‘Do you find it much changed, Fräulein? I suspect the air was of a different sort in the mountains.’

Lisbet wishes he would stop talking, yet she would dearly like to know the answers to his questions. She herself has seen the descent of the city, already in motion when she arrived, but surely worsened for her proximity. She came by Henne’s side in this very cart, with this very mule drawing her into her new life. The signs of the previous year’s Hungry Winter were everywhere, small crosses marking the spots on the cobbles where men and women froze to death in the streets.

There has been more and worse since, the returning war wounded mouldering in the almshouses, their eyes empty and mouths full of stories of the Turks. But the most brutal stories are of those unlucky enough to die unburied, their spirits returning to the forests and fields, legions of fury screaming toward their kin, shrieking justice. Lisbet can believe it: devils walking the earth. The whole of Strasbourg in free fall toward this hellish summer.

They begin to pass the hovels, slumped structures of wood and thatch, bound with rotted rope or else left open and unpeeled to the elements. Herr Lehmann and his wife are sleeping slumped in their doorway: Lisbet knows that inside are eight children, knows they will have sucked the meat from the scrawny chicken she brought five days ago, long boiled its paltry bones to mush.

It has not always been like this, as Sophey takes great care to tell her. The city sat high in the Pope’s estimation, had been gifted funds to build upon its fortunes as Heidelberg did. But then Lisbet arrived, and with her, signs suggesting damnation. More and worse Hungry Winters, blighted summers, plagues and sweats and starvation. Only Sophey seems to see it clearly –the rot at the core of her, like spilt salt or a fishbone in the throat: a bad omen. In the fields of her father’s farm, furrowed by the comet’s fall, it felt safer to be so, though her mother saw it too, prayed for her daughter until she lost her reason and her will. Lisbet flicks the thoughts from her like lice. Not with the child inside her. She must not linger in those dark and waterlogged places.

The outlook doesn’t improve as they near the labyrinth of the city centre. The miasma is heavy as fog, the sunlight mired to a feverish yellow that taints all it touches. Lisbet shudders as they descend through it. Sometimes there is an edge of sweetness from a private church, or else freshness from a baker, but those scents all are jumbled together, like threads of gold in stinking rope. Only the cathedral seems unblemished, its pure honey stone shining over the low rooftops surrounding them.

She straightens her back as Plater navigates the mule through the outskirts into the main market square. Notre Dame looms at the far side, and the air is awash with flies numerous as crows over her father’s fields. It is busy as ever, bodies packing in from all sides, but the stalls are empty. She sees no meat anywhere, just meagre rye and shrivelled salsify. Only firewood is plentiful, and no one is buying that with the heat, the forests so nearby.