Before long it was true, what Kitta said: we were breaking ice in the farlins every morning. Imagine, lambsie, our mittenless hands plunging into that ice, our sleeves rolled up to the elbows. When your hands are that cold, doesn’t matter how many ganseys you wear over your dress and under your oilie. Your blood canna warm, canna move other than painfully, trying to reach your hands and feet.

The work slowed. Clumsy, all of us. It was common for blades to slip, to nick the clooties, even slice through them. Those mission ladies were kept busier with cuts in the Great Yarmouth winter than ever I had seen them with salty holes.

In some ways, the cold was easier on my hands. It numbed the burning and itching of the ulcers. But the infection just got worse. I stopped going to the mission huts. What if the lady deputies took it into their heads to report me to Old Bloddy? Clementina said no, they wouldn’t, it was not their job. But best ye take no chances, aye, quinie, aye.

I was moved wordless when she scratched the back of her hand with her gipper so she had an excuse to go to the hut herself to get dressings for me.

~

We are singing when it happens. Singing helps—I don’t know why. Perhaps it gives our brains something to do other than send those little sparks of protest and pain to and fro. What a friend we have in Je-sus …

Kitta screams.

I turn and there is blood pouring from her wrist, redder, fresher than herring blood, than the guts we are awash in up to the calves of our boots. She thrusts her hand into the pit of her arm, pulling away from Clementina, who has ripped off her headsquare and is trying to stop the bleeding.

Fetch Old Bloddy! Clementina yells at Limpy Davy.

Kitta shrieks anew. What? NO!

But Clementina nods at Limpy Davy and jerks her head, the signal to run. Clementina Slater has been in gutting yards long enough to know when it is best to take no chances and when there is no choice to be had in the matter at all.

I have to hold her round the arms, my Kitta, to stop her scrambling after the cooper boy.

~

Kitta was sent home to Roanhaven on the train, with a clumsy stitch in her wrist and a thick wad of calico around wrist and hand.

For all the days of my life, I have not forgotten the sight of Kitta’s face against the window of the train. It seared me cold, lambsie, but I didn’t know what it meant—not then, not straight away. But Kitta did. She knew right in that moment: all that stood between her and the end was a journey on a train. There would be no escaping it again, no escaping Roanhaven.