At her breast the baby shuddered and let out a wail. It began to cry. It went on crying. It did not stop. It was hungry or thirsty or dying, Alice did not know which. She patted its head, and stroked its downy cheek, she jiggled it on her knee, propping up the head, which seemed impossibly large for its body and in imminent danger of wobbling right off. She lay the baby down, she picked it up. The baby cried.

Panic-stricken, she put it down and ran from her tiny room down the narrow staircase to the floor below then downwards to the hallway and the closed doors of the dining room and the drawing room. She opened each door to reveal the empty unlit fireplaces and the polished unlaid tables and the silverware in the cabinets and the paintings on the walls and the rows of untouched books on the shelves. She threw back the curtains. There was no one here. She did not know what it was she searched for. Silence, perhaps, peace—for, distantly, she heard the crying of the baby. It did not stop. The Dunlevys would be home this hour or the next, the empty house would not remain empty for long. And then what?

She did not know what to do. Everything sped up inside her, the beat of her heart, the blood in her arteries, the breath in her throat, the thoughts in her head. She ran back up the two flights of stairs and flung back the door to her room to scoop up the crying thing—

But someone was there before her. Someone was in her room holding the baby.

‘Why do you not feed it, Alice? The baby will perish if you do not tend to it.’

Mrs Flynn. Her sleeves rolled up and her coat and hat on as though she had thought to leave for the night but had changed her mind. Spots of animal blood on her arms. Her lips set firm around her toothless gums. The baby in her arms.

‘I do not know how to,’ said Alice, and her shoulders sagged and the breath went out of her at her own failure, at this blessed and unhoped-for relief.

‘It needs mother’s milk,’ said the elderly and toothless cook. She did not say, And who is the mother and why is she not here? She had lived too long in the world to bother with such questions.

‘But where?’ said Alice helplessly. ‘Where do I get such a thing?’ Her own failure, her lack of knowledge, hung heavily about her.

‘From a nursing woman,’ was the simple reply.

The baby did not stop its crying but Mrs Flynn did not flinch. She held the little shrivelled thing to her shoulder and nursed it as best as a wizened and dried-up old woman could.

‘You must find a nursing mother if the real mother cannot nurse it,’ she said again.