The girl was part of a family of four. The mother was as pale and fair-haired, a weary prettiness persisting into her late thirties. There was a brother, perhaps twice the girl’s age, hunched over a hand-held video game – they heard at fifteen yards its bleeps and kapows. The father was sallow and dark-haired.

‘Daddy’s a greasy-looking Herbert,’ Ernestine said.

‘Would he be foreign?’

‘Is the child nearly his at all, you’d wonder?’

‘If ’tis, his blood is weak.’

‘Might have a manner of a … Portuguese, have we?’

‘And as sour-looking as it’s greasy.’

Quiet outrage bubbled in their insides. Oh, the undeserving bastards who were blessed with the presence of angels.

‘The mother is a liar,’ Kit said.

‘Would you read her so, Kit?’

‘I would. She has a liar’s chin.’

They waited at distance for the family to finish up. They prayed that they had encountered them at the right time, that they were at the start and not the finish of their visit. They were rewarded when the family rose from the table and aimed not for the car park but for the castle’s interior. The family went dutifully through the cool hallways, and Ernestine and Kit followed; carefully, they drifted into the melt of visitors, there by the chain mail and the crests of arms and the dark stonewalls.

The parents were not careful with the little girl. She roamed ten and twelve and fifteen feet away from them. And that could be enough, in the labyrinth of a castle, a place of quick turns and sudden twists, and the child was forgotten for a half-minute at a time, and that too could be enough.

Ernestine felt a slow hot flush creep her shoulders and ascend her neck.

Kit tinily in the dry pit of her throat made a cage bird’s excited trilling.

The albino sheen of the child’s hair was a perfect tracer in the crowd.

‘Are you looking at the backs of her knees?’ Ernestine whispered.

‘How so?’

‘I mean the little folds of flesh there, look? There’s still pup fat on her!’

‘Ah there is. Ah sweetness!’

The family as it moved with the afternoon crowd broke down into a spat. The father shouted at the little boy, who was showing great interest in his video game but none at all in Ireland’s heritage. The lazy blur of the crowd’s movement was watched closely by Kit for the blocking it would afford; Ernestine’s eyes were locked on the girl child. The mother scolded the father for his shouting – an index finger was wielded at his face. The father seethed and snapped a remark. The boy was in the zone only of his game. The tiny girl was for a moment forgotten.

‘Move,’ Kit said.

Ernestine slipped a tube of wine gums from her bag and as she moved her smile was warmed by her desire to have the child’s heat – if briefly – in her life.

‘I think I know your name, sweetie thing?’