Even as they stared at her – the priest with shame, Mrs Bannister with horror – she moved. She levered herself up, threw aside the blankets, and felt her way along the edge of the bed towards the door. The three of them fell back, as before a leper or a loose animal, while she fumbled for the edge of the door and the beginning of the rope. Outside in the sunlight, she seemed to become, in some final degree, a blasphemy of the human shape.

She was dressed, they now saw, in a single garment, a kind of smock or shift, torn, stained brown, reaching halfway down her thighs: below it, her shanks were wizened like an old man’s, and her spindly legs moved jerkily, as she felt her way along the frayed rope that reached to the privy. She turned her head this way and that, as if feeling for the sun: the blind eyes still roved about her hopefully, the head was cocked as if still expecting some faint sound from the world. The small developing breasts under the shift were a last cruel flourish of mockery; for by their evidence, their shy promise, she was, in all her horror, in all her degradation, a girl of thirteen on the bright edge of womanhood.

“She knows when she wants to go,” said Mrs Costello. The priest and Mrs Bannister prayed, the one for forgiveness, the other that she might not vomit.

They watched Esther return after a time, stumbling and groping along in the same way, and then burrowing under the blankets again in search of warmth. When the door was shut on her: “For Heaven’s sake, why don’t you look after her properly?” asked Mrs Bannister in a sudden fury. “That’s the wickedest thing I’ve ever seen.”

“We do the best we can,” said Mrs Costello forlornly. “Money’s hard to come by, these days.”

“It doesn’t cost money to keep her clean … She should be in an institution, anyway, with proper care.”

“We do the best we can.”

“God forgive us all,” said Father Haggerty.

“Or better still, the doctors should look her over again, and see if anything’s changed.”

“Doctors cost money,” whined Mrs Costello.

“Father,” said Mrs Bannister, turning to the old man, “we must do something.”

The priest nodded, hopeful and fearful at the same time, wondering what was in her mind, and whether it could be the miracle that long ago he had prayed for. “What can we do?” he asked, trembling with age and fear and hope. “What can we do?”

The Cadillac fetched the doctor from Wexford and then the doctor from Dublin; but neither could add anything to what they had said already – the ‘massive shock’ still persisted, and showed no signs of abating. Mrs Bannister cast about her for the next step. The girl was now, at least, clean and properly dressed and fed – that much, Mrs Bannister had insisted on, and had driven the insistence home with money, and a threat of prosecution for good measure; but these basic improvements were nothing like enough. She had been profoundly moved by Esther Costello – by the cruel mischance which had laid her low, by the shock of her appearance, by those childish breasts so bravely sprouting into a barbaric world. She wanted to do more, much more; and since there was little to be done on the spot, it must be done in some other place, somewhere where these things enlisted effective aid as a matter of course.