The girl picked up Setswana quite quickly. She found ways of making a few pula by collecting empty bottles from the edge of the road and taking them back to the bottle store for the deposit. She carried the baby on her back, tied in a sling, and never let him leave her sight. I spoke to the nurse about her, and I understand that although she was still a child herself, she was a good mother to the boy. She made his clothes out of scraps that she found here and there, and she kept him clean by washing him under the tap in the nurse’s backyard. Sometimes she would go and beg outside the railway station, and I think that people sometimes took pity on them and gave them money, but she preferred to earn it if she could.

This went on for four years. Then, quite without warning, the girl became ill. They took her back to the hospital and they found that the tuberculosis had damaged the bones very badly. Some of them had crumbled and this was making it difficult for her to walk. They did what they could, but they were unable to prevent her from ending up unable to walk. The nurse scrounged around for a wheelchair, which she was eventually given by one of the Roman Catholic priests. So now she looked after the boy from the wheelchair, and he, for his part, did little chores for his sister.

The nurse and her husband had to move. The husband worked for a meat-packing firm and they wanted him down in Lobatse. The nurse had heard of the orphan farm, and so she wrote to me. I said that we could take them, and I went up to Francistown to collect them just a few months ago. Now they are with us, as you have seen.

That is their story, Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. That is how they came to be here.

MR J.L.B. Matekoni said nothing. He looked at Mma Potokwane, who met his gaze. She had worked at the orphan farm for almost twenty years—she had been there when it had been started—and was inured to tragedy—or so she thought. But this story, which she had just told, had affected her profoundly when she had first heard it from the nurse in Francistown. Now it was having that effect on Mr J.L.B. Matekoni as well; she could see that.

“They will be here in a few moments,” she said. “Do you want me to say that you might be prepared to take them?”

Mr J.L.B. Matekoni closed his eyes. He had not spoken to Mma Ramotswe about it and it seemed quite wrong to land her with something like this without consulting her first. Was this the way to start a marriage? To take a decision of such momentum without consulting one’s spouse? Surely not.

And yet here were the children. The girl in her wheelchair, smiling up at him and the boy standing there so gravely, eyes lowered out of respect.