I’ve only ever gone to a cunning woman for healing and only for household ailments: warts, charms, constipation. I’ve no notion where to go. In my mind I see black robes. Curiosities in windows. Apothecary lane.

I make it to Northside, passing the whores and taverns. The apothecary shops are just shuttering. I’m very tired, and when I shift my shawl, there’s no more dry to staunch the wet. I step into the path of a man in apothecary robes with a small, curled beard. I raise my hand for help.

He rears back like a horse, hands crossing himself, and goes around me. Like a drunkard I turn in slow steps after him, but he’s too quick. Across the lane, another robed man stops to gape. I raise my hand to him. He hisses as if across a great distance, and the ground moves under me like water under a river wherry. By now folk have gathered in a wide circle around me. No, an egg. An egg is the shape they’ve made. It seems suddenly important that the shape they’ve made is an egg and not a circle. And none in the egg will help.

The ground moves again, this time in a sudden jolt. I feel a smack against my temple. I lick my lips and taste cold earth. There’s a white mist rising from my lips. Mayhap it’s my soul fleeing my body. My soul melting away into the air. Why doesn’t it take me with it? I try to go after my soul, but my legs don’t answer when I call on them to move. I am the sow who was cut open by the pig man. I shall be butchered and strung up in the marketplace. I see faces dimly in the distance. And then the mist comes and swallows me whole.

7. PIG’S HEART

‘STILL WARM.’ A dream voice hardens into waking life. It’s night. Deep night. My shoes are gone, and somefolk’s digging in my sleeve. I shudder.

Two figures jerk back above me. Vagabonds. Two women. No, a man and a woman. I’m still on the apothecary lane. I must have fallen.

‘We’re mere beggars, not rogues,’ the man says with a Northern accent. ‘We would never have molested your person had we known you remained among the living.’ His face is clotted with earth or clay, and his speech is fancy like an actor’s. I lift a hand to my neck. My shawl is stuck about my neck in a wet lump.

‘If you have a penny . . .’ says the woman. She’s curled in on herself under a blanket. ‘We’ve not et since a week past.’