Patience sniffed and dried her cheeks with a half-made bootie. She straightened her long dry braid and squared her bony shoulders.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘Enough of my disappointments, Mr Pike. How are you today?’

Pike wanted to tell her he’d missed her yesterday when she hadn’t come.

‘I’m okay,’ he said.

‘That’s good,’ said Patience.

‘I have something for you,’ said Galen Pike, laying his hand upon the table. He had made it, he said, to brighten her frock.

It was a kind of rosette, or flower, woven from what appeared to be loose threads from the rope that had been twined about his hands, which Patience saw now was no longer there. Four rough stringy petals; at the centre a button from his putrid blood-soaked shirt. Patience held it for a moment in the palm of her hand. The rough petals scraped her skin. She wondered if Pike meant it as a romantic gesture of some sort.

If the preparation of the heart is taken seriously the right words will come.

‘Thank you, Mr. Pike,’ she said gently. Thank you but she couldn’t accept it, she was against adornment, material decoration.

She placed the flower back in the hollow of his cupped hand. His dirty fingers closed around it.

‘You hate me.’

‘No.’

Knapp held his breath. He watched Pike turn the rope flower over in his hand and shake his head, the foul matted tangle of snakes and rat-tails, and heard him tell Patience Haig she was wrong about the light of God being in every man. He didn’t have it. It had passed him by. Where he was, was dark and swampy and bad.

‘Nonsense,’ said Patience.

It was true, said Pike, looking out through the tiny window at the maroon-coloured peaks beyond. Since his mother died he’d done all manner of wicked things. Since she passed away, years and years and years ago, there’d been no one to tell him how to behave; no one in the world he’d wanted to please, whose good opinion mattered at all. If he’d wanted to do something, he’d gone ahead and done it. He looked at Patience. What was her name? he asked.

‘Patience,’ she said. ‘Patience Haig.’

‘You remind me, a little, Miss Haig, of my mother.’

Knapp’s beady eyes moved from Galen Pike to the thin Quaker lady in her drab frock. It was hard to tell from her expression if she enjoyed this comparison with Pike’s mother. Her face showed no emotion, her long braid lay neatly down her back, her hands folded in her lap.

‘I am afraid of the hangman, Miss Haig,’ said Galen Pike.