‘Lisbet?’

She paces.

‘Lisbet. Stop.’

‘It’s hot.’

She can only make out the glint of his eye, his teeth when he talks.

‘A beer?’

‘No.’

‘You should lie down. Rest.’

She grinds her teeth. She tried that in her earliest pregnancies, though his mother argued, wanted her up and moving before her confinement, to speed it along and be strong. Henne overruled his mother’s wish the first and second times, and Lisbet spent the latter days lying in their bed like a noblewoman, or else sitting at the kitchen table while he fussed and soothed her, feeding her milk dumplings drizzled in honey with his fingers.

They were hopeful, then, and even after the sixth they’d heard worse from the women at church. And now they are five years on from the milk dumplings and she has nothing living to show.

Sophey blames her, Lisbet can tell. She repeatedly calls Lisbet a slattern even though she is dedicated to the bees, telling her daughter-in-law how she worked the fields before birthing Heinrich, milked cows before Agnethe.

‘This is why Henne has strong shoulders, and Nethe strong arms.’

Agnethe. Nethe. The name is almost mystical to Lisbet, mythical as those strong arms, or the jaw she is said to share with her brother. Soon enough Lisbet will see if it is all true. Sophey and Henne’s mentions of Agnethe in the first years were so sparse they were easily swept aside, and any questions Lisbet asked were brushed off too. Lisbet always had the sense of entering a room another, dearer person had just exited, as though Henne went searching for a wife to fill the space at their table Agnethe had left. Ever a harbinger: her birth circling the comet’s, her arrival stalking Agnethe’s departure, her bloods chasing her mother’s madness. A bee butts the shutter. She taps back.

Even Ida, so good at making Lisbet feel like she belonged from the first moment of her arrival, will only edge around the boundaries of the truth about Agnethe, giving her no answer beyond the facts. ‘She has been at a nunnery, in Mont Sainte-Odile, paying penance.’

‘But you were friends,’ Lisbet would push, with a sensation like pressing on a bruise, braced for envy at the thought of Ida loving another friend as dearly as she loves Lisbet. ‘You must know what sent her?’

But Ida, for all her wide eyes and childlike gaiety, is a master equivocator, and always led Lisbet past the topic and onto the new, more pleasurable grounds of gossip – Herr Furmann’s latest indiscretion, Sebastian Brant’s gambling debts – until Lisbet forgot why she cared, and Agnethe was once more only a shadow pinned to her back, glimpsed less and less.

Seven years’ penance. Lisbet has tried to sound out the depths of such a sentence, weigh its particular gravity. She wonders how things will change, now another body will be in the house. Agnethe’s is not the presence Lisbet has prayed all these years for. They were certain a child would arrive well before Agnethe’s penance was through, maybe two or three as happened for Ida, their small faces scrubbed clean, their tiny fingernails full of wax from learning the bees. Lisbet closes her eyes against the vision, a sound escaping her, each lost child an excavation into her body and her heart. Into the gap she has portioned off at the table will step a full-grown woman, washed of some sin no one will name.