It wasn’t enough that they were refused service in the town’s shops, shunned wherever they went. There were still those who dared to buy the fish they tried to sell, secretly offered them succour and support. Just like the accused, these people sought to make dupes of him and all who believed the women were what he knew they were in his heart: witches, with malfeasance running through their veins. They were a blight on his authority.

Even so, God had found ways to punish them. Firstly, Sorcha’s lover had been sent to Bavaria. (Even though he had had something to do with that, he still attributed it to God. Had not the Almighty planted the idea in his head? Allowed those he contacted to see the right of his suggestion?) Then Janet Horseburgh’s husband had died. Two women, whores and witches by any other names, were answering to God for the sins of their souls. Forsaken by the men who supported them, who, bewitched as they must have been, bedded them, they were adrift without a male to anchor them, to hold their heads above the waters that even now were rising to sweep them away. Smiling, he thought of Nicolas Lawson. Aye, she still bore the scars of her internment and it was said her husband couldn’t bear to touch her any more. No doubt he saw what Bollard and he too had seen — the marks upon her body where the devil had suckled; where, of her own admission, she’d taken him as a beast does its mate. Shuddering, though not with displeasure, Patrick forced an image of Nicolas’s lithe body from his mind and thought instead of auld Beatrix Laing, that shrivelled prune and, finally, the wizened woman in the cell above — Janet Cornfoot.

‘Leave the window, Camron,’ barked the reverend as the keeper tried to close it. ‘The woman likes fresh air, let her have some.’

‘But, reverend, it’s not s’posed to be ajar.’

The reverend smiled sympathetically at the young nyaff. ‘Janet Cornfoot is an auld, auld woman and weak. Weak now we’ve wrangled the devil from her soul. An open window is the least of our worries or hers.’

If Camron thought differently, he didn’t argue. ‘I’ll see she brings her belongings with her then, the blankets and such, shall I?’

Not wishing to stay any longer, unable to escape the memories that seemed to leach out of the stone, an irrational fear that the walls were crowding him, the reverend made to leave. ‘Nae, Camron. She’s to be brought here alone, without bedding or blankets, do you hear me?’

Camron appeared about to object. He was becoming too bold. The reverend frowned. ‘You’re not to give her any nourishment either, you hear?’

‘Do you want me to leave her water so she can wash away the blood?’