He was no match for my uncles. It took only one strike for him to fall. And that’s how I came to live with the Daffreys for the turn of a year. As black a year as ever there was.

The Daffrey house was down by the river on a spot where the earth sank and squelched under every step. The first week during my year with the Daffreys, my granddam kept me tied by a leash to the kitchen stove to be sure I didn’t run away. She was turned in and hard like an old walnut, the meat all black and sour inside.

‘Your uncle’s going to get your sire to pay up and then we’ll live high and fancy-like,’ she said.

Da didn’t have money for high and fancy, but I said nothing, just sank down as far from the stove as I could.

And then my cousins came. Two boys of an age with me. They came with a sack just the size for hoodman-blind. It went over my head, and the boys’ hands were on me quick as a whip, pulling off my clothes, even my undershift. I yanked at the hood to get it off, but one boy held it in place. When I was bare, they put their hands all over, even between my legs. I tripped in my struggling, landing hard on the stove corner. It burned a V into my right shoulder. I heard footfalls, and my granddam’s voice loud and rough, and then I was alone. The hood came off my face, tears and snot leaving two snail trails along the inside. My granddam cut my leash then, but promised she’d tie me up again and let the boys have at me if I tried to leave the kitchen.

I always hated the cleft in my cheek because of the Daffreys, hated having their mark on me.

‘But you did them one better,’ Da told me after he got me back. ‘For you have a cleft on your chin too. None of them can boast that. It’s a very rare thing, a cleft on the chin. Not two folk in twenty have such a thing.’

I turn my ring when I miss my da, sometimes so much it cuts the flesh.

A week passes in the jail and another round of girls go off to the courthouse. They seem hopeful, nervous, bewildered. I feel older, wiser. Then, just as the last one is leaving the cell door, the turnkey calls, ‘May Owens.’

And suddenly I’m hopeful, nervous, bewildered, too. ‘What news?’ I ask.

The turnkey just looks away.