I am not there to witness their entreaties at the manor, nor to make my own appeal for Kitty Gosse, as I should, because when we reach the unbuilt gateway to our unbuilt church, I discover Mr. Quill — as was arranged this afternoon, though in the mêlée I’ve forgotten it — in conversation with the one surviving tenant of our pillory. It is his third night fastened here. My neighbors do not even pause or lift their caps for either of the men; their business at the manor house is more urgent. But there is a stifled, communal cry and a shaking of heads. The night is swarming with a hundred tuts. Clearly they’re unsettled and displeased to discover this new conjunction, these two contrary outsiders unified in whispering. They see that Mr. Quill has spread his arm across the young man’s shoulder. They see the gap between the mouth and ear. And it is disturbing. Yet every one of them will admit in their heart of hearts that we have not been just to this ragged, shaven visitor and certainly not to the older man, who died; his fate is far too cruel to contemplate. That is why no one has come in these few days to throw windfalls at the remaining captive or to cuss at him, for fun, as would have happened if he were genuinely culpable of anything more serious than not belonging here. And that is equally the reason why none of us has been more kind, offering to share his burden of bereavement, a crust and rind, at least, a gift of ale. A greeting, anyway. A wave. We’ve been ashamed, I think. And bewildered, truth be told. Bewildered by ourselves. These are not the customary village ways. Our church ground has been desecrated by our surliness. Our usual scriptures are abused. This body on the cross is not the one that’s promised us. Yet, once again, it’s Mr. Quill who teaches us our shortcomings. It’s Mr. Quill who’s intimate and kind. It’s Mr. Quill who’s valiant. It will not make him popular.

The woman and the man are husband and wife, Mr. Quill explains as we settle down with churchyard stones as our bench for our long wait for Mistress Beldam to appear. They are fugitives from sheep, exiles from their own commons, six or seven days away on foot. They’ve come to us because their ancient livelihoods have been hedged and fenced against their needs. And the man who died was Beldam senior, her father. This, I suspect, is information neither of us has hoped to hear. Our imaginations have been fed by having her as a sister and a widow, a woman, that’s to say, free of ties and so within our grasps. We are, the pair of us, one bachelor, one widower, unspoken for — but now we are required to feel less ravenous. A married woman’s out of bounds, in principle at least. But, though I cannot speak for Mr. Quill, my attraction for the woman, based on that glimpse of her in the lamplit dancing barn and on the recent sight of her blood-soaked shawl, has not abated but only quickened at the knowledge of her kinship to this man. The marriage of an older woman to a thin-bearded youth is something that appeals to me. I can imagine being younger, being him … well, I will stop. These are the stories that we tell ourselves and only ourselves, and they are better left unshared.

Except I cannot stop. I find myself too keen to catch the woman stepping through the night. I can see her stretching on her toes to kiss the cheek and ear where just a while ago Mr. Quill almost pressed his lips. I can see her kneading all her husband’s muscles and his joints, to drive away the stiffness and the pain of three nights hanging on the cross. I can see her taking from a wrap a supper she has foraged from the woods — there’s apples there aplenty now, and blackberries, and game. And I can hear them whispering: she’s saying that his sentence is almost half served and that he must endure; she’s saying how our village will be punished for its sins; she’s promising the fire they lit to stake their claim on common ground will be remade and lit again; she’s drawing bows and firing arrows at the night; she’s making love to him.

Mr. Quill is silent too. His hands are gripping tightly onto his knees. The moonlight catches us infrequently tonight but when it does I see the paint stains on his fingers and knuckles — some blues and greens, some luster work — and I can tell that apart from his plain cap he has dressed himself in finer and more gentlemanly clothes than those he wore for me this afternoon. He’s like a decorated strippling at a fair, come to spy himself a girl. We sit like this in brewing silence for a while, busy with conjectures of our own and only lifting our heads slightly whenever we’re disturbed by snapping twigs, a shifting animal, a bat, the hint of footsteps coming close, raised voices from the manor house, and all the usual, rowdy ardors of a fading summer night.

It is, I think, the husband who hears her coming first. The top beam of the pillory rattles, bone on wood, as he tries to turn his shoulder and his head. I do not know if he’s aware that Mr. Quill and I are sitting only twenty paces from his back. I do not know what Mr. Quill has said to him or what arrangements they have made, if any. I wouldn’t be surprised if Young Beldam (he has a name of sorts, at last) calls out to her. A warning. There are other men about, he’ll say. Best run. But he says nothing, only whistles lightly, no more than the whistle of a breeze. I think he wants to let her know, as she comes close, that he still has breath in his lungs. She will not find another corpse.

Mr. Quill touches the back of my hand with a single finger and lifts his chin to point toward our left, where beyond our tumble of stones the church ground falls away a little into a ditch backed by thorn scrub and sore-hocks and, then, the groping nighttime silhouette of trees. He cocks his head. I do the same, until I hear the rustling. It could be another roaming pig, come to feast on someone else’s shins, but it’s too delicate and purposeful.

I have forgotten how small she is, and how silent is her brightness. My memory has plumpened her and toughened her. But without the heavy wrapping of her shawl she’s even more birdlike than she appeared on that night in the barn. Now her shoulders seem especially narrow, particularly given the fullness of her hips. Could such shoulders really find the strength to drive a prong of metal through a horse’s skull? She has not seen us, evidently, because she walks between us and her husband’s back, not carelessly but not on tiptoe either. She’s confident. Perhaps she knows that everyone has gone to shake their fists — politely — at the manor house. Her hair, so far as I can tell from her gray silhouette, is no longer grinning with the exposed white of her scalp. It’s slightly darker now — a few days of defiant growth — and velvety. At least, I think it’s velvety. At least, I think of touching it and finding out. I think I’d like her to turn round. I want to see her face a second time. That first time she was hardly visible. She was little more than dark on dark, a body shape, as I remember it. If only she would spin round on her heels and the moonlight would oblige, I could persuade myself she’s real and not a specter summoned up by loneliness.

She’s carrying a piece of sacking, heavy with food, in one hand, and a dark, stoppered bottle of cordial in the other. I recognize that stoppered bottle: William Kip has got a shelf of them — pippin juice or burdock or rosewater, mostly — his summer bottled for winter. I think he’ll find that one is missing now, unless she plans on taking back an empty. It seems that Mistress Beldam has been foraging but not, as I expected, in the woods. Again Mr. Quill puts a finger on my hand. He means we should stay patient and not be tempted to show ourselves to her with our warnings for her safety until her husband has been greeted, comforted and fed. Then we will reveal ourselves. We will reveal ourselves to be her friends.

It’s hard for me to watch her kissing him but it’s not an ache that lasts long. She’s hardly lifted the bottle to his mouth when the hubbub of my neighbors now returning from the manor house along the apple-strewn lane reaches us. We look in that direction, all four at once, like cattle in one herd, and when we turn our heads again, she’s gone. Mr. Quill darts forward, throws the stolen bottle which she’s abandoned at her husband’s feet into the sore-hocks, and hurries off with his strange gait, right shoulder first, in Mistress Beldam’s midnight steps.