The servants sat at dinner in their hall. No one had remembered to leave a plate of meat and vegetables on the table for Rose, so she cut slices of bread, spread them thickly with jam and slipped up to her room, where food was forbidden, but where at least she could watch the street, not the latrine with its stench.

In the almost quiet up there, nibbling her bread, she could remember Overflow, which was what her country had been named now. Remembering it, she thought, gazing from the attic window at the mud and pallid faces of the street below, she could even keep on living now, even if it was a ghost who lived, who . . .

Her thoughts stopped. Her breath stopped. For there were dark faces below her. Men, in shirts and trousers, but with bare feet to feel the earth.

She slipped out of her room quietly — quiet was automatic now. Down the stairs, narrow, splintered, down the next stairs, broader for the important people of the house, out the front door, for the servants would notice her if she passed them to go to the back door she was supposed to use.

The dark-skinned men were out of sight, but she knew the way they’d gone. Here, in this city, where countless footprints obscured the ones she wanted, there was only one way for them to have gone, along this street. She ran and saw them at last, squatting by a place where other men — men with faces that were called white, though none were the colour Mrs Flora had pointed to on pages in the books, white paper, see, white clouds, and that is red — drank indoors. The place smelled of the drink the Overflow men drank on Sunday afternoons. The black men had been served drink too, but only outside.

She stopped running and walked politely, her face down, not meeting the eyes of the warriors. One of them laughed. He said something in a language she didn’t understand — not English, but enough words almost like the one her people spoke for her to know that these were not her people, nor would these men help her. Instead they might — would — use her in the way the Overflow men told her they would, if the master hadn’t been around, though only when Mr Clancy, Miss Maria or Mrs Flora could not hear . . .

She ran again. She ran towards the sea, because it was water and she understood that while water might kill you, trap you, there was no malice in it. But the nearer she came to the water the more men shouted at her, tried to grab her, so she finally turned and ran the other way, back to the house and through the front door, missing Adams, Mrs Drinkwater’s butler, by a few breaths, for she heard his footsteps, shoes on wood, but managed to get back upstairs in time.