says Lisbet.

She begins to hum, bringing music to her as though the lute is not dumb at their feet but being played, dark nimble fingers plucking its strings. Nethe joins in, tunelessly, and wraps her arms around Lisbet and Heinrich. Beneath the thrumming branches, both holding and held, Lisbet hums louder. In the dark cave of her sister’s chest, she smiles, her son’s body hot against hers. He is here. There is a whole life ahead. She and Nethe begin to dance.

Author’s Note

In July 1518, in the midst of the hottest summer Central Europe had ever known, a woman whose name is recorded as Frau Troffea began to dance in the streets of Strasbourg. This was no ordinary dance – it was unrelenting, closer to a trance than a celebration. She danced for days, any attempts to make her rest thwarted, until it drew the attention of the Twenty-One, the city’s council, and she was taken to the shrine of St Vitus, patron saint of dancers and musicians. After being bathed in the spring there, she stopped dancing.

But it was too late. Already, the dancing plague had spread, and it lasted two sweltering, frenzied months. At its height, up to four hundred people danced, with claims that up to fifteen people a day died. It is the biggest outbreak of such a mania ever recorded.

But it was not an isolated incident. Between the fourteenth and the seventeenth centuries, dancing plagues, or choreomania, occurred regularly. Sometimes they were contained and concentrated around the feast day of St Vitus. Sometimes they involved only children, sometimes mainly women. Often, the dancers were society’s most vulnerable, whether through class, age, race, or gender.

Because of these characteristics, one of the most popular explanations, both now and then, was a religious mania. God and the Devil were not ideas to be debated in medieval times – they were facts, as real as weather or hunger. Indeed, weather was sent by God, and so too was drought and famine. The sixteenth century was especially plagued by extreme weather events, and though these are now easily explained by science, at the time there was only one explanation for the endless ruined harvests, the excruciatingly hot summers, and the winters so cold people froze to death in the streets. God was punishing the human race, and they must atone.

At the very end of the fifteenth century, He had sent a warning: a comet that many notorious preachers such as Johann Geiler von Kaysersberg, who is a favourite of Sophey’s in The Dance Tree, pointed to as a sign of damnation. It threw the Alsace region, a much-disputed area between France and Germany, into a state of panic, heightened by war at the borders between the Holy Roman Empire and the advancing Ottoman Empire, as well as by two decades of floods and drought that decimated crops. Those closest to poverty were forced to borrow from the Church, who seemed to be more a business than representatives of God.