Alice nodded. She knew where she must go—it was as preordained as Christ’s death on the cross—and she readied herself to go out into the night. The clouds had rolled in to obscure the moon and it seemed likely the rain would come again. But not yet, and under Mrs Flynn’s silent gaze she hurried down to the scullery and gathered such items as she might need and tied them in a cloth. She wrapped a shawl about her shoulders and over her head and took the baby, which Mrs Flynn held out to her, enclosing it inside the warmth of her arms, and set off.

Alice returned to Frog Hollow and to Mrs Renfrew, a woman who had four or five children already and a sixth at her breast, whose husband had lost his job because of his drinking and who would never get another and whose bitterness at his own failure was displayed daily on the swollen faces and bruised and bloodied bodies of his wife and offspring. ‘This is where you come when you cannot sink lower,’ Milli had said once, meaning herself, but it applied equally to the Renfrews and to all the others too, for the Hollow was large enough to swallow up countless unfortunates and many families found their way there eventually.

But at least Mrs Renfrew had her freedom, at least she was not locked in a cell at Darlinghurst Gaol. And so Alice hurried to her, through the lengthening night, carrying her valuable prize.

She negotiated the descent down the flight of stone steps and picked her way as carefully as she could. A child, ten years at most and pale as a corpse, darted past her and slipped behind a square of sackcloth pinned across the doorway of the shack that four nights ago had been Milli’s. This place, the Hollow, and the souls that inhabited it, did not remain stagnant for a moment. A space had become vacant and had been filled almost before it was cold.

Someone at some point had fashioned a rudimentary ladder up to the Renfrews’ shack and Alice grimly attacked this ladder, hauling herself up one-handed, clutching her precious bundle. As she neared the top she called, ‘Hello? Anyone inside?’

A head appeared, dark against the dark sky.

‘Who’s there? What d’you want?’

‘It is Alice Nimrod, Milli’s sister. I have come to see Mrs Renfrew. It is terrible important I speak with her.’ For the head, the voice, was not a woman’s but a man’s.

‘Terrible important, is it? Then you had best come up.’

Scorn—but also an invitation.

Alice pulled herself up, stood unsteadily for a moment atop the little ladder, swayed and might have fallen had not a hand shot out and grabbed her sleeve, hauled her inside.