Alice said nothing. She left the kitchen. She went from room to room. She thought of the baby whose future she could not see beyond the wretchedness and squalor that was the breast of Mrs Renfrew. When she returned to the kitchen the page from the newspaper lay where Mrs Flynn had placed it, still with its revolutionary corsets and its Mrs Flowers. Alice wished she could be left alone to do her work in peace, but this Mrs Flowers had wormed her way into Alice’s head and would not be dislodged, so when Mrs Flynn went for a moment into the scullery Alice reclaimed the page of the newspaper, folding it carefully and tucking it once more into her sleeve.

‘You oughta think real careful before you do that, my girl.’

Alice spun around and met the inscrutable and unblinking eyes of the cook, who had re-emerged from the scullery with all the stealth of a housebreaker, looking very much as though she had sprung a trap and was come to claim her spoils.

‘You know what a baby farm is, don’t you?’ Mrs Flynn said.

‘’Course I do! I weren’t born yesterday.’ It was an unfortunate thing to say given the circumstances.

‘You hand that baby over, Alice my girl, along with whatever sum of money they demand of you, and you will never see its face again this side of Paradise, of that you can be sure.’

‘You don’t know that!’ Alice spun away.

But Mrs Flynn would not be silenced. ‘They will do away with it first chance they get,’ she went on with a sort of grisly relish, ‘and they will go on taking your money just as long as they can get away with it. And when at last you get your suspicions they will be off and nothing to show they was ever here except a tiny corpse stuffed in the drain or buried in the yard for the coppers to find a year or two later.’

‘Stop it!’ cried Alice, for who can bear to hear their own fears voiced—and with such grim satisfaction—by another? ‘That ain’t so! Not nowadays. There’s laws against it.’

‘Laws?’ Mrs Flynn laughed. She laughed so hard she had to pull up a chair and heave herself into it.

And it was funny, hilarious even, the idea that the law existed to protect people like themselves.

Alice went back to her work. She cleaned a tea stain from the carpet so that you would not know it was there. She polished the silver. She cleaned all the shoes that she had not cleaned over the last few days.

She answered a summons from Mrs Dunlevy.