DARK city streets; an old church. Inside, shadows gather in the rafters while two voices hold an audience in thrall. One sings; one reads – and this is the story they tell… An old man takes a train journey, back to the Yorkshire manor where once, in his childhood, his mother served.

He recalls the Lady of the Manor, Isabella, leaning against a column, her skin as pale as marble.

Once, she placed her lavender-scented finger on the boy’s lips, before asking him a favour – to carry a message to a young doctor.

Slowly, the story unravels, punctuated by reedy singing: of a faithless young wife using a servant boy to carry messages to a lover. Of a Lord of the Manor who returns wounded from the war to find his wife in bed with her lover. Of two murders, and two slain lovers tossed down a well.

The narrator is Peter Robinson; the singer Martin Carthy. And between them, in a York Literature Festival event at the city’s National Centre for Early Music, they wove a tale of love, betrayal, murder, and innocence lost. A lovers’ lament in words and music.

The story, Enchantress, was Robinson’s: but it had echoes of folk songs and tales from old England, and hints of magic, of ghosts and of John Keats’ La Belle Dame Sans Merci.

The songs were Carthy’s take on folk classics – The Ballad of Lady Barnard and Little Musgrave, the True Lovers Lament – sung in that haunting voice, sometimes unaccompanied even by guitar.

The effect was… spellbinding.

• The York Literature Festival runs until Sunday. For details of other events, visit yorkliteraturefestival.co.uk