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midwives’ potions and witches’ spells. It had been nearly three years since Jacob’s death, but Eva could still recall the blows of the birch rod on her back and, even more painfully, the thud it made striking Katharina.
    Eva slapped a sweet bun onto the greased tray. Her reluctance to remarry had cost her a few customers,
hausfrauen
who now went to other bakeries. The women who remained sometimes studied Eva from the corners of their eyes. They might as well speak their suspicions aloud, Eva thought, and simply ask whose husband warmed her bed. A flush rose from her neck to her cheeks, and she again felt the anger, and the shame, she’d known the day she dared to wear a blue gown instead of her widow’s weeds. She’d felt the women’s sharp measuring looks, and less than an hour after the bakery opened, she went upstairs to change back to her black gown, though it reeked of stale sweat and wood smoke.
    Eva dusted her hands on her apron and set the sweet buns to rise. She walked to the window that looked out on
Domstrasse
. The sky was beginning to grow light. She cracked open the window and heard the clang of hammering from a nearby smithy, then the distant bellowing of cattle being driven through the streets and out the gates to graze in the meadows beyond the city walls. A skeletal bright-eyed mongrel circled a heap of refuse, snarling at a scrawny pig rooting through the garbage. When the dog dashed in to snatch a bone, the pig squealed and trotted away.
    Eva smelled it then. Again. She’d closed the window and door tightly the day before, but the greasy stench of burning flesh had crept in. She was sure she’d seen grey wisps seeping in around the windowsill. Eva hated the stink. It made her skin prickle, andshe’d tried to wipe it from her face and neck with a damp cloth. When the Angelus bells rang out and the Rosen Bakery closed for the day, she’d hauled out the rags and pail, hiked up her black skirts, and gone down on her knees to scrub the floors with lye soap. Then, she’d washed the counter and walls. Even so, the odour lingered. It always did, underlying the fragrance of baking bread.
    She heard a soft uneven tread on the stairs behind her. Eva turned and saw Katharina, still in her sleeping shift. In the candlelight, her long braid, twining over one shoulder looked white. Her eyes glittered like emeralds. Eva’s throat tightened even as she tried to smile. Just the day before, those beautiful eyes had seen visions of orange flames and white-winged angels.
    The girl’s strangeness made Eva afraid for her, and she forbade her to speak to anyone of her dreams and visions. There was little danger of that, however, as Katharina avoided other children and rarely even spoke to anyone but her mother. She spent her days at the window, watching the street, or walking the riverbank, collecting coloured stones, plants and flowers, and white feathers. Angel wings, she called them. Once she’d returned home after dark, telling Eva that the
feurige mannlein
, the little glowing men, had helped her to find her way. Eva had put her trembling fingers to her daughter’s lips and told her not to speak of such things. Ever.
    Katharina looked like a wraith, her milky skin never darkening in the sun. Her limping gait only added to her oddness. Jacob had claimed the girl’s misshapen foot was a sign that Eva had sinned.
    Eva knew which of her sins had crippled her daughter. Her limp was a daily reproach.
    Katharina yawned. “Some bread, Mama?”
    â€œOf course,
Liebchen
.” Eva walked back to the ovens and picked up a fresh loaf of barley bread. Herr Stolz jerked his chinat the shelf, at the day-old loaves. Ignoring his sidelong glance, Eva cut off a thick slice from the still-warm loaf.
    The journeyman wiped a forearm across his sweating brow. “You spoil the child.”
    Eva spread the coarse bread with a thin layer of cherry jam. No, he would