‘What would happen if we didn’t leave the jug out?’ Edith had asked when she was a little older and more able to make sense of things unseen.

Grandmother said that if that was to happen, the evil one could make its way into the walls of the house. Edith thought now the only thing that had made its way into these walls was a deep sadness, a damp melancholy that refused to be defeated by the warmth of the stove. Her grandmother knew the mountain was rife with stories of the bloodless. The dread of the unknown was a bindweed of superstition that tied women to the house for fear of what might lie beyond the garden gate.

She would start her stories with ‘What once took place and if it had never been it would not be told’.

Once, I loved a shepherd with eyes as blue as a winter sky. He was no prince, but to me, he was a king of men. What is this life without him, a life without hope? What is life without hope? A newly dug grave. Edith wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, swallowed her wordless misery. It tasted bitter. But life went on, not caring that she was broken. She still had to clean out the pigsty and feed the pig and the chickens. Her father still demanded his supper. It mattered not that her dreams had vanished.

Edith’s white hair and her silence were of great interest to the villagers. No one said they were sorry or asked about Demetrius; it was as if he had never been there. The only person to enquire was the cobbler’s wife, Vanda, and she, being also the butcher’s daughter, had already made it quite clear that she didn’t want a stepmother, certainly not one as young as Edith.

Edith had no intention of being married to an old man. Her father had sucked enough of her life from her. What can I do, she asked her heart, when you are broken, when I can’t even speak in my defence? Her tongue sat unmoving, redundant in her mouth. An image of the butcher’s slab came to her: the sheep’s head, its tongue lolling out of its jaws.

At night she dreamed of Demetrius. She saw him floating over the village, his violin resting on his chest. He reached down towards her, their fingertips nearly touching. She felt his spirit enter her, run free through her blood – and then he was gone. In all her dreams he never spoke.

One morning, caring little for the superstition that had turned a water jug into a charm against evil, Edith picked it up, drank from it then went about her work. Later, as she refilled it from the well in the yard, she began to hear Demetrius in her head, speaking in a language without words. A language she understood.