And Alice baulked. For here, in a space no bigger than Milli’s little shack below, Mrs Renfrew and her brood lived. A quantity of this brood were here now, sprawled or huddled, every space taken, the smallest ones perched like doves in a coop on shelves that had been hammered into the timber walls and the furniture stacked one thing atop another so that you wanted to step right outside again to draw breath. The little ones watched her, rows of eyes in the gloom staring, unblinking, as though she was a ghost or a phantom. The watching eyes and the chaos and the roof-high piles of clutter on the brink of toppling was oppressive, a great weight pressing on the chest. How did they stand it? Alice wondered. The smell of too many bodies, of rotting food scraps, of night-time slops in such a confined space almost made her gag.

‘It is the Nimrod girl’s sister,’ said the man who had pulled her up. A tallow candle burned and the light it gave out was feeble and flickered madly on the walls and danced about in the breeze, distorting all that it touched. A sea of staring faces, a mass of shifting bodies was all she could discern.

‘Alice, is it?’ said a woman’s voice, and she recognised Mrs Renfrew emerging out of the dark, creeping, as though the roof were low or as though she expected it to fall in on her at any moment. Mrs Renfrew straightened herself up and peered closely through yellow eyes that blinked in the candlelight. Her lips were split and covered in scabs.

‘You are brave, coming here,’ she said in wonder, as though ‘brave’ was not a word she had much cause to use very often. ‘Or you are foolish.’ And she sighed. ‘You know they are after your sister for she owes them money?’

‘Quiet, woman!’ said the man, Mr Renfrew, emerging out of the gloom and striking his wife a blow about the face. She tottered and almost fell over but otherwise seemed barely to notice.

‘Please, I have come to ask for your help,’ said Alice, and at her breast the baby stirred and let out a wail.

‘Zat Milli’s baby?’ said the man, moving into the candlelight so that Alice saw the whites of his eyes in a blackened face, saw the sluggish shuffle of a body broken by drink and poverty but still with a strong right arm on him. He reached out with long callused fingers that twitched as though they longed to feel the newborn’s flesh and Alice shuddered.

‘The child is born then,’ said Mrs Renfrew, as though a prophecy had come true.

‘I cannot nurse it,’ said Alice. ‘But you can.’

She looked at the woman, at her yellow eyes, at her split and bloodied lips.

‘And why would she do such a thing?’ said the man, testing her, searching for the profit that might be had.