‘I have food and a little money. It would only be for a few days. While I decide what must be done.’

‘Is Milli not returning then?’ said Mrs Renfrew simply, as though a mother disappearing after her child is born was a common enough matter—and perhaps it was, here. Perhaps it was everywhere.

‘No,’ said Alice.

‘How much money?’ said the man.

It was a simple enough transaction. Alice gave them what money she had brought with her, which was little enough but more than nothing so it was greedily accepted. And then she brought out the small bundle wrapped in a cloth and tied with a knot so that she could lay it upon a table and untie the knot and let the contents fall out and dazzle them: bread and cheese and the drumsticks from lunch and leftover game pie and a little wine in a bottle sealed with a stopper. And they fell on the food, like dogs, until the man swatted the children away and curses were thrown and a little blood spilled.

‘It is just for a few days,’ said Alice, holding the baby, still wrapped in its shawl.

Mrs Renfrew reached over and plucked the baby from her and put it under her left arm as her own baby was under the right. Alice would have asked, Do you have enough milk for two? Will the baby live? But she did not ask for she did not trust that the replies she got would be the truth. The man, she saw, wolfed down the food when she had brought it for the mother, but she said nothing. ‘We have no room for an extra mouth beyond these three days, mind,’ said Mrs Renfrew.

And what she meant was: We cannot say what will happen to it after that time, if you do not come for it.

The man would sell it, Alice presumed. Or worse.

‘God bless you,’ said Alice, reaching out to touch the woman, to touch the stunned baby, which had not uttered a cry since she had handed it over. The woman said nothing and it seemed unlikely that God did bless her, or indeed any of them, and Alice made ready to leave, taking one final look at the child.

‘It is a boy,’ she said, from the top of the ladder.

She had saved the baby, for now. And Alice almost tripped and fell in her scrambling haste to descend the ladder and at once her feet sunk into the mud at the bottom. Her dress dragged in it and her boots were sucked into the quagmire up to her ankles. All about her the tumble of shacks and huts crowded any which way and no one but herself was abroad, though every pair of eyes in every dark corner watched her.

She was leaving the child in this fearful place. But Alice Nimrod could not afford second thoughts. Second thoughts were for rich people.