I approached, and Mabel acknowledged me with a bob of her head, as if she’d only seen me the day before. She was skeletal in her rags, and her voice was an echo of itself. What breath she had gurgled in her chest, damp and dangerous. When I leaned in to hear what she had to say, her decay was overpowering. All that was left on her crate were a few broken things and three whittled sticks. One I recognised from the last time I’d seen her, more than a year before. It was the head of a crone, finely carved.

I picked it up. “Is this you, Mabel?”

“In better days,” she whispered.

The other two sticks were poor attempts at carving, made by hands that could barely hold a knife. I picked them up and turned them round and felt all the grief of knowing they were her last.

“Still a penny?”

A cough wracked her and she spat into a rag. “Not worth a penny,” she managed to say.

I took three coins from my purse and put them on the crate.

“Lizzie says you have a word for me.”

She nodded. As I reached for my slips and pencil, she reached into the folds of her clothes. Mabel brought out a fistful of paper slips and put them on the crate between us. Then she turned her face up to mine and made a sound that made me think she was going to spit again. But it was a laugh, and her rheumy eyes were smiling.

“She ’elped,” Mabel said looking over at Mrs. Stiles, who was straightening her flower buckets. “Told ’er I’d shut me gob whenever there was ladies sniffin’ ’round ’er flowers. Better for business, I told ’er. She ’ad to agree.” Again, her drowning laugh.

I picked up the slips, crushed and grubby from where they’d been stored. They were the right size, with the contents more or less as I would write them.

“When?” I asked.

“When you went away. Thought you’d need cheerin’ on yer return. Whatever ’appened.” She reached into her clothes again. “I saved this for you, too.”

Another carving, exquisite in its detail. Familiar.

“Taliesin,” Mabel said. “Merlin. Me ’ands gave up after that.”

I took more coins from my purse.

“Na, lass,” Mabel said, waving the coins away. “A gift.”

I had been avoiding Mabel, but now the state of her, this kindness and the reason for it, ambushed me. I felt paralysed, unable to raise a defence against memory. Like a vessel, I filled with sadness until I could no longer hold it, and it spilled, soaking my face.

“I ’eard you got the morbs,” Mabel said, refusing to look away. “Only natural.”

Lizzie was there then, at my side, a pocket handkerchief in her hand, an arm around my shoulders. “Mabel will be all right,” she said, misunderstanding. “Won’t you, Mabel?”