In the little room, she set Fuss to watch the door and stripped to her skin as the hot stones gave their warmth to the water. There was only the dagger over her heart left on her, hanging between her meager breasts on the worn leather thong. She scoured every inch of herself, removing every last trace of her sister’s foul world. Her hose and linen undertunic were plunged into the water, and she searched out the harsher soap in the depths of her bag so that she could make it all come perfectly clean.

Sitting naked on the stool in the tub, dirty water to her ankles, arms and shoulders aching from the work, she made herself imagine returning to Morency. She tried to speak it aloud as she must say it to her friends.

“My sister lives. She is a bawd.” That was easy enough. It was harder to say, “I will have naught to do with her,” but not impossible. And then: “She sees no evil in forcing a child to whore.”

Her mouth pressed hard against her arm on the last words. It was the truth, and it felt like poison on her lips. It was the worst part of all, that Bea saw no wrong in it; the way she had looked at Nan as though she were being prudish and unreasonable. She don’t want redemption, Aunt Mary had said, but it was worse than that: she saw nothing that need be redeemed.

Nan looked at the wet linen draped over the edge of the tub. It should be set in front of the fire to dry, but she could not make herself rise to do it. She could only sit and shiver, and wonder what to do with herself. Morency had been her home these four years, a comfort and a haven. All her time there had been spent in study – in making herself better, safer, stronger – always in anticipation of finding her sister. Always with the aim of giving them both a better life than the one they had been born to.

And this was what it had come to. All that preparation and planning, to end like this. The thought of returning to the place where all her hopes had lived... It was unbearable.

She might go to her Aunt Mary instead, and perhaps it was her duty to do so. But the idea made her clutch her arms about herself in misery. She did not belong there. Her aunt had all but said it with her extreme humility, the same thing that Bea had flung at her as accusation – better than.

It did not matter that Nan did not think herself better. Aunt Mary did, and she would forever put a distance between them, a buffer of admiration that only made Nan feel shut out, a stranger to her own family.