And Mrs Flynn, who was in the midst of preparing a duck for that evening’s dinner, brought her chopping knife down on the neck of the unfortunate fowl with a violent thwack! The feathered head with its glassy sightless eyes rolled from the table and dropped with barely a thud onto the tiled floor at their feet. She flicked the severed head aside with the toe of her boot, grabbed a handful of feathers and proceeded to tear them from the unprotesting corpse of the duck. Alice stood and watched as the pile of discarded feathers grew and the grey, mottled flesh of the bird was revealed.

Mrs Flynn had not said this morning, nor at any time since last night, ‘Where is the baby gone to, Alice?’ She had not made any allusion to the unusual turn that events had taken, except to say, ‘You did not clean all the pots and pans nor take out the slops last night, Alice. I had to do them myself this morning and my knees are gone now because of it.’

Her knees did not look gone. She stood at the great scrubbed wooden table and tore and tore at the flesh of the duck and did not look gone at all.

Alice had not cleaned all the pots; she had not taken out the slops. She would work twice as hard today. But it was not just the kitchen. The silver tea set that Mrs Dunlevy was at this moment offering to her callers was dulled where she had failed to give it its weekly polish. The clean linen was piled in unruly heaps about the house and was not put away and the bedding was not properly aired and in some rooms the dust lay thick and undisturbed. As each task went undone Alice felt the weight of it pull at her limbs and thump in her head, and her exhaustion was such that the very skin covering her muscles ached. But it could not be helped. There was Milli. There was the baby.

There was, besides, a nick on her throat where a razor had pricked her skin and there was also this second mark, much deeper, and unseeable (unless one peered very closely and no one did peer closely for Alice was a servant) that had been made in the dark by the two men holding her life in their hands and tossing it carelessly between them as one might a trapped fly, choosing to release her simply because it was in their power to trap her again whenever they wished. In the last five years Alice Nimrod had become complacent; she had forgotten the tenuous and fleeting nature of life. To be reminded it of now had left its mark on her.

The drawing room bell rang.