As she speaks, the other women settle in. There’s nowhere for them to go, so they listen. The skinny girl goes on. ‘Most times I keep my anger in and hold myself against it. I know a girl’s meant to be meek and kind. I’ve been told enough.’ The thick woman who spoke first gives a murmur like she’s been told the same. ‘I worked as a maid in a fine house. You know the two-storey house in merchants’ row that’s got yellow-painted shutters and red tiles on its roof?’

‘I know it,’ says another girl. ‘Next to the one with blue glass in the window.’

‘That’s the one,’ says the skinny girl. ‘I’ve been there three years now, keeping the house as tidy as you’d ever want. Brushing cinders every day from the hearth. Scrubbing out the closestools. Caring for the goodwife when she’s poorly. I do it the best I can. But then last Makersday, she comes to tell me her husband is moving them to his family’s estate for the summer months, and they won’t be bringing me because there are maids in the countryside.’ A couple of women suck their teeth. ‘I told her I haven’t any other work. Where am I to live? How am I to eat? She said it’s none of her concern and I shouldn’t speak so boldly to my betters.’ A girl takes the skinny girl’s hand, but the skinny girl throws it off. ‘The goodwife never even learned my name. Three years I work there, and she still calls me “girl”! I told her she wasn’t my betters, she was my worse because she was leaving me with no work. She slapped me for that. Then she said she’d tell all the other goodwives that I was of so choleric a temper that none would take me on as a maid.’

All the folk, even the turnkey, suck their teeth at such a thing.

‘She said she’d take my good name! How would I find a place after that?’ cries the skinny girl. ‘And that’s when the rage came up all over me. When it comes on, I get deaf, like I can’t hear my own thoughts. I regret it sorely now. Maker forgive me, but I slapped and scratched at her as hard as I could.’ Some suck their teeth again, some harrumph like they’d have done the same. The skinny girl’s voice gets smaller. ‘I put out her eye. And so I’m set to hang.’ She tells me a few other small sins, lying and forgetting her prayers and the like. I tell her the foods I’ll eat after she hangs.

‘But I’ve none to make the food,’ the skinny girl says once I’m done. ‘Not even for a Simple Eating.’