She was a hard one, Noreen, always had been, but she had kept Joy alive all these years. Twice she had stopped her ending it. Once when she found Joy with a bed sheet looped around her neck, ready to jump from the upstairs landing. She had grabbed her, held her, fought her, until Joy gave up trying. The second time, Joy had been stabbing at her own wrist trying to find the vein. Noreen had entered the room at the moment Joy brought the blade to her throat and she seized her wrist, pulled it away, slammed her hand against the edge of the sink until the knife fell in among the dishes and the blood.

Noreen Weaver possessed a fierce will to live, a stubborn, spiteful drive to outlast the men who had held them in this house for more than a decade. She had outlived the third woman who had been here when Joy had first arrived, and four of the five children who had been born here in that time, and now this girl from the outside. Joy would have been dead these many years if not for Noreen. Sometimes, in the cold and wakeful hours of the night, Joy hated her for it.

They each kept watch as Mary’s fever deepened, as her coughing grew more ragged, as the tremors spread out from her centre to her fingers and toes, her teeth chattering. Noreen said she wouldn’t die, but Joy didn’t believe her. She had said Matthew wouldn’t die, no bloody way would he die, and yet he had perished in Noreen’s embrace, like a candle flame blown out. A real live boy one moment, an armful of rags and skin the next.

Noreen had cried hard for Matthew, and Joy had too, and Joy had done Noreen’s share of the work for a few days, just as Noreen had done for Joy when her last baby had died still tethered to her, still slick with her blood.

As the first promises of daylight showed in the gaps around the door at the top of the stairs, Mary began to scream. Awful screams, like the howling of the damned. Joy pressed her hands to her ears, but Mary’s voice cut through, a blade piercing Joy’s skull. Stop, stop, stop, she whispered to herself, feeling the spreading cracks in her mind.

Noreen took hold of her wrists, pulled her hands away from her ears.

“We have to get help,” she said.

“They won’t help her,” Joy said. “They’ll let her die.”

“We’ll see about that,” Noreen said, getting to her feet.

She climbed the stairs to the door and hammered it so hard with her fist that it rattled and shook in its frame. The noise seemed to free Mary from whatever torment held her, and she fell silent, staring up at Noreen with wild eyes.

“Mary,” Joy said.