She is crying, but she is not ashamed. The tendrils of light swarm about her like flies, heavenly and revelling, ravelling her in their soft threads and weave. Her hands are full of earth and excrement, her fingernails itch and she wants to peel them off.

The light tickles her beneath the chin.

Frau Troffea tilts her head back, looks at the sun until her eyes fill with white. The light swirls about her like a cloud, buffeting her gentle as a wind-knocked sail. She picks up her foot, then the other. Her hips sway. She parts her lips in ecstasy.

Beneath the blue and burning sky, Frau Troffea lifts up her hands, and begins to dance.

One

Lisbet arches her foot, braces it against the wooden bed frame until the cramp subsides. Her eyes are sticky with sleep: she scrapes it away. She could lie here another hour in this early quiet, but this is precious time, and confined. Today Henne’s sister Agnethe will return from the mountains, and all will be changed.

Henne lies with his back to her, his cotton undershirt dampened to translucence, his skin pink at the neck, a scar puckered starlike beneath his hairline where an empiric cut out a mole that would not stop growing. She turns her head to watch his breath. She could press her hand between his shoulder-blades, feel the work of his breathing hum like the skeps – but it is impossible, a distance too far to span. In their earliest days, she touched him always: her hands on his forehead, plucking chaff from his hair, stealing kisses behind his mother’s back. Those tendernesses are past, now.

Her toes curl themselves again and she levers herself upright with a hiss. They have long discarded the sheet, are sweating into straw like horses, and a trickle works its way down her back. She wants to pull off her nightgown, walk through the forest to the river and roll in its mud like a pig.

She heaves herself to her feet, crosses to the window. A few bees drowse past the shutters, and she wonders if they recognise her out of her silk and wicker, can smell her sweat sweet with the honey they give.

The light itself seems bunched and thick with heat. Agnethe will return from her penance into a dismal summer. No air comes to stir the skin-stretched shutters, nothing moves at all except the bees and the pain in her leg, unfurling like thorns along its length. She catches her lip between her teeth, bites just hard enough to hurt, to turn the focus of her pain from there, to there. Inside her, the child stirs, and she watches the shadows flicker beneath her nightdress like minnows. Still there? Good.

She clasps her hands beneath the mound of it, lately grown too large to encircle at its widest point. Two months left. She has never got this far before, this large. She strokes her thumb against the taut skin and paces until it is no longer like walking on hot shards of glass. She manages eight turns of the room before the mattress rustles.