But Alice Nimrod did. Though it was true she paused a moment to lift her skirts and perhaps, too, to steel herself. But only for a moment. She stepped down, picking her path carefully for the way was treacherous at the best of times and on this night it was a fast track to the city mortuary and a pauper’s grave. If you were lucky. If you were unlucky, your body was spirited away by the people lurking below—for who knew what nefarious purpose—and you were never heard of again.

Alice made slow progress down the flights of steps until something blocked her path just a step or two from the bottom. What seemed to be a decaying pile of clothes or waste slowly took on a human form with two staring eyes. A woman, unmoving, and whether soaked by the rain or by the grog Alice felt no compunction to find out. When the figure did not stir and the staring eyes did not blink she understood that the woman had departed this earth, and her suffering, whatever form it may have taken, was ended.

Alice stepped over her and thought no more of her. There was compassion in Alice but, like everything else in life, her compassion was not limitless, it must be parcelled up. It must be rationed.

She reached the bottom of the Hollow and her boots sank in sludge and, at the same moment, a figure reared out of the darkness and lurched at her with a drunken roar. Alice let out a cry but she struck out because she was not helpless, far from it, and her own upbringing, though better than this by far, had still been filled with hardship. Her strike hit home, meeting something solid and rebounding off it so that she almost lost her footing. Her assailant staggered, reeling towards her, whether off balance or with actual intent it was impossible to tell, but Alice shoved him hard so that he fell and, before he could right himself, she fled.

Her heart beat a little faster. This was not her first visit to Frog Hollow after dark and, though she was clearly no policeman or priest or bailiff nor any of the natural enemies of the Hollow, she well understood the horrors that might befall a woman in this place. She turned this way and that, negotiating the labyrinth of narrow byways, her flight more panicked than before, but no one save herself need know it. She pulled up only when she reached the low, uneven opening at the entrance of a timbered shack.