“You force her to choose between whoring and starving,” Nan said, measured and clear, willing her sister to comprehend. “It’s no kind of choice, and it’s all manner of cruel.”

It was appalling, the way Bea scoffed and rolled her eyes. Like they were fighting over who had eaten all the butter and lied about it. Nan looked down at the girl’s bent head, felt her thin shoulder trembling under her hand.

“Bea.” She waited for her sister to look her in the eye. “She’s no older than I was, when he sold me off.” Nan could still see the man she had almost been given to, so eager to have her that Aunt Mary had shamed their father for considering it. “Only think of it, if I had been forced so young.”

“And what if you had? It’s only the way of things,” Bea shrugged.

“Hear yourself! You cannot mean it.”

“I do mean it,” she snapped. “You would have done your duty and been no worse for it.”

The words hit Nan like a stinging slap to the face. It woke her just as a slap would, and she stared at her sister with clear eyes for the first time.

Bargate Bettie was not just a mask that Bea put on when needed. This was who she truly was. This was what she truly believed. And it seemed to open a great chasm at Nan’s feet, a hole in the earth that threatened to swallow her.

Nearly all of Nan’s life, over and over again, lecherous men had reached for her. And over and over again, good and kind people – women, always women – had protected her, or tried to. It was one of the few unambiguous truths she had learned: there were the kind of people who would sell a girl to a lecherous man, and there were those who would object to it. Everyone in the world was sorted to one side or the other of that great dividing line.

She had never thought – not once, in all the time she had searched – that her sister would be on the wrong side of it.

Love for her little Bea swelled up in her, filling her throat with a tenderness, and at the same moment she felt something crack within her. It was like a frozen branch in winter, splintering in her chest.

When Bea reached to take the girl’s arm, Nan stepped forward to put herself between them.

“She won’t be going to him tonight, Bea.”

She said it calm, and then did not know what else to say. Words were useless. They only ever said what was already obvious, or confused everything more. Her mouth was weary with speaking. All of her was weary, and cold, and broken.

Behind her, the child that her sister would make a whore huddled close to Nan’s back.