At this the crowd surged forward once more and someone screamed and someone else fainted and a cry went up—‘Send for a priest!’—and Alice craned to see. Someone had fainted; a young man, it seemed, which was curious, for people usually spoke of young ladies fainting yet this was a man. But as the young man slithered away to the ground a gap appeared in the crowd and Alice thrust her way into it and saw the courtroom. She had a confused impression of wood panelling and cream-coloured walls, of a very high ceiling and a row of wooden benches on which, at present, no one sat. She saw that the faces of the clerks were a peculiar greyish hue and several of them were kneeling down and one or two were standing back in horror and there in the middle of them all was her sister Milli, in the final stages of childbirth.

Alice cried out and threw herself at her prostrate sister, but the court officials and the constable made a final effort to shut out the crowd and Alice was forced back and found herself on the wrong side of the door as it was slammed shut. She regained her footing and flung herself once more at the door, but with the futility of a fly at a window.

‘It is my sister!’ she cried, banging on the door. ‘She is my sister! Let me see her!’

She banged her fists again, but the door was solidly built and would not give.

The crowd, deprived of the spectacle that had kept it amused, grumbled a good bit and began to drift away, all but one woman. This was a stout elderly soul in a patched tartan shawl and features as scoured and coarsened as stone on a windswept hillside, but perhaps this woman had known motherhood or remembered the warm embrace of her own mother for she broke from the dispersing mob and came to Alice’s assistance.

‘Hush, lass, you shall not help your sister by banging on the door and carrying on,’ she said, putting a restraining hand on Alice’s arm. ‘It is her time and the baby is coming, ready or not. Come now, calm yourself. Is it her first?’

And the hands she placed on Alice’s arm were deformed by age and by work but no less kind for that.

Alice put out her own hands to steady herself and allowed the old woman to seat her on one of the hard wooden benches. She stared into the woman’s face and shook her head numbly.

‘No, it is not her first.’