I didn’t understand.

“Look at ’er face. Never ’eard of a dollymop.” Mabel was not so discreet, and Mrs. Stiles made it known she’d taken offence with a scraping of buckets and a mumbled protest. “Come on, girl,” Mabel said to me. “Take out yer slips.”

Tilda cocked her head.

“She collects words,” said Mabel.

“What kinds of words?”

“Women’s words. Dirty ones.”

I stood dumb, caught with no adequate explanation. It was as though Da had asked me to turn out my pockets.

But Tilda was interested, not appalled. “Really?” she said, taking in the loose fit of my jacket and the daisy chain Lizzie had embroidered around the edge of the sleeves. “Dirty words?”

“No. Well, sometimes. Dirty words are Mabel’s speciality.”

I took out my bundle of blank slips and a pencil.

“Are you a dollymop?” I asked, not sure how offensive it might be but curious to try the word out.

“An actress, though to some it’s the same thing.” She smiled at Mabel. “Our friend tells me that treading the boards was how she got into her particular line of work.”

I began to understand and wrote dollymop in the top-left corner of a slip I’d cut from a discarded proof. These slips were becoming favourites, though the pleasure I took in crossing out the legitimate words and recording one of Mabel’s on the other side was never without an echo of shame.

“Can you put it in a sentence?” I asked.

Tilda looked at the slip, then at me. “You’re quite serious, aren’t you?” she said.

Heat flushed my cheeks. I imagined the slip through her eyes, the futility of it. How odd I must have seemed.

“Give ’er a sentence,” Mabel urged.

Tilda waited for me to look up. “On one condition,” she said, smiling with anticipated satisfaction. “We’re putting on a production of A Doll’s House at New Theatre. You must come to the matinee this afternoon and join us after, for tea.”

“She will, she will. Now give ’er a sentence.”

Tilda took a lungful of air and straightened. Her gaze fell just beyond my shoulder and she delivered her sentence with a working-class accent I’d not detected before. “A coin for the dollymop will keep your lap warm.”

“That’s experience talkin’ if you ask me,” Mabel said, laughing.

“No one asked you, Mabel,” I said. I wrote the sentence in the middle of the slip.

“Is it the same as prostitute?” I asked Tilda.

“I suppose. Though a dollymop is more opportunistic and far less experienced.”

Tilda watched as I fashioned a definition.

“That sums it up perfectly,” she said.

“Your last name?” My pencil hovered.

“Taylor.”

Mabel tapped her whittling knife on the crate to get our attention. “Read it to me, then.”

I looked around at all the market goers.

Tilda held out her hand for the slip. “I promise not to project.”