Mr. Arkwright took a short pipe from the mantelpiece, tapped tobacco in, and lit it with a taper. Under other circumstances, the sweet scent would have been soothing. “It’ll all come out in the wash.”

I felt gratified that so many people, besides me, believed in Stephen’s innocence.

The old couple now seemed so despondent that I felt obliged to prompt them to happier memories. “And now you have Joan as your adopted daughter. Is she a dab hand at hospital corners?”

Mr. Arkwright laughed, but left his wife to answer.

“She is if she feels like it. She wanted to do what the lads did. There’s more to her than her cheeky ways and the colour of her skin, but domestication is not one of her virtues.”

“Tell her,” he said. “Tell her how we came to have Joan. She won’t mind. She likes hearing the story herself.”

There followed such an odd tale that I must tell it.

One May morning, Mr. Arkwright opened the back door, to fetch the milk, as usual. He noticed a wicker shopping basket on the back doorstep but thought nothing of it. He would pick it up as he came back. People often left something towards the children’s upkeep: a loaf of bread, a pie, new-laid eggs. In the autumn, they had more apples than they knew what to do with.

He walked to the gate to meet the milkman, taking his can to be filled.

He picked up the basket on the way back. Even when he took it inside, he did not look, but left it on a stool for his wife to see to. And then the sheet moved, just a small movement, like the ripple of a stream. He lifted the sheet. There lay a baby, cocooned in a crocheted blanket, face the colour of a hazelnut, dark eyes wide open, looking up at him.

Mrs. Arkwright came in at that moment and said, “Where did you come from?” She picked her up. She and the baby looked at each other, and that was that.

At first there was no thought about who she was and where she came from. It was all a matter of making sure she survived. He wanted to call her Hazel, for her colour. Mrs. Arkwright wanted to call her Joan, after her own mother. They chose May as her surname, the month she was found.

She was going on twelve when she said, “Joan May and Joan may not. I want to be called Arkwright, like you, which is a proper name.” She harped on so long that they paid out the money to do it, to change her name by deed poll. It was no use telling her that she might wait until she wed, and pick a young man whose name she liked.

They could only guess at where she came from. Rumour had it that she was from the north. Oh not Durham, not Scotland, not as far as that. Somewhere in the Dales, where years ago an unchristian fellow brought back slaves from the West Indies and set them working on his farm. It was said that the daughter of the family fell in love with one of them.