‘Yes,’ says Agnethe, and Lisbet notices how her voice is thick with emotion, too.

‘Good,’ he says, unwrapping the bundle as briskly as his stiff fingers will allow. ‘Have you . . .’ He trails off, and shakes his head as though dislodging a fly. ‘You can take three.’

‘Three?’ says Lisbet.

‘Three sacks,’ says Mathias, ‘with my blessings.’

Lisbet cannot understand what is passing between them, but she will not decline his kindness. ‘We must to the cathedral first,’ she says. ‘Thank you, Mathias. We will collect them on our return.’

‘I prayed,’ he says. His eyes are still bright. ‘Every day. I pray still.’

‘Thank you,’ says Agnethe. She looks as though she will reach out to him, but instead she turns to Lisbet, and motions for them to mount the cathedral steps.

At the stone basin set outside and filled daily with fresh water, they wash their hands. Lisbet wonders if the farmers anoint their animals before crossing the dark cave of the cathedral threshold. Agnethe rubs the dusty, lukewarm water over her scarred head. She is drawing looks and mutters, her baldness marking her out as a penitent, but she seems not to notice, or at least not to care. Perhaps she was always a woman who was stared at: with her handsomeness and her height Lisbet can believe it.

Into the blessed cool of the cathedral they step, side by side like newly bound lovers. The smell of shit dissipates, replaced with incense made from a tree that grows in the deserts of the place their empire fights for even now. Somewhere far away that is hotter, Pater Hansen says, than even this summer, so hot the Turks’ blood bubbles and runs black as their hearts, darker than their skin. Lisbet sees such men and women more and more often in Strasbourg, though they mostly keep to their quarter of the city. They do not look like demons to her, any more than her mother looked possessed when the priest declared her so.

The light is softer here, like being underwater, the sun’s glare dispersed to a glow through the rose window. Someone, somewhere, is crying, and the stone walls bat the sound about like a cat with a mouse in its paws. Lisbet looks around, searching for the source, but Agnethe seems to hear nothing, see nothing but the gilded cross hung over the altar, the flooded light of a hundred candles. She walks towards them as though in a dream. Lisbet trips after her, pride blooming in her chest. These are their candles for the most part – the bees who hum in their hives worked this wax into existence. It is a miracle greater than anything she hears of in church – this everyday transformation, like water into wine. But that thought in itself is blasphemy.

Agnethe falls to her knees on the stone, the dome of her head tilted back, her arms draped out at her sides in supplication. Lisbet has never seen someone pray in such a pose. When she bends her neck to speak to God, she feels the aim is to make herself as small as possible, turning inwards to find some tiny voice that perhaps sometimes she believes is from heaven, but is more often her mother’s. She fails even at carrying God inside her like others seem to. But Agnethe prays like in the holy stories, as though God is everywhere, and she is showing herself as broadly and as boldly as she can.