She wondered for a time about Mrs Flynn, whose domain was the kitchen and the scullery three floors below and who returned home to her own family each night, sloughing off the house in Elizabeth Bay, and returning, different and changed, at dawn to prepare the day’s meals. She wondered if Mrs Flynn would keep her secret or if she would shrug her old and bony shoulders and betray her. In the pantry the meat hung, a goose or a lamb or half a pig or a side of beef, dangling lifeless from a hook waiting to be cut into pieces. Sometimes the blood dripped onto the cold hard floor and congealed there. Sometimes it stained Mrs Flynn’s apron. Alice imagined that Mrs Flynn, if asked about the baby, would say: ‘Drown it!’ Drown the baby. As though it were a cat or a stray dog. And not because she was cruel, not because she was callous, but because she was practical.

Alice held the baby to her breast. It was her sister’s baby. She felt her sister’s blood pulse through the baby’s tiny veins, she saw the blood purplish-blue beneath the transparent skin of its eyelids. She thought of her sister locked up this cold June night and every night for three years in a cell in Darlinghurst Gaol.

And then she closed that door and did not open it again because she could not endure it.

The clouds had rolled in from the west to obscure the moon and Alice turned away from the window and looked about at her room beneath the eaves, a sloping room cut from a space in the roof that was usually reserved for bats and birds. A narrow bed pushed close up against the sloping wall filled most of the space, crowded beside it a chest of drawers and a small, roughly hewn table on which a water jug stood. The window jutted out into the night and the doorway opened onto the little landing and the narrow staircase down which you crept at night without a candle at your peril.

Might she ask Father McCreadie for help? The old priest had come to her aid once before when she had found herself alone and unprotected, but five years had passed. She had not returned to the church, had not once attended mass. Did not know if Father McCreadie remained still at the church. Was even alive. He had been an old man then, stooped and unshaved and smelling already of the decay and the dust of the dead. I will take the child into the orphanage, Alice. I will hand it over to the Sisters of Mercy, he would say. It is for the best. It is God’s will. And that would be the last she would see of it, Milli’s child.