‘Where now, dearie?’ comes the woman’s voice. We’re a stone’s throw from the Sin Eater’s house. Perhaps I can crawl there. ‘Where, dearie?’ she asks again. They’ll flee from me when I show them, but there’s nothing for it. I raise my finger and point. The woman starts like a horse.

‘Oh, Maker mine,’ says Paul. He half drops, half places me down. I can see him wrong way round above me. ‘Did I touch her skin? I surely did. I surely did!’

‘Are you sure she’s a . . .’ asks the woman.

The man’s fingers feel about my neck. He jerks back when he finds the collar.

‘Does your flesh burn, lovey?’ calls the woman.

‘She was light as a child,’ is all Paul says. I can’t fathom why they haven’t yet fled.

‘Mayhap new to it. Hasn’t had time to fatten,’ the woman says back. ‘Can you get her inside?’

‘While avoiding touch and direct gaze?’ Paul asks.

‘Lodging for the night out of the cold,’ says the woman. ‘And no constable chasing us down.’

‘What have we come to?’ Paul grabs hold of my skirt and drags me in the door without touching my flesh.

Just before the door shuts, a piece of moonshine falls across Paul and the woman. And suddenly I know why they dare come in with me. What looked to be clotted cheese in Paul’s beard are pocks and patches of grey, hardened skin on his face, as if he was burned, but a little different. And the woman. Her rags have fallen open. Inside is but half a body. A shoulder caved and drooping, a rib cage with an unnatural cant, a cropped and misshapen arm. These are not just vagabonds. They are the unseen too.

I’m stuck like a beetle on my back, too weak to turn myself. Paul’s left me just inside the door and is now building up the hearth fire. The woman, called Brida, I learn, settles down on the Sin Eater’s stool. As the flickers of firelight grow I see fully what she is. A leper.

There’s old stories about lepers, of how they banged clappers when they walked through town to warn folk of their coming. How they were forbidden from using the well for fear of contagion. How, like a sin eater, none looked upon them lest they be cursed. But I must have heaped lepers in with goblins and hog boons and other fables because, seeing Brida before me, I can’t countenance she’s real.

‘Don’t fear, lovey,’ she says to the ceiling as if she knows my thoughts. ‘The sickness doesn’t pass so easy as that. Paul, here, hasn’t caught it, not in a handful of years. We won’t share food and drink or sleep close, and you’ll be right as rain.’