‘He risks all for us,’ she says. ‘And you would wave him off gladly?’ Her hand cuts the air, stopping Lisbet’s interruption before it has begun. ‘You hear as well as I do the warnings at church. They hang the rebels at a rate of hundreds and still there are more. It is as Geiler foretold. In this heat everything is damned.’

She speaks as though Lisbet does not know it, has not heard with her own ears word of Sophey’s beloved Geiler’s now infamous sermon that rot will grow from rot ever since the comet smashed a year’s corn in Eninsheim. Their corn, Lisbet’s father’s field, the same night Lisbet was born. The field never yielded again. All this, Sophey doesn’t know.

Whatever Sophey thinks, Lisbet does listen to Pater Hansen at church. More than that, she sees it with her own eyes when she and Ida travel the slums. Stink and sickness, and so many babies, sallow-skinned and barely crying. Pater Hansen tells them in the city women drown their babies, and Lisbet dreams herself with a net, hauling them to safety.

‘Which is exactly why we must keep our bees,’ says Lisbet with a courage she doubts she’d possess had she not a witness in Agnethe. ‘They alone are unsullied by the heat, or else we’d be at the mercy of the weather like any other farmer.’

‘Like my husband?’ spits Sophey. ‘You think you are so much better, turning us from cabbages and beets to bees. But nothing is worth losing a son for. If you were a mother you’d understand.’

The breath stops in Lisbet’s chest. Her face flushes hotly and she feels she will be sick on the fresh-swept floor. She shoves past Agnethe, standing blameless beside the door, and walks as fast as her belly will allow to the forest.

Both women call after her, Agnethe soft and Sophey angry, but Lisbet’s blood is a roar in her ears and nausea rocks her belly. She does not trust herself not to cry, or scream, and there is only one place where she can do both without judgement or notice.

The skeps hum quietly, the bees stilled by the heavy air. The pressing shed’s door is closed and the bowls are recently filled, and she is glad for once not to have to tend them. A needle enters precisely under her ribs and darns in time with her breath as she crosses the boundary of the wood, and within a few steps the trees have thickened. She finds a smooth-trunked paper tree, its bark peeling in feathery strips, and leans her palms against it so she can vomit without falling. She heaves until there is nothing left inside her, nothing but the baby and her thumping heart.

Lightheaded, she presses her forehead to the bark. It is warm as her blood, and she clasps her sweating palms beneath her belly, trying to take the strain from her back. Her anger feels enormous and smothering as smoke. If you were a mother . . .