‘Here, girl! Come on, Shandy.’

Silas waited.

On the riverbank below, a house released a tide of roof slates – a glassy cascade of sound – and a raven glided implacably away. He watched the bird flap upriver then turned to gaze again at the factory chimneys belching out smoke. No money, no lodgings, no job. He was nobody here, with nothing at all. But hadn’t that been the case when he first arrived? And he had something many now did not. A life to live.

Silas set off, back towards the town.

Chapter 17

Gunson placed his hat on the wide shelf under the window inside the double doors of the workhouse, adding the topper to what looked like a landscape in miniature of squat black chimneys. He turned to Millicent Leigh, who had stopped on the threshold, her face ashen.

The Kelham Street workhouse was a place of last resort, and now, he reflected, of last repose. The first bodies had been brought here within hours of the disaster and the macabre deliveries of the unclaimed dead would continue for several days yet. He’d been told the wave had thrust itself into the workhouse, throwing the heavy doors open like an unwanted guest, but although the beds in the women’s hospital and lunatic ward were said to have been afloat, the waters quickly subsided. He could barely comprehend it had been a mere fourteen hours since he was scrabbling for his life on the collapsing embankment.

‘Mrs Leigh.’ He went back to her. ‘Would you like me to go on alone? There is a bench outside and it’s a tolerably mild afternoon. You can wait there.’

She looked at him as if he was an imbecile. ‘She’s my daughter. You don’t know her.’

He was an imbecile. ‘Yes, of course. I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking. The past night has affected…’ He trailed off, ashamed to be complaining of a lack of sleep.

In the first ward they came to, the bodies were laid out in rows. He thought there must be fifty or sixty of them. All but the deathly pale faces were covered in sheets. Someone had combed out the long dark hair of a young woman and draped it over the sheet that covered her torso. She could be sleeping, were it not for the deep gash that ran down the side of her face from forehead to neck. Gunson squeezed his housekeeper’s cold hand.

‘How old is your daughter?’

‘Louisa. She is twenty years old.’ Millicent moved to the next row. ‘She has lovely blonde hair, curly. She’s not in here. I’d know her sleeping face in an instant.’

A wail rose from another part of the building, an animal sound of despair that lifted the hairs on Gunson’s neck. A woman in a nurse’s uniform gave him an apologetic nod and went to investigate.

‘No, she’s not in here,’ said Millicent faintly.

‘Right.’ He guided her back into the corridor. Two men carrying a stretcher were heading towards them. Mrs Leigh put her hand to her throat but the body on it was that of a bloated white-haired woman. Gunson glanced into a side room to see a man and woman on their knees as if in prayer, pressed together shoulder to shoulder. They were leaning over a small marbled body, as still as statues. A nurse stood over them, writing in a book she had balanced on her arm.