Lisbet searches for a priest or warden, some figure of authority who will surely come and clip Agnethe’s exuberance, but she sees no vestments, only hungry faces. She lowers herself, the smooth stone cool enough to be felt through her skirts. She has not prayed in the cathedral for years, and knows she should pay her respects, if not to Him then to the place, the old stone and high windows, the glass and the scents pressing down on her like a heavy palm.

She clasps her hands in the attitude of prayer, but all her attention is for Agnethe. Her lips move fast, as though she cannot possibly fit all she has to say inside her head, inside the time she has left on this earth. Her eyelids are nearly closed, but a line of white shows shining in the candle light, and beneath them Lisbet can see movement, as though she is a child caught in dreams.

Soon Lisbet’s knees are aching, and her back and her neck, and she knows she will have a job standing, but Agnethe gives no sign of stopping her prayer. Her stance has drawn more looks, more mutters, but Agnethe has not noticed. She is entirely elsewhere.

At last, Lisbet admits defeat. She does not know how long this final act of penance will last, and her legs are starting to tingle and spasm. She heaves herself upright using the pew, the wood groaning with the effort of holding her, her skirts catching beneath her feet. She hears a small tear: her hem, giving. She wants suddenly, foolishly, to cry. This is her mother’s skirt, let out again and again during her mother’s repeated carryings until it would only be good for a belly Lisbet was certain she would never be able to grow. At last she fills it, and she misses her mother with the sharpness of a child waking in darkness.

She turns from Agnethe, from the altar, from their bees’ candles transmogrifying the building into a celestial space aglow with gold, and stumbles back into the blunt sunlight. At the doorway, she looks back at her sister-in-law, made tiny by distance. From here, she looks as though she is aflame, and Lisbet shudders.

She thinks to return to Mathias, to start the process of transferring the sacks to the cart, but a shout pulls her attention. A child is running, laughing, followed by another, toward a crowd of perhaps fifty people at the square’s edge. For such a gathering, they seem oddly silent. Lisbet squints. There is dust rising from the crowd’s centre. The children reach the outermost edges and vanish amongst the larger bodies. Checking again over her shoulder that Agnethe has not moved, Lisbet traces the children’s steps.

She shoulders through, imagining a Gyptian in scandalous dress, or perhaps even a bear brought from the north and poked into a jig. But the feel of the crowd is wrong: there are no lewd calls, no drums beating. Only a muttering, a solemn witnessing.