Agnethe twists in her seat to watch it, and Lisbet feels her trembling. Her lips move.

‘What are you praying for, Agnethe?’ says Plater. ‘Surely not the sinners?’

Agnethe turns her face away.

The road takes on a gentle slope, and they lean back in the cart while the mule puffs and wheezes, its hooves skittering slightly on the packed dust. The candles shift in the back, and Agnethe puts out her arm to hold the protective cloth in place. Lisbet sniffs the air, checking for signs the wax is melting in the heat. She wishes she could force the mule to quicken its pace, but Plater has taken the reins as though it were his own cart.

‘There will be a thief there soon enough,’ continues Plater, though they have left the cage behind them. ‘A woman, caught taking nails from a church door. A church! The depravity of this city.’

Lisbet’s stomach twists. She imagines her, this woman, who for some reason has her mother’s face in the worst, final days of her sickness, with ragged fingernails prising metal from wood, splinters beneath her nails, like Agnethe and the egg shell.

‘You are lucky, Agnethe Wiler, I said it even then,’ says Plater. ‘To be sent to the mountains. There is a tighter grip on sinners, now. Sebastian Brant has a firm hold of the council, and agrees we must instil the fear of God back into their hearts, or else they will not obey.’

He speaks as though he is a part of the Twenty-One, not only their hired brute. Beside her, Agnethe is stone again. Lisbet holds her breath and her tongue, wondering if this is the moment she will at last learn Agnethe’s transgressions. But Plater speaks only in allusions.

As they reach the lip of the hill they see the spires of Notre Dame, and Plater crosses himself. Lisbet and Agnethe mimic him. The first time Lisbet saw them, she wept at how the world held such beauty, such grandeur. She had never seen the like near her father’s fields, where only trees stood higher than their farm, and their church was cramped and draughty, housing animals in the bleakest winters. She felt Henne had pulled her from a pit, loosed from her the misfortune that trailed her like a dog.

And now there are stories of farmers bringing their herds onto the cool, hallowed stone to save them boiling in their pens. Though the cathedral’s spires stand high enough to spike the sky, it does not take long for her sights to be brought low once more.

The smell comes like a cloud from the river that cuts east of Strasbourg. It is brown and sluggish beneath the sun, and as they near the city proper, the smell grows solid, grows guts and breath. Lisbet comes this way most weeks with Ida, making for the slums that line the outer edges of the city, and yet the smell is always a slap. She scrunches her lip below her nose, and Agnethe retches quietly into her sleeve. Only Plater seems unmoved.