BERNA AND POGGE passed a line of village children who foraged in the husks of last year’s beechmast. They followed a path to the foot of a tree, sat on a blanket and placed between them the book and the rose. From a pouch she carried, Berna took a bowl and a bloodletting knife and demanded that Pogge bare her arm.

      ‘I prefer not to,’ said Pogge.

      ‘It is simply to demonstrate the method, that you might at some future point apply it yourself.’

      Pogge lifted her arm, rigidly enclosed in linen. ‘It’s sewn in,’ she said.

      ‘I advised you to permit your limbs liberty of movement.’

      ‘I desired to accustom myself to sewing in, in advance of your marriage ceremony.’

      ‘It is my opinion that you contrived this excuse. You doubt my ability to bleed.’

      ‘You know I admire your numerous virtues, but you are a knight’s daughter, not a surgeon.’

      ‘It is notorious in our family that I possess a plethora of blood.’ Berna rolled up her own left sleeve till it was above the elbow. ‘Regard,’ she said, demonstrating the faint marks of previous cuts in the crook of her arm, and one more fresh. ‘Are they not finely accomplished? I chanced to see my friend sanguinary, the barber, in Brimpsfield last week. He advised that should the advertisements of the clerks prove true my former comfort would be a form of defence. My chaperone left me unobserved for a moment and the barber supplied me with the knife.’

      ‘I would have held you too determined in your gentility to have acquaintance with barbers.’

      ‘I ne strain for gentility,’ said Berna, raising her voice a fraction. ‘It is courteous amiability towards such classes as barbers that distingues our relations with them from their relations with each other, determined, as they are, by money.’

      The pique left her, though not the ardour with which she spoke,