But then she steps towards them, golden hair catching the early light, a basket clasped in her slim hands, and it is Ida.

‘Good morning, Frau Plater.’

‘Herr Wiler.’ Ida returns Henne’s curt nod, but her eyes are fixed beyond him, on Lisbet. No one looks so directly at her as Ida does, and it is another reason to love her. Henne continues to the skep yard. Their shared childhood should lend them some ease with one another, but instead there is something hard between them, a pit in soft fruit. Perhaps it is Plater himself – Ida’s husband is as loathed as Ida is adored.

Ida kisses Lisbet’s flushed cheeks, her breath sweet with wild mint and her lips soft and dry.

‘How are you this morning?’ asks Ida, eyes performing their now-familiar flick from Lisbet’s belly to her face.

‘Well enough,’ says Lisbet, and the worry line pinching between Ida’s eyebrows loosens. There have been so many days when all Lisbet could answer with were tears, that she takes each day of discomfort as a triumph.

‘Good,’ says Ida, and presses her miraculously cool hand to Lisbet’s. ‘See what I have brought you.’

She leads Lisbet to the woodpile Henne has stacked and left to dry in the steaming yard, and Lisbet sinks gratefully down while Ida perches beside, balancing the basket between them. She pulls back the cloth with a flourish, revealing a sack full of flour, white as fresh snow.

‘A gift,’ says Ida, ‘because the rye didn’t suit you.’

‘I can’t accept—’

‘Feel it,’ says Ida, her eyes shining with delight.

‘My hands are dirty,’ says Lisbet, though in truth these days even scrubbed clean her hands are a state, covered in bee stings, swollen with heat. She doesn’t want to place them beside Ida’s, so slender and neat-nailed as a newborn’s. But Ida seizes her hot fingers and scoops a handful of flour into Lisbet’s palm. It is soft as petals, light and fine as dust.

‘My father double-milled it for you especially,’ says Ida.

To her humiliation, tears start in Lisbet’s eyes, and she swallows the lump filling her throat.

‘Silly goose,’ says Ida, laughing and wiping Lisbet’s cheeks. ‘You’ll remember I was just the same, my final months. Like a rain cloud. Anything we can do to help comfort you is a joy to us. And in this heat I cannot imagine how you feel.’

‘I am well enough,’ says Lisbet sharply, pouring the flour carefully back into its sack, returning to the phrase that is all she can offer when her friend asks how she is.

Lisbet is careful not to complain, in case God hears and decides to take this baby from her too. It is one of the many bargains she has made with herself, balancing them atop each other as precariously as the basket between them. Ida has no such qualms: she has carried each of her children without so much as a cramp or a bleed, tempts fate and the Devil both without a second thought. But she is not Lisbet, who lives with the blunt evidence of her own accursedness, the litany learnt by heart: comet, Mutti, babies. So much wreckage. So much blood.