The last knot was untied and the dirty gag taken out of Margaret’s mouth. With an effort, for she was stiff from being tied up, she sat up and all she wanted to say boiled up in her: then she saw Matron and the boiling stopped.

Matron, as she had known her, had been a cruel-faced woman, rather plump because she fed herself well, and very well dressed for her position. The woman Margaret was now looking at was scraggy, with grey hair hanging in rats’ tails round her shoulders. She wore a dirty, torn, woollen dress, and over it a large black shawl. Margaret would not have recognized her except for her snappy beady eyes and her terribly cruel mouth. It was those eyes that kept her silent. ‘She’s mad,’ she thought. ‘Whatever has happened to her, she’s mad.’

Back in the village where Margaret had been brought up there had been a mad woman. If left alone she did no great harm, though her mutterings scared people. Margaret’s guardian, the rector, made a point of visiting the mad woman regularly. ‘I don’t do any good,’ he would say, ‘but I like her to feel she has a friend.’ Margaret had no wish that Matron should be looked upon as a friend but, if she was mad, she must not be made madder. She must be treated with cunning. Matron pointed to a door.

‘You’ll find a tap in there and a dish rag and basin, then get on your knees and scrub those stairs.’

Margaret, with immense grandeur, her chin high in the air, went to do as she was told. ‘It’s not me doing this,’ she comforted herself, ‘it’s Anastasia.’

Poor Margaret needed all her imagination to believe she was Anastasia. The house was appallingly squalid; just to touch the dishcloth when she found it made her think she was going to be sick. There was no hot water and nothing on which to heat a kettle so she filled the basin with cold water from a dripping tap. She had no chance to explore for before she had filled the basin Matron was shouting:

‘Hurry up, Margaret Thursday, or you’ll get a beating you won’t forget.’

For the rest of her life Margaret remembered cleaning those stairs. When she was filling the basin she had noticed a broken knife on the floor. She had picked it up and hidden it under the dishcloth thinking a weapon would come in handy. But its first use was to scrape the stairs, which had dirt so thick on them, it was, as Matron had described, like a carpet.

Before the stairs were half done Matron was screaming at Margaret to hurry.

‘I’ve got to go out to the shops and I can’t leave you loose, so get on with it now.’

Margaret decided that if Matron could live with stairs in that state she wouldn’t notice if the last part was only wiped over, so in a few minutes she got thankfully up off her knees. Her pretty frock was creased and dirty where she had knelt on it. ‘But I don’t care,’ she thought. ‘The first thing I shall do when I escape is to burn every scrap of clothing I have worn in this terrible house.’