‘You were loved,’ Frederick agrees. There’s a scraping sound, like somefolk getting up from the stool. ‘Where are you going, Paul? Good company is the only balm for hard living.’

‘I’m not distressed, I’m just fetching more wood,’ Paul says back, and the door to the yard opens and shuts. It’s plain he’s lying.

‘He’s a fair piece worse than last I saw him,’ Frederick says almost too low for me to hear. ‘He sweats melancholy.’

‘He’s of a fickle humour these days,’ Brida says back. ‘He calls me such things! Eve’s handmaiden and, what is it now,’ Brida searches for the words, ‘foul Mefite?’

‘Mephitis, the goddess of sulphurous stink,’ offers Frederick. ‘Paul’s the bastard son of a lord, you know. His sire educated him. Refused him his name, but equipped him with a ranging knowledge to call upon when cursing his companions.’

‘All the same, he cares for me as kin,’ says Brida with warmth in her voice. ‘So there you have it.’

‘He ever had a kind heart,’ sighs Frederick. ‘Bruised and beaten as it is. Justice would see that villain whipped who stole his heart and then cast him off when he was no longer beautiful.’

The yard door opens. Frederick’s voice gets louder again. ‘Paul! You must read the lines I’ve been given. The scholars who wrote it read Aristotle and believe that makes them poets, forgetting as they always do that wit must be accompanied by irreverence, lest the audience succumb to sleep as the verse is spoken.’ As he says this bit, a new thought brings me fully awake.

I’m down the ladder in a moment. Frederick and Paul scoot away as I near the hearth, while Brida does her best to make herself smaller on the rug. I hold out the book I found in Ruth’s box. Frederick and Paul have their letters. I can learn what kind of killing the deer heart signifies.

‘You told me the sin eater didn’t trouble you!’ cries Frederick, tensed like a rabbit against the wall.

‘It’s the book from the box,’ Brida sees out of the side of her eye. I turn the cover and indicate the first collection of letters. Brida grasps my meaning. ‘She wants you to read it.’

Paul pulls his hands back. ‘I told you I’ll have nought to do with her!’

I need their help, so I hold my ground a pace from them, the hearth embers crackling in the quiet.