I tried telling my noticings to our neighbour Bessie. She was welcoming when I first came to chat, laughing, calling me a gabby goose as my mother had done. But as the days went on, I’d catch her sagging a bit when she’d see me coming over. Days got to weeks, and she’d sigh loudly when I came, as if I wouldn’t hear her sigh softly.

I tried speaking to the cat that liked to hunt in the weeds of my fallow garden. Or I’d speak to the sachet of flowers my mother had kept on the mantel. I’d trip over myself just to greet the few folk who still came for laundry. To hear their ‘Thank ye kindly,’ and say, ‘’Tis nought,’ in return. Sometimes I’d speak to their clothes as I washed them, as if they were the folk who wore them. But I missed the answering back. So even though I knew she wasn’t happy with me, I’d wait by my shutters, and when Bessie went out into her kitchen garden, I’d scamper over to share my news.

Then one day she was there on her knees, six dirty carrots at her side. One carrot, I remember, looked short and misshapen like a broken finger. I had come over to tell her about a crow that was pecking at an old bit of leather. She stood before I even got to the leather part.

‘No, no, no, you don’t. It’s too much,’ she cried. ‘I’m not your ma. I’ve Lee and Tom to look after. Not you too.’

‘You’re my neighbour,’ I said.

‘I’ve done my neighbourly duty by you plenty.’ Her words jumped all over me. ‘What you need is kin, and you’ve got a whole lot of them down by the river. Go there with your chitter and chatter about what a dog smelled this morning and which cloud is shaped like a lamb.’

Kin was the last thing I needed.

Two mornings on, the hanging girls march out of the jail. The turnkey doesn’t even blink when I say, ‘What’s to become of me?’

Just a few of us are left behind. It’s better because of the piss pot. There’s just the one, and when the cell is full, the pot fills so quick we have to piss in the corner. If I had known before how much piss there is in a jail, I’d have brought pails by to collect it. There’s places will buy old piss. My mother and I used it for whitening laundry and fullers use it to clean new wool. Woad dyers use it too, but I don’t know for what.