She listened as Bea went on to describe how she fell out with the candlemaker’s son and found a mason who was happy to pay her for what she’d previously given for free. Then there were more men who paid, including a priest who was her best customer. “I still warm his bed sometimes, when he is lonely for me. Fergus don’t mind it.”

Fergus was the man she had met a few summers ago, and he had told her she had a good head for business. This was his place, an inn where a few whores had already been plying their trade when he met Bea and invited her to come here and make a proper business of it. She had brought in more women – seven in total now, and always more wanting to come work here where they were sure to find a safe and prosperous place.

As her sister spoke, Nan felt an increasing sadness. It was not that Bea was a whore and a bawd, nor even that she seemed proud of it. Aunt Mary judged it foul and sinful, but Nan could not think so harshly of anyone who turned to whoring. It was only one of many necessary evils for the poor and the lowly. It was to be avoided if at all possible, of course, but when you had no name and no real home, no notion of where your next meal might come from, then it was no easy thing to avoid. For the whole of her own life she had barely escaped it. Sometimes she even thought her brief marriage to Oliver was not much different, for she had always known she must give herself to some man if she was to have any hope of surviving.

Her sadness came from the discovery of how different she was from her sister, who did not seem as if she had tried very hard to avoid this life, nor did she mind it so much. In this way, it was as Aunt Mary had said: they were so different that none would believe they were sisters. Nan could not imagine ever being happy to bare her body to a strange man – to many men – and let him do what he will. Even before that terrible lustful lord had made it seem a terror to her, she had been that way.

But Bea was different. Bea was Bargate Bettie, a thriving bawd even at this young age. And there was more as the day went on that made Nan feel more alone than she had expected to, if she ever found her sister.