One man, sensing I was there, turned. He touched his neighbour on the arm and they both moved away from me. Others stared sullenly at me, mutinous, like sulky children. There was a movement at the front of the crowd. Father Ulfrid pushed his way through and stood in front of me, his hands tucked into his sleeves as if he was in his own church doing God’s work. His narrowed eyes glittered with triumph, but his body was trembling as if gripped by the kind of giddy relief you see in young boys after battle.

“Crawl back to your nest of vipers, woman. You’ve no business here. There will be no more souls from this village coming to your door. The sickness is over.”

He bellowed these words for the benefit of the crowd, who made a half-hearted cheer in response, but there was strangely little rejoicing in the sound.

I tried to muster what dignity I could. “Praise God for it, if it is so. But can you be sure?”

“Oh, I’m sure. We know the cause. We know who brought the evil upon us and you can rest assured, Mistress, the malefactor will not trouble us again. Take this back to the house of women as a warning: We have dealt with one of your number and should any further misfortune strike this village, we will see to it that the rest of you suffer the same fate. You tell that to your so-called leader.”

“Dealt with?” A dreadful coldness gripped my bowels. “How dealt with?”

He turned and gestured. The sea of people divided and parted. A brown-cloaked man stood at the pond’s edge, legs planted firmly astride, arms folded across his chest. He had a man’s body, but his head was the head of an owl. His bronze beak was hooked and sharp as a wetted scythe. The tawny feathers were smoothed and glossy. His eyes were hooded deep within the feathers, so that I couldn’t see if they were the eyes of a man or a bird. He pointed down at his feet with a slow extravagant gesture, but I couldn’t tear my gaze from his head.

Someone pushed me from behind and I stumbled forward. I followed the pointing finger.

A body lay facedown in the mud at the Owl Master’s too-human feet. She was naked. Her red hair snaked in thick wet strands across her shoulders. Her wrists and ankles were bound, tied so tightly that the skin was cut and bruised purple where she’d struggled. They had whipped her, lashed her slender back again and again. The water had washed the blood away, but the cuts were bright as poppy petals against the bluish-white of her skin. The whip had curled around her side. Its tip cut into the small mound of her stomach, biting deep into the soft flesh of her little breast.

I dropped to my knees, heedless of the stinking mud, and turned her over, tilting her face towards me as if I needed to see, as if my mind could still cling to any shred of hope that it was not her. Tenderly I plucked the wet weeds of hair out of her wide-open eyes. Livid bruises covered her face and arms, purple as a summer storm. Her lip was swollen. She had not died gently.

All my fear was consumed in fury. I wanted to tear the faces off the men who stood there.

“Why did you do this? She was only a child! You put her through the ordeal of water, and she sank in front of your eyes, proving she was innocent. You could have pulled her out before she drowned, but instead you all stood there and watched her die. How could you do that? She’d never done you any harm!”

The man in the owl mask neither moved nor spoke. In the silence we stared each other down. Father Ulfrid nudged Gudrun’s body with the toe of his shoe as if to assure himself she was really dead.

“She stood accused of malfactorum. Many worthy witnesses testified on oath that she danced up a storm and raised a flood against this village and that she poisoned the water with her evil eye so that our children sickened and died. She was whipped to encourage her to confess her sins and save her soul, but she was so steeped in sin that she stubbornly refused to make confession-”

“She was a mute!” I screamed at him. “You knew that! Each and every one of you knew that. If you had tortured her upon the rack she could not have uttered a single word to save her life.”

“If she couldn’t speak it is yet further proof of her malice, for her soul was so far given over to Satan that he stopped her mouth so that she could not confess and receive divine grace and forgiveness for her sins.”

“She didn’t feel no pain neither,” yelled someone from the back of the crowd. There were murmurs of confirmation from those at the front. “Even when the Owl Master was laying the whip on her good and hard, she never screamed.”

“Not natural that. Even a grown man cries out under the lash.”

“It was the Devil protecting her.”

“Don’t you understand?” I pleaded. “She couldn’t cry out, however much agony she was in.”

But no one was listening to me. All eyes were riveted on Gudrun’s body. A great cry of horror went up from the crowd and they shrank back, crossing themselves. I looked down. Her mouth had fallen open and a green frog was crawling out from between her lips.

paul was buried in the desert by two lions who dug his grave with their paws, at the request of saint antony of egypt.

tHE WOMEN CROSSED THE COURTYARD in twos and threes, chatting companionably to one another in the glacial winter sunshine. As I stood in the doorway of my room, watching them, a wave of loneliness washed through me. Their solidarity only sharpened my isolation. They could complain to one another, cry on one another’s shoulders, and receive a friendly arm of comfort, but I couldn’t undress my weaknesses before anyone.

Healing Martha lay in her cot as withdrawn from me as if she lay across the sea. Perhaps she heard me when I talked to her, but even if she did, she couldn’t answer. Looking back through all those years when we were friends, I don’t think I ever really told her anything. I never needed to. She had a way of seeing through the most closely veiled silence and would say the word that could lance a boil, however carefully concealed. Now, even if she could understand what troubled me, she couldn’t offer me any words of advice or comfort. A seer without a tongue is as useless as a blind watchman. Until I lost her, I never realised how much I needed her.

The gate burst open and Beatrice stumbled in. Her hands and the front of her kirtle were spattered with mud. She staggered as if she was drunk, and didn’t even seem to see me standing in the doorway of my room. I hurried out.

“Beatrice?”

She stopped and stared up at me, as if I was a stranger. Her eyes were swollen and her face was blotched with red marks.

“Have you fallen?”

She shook her head, but I knew something was wrong.

“Is there some problem with the livestock? The murrain has not struck again?” Merciful God, not that. We needed every shred of meat we could store this winter if we were to survive.

“Why didn’t you at least beg them for her body?” She spat out the words with a look of such venom on her face that I took a step back.

“Why did you let them kill her? You could’ve stopped them. The fever was none of her doing. She didn’t cast the evil eye on them. She wasn’t a witch, she was just a child… an innocent child!”

She gabbled her words so fast that it took me a moment to make sense of what she’d said.

“Do you mean Gwenith’s granddaughter? Beatrice, you know perfectly well that I knew nothing of this matter until you yourself told me of it last night. I’m as appalled as you by what was done to the girl. It was a wicked and evil act, but if anyone could have prevented it, it was you. You insisted on the care of the girl. You encouraged her to wander abroad instead of schooling her to tasks within these walls. It was only a matter of time before she came to grief. I’ve no doubt that Pega warned you of the fear the villagers had of her.”