“Here we have the fruit,” she said, continuing to dig. “They prefer to eat the leaves, but this time of night, they will be burrowed in the soil.” And then, out of nowhere, she withdrew a glossy little bug, no longer than her thumbnail. “Now this is very important,” she said, dropping the squirming beetle into the bag. “Do not press them or crush them.”

I wiggled my toes in my shoes, hardly able to feel them even though we had been in the field only a few minutes. “How can I get one from the ground without pressing it?” I asked, my interest in the whole activity suddenly waning. “When I find one, I will need to grab him before he runs off, and I cannot do that without pressing on him a bit.”

“Let’s do the next one together,” she urged, patting the ground beside her. It seemed her aches and discomforts had lessened; perhaps the cold had numbed her. “Reach into that same spot, where I just put my hand. I’m sure I felt another set of legs.”

I shuddered. I had expected we would use a tool—a net or spade—instead of our gloved hands. But I did as she asked, grateful that the dark sky prevented her from seeing the grimace on my face. I moved my hand around the hard, smooth bulb of beetroot, and then I felt it: something crawled against my fingers, something very much alive. Steeling myself, I twisted my hand in the dirt and cupped my fingers around it. I lifted a pile of soil to show Nella and, sure enough, a green striped beetle crawled out of the dirt as though to greet us.

“Very good,” she said. “Your first harvest. Drop him in the bag and close it up, else he will make quick work of escaping back to his little beetroot. I’ll start over there, on the next row. We need one hundred beetles. Keep count of yours.”

“One hundred?” I glanced down at my single beetle, writhing around in the bag. “Why, we’ll be here all night.”

She cocked her head at me, her face serious. The moonlight reflected against her left eye, giving her a strange, two-faced appearance. “It’s curious to me, child, that you’d complain of the effort in catching a night’s worth of beetles—mere bugs—and yet you think nothing of killing a man.”

I shuddered, wishing she hadn’t reminded me of Mr. Amwell’s ghost, still pressing inside of me, making me trickle blood.

“It is hard work,” she said, “and harder for me, as of late. Go on, now, let’s get to it.”

The night passed, though how much of it, I could not in truth be sure. The moon moved a quarter of the way across the sky, but I was not wise enough to use it as my clock.