Things just want to run right, he’d say. Listen, and they’ll tell you what needs fixing. He’d hold a lock up to his ear. A jammed pin, you say? Let’s have a look.

I remember one day Da brought home a wool merchant’s necklace to repair. It was midsummer, and I was nine. The chain was broken, and while fixing it, Da showed me the red stone in its middle. So lovely. Then he showed me the back. It was made of paste. My face fell.

‘Doesn’t matter,’ said Da. ‘Still shines as nice.’

All the Owens could mend things. Owens. I pick apart each letter. The letters all sound wide and open to me. Like warm wind in spring. I am an Owens.

When I turned ten, Da told me it was time for me to take a profession. ‘I wash clothes,’ I said. ‘Like Mother did.’

‘Your mother washed clothes because she didn’t know anything else,’ he told me.

Da didn’t know she knew lots of things. She knew how to nap like a cat in the fine sheets brought by the wool merchant’s girl. She knew how to dress up in Goodwife Burley’s nightgowns and pretend she was a queen with a badge and a crown. The nightgowns were silk, she told me, pooped from worms. When I heard that, I brought her a sack’s worth of earthworms and presented them to her in our special crockery. I thought it was a fine gift, but she threw it back at me, worms and all, and sent me to bed with nothing to eat, unless I cared to eat the worms.

I imagine the worms in the earth all around my mother eating her now.

Thinking ill of the dead: roast pigeon.

My mother’s folk were Daffreys. A name like the colour inside a bruised apple. All of us with the same hair, black and with the feel of sheep’s wool bred for mutton not yarn. All of us with the same half smile and the same cleft in the cheek like a nail paring.

When I was small, I never much saw my Daffrey kin. Da said they weren’t like us. He meant they weren’t goodly folk. He didn’t say it exactly, but I knew.

One year after my mother died, my Daffrey granddam arrived with two big men, my uncles. She pointed a finger warped like a birch twig at me. ‘Learned something new about this one. We’ll be taking her now.’

Da tried to fight them. ‘She’s mine by law.’

‘Is she now?’ said my granddam.

It was the only time I heard Da swear.

Grains of barley on the grave,

The blasphemer’s soul is saved.