In the morning they moved on as soon as there was light. The city gave way to brickfields and then to farms, but they could not leave it behind entirely. In every valley they rode through they found the chimneys of mills, or if not a chimney then some building, big as a barracks, where work was going on, the new work that was the labour of crowds.

At one place—a day’s ride north—they looked down from their camp in the early morning to see men and women hurrying through the gates of a mill, five storeys of raw brick that straddled the shining wire of a stream in the crease of the valley. Behind the adults came the children, and behind these, one on his own, a boy. Calley pointed to him, followed his progress with a finger as though with the barrel of a gun.

“That one is me,” he said.

“You were here?” asked Medina, amazed.

“Not here,” said Calley. “Not this one.”

He said nothing else but when they rode on, picking their way along a sheep track over the ridge of the valley, he began to speak of it. At eight he had been sent out of London in a haulier’s wagon loaded with boys and girls much like himself. High summer on the Old North Road. They saw what they had not seen before—open fields and great woods, haycocks and hedgerows mad with birds. They saw rabbits under the briars, and at dusk the soundless running of deer. They saw distance, the haze of far hills, the sun setting right to the flat of the earth. Country folk stood up from their work to watch the wagon pass. They knew where it was headed. It was not the first they had seen come up that road loaded with pale children. After a week they arrived at the mill. By moonlight it looked like Newgate prison, and though the children were all familiar with buildings that pinch the soul, they were frightened. They followed a man with a lamp to the apprentice hall, a stone house behind a stone wall, one door in and out, kept locked. They followed him up the stairs and at the top the boys were sent to the right, the girls to the left, filing into dormitories to find space for themselves by touching strangers, other children so dead asleep they could have been tumbled on to the floor without fear of waking them. In the morning—or was it night still?—the man came back with a bell and took them into the mill.