I stood still, dumbfounded, as the various servants came at me as if all of one mind and delved in and out of my pockets in a matter of seconds. I tried to push them away but there were so many of them.

‘Is that all?’ asked Piggott.

The women nodded, and all looked very disappointed.

‘It’s not much, is it? A handkerchief, a pencil, a comb.’

‘I wasn’t allowed to collect my things,’ I said in defence of those few bits I’d helped myself to at the orphanage, ‘they never let me back home. Said they burnt everything.’

‘I shall take these now,’ said Mrs Piggott.

‘They’re mine,’ I said.

‘And they shall be looked after, my dear.’

‘That’s theft,’ I said.

‘Calm please. Now it is time for your medicine.’

‘My what?’

‘You shall be inoculated, child. Everyone out here has been inoculated, it is to keep you well. It is to stop you from catching any sickness, there are many maladies, you know, to be picked up from the heaps. Iremonger, if you will,’ said Mrs Piggott to one of the servants who came forward with some sort of metal tube with a point to it.

‘Roll up your sleeve,’ said Mrs Piggott.

‘Why should I?’

‘It is for your own good,’ she said, ‘everyone here must have it.’

‘What is that thing?’ I asked her. ‘Whatever shall you do with it?’

‘It is, child,’ she said, ‘a very advanced piece of business, a thing of great scholarship, very modern, it is a brass oil gun syringe with leather washer. Upstairs of course, theirs is of pewter and with a fruitwood handle. It shall pump some physic into your arm.’

‘I don’t like the look of it.’

‘Nor does anyone very much, but you should like the look of yourself even less with weeping sores and swollen limbs I dare say. Come now.’

‘I don’t think I will.’

‘Hold her,’ said Mrs Piggott very calmly, and two Iremongers took hold.

‘Let me go! I’ll take my chances with any sicknesses if it’s all the same to you. I never got ill like Mother and Father, I never …’ but before I could tell them Mrs Piggott had come at me with that brass thing and she’d pressed it against my skin, and something sharp had gone right into me. ‘Ow!’

‘What a fuss you make,’ said Mrs Piggott, returning the brass thing to the servant.

‘That hurt!’

‘It is all over,’ she said, dabbing at the drop of blood upon my arm with a bit of wadding.

‘I didn’t like that.’

‘Never mind now,’ she said, busy wiping the wadding on something upon her desk.

‘You stabbed at me!’

‘Now then, your birth object.’

‘My what?’

‘Your birth object, poor ignorant of new Iremongers, has been selected for you I have it here. There, you may hold it a moment.’