His fever did not break all night. She sponged him down with water and her own lavender oil. She added the oil of lemon to the soup, and she grated cinnamon over it as she spooned it down his throat, but he remained half conscious, in a fevered sleep, turning his head from side to side, and speaking words, Latin words, that she could not understand but that she feared were heresy or magic, or both.

He was only still when she held him, one arm around his shoulders, as she helped him to drink small ale, which she dosed with more lemon oil. Only then was he quiet, as if her touch cooled him, and so, as the night wore on till dawn, she held him, leaning back against the rough wooden wall, his hot head on her shoulder, her arms around him. He nuzzled his head into her neck as if he wanted the cool of her skin against his face, and he slept.

When the thick horn windows showed a cloudy light, he groaned with pain, staggered to his feet, and crammed his fists against his belly. She knew what was coming and tucked the pail beneath his buttocks as he voided himself, doubled over in agony.

“There,” she said, “there,” as if he were one of her sick children, and washed him with Beard-Papa water that she had brought from her home. She lowered the stinking pail on the pulley, and called to the stable boy to tip it in the midden and wash out the pail and return it. Then she washed her hands in the Beard-Papa water and made herself as comfortable as she could against the planking of the wooden wall, and once again took him in her arms and laid his head on her shoulder.

Alinor dozed, dreaming incoherent dreams of love, of a man who spoke of “a woman like you in a place like this,” of a world where women were not condemned in church before the men who were sinners like them, who had sinned with them. She dreamed of Alys and her sweetheart, Richard Stoney, of Rob and the life he might live if they were not poor and born to be poor, of Zachary sailing far away and saying into the wind of the dream, as he had once said so bitterly to her: “Your trouble is that nothing real is ever enough for you.”

She woke in daylight, cramped, with a sense of defeat. All her pride in her passion of the night was gone. She thought Zachary was right and that she had misled herself and misled her children, and he had spoken the truth—not when he said that she danced with faeries, but that she longed to be with them. All her life she had wanted more than the life she was born to; but this morning she knew she had sunk very low: a poor woman, about to be disgraced before her neighbors, working as that lowest of beings: a plague nurse, almost a layer-out, only one step above a porter of a plague cart heaped with dead bodies, calling for people to bring out their dead. She knew no work lower than a plague nurse, and her folly and her love had brought her down to this: locked up with a dying man, who was foresworn, and who had never said that he loved her.