She took up a pinch of the spilled salt and tossed it over her shoulder, chuckling. ‘To keep the Devil at bay!’

Abel smiled back, indulgently and bent to clear the soup bowls.

As he did so, Mrs Gillyflower did a very extraordinary thing. Taking care not to be seen, she grabbed the silver cellar, pulled open her lace collar and began to pour a quantity of salt inside her dress.

Unseen by the Pilgrim and, of course by her daughter’s blank eyes, there was a strange, small shifting movement in Mrs Gillyflower’s bombazine. As though something were settling.

Breathing …

*

Being the reminiscences of Miss Jenny Flint, lady’s maid of Paternoster Row, London.

There was a noise from close by, so I threw myself behind the iron cage of the lift and watched as a group of ’Grims arrived. Strapping young fellas they was, real bobby-dazzlers. Enough to make a gal’s heart beat faster, if she hadn’t had other proclivities, if you takes my meaning. They marched through the huge, empty room and got into the lift, dragging back the iron grille and then rising up, up, up into the rafters. And they was carrying something. Strange glass vessels like you might store liquor in, or acid …

Once the lift come back down, empty, I got inside and it took me up into the top levels of the Mill – if that’s the right word now I knew the whole thing to be a kind of confidence trick. I dragged back the iron grille and stepped out into a corridor.

At one end there was a spiral staircase heading further up still. At the other a door with a round window in it – like you’d see on a ship – and there was light spilling through it, a sort of sickly red light. And the sound of thunking machinery. So I headed towards it. I tried the door – locked – and reached up on my tiptoes to try and peek through the glass but it was all steamed up. I felt for my skeleton keys when something brought me up short. There was another sound and I could make it out even with the thrum, thrum, thrum of the engines behind the door. It was the sound of someone breathing. But a terrible, ragged, lungless sort of sound it were. And it was coming from the spiral stair …