‘Scandalous,’ observed Charles Booker-Reid, leaning back in his chair and regarding his dinner guests through the blue trail of smoke from his own cigar.

Mrs Pyke looked up with very bright eyes, the flush still on her face. ‘I do wonder at the depths of desperation to which such a woman must have fallen to be driven to such an extreme,’ she observed to no one in particular.

‘No doubt the woman was desperate,’ Eleanor countered, weary of Cecily Pyke’s veiled and rather pious reproaches, weary of her quantity of daughters. ‘It is hardly the act of a rational, God-fearing person who has lived a moral life.’

And at this, Mrs Pyke, who was her friend, flushed again and Eleanor turned her gaze away for she did not, altogether, believe her own words.

‘And do we not feel even a moment’s compassion for this woman?’ said Alasdair, stirring as though he had just that moment woken from a sleep. ‘Can each of us say, in all honesty, that we have never committed an act some might consider immoral?’

He made this statement to the table in general yet Eleanor felt a flush creep over her own face for the rebuke was aimed solely at herself.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN: THRIVE

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

THRIVE

The baby did not thrive. Instead it cried piteously, expelling a sound from its lungs to echo the suffering of ages and a black muck from its bowels that was as viscous and primeval as Hell itself. And then it fell silent. It lay limp and unresponsive as though it had tasted life and had found it wanting and turned its tiny, red-creased face away from such torment.

Alice Nimrod thought it dead. She snatched it up and held it to her breast and felt, faintly, its heart still beating, the blood still moving sluggishly about its little limbs. The baby lived, though it did not thrive. It would not live much longer if she could not get it to feed.

She could not think what she would do. She had taken the baby and that was perhaps a crime, she did not know. If the baby died in her care, was that too a crime? And what if they should hear the baby cry downstairs? This was her biggest fear.

She had returned to the house with the baby under the cover of darkness and had fled up the stairs to her room at the top of the house. Here, she had swaddled the baby in a shawl and laid it in a drawer and run downstairs to be the housemaid once more.