The turnkey takes us into a fine building with a roof so high even the tallest of folk couldn’t touch it. We line a bench, twenty shivering girls. I guess some of us are women. I’ve been one for two years, though I don’t know that I feel like one. Then again, I don’t know what a woman is supposed to feel like. I twist my ring. It’s thin and uneven and not real gold, but I like to imagine it is. It’s the only bit left of my da. A token of him.

‘What’s to happen now?’ I ask the dog eater, who’s sitting beside me.

‘Justice takes his decision,’ says a dirty girl a ways down the bench. She stole a silver cup.

‘Recorder is what he’s called,’ the turnkey says.

‘Why a recorder?’ I ask.

‘My fate’s decided,’ says a ratlike girl who tried to sell the bastard she bore, mayhap trying to trade her soiled name away with it.

‘Yeah, but it’s got to be pronounced,’ the dirty one tells the rat.

‘Why is he called a recorder?’ I try again. ‘Does he record what happens?’

The turnkey shushes me.

‘Sounds like donkey paddies to me,’ the rat girl answers softly, an eye rounding the rest of us for nods. The others ignore her, so I drop my eyes too.

‘When does the recorder come?’ I ask the turnkey, but he’s already starting to stand.

The recorder comes in by a side door. He walks to a high wooden table and climbs onto a high wooden chair. He looks for a moment like a child mounting his da’s stool, and the laugh comes before I can stop it. The turnkey and recorder look over sharply, but I deaden my face, and the other girls don’t give me away, even the rat. I feel bad I looked down earlier.

‘Chasy Stow?’ the recorder speaks. The turnkey waves for the girl to stand. ‘Vagrancy and begging without a licence.’

‘I’m from Chester Town,’ Chasy says all quiet.

‘This isn’t Chester Town,’ says the recorder without even looking up.

‘But there wasn’t any work, and I couldn’t stay at home!’ Chasy tries.

Even I know it doesn’t matter the reason. Folk without a settled place to live are swept up by the constable for being vagabonds unless they’ve a special passport from the Queen.

The recorder’s eyes stay on his parchment. ‘Can you produce two credible witnesses to speak for you?’

It’s a fool thing to ask. ‘There’s no folk here but us,’ I tell the dog eater. ‘Only the turnkey, and what’s the chance he’s her brother?’ The recorder bangs a wooden mallet on his table, and I shut my lips.