Nine days had passed since the catastrophe.

Polly was back in her own bed, complaining about the musty smell the house gave off. ‘It’s drying out,’ Harriet had explained. ‘The structural damage is repaired, but the walls cannot be repapered just yet.’

‘You seem to know a lot about it,’ said Polly.

Harriet had shrugged, her head bent over her bone-handled crochet hook. ‘I listen when Uncle and Mr Boothby talk.’ She laid the hook down. ‘Aunt, would you not consider rising again? I can make you comfortable downstairs. A change of…’

Polly had looked away. ‘Do not badger me.’

Alice had not been found, although she appeared nightly in Harriet’s fevered dreams, slipping into the room to announce she had fooled them all with her game of hide-and-seek, or pounding up the stairs to wake her parents, water streaming from her hair and nightclothes. Or unseen, calling Harriet’s name entreatingly, the voice she adopted when she wanted to play a game or have Harriet help her with her embroidery. That was the dream where Harriet woke sobbing. She knew Mr Boothby had observed that Walter could not stand the sight of her – that her uncle’s eyes slid away when he was forced to address her, to focus on her shoulder or the ceiling or the lace cap on her head, anywhere but directly at the face of the girl he had saved, the wrong girl, the one whose very presence only reinforced his failure, and her own. That was why Mr Boothby was doing her this kindness. What other reason could there be?

‘It’s voluntary work, of course,’ he had told Walter. ‘Nothing so demeaning as a waged job. I shall be happy to take her under my wing. Now, Miss Wragg, you are to help record claims from the survivors of the disaster.’ He had turned back to Walter. ‘You too must apply for compensation from the waterworks company. For the damage to the house, and for the new furniture and right down to the silver teaspoons. Other property owners are doing the same, the mill owners, the landlords from their country piles, and the poor who only rent their cottages and even before the flood had barely a pot to piss in. Excuse my language, young lady.’

‘But where are the poor living now, if their homes were swept away?’ asked Harriet.

Mr Boothby had dismissed her with a wave of his hand. ‘They can apply to the guardians and go to Kelham Street, if it comes to that. We need not concern ourselves with fellows who find themselves become paupers and vagrants. They could not have been so far above that status before. Now, it shall be my pleasure to escort you to the town hall and return you home afterwards. You start tomorrow. We should walk. It is predicted to be a fine day.’

His prediction had proved correct. Harriet glanced up at a pale blue sky striated with plumes of smoke from the surrounding factories. She looked back down at the two men on the platform over the river. The younger one had begun to scale the ladder. He squinted as a shaft of sunlight crossed his face. Something about this – the light, or his expression, she did not know – penetrated the numbness that enveloped her and she drew her own brows together in puzzlement.