Alice ran to the doorway but pulled up sharp, for there was Milli on the floor and Milli was not dead. She lay, her body covered for modesty by a large blue cloth which, to the onlookers, appeared curiously patterned and providential (for what courtroom anticipates its clients halting proceedings to expel a child?) and turned out to be the British flag that hung in each court, torn from its hooks and pressed into emergency service. If Milli was cognisant of the assistance rendered her by the empire, she did not show it; her eyes were closed and her breathing was laboured and uneven, her hair matted and bedraggled, her face drawn and exhausted and grey. When her eyes opened she let out a scream, shrill and piercing and dreadful, that seemed to express not gratitude for help rendered, but outrage that her child had been taken from her.

‘Milli!’

Alice ran to her sister and fell at her side, but at once an official hauled her up and shoved her away.

‘Do not approach the prisoner!’

A second man joined the first, for it took two of them to drag Alice from her sister and attempt to bundle her from the courtroom. She bit the hand of one, drawing blood and forced her way back inside, and in the general commotion that this caused Milli stopped her scream and her gaze fell, instead, on her sister’s face.

‘Alice, the baby! Do not let them take it away or I shall never set eyes on it again! Alice! Do not let them—’

But the door was closed on her and Alice, reeling, understood that the baby was born, that the baby was somewhere, might indeed be living.

She shook herself free of her captors, cursing and screaming at them so that the two guards backed away, one nursing his injured hand. They advanced but seemed undecided whether to forsake her or to arrest her, and as they delayed the woman in tartan clutched Alice’s arm and led her very smartly away down the wooden staircase.

‘But Milli—the baby …’ cried Alice, and she would have turned and run back up but her saviour propelled her downwards. Reaching the bottom of the stairs they paused and Alice saw what it was they pursued: just ahead of them, disappearing around a corner in the corridor, was the matron who had passed by them with her bloodied consignment. This woman had made slow progress, for she moved with the waddling gait of a very fat person, wheezing as though she might expire at any moment, but—they could both see it!—was still clutching her cargo.

And they set off after her, Alice only dimly perceiving why they did so.