He is up in a moment, and it is not Lisbet he rounds on, but Eren. He shoves the musician hard, knocking him against one of his companions, who shoulders him back. The colours have become red and hellish, her body thick and swollen with heat and the blood of her and the baby both.

‘Stop,’ says Lisbet weakly, but of course no one hears her. Eren is allowing himself to be buffeted among the drunks, keeping his balance like they are spinning him in a jig.

‘Stop,’ she says again, and when she plants herself among them, they do. The men move off, and Lisbet’s heart flutters in relief. She looks at Eren, and he is looking back with undisguised anger.

‘I’m sorry,’ she says, uselessly.

He shakes his head once, a sharp and cutting gesture. ‘I would rather you spared me your defence, Frau Wiler.’

‘Lisbet,’ she says weakly, but she has snapped it now, the fragile rapport they had been building. She staggers a little and feels Eren grasp her beneath the armpit. Shame prickles in her chest: she knows she is damp with sweat, that even now those slim fingers will feel it and he will be disgusted.

A warning is shouted from behind and the crowd parts to allow an open-topped cart access along the overcrowded road. She has forgotten Ida and Nethe, forgotten herself.

‘Will we go back?’ asks Eren.

Lisbet straightens her spine though it costs her, and she is brought tall as he. His lashes are long as Ida’s, and brush his cheek where it is bare above his beard, apple-smooth as worn wood.

‘I’m fine.’

Her armpit is tender where he steadied her. She feels her pulse throb there, the flush grows up her throat. Henne used to like it, blotches like stepping stones skipping up her neck when they were in bed. He’d press his lips each to each, close his mouth over her earlobe and bite.

She turns away. ‘If you are tired, you can go. I must find my friend.’

‘Your sister?’

‘Ida!’ she snaps. ‘She is with Nethe.’

She is being a fool, and rude with it, but shame has mingled with her fear and she will not have come all this way and inflicted this on him for nothing.

He sighs, and she knows he is tired of her. She wishes he would go, wishes to be left in this faceless expanse of people and capture some of the recklessness she felt only minutes before. But he does not leave her. Instead, as the cart passes, its bed stacked with sacks and people, he lifts her, so deftly she could be a child, onto it and jumps up alongside, sitting on the edge with his feet almost in her lap.

The man overseeing the cart and its contents holds out his palm, and Eren reaches in his pocket for coin, but Lisbet finds a dusty block of honeycomb stuck to the inner of her apron. The man accepts it with gleaming eyes. Lisbet covers her belly and allows herself to be lulled, rocked by the motion of the cart as it passes over the rutted road. She tilts her head back, sees the sky immense and thickly starred overhead, and closer by Eren’s jaw, the underside of his throat, his pulse flickering like some strange current in the black of his beard. She stares until they merge, the night and Eren, and she could not know where one ended and the other began.