One morning the baby’s lips are blue, and Jan says it is too late for an empiric. She knows it is true, but still pleads for him to give her the last of his coin. He has none. It is all drunk at the dances. She screams and cries, and carries her baby to the cathedral steps, prays for her tiny soul, a white feather drifting away. Edith’s heart breaks with the weight of all her love, and the pain is too great to hold.

When she hears the music she thinks it is angels come to take her child to Heaven. She follows it, and there are women, all together in a cacophonous riot, and she knows they are the same, they are like her. They met a boy at a dance, and wore wood violets in their hair. They loved their children, and their children died, and now they begin at the beginning. She slides in among them, her child clasped to her chest, and starts to dance herself back to before.

Ten

It has the heat of trespass when, the next day, Lisbet waits until Sophey and Nethe are abed, and slips outside with a torch to sweat in the yard until she hears the jangle of Eren’s lute strings. In the firelight he looks grey under his black beard, his skin so matted with sweat and dust he could lie down in the dirt and blend with it.

‘Forgive me,’ he says as he reaches her, and her heart sinks. He will not do it, of course. It is absurd. She is already shrugging as if it is of no consequence when he unloops his instrument from his shoulder and hands it to her. It is lighter than it looks, hollow with air.

‘May I have some water, and a bowl?’

He means only to wash, to wash before they walk, and her heart lightens with the relief of it.

‘I will go to the well,’ she says.

‘We can pass it?’

‘Of course.’

‘Today has been . . . but the well will be welcome.’

She wonders about his day, what he has seen, the scenes in the city. It must be like walking through Hell every day. ‘Or the river, further on. There the water is cooler.’

‘You should drill your wells deeper, if rivers are more refreshing,’ he smiles. ‘Would you mind taking that inside? I don’t wish to muddy the floor.’

‘Of course.’ She carries the instrument carefully. The door to her and Henne’s room is ajar, and she hesitates at the threshold.

The shutters are closed and clearly have been for days, perhaps since the musicians’ arrival a week ago. The air sticks in her throat: unfamiliar sweat, sweet and sharp. The sheets on the bed are unmade. There is dirt on the straw and she knows this must be from Frederich, less careful with his boots.

So there, on the floor, is where Eren lies. There is a jerkin wrapped around the thin pillow, a sheet folded back to air. She rests the lute atop it, then changes her mind and moves it onto the stool where their clothes are heaped, in case Frederich stumbles home.