‘The house is an A.’

‘Because the floor is floating in mid-air, like the cross stroke of the A. There is no ground underneath it. Just empty space and more empty space.’

It seems strange to Agnes, during this time, that she has, in the space of a month, exchanged country for town, a farm for an apartment, a stepmother for a mother-in-law, one family for another.

Agnes believes her position, as new daughter-in-law, to be ambiguous, somewhere between apprentice and hen.

So she can withdraw into her own place but also mix and mingle with the others. She is at once observer and participant.

Agnes glances at the face of her father-in-law and that of her mother-in-law and then her husband. He catches her eye and gives a barely perceptible nod towards the bread, raising his eyebrows.

Agnes sees this but doesn’t say it.

She sees, too, that all six children flinch if John gets suddenly to his feet, like animals sensing the approach of a predator. She sees Mary blink slowly, as if closing her eyes to what might occur.

‘No. That you see the world as no one else does.’

She thinks of the private cruelty behind something as beautiful and perfect as a glove.

In their apartment, he lets her take his hand, lets her lead him from the fire to a chair, lets his eyes lose focus, lets her rub her fingers through his hair, and she can feel him switch from one character to another; she can sense that other, big-house, self melt off him, like wax sliding from a lit candle, revealing the man within.

She wished she could say to him, You must not fret. You and I are to have two children and they will live long lives. But she remained silent: people do not like to hear such things.

But she knows enough to be able to record an approximation of this sentence: The branches of the forest are so dense you cannot feel the rain.

She says the word to herself – rowan, rowan – pulling out the two syllables. Reddened berries in autumn, used for stomach pains, if boiled, and wheezing chests; if planted by the door of a house, it will repel evil spirits from the inhabitants. People say the first woman was made from its branches. It was her mother’s name, although her father never let it past his lips; the shepherd had told her, when she’d asked him. The branches of the forest. Agnes plants her hands in front of her, on all fours, like a wolf, and submits to another pain.

His mind is traversed, for a moment, by an image of her body in its current astonishing shape, as he saw it last night: limbs, neat ribcage, the spine a long indent down the back, a cart-track through snow, and then this perfectly rounded sphere at the front. Like a woman who had swallowed the moon.

Something has changed. He pauses. The quill rests in the inkwell, point down, fronded feathers up. He frowns. This is something he never does: to leave a quill like that, overnight, in the damp dark of a well. What a waste, what profligacy. It will be quite spoilt.

Who would ever think it could be so thick, so strong, still pulsing like a long, striped heart? The colours of birth assail Agnes: the red, the blue, the white.

‘That you had more hidden away inside you than anyone else she’d ever met.’

The first is a glassmaker on the island of Murano in the principality of Venice; the second is a cabin boy on a merchant ship sailing for Alexandria on an unseasonably warm morning with an easterly wind.

She hands the girl the box of millefiori beads and Judith takes it, her hands eager and quick, her face lit with a smile.

There is nothing more exquisite to her than her child: the world could not possibly contain a more perfect being, anywhere, ever.

He is like the picture of a man, canvas thin, with nothing behind it; he is like a person whose soul has been sucked out of him or stolen away in the night.