She paused for a moment in the small square of yard, staring blindly upwards as she murmured, ‘You’ve won, Ruby. Hands down, you’ve won, lass, better than you could have ever imagined.’

Somewhere not a million miles away, her sister was enjoying life with Ellie and other friends she’d made, no doubt, probably without a care in the world and certainly no guilty conscience to eat her up. And why shouldn’t she? Olive bent over a moment as her stomach contracted with an after-pain. Ruby was blameless, after all.

It was that same day but in the evening, and if Olive had but known it, Ruby’s conscience had kept her awake all the previous night telling her she should never have let Ellie leave with Daniel Bell that day weeks ago, that she should have wrestled Ellie away from him by force if necessary. She had known he was bad news.

As she and Bridget alighted from the tram in Castle Square where Flo, who’d agreed to accompany them to Daniel’s house, was waiting, she was still feeling wretched. She knew Flo slightly from her early days in Newcastle, when she and Ellie had gone out with Bridget’s group of friends a few times before she’d decided such evenings weren’t for her. Flo’s greeting was on the cool side. More by what Bridget hadn’t said than what she had, Ruby had gathered that Bridget’s pals thought her something of an upstart because she hadn’t thrown her lot in with them as Ellie had, and now she said quickly, ‘Flo, I can’t thank you enough for coming with us today. I know you’re doing it for Ellie and not me, but I’m so, so grateful.’

She was trying to hide the fact that the area was much worse than she’d prepared herself for as Flo lived in the vicinity. She had known it was close to the docks with the attendant industry and all that meant, which resulted in grime and dirt and deterioration, but the overall poverty was shocking. As the centre of Newcastle had moved away from the waterfront in past decades, so had whole districts been left to decay into grotesque squalor with overcrowded tenements housing families of fifteen or more in one room.

Sandhill, where Lombard Street was situated, was one of these. The proximity of the slaughterhouses and the equally strong smells from the fish markets and stinking outside privies made the area as different to Bath Lane Terrace as chalk to cheese.