He stepped aside for a cart that rattled ahead to disgorge a dozen men into the knots of villagers clamouring for help; grim-faced and purposeful men wielding shovels and picks and jumping ankle and knee deep into the mud to be surrounded by angry men and women and urged to dig, and dig deeper still. A stretcher was placed on the ground, ready to receive a small body that a constable had pulled from the mud. He ignored the stretcher and carried the limp child in his arms to the bed of a wagon piled with bodies, his face a grizzled ruin of grief above his black cape.

A human limb, an arm – as pale as a fish belly in the sunlight – was jammed in the spokes of a mill wheel that lay flat on the riverbank. Next to this, the corpse of a small black dog was draped over a branch, as if the animal had been put there to dry. It hung, paws limp. Silas shuddered. He’d tied Shandy up in the backyard. He’d looked into her trusting amber eyes as he closed the door on her. Three men were dragging a dead horse towards a pit of animal carcases. Another man waited for them, leaning on a long-handled spade, a tub of lime at his side. Silas wondered if this was his horse. He would never forget the animal’s fearful eye rolling in its socket. He hoped it had survived the wild ride they had shared and was not the creature now having lime shovelled onto it. Two men and a woman were waist-deep in a hole in the ground, pulling at something unseen. An old man sat on a stone beside them, quietly weeping.

Silas passed a stable yard where a row of corpses had been arranged neatly on the flagstones, his gaze snagging on a boy in a tattered nightgown streaked with orange clay. He wondered why a slab of stone had been placed on the stomach of one of the bodies, then realised he was looking at the ground through a hole in the man’s torso.

The landscape was reminded him of the scorched earth left by a grassfire, but on a massive scale. The foliage and buildings that had, for long stretches on his journey by foot and carriage yesterday, hidden the river from view were either gone entirely or crumbled into ruins. The river itself was little more than a glutinous mud flat punctuated by stagnant ponds. Pieces of metal and stone and wood poked out, like a monstrous half-digested meal. The cries of survivors were like the cries of gulls, plaintive and hopeless. He was choked by the need to find his dog, to be reunited with Shandy and bury his nose in the thick ruff of her neck, breathe in her familiar scent and be reassured that the world had not ended.

He walked on.

All he knew was that Mrs Armitage’s cottage was near a stone bridge and he should stay close to the riverbank. He crossed the foot of a steep road, pausing to allow a carriage pulled by two horses to turn to make the ascent, the white discs of faces staring out at him.