‘Are you all right, Bet?’

The trunk bends, sinks beneath Ida’s weight. Lisbet can tell Ida’s face from her tone: hesitant, her plump lip caught between her crooked front teeth. She can tell, too, that Ida has been drinking, something sharp and strong.

Lisbet cannot bring herself to look at her friend – she will strike her, or else burst into tears, and she doesn’t want to do either. She can feel their combined attention on her, and she wonders how she looks to them, hunched over her belly, her whole body heaving.

She concentrates on her breathing, on slowing its pace, deepening its reach so it can stretch to the baby and her own heart both, soothe them. When at last her pulse has stopped racing, and the baby has pressed itself visibly against her skirts, she collects herself enough to look up.

Ida is blur-eyed from drink. Lisbet searches her friend’s face. The woman she thought she knew so well is, she now realises, a stranger. All this time Ida has kept these dangerous night-time jaunts from Lisbet, and more besides. The betrayal rises sharp in her throat. Ida looks at her fearfully, sorrowfully, and it makes Lisbet feel powerful. She stares back.

‘Well?’

‘We were friends, you know it.’

‘But no longer,’ says Lisbet, searching Ida’s face for the lie she is certain will come. ‘You told me you cared nothing for her.’

‘I wish that were true.’

‘We prayed for it to be,’ says Nethe, a little too loud, and Ida’s face crumples further.

‘Why?’ says Lisbet. ‘What happened between you?’

‘Must we do this before the Turk?’ says Nethe, and Lisbet glares up at her. Nethe glares back, and though she wears it better than slight Ida, Lisbet notices a haziness to her gaze too. Both drunk, then.

‘He is likely a kinder witness than me at this moment,’ Lisbet says coldly.

Laughter erupts from the trees: a man and a woman, searching for somewhere to tup. Lisbet pushes herself from the trunk with immense effort, trying to keep some sort of dignity as her belly overbalances her and the laughter turns to rhythmic pants, the slap of flesh on flesh.

Eren motions for them to move further off, towards the river. To Lisbet’s astonishment, as they go Ida lets out a quiet giggle, which she stifles with her palm. Nethe echoes it as the moans rise faintly from the shadows.

‘Ida,’ hisses Lisbet, ‘Agnethe. Stop.’

But both women are laughing openly now, and holding each other about the waists, and though they are out of earshot of the couple Lisbet feels furious, embarrassment flooding her body.

‘You are children,’ she snaps.

‘It is all right, Lisbet,’ says Eren, but even his low tone cannot comfort her. She increases her pace, her neck burning, holding her skirts to ford the river, and still on she plunges. She wants to be away and rid of them, her questions and their company both.

Lisbet hears the women’s laughter, and Eren’s calls, and knows she is worrying him with her pace, but she doesn’t care. She all but runs across the boggy ground, hearing Ida’s shrieks as the mud sucks her toes, hearing Nethe’s voice join Eren’s in shouting her name. But she won’t stop, won’t slow enough for them to catch up, slipping between the silent trees until she reaches her brambles and wrenches them aside, hauling them over behind.