The larger guildsman marches his well-fed bones to the singing actor and strikes him across the face. ‘Foul-mouthed pig!’

Soon after, the constable barrels down the lane led by the smaller guildsman, and the actors break off their mummery to make a run for it. The constable catches one of the actors by the ear. Two strikes with his club and the boy is squealing, ‘We were offered six shillings!’

‘What’s this?’ asks the constable. It’s more than a washerwoman makes in a season.

‘To make a play that the Queen killed her sister Maris’s babes by black magic—’ The back of the constable’s hand whacks the boy’s mouth.

‘Six shillings,’ the boy says again as if the amount makes it less wrong.

‘Who gave it to you?’ asks the constable.

The answer is what you’d expect. ‘Don’t know.’

‘Well, then it’s the press for you, isn’t it?’ says the constable.

The press. The crowd of folk suddenly feels too close around me. I push hard against a goodwife to make way. She cries out but gets quiet again when she sees who I am. A friend pulls her out of my way with a low hiss. The hiss rankles. I lunge at the friend and give her a good hard shove too. She stumbles with a scream into a sweets vendor, smacking her head against his cart.

‘Maker save us!’ cries another woman. I turn back to the crowd. They’ve opened wide around me, their faces turned away. All of a sudden I want to run at them, make them all shriek and squeal. But it’s not them who’re nettling me. Not truly. It’s the picture I see inside my head of Ruth the Sin Eater under the stones of the press.

I lurch to the side as if I might slip away from the picture. My head’s hot and my chest aches. I walk faster as if to outpace my thoughts, but the picture dogs me down the street.

Ruth crushed. Ruth bleeding.

Soon I’m running, urging the picture to leave me alone.

Ruth, Ruth dying, the picture calls after me. Bessie dying, Ruth—

It takes a moment for me to catch what’s happened. Bessie’s name, fallen in with Ruth’s. And suddenly the boy catches up with me, calling out his message. And like the sun’s last light disappearing over the fields, quicker than you ever think it will, the picture of Ruth’s death leaves my thoughts completely because the messenger’s calling out my old neighbour’s name.

Bessie’s dying.

15. GRAPES

THE SMELL OF Bessie’s house is so familiar, it’s like I never went away. Broth smell from the pot always on the hearth. The mild, milky smell of Lee. The sharp tang of Tom.