When we sit, the neighbours take their chance to leave their guilt behind with the ants. It’s good they leave because I puke over and over at the foot of the body just from the smell. Only greenish-yellow bile comes out, speckled with blood from my branded tongue, yet my guts go on. In between, the Sin Eater hands me bites of food. It’s a fool’s show: bite and puke, bite and puke. All the while, she licks every drop of milk from the saucer, chews every crumb of bread. The crush of the leek between her teeth, dry and shrivelled as it is, sends me into greater retches with its onion stink. Finally she says the words to end and makes the Maker’s sign over the rotting body.

We climb down two sets of stairs. I never knew you could climb so many stairs in a day. A neighbour holds out a penny as we go into the gathering dusk. My legs wobble like a newborn calf’s, but I follow. Because where else can I go?

I nearly weep when she stops at a merchant’s house. We aren’t done. Why must we do so many Recitations and Eatings in one day? I ask the house.

Because souls do not wait upon young women like you, it says back. You wait upon them.

Red hangings line the hall like long tongues. It’s a colour I’ve never seen in cloth. The woad blue woven around the red I know well. Woad blue is the colour of common folk’s clothes because woad dye is cheap and bears up through years of washing. But this bright, rich red. I thought it was just a colour of the body – the inside of an open mouth, chapped lips, a cunny.

The coffin sits in a large wood-panelled room hung with paintings and lit by sconces of fat, beeswax candles. I startle when one painting moves, before I see it’s just a looking glass. My black hair is slack. My eyes are small, black stones. But my square face is pink. My lips too, bright as the hangings on the walls. Must be the retching.

Fetching retching, I tell the looking glass.

I open my mouth to see my tongue. A black S weaves down it like a snake, just as Lee said. The tongue around the S is red and puffy. It’s monstrous. I’m monstrous. I turn away from the looking glass.