Two days, I stayed close to the river. By day, I watched the ships go in and out. When night snapped my heels, I huddled in quieter spots and fought sleep, back to the wall, head to my knees. I dreamed of shillings clinking in my fist, though a knife would have been more use. I tried an inn. No working girls, they said. No touting your wares here. I came back to the bridge and looked out across the oily water and the winking lamps. Without laudanum, my mind was awake, and raging. And remembering. Even my teeth hurt. By the second night, my hands shook like leaves. I folded in two, vomited. When I straightened, I lifted my skirts, trying to keep them up out of the filth. A voice came from behind me. ‘Looky! Black as the night, yet trying to keep yer skirts up out of it!’

My head had emptied so I could barely move.

‘Quiet, aren’t you? Puss? No use fighting it, love. You’re as filthy as that muck and you know it.’ A cold hand curled around my elbow. I spun around with my hands up, but ribbons of sweat clogged my eyes.

Silence. My whole body clenched. Head down. Breathing. I could tell that time passed only by the clack of boots striking cobbles. I’d beaten him with my fists, but it was whatever he saw in my eyes that had beaten him off. Dog barks tore through the night. Finally, I thought. Finally. I’m being punished at last.

Next morning, I kept my eye on a row of houses, set back a few streets from my lair. People came and went. Messenger boys. Deliveries. Maids with packages. Ladies, waiting for their carriages. I went back to my alley, damped my fingers in a puddle, and tried to smooth down my hair. I fluffed my skirts around me, wiped my cheeks with the hem. Then I went back, started with the busiest door.

Most of them threatened to call the watch. The last one did.

A maid with no character, whether turned out or run off, is worse than one of the scraps of rubbish you see blowing along London’s streets.

I tried begging. I tried standing up to do it, at first, but soon learned it worked better the dirtier you looked, the lower you crouched, and the further out you stretched your hand. The coves weren’t giving, you see, they were buying. What they paid for was humiliation. Yours, as an indemnity against theirs. After an hour or so on my knees on the pavement outside a coffee-house, a man approached. He had a watch on a chain under his grey waistcoat, one eye a toad-goggle, the other half shut. ‘Money for nothing?’ he said. ‘Not very enterprising of you.’

He gave off a powerful smell of raw onions. Said he was writing a diary of the streets, and would put me in it. You and everyone else, I thought, but what I said was: ‘I’d much prefer the black drop, sir, if you have any.’