Like a squirrel, I make a dash around them, expecting their pull at my clothing. But all they do is yell. At each other. ‘You let her pass!’ scolds Grey Beard.

‘What was I meant to do?’ says Mouldy Beard.

‘What does she intend? Follow her!’

I hear their footsteps behind me as I peer in a small hole cut into the first door. Inside the cell’s a young man on his knees in prayer.

Inside the next is a large man lying on a dirty pile of rushes, still as the dead.

‘She’s looking for somefolk,’ says Mouldy Beard.

The following cell is larger. It has a bed and a table. There’s a woman in a fine dress writing on a parchment, a nub of a beeswax candle lighting her work.

‘She’s looking at the Eucharistian countess,’ says Mouldy Beard.

‘You needn’t recite what we both see plainly!’ curses Grey Beard.

The countess looks up at the voices.

‘Have you a parcel for me?’ she says to the guards in a tired way. ‘I was to be brought one by my kinfolk.’

There’s some quiet, and then Mouldy Beard calls, ‘There was, milady.’ His footsteps go and come back. He unlocks the countess’s door, a basket in his hand. It’s covered in a yellow cloth embroidered with a red badge like the Painted Pig was stitching.

‘And would you have given it me had I not asked for it?’ says the countess like she’s in her own home, addressing a servant. ‘Or kept it for yourself?’

Mouldy Beard looks at his shoes and locks the door again. But Grey Beard says, ‘You’re a traitor to the Queen, so mayhap you shouldn’t complain.’

‘Perhaps you should not address me so boldly!’ the countess says back through the door. ‘I may be Eucharistian, I will not deny my faith, but I have never plotted to overthrow Queen Bethany. My own cousin serves as a lady of the bedchamber! We are loyal.’

‘Eucharistian spies all over Queen Bethany’s court like vermin. Eve’s own daughters,’ says Grey Beard, nasty-like.

‘I was a dear friend of the dowager Queen Katryna, Bethany’s stepmother, and lived in her household the same years Queen Bethany did. She should recall as much and take care lest the cuckoo call too loudly.’ Then the countess sings a rhyme:

The cuckoo is a sly bird

It never builds a nest

It will not claim its hatchling

It leaves it to the rest.

‘You speaking riddles now? I’ll call the witch finder,’ says Grey Beard.

The countess doesn’t answer him. ‘There’s only candles and cakes in the parcel. My cousin was to send me ink.’

‘So you can write your spy letters?’ asks Grey Beard.

‘Give me my ink!’

Grey Beard says nothing back.