•

‘More,’ Lisbet tells them the instant she comes through the door. Sophey is at the fire, stirring stew and looking weary, older even than she had when they left for church that morning. ‘There are more of them. Dozens. All women.’

Sophey raises her arm impatiently, cutting off Nethe’s words at the inhale. ‘You saw them?’

Lisbet nods, dipping her hands into the bucket and running the rag over her neck. ‘Ida and me both. The entire horse market is given over. The guilds too.’

‘Ida saw them?’ asks Nethe.

‘Yes, and she was horrified,’ lies Lisbet. ‘Of course.’ She shudders at the memory, the crowds, the men grabbing and spinning the women. Ida’s shining face.

‘Don’t you go strange,’ snaps Sophey. ‘I’ve enough foolishness from this one.’

‘But it means something, now,’ says Nethe with the tone of a dropped conversation taken up again. ‘Now there are more dancers. I said more would follow, and see? They are.’

‘The Twenty-One are bringing in musicians,’ says Lisbet despite Sophey’s warning glance. She knows her mother-in-law wants her silent, but she needs to speak it. ‘To play out the devils.’

‘They are daft with heat is all,’ says Sophey, crossing herself. Nethe and Lisbet follow. ‘And thirst and more dancing will not cure it. Geiler would agree. I will have no more talk on it.’

She sets down her cup, sitting with difficulty, her coarse fingers out in front of her. They are curled as though about a churn, and from the strain in the ropes of her knuckles Lisbet knows she is trying to straighten them. ‘Such mania means prayers, and prayers mean candles. We have work to do.’

Forty-seven dancing

In Frau Clementz’s thirty-second year, there came a fervour for angels. Men, her husband and eldest son among them, heard angels whispering in the rotten crops, and plucked up scythes and marched to the Church’s stores, demanding grain. They saw angels in the whorls of the huge wooden doors, and broke them down. They felt angels in their throats, and her son Arnd swore he saw an angel running gold beneath his papa’s skin.

Most of them were killed of course, angels slipping from their cut-down bodies and dispersing in the air like smoke. Frau Clementz herself saw it when they hanged her husband, the gold threads Arnd spoke of severing and the last essence of the angels flying from him. He pissed himself and she hoped the angels would not see this, his final human failing.

Arnd was angry, after. She could not reach him in his anger, his rage. When the next Bundschuh came, he was first out of the door though she threw herself around his waist, threatened harm on herself, his brothers, anything to keep from having to watch another man she loved hang before a screeching crowd. Still he went, and again he returned free and unharmed, their rebellion beaten. And angry, so angry he was like a hot coal in her house. He brought her a gold bracelet, a thing so fine it was as though it was woven, and bound it still warm around her wrist. He said he took it from a priest. He said it reminded him of the angels beneath Papa’s skin.