She gazed at the discarded items—hat, gloves, coat, the soiled boots—but she did not tidy them. She went to the kitchen. There was a back door here, accessed from the outside via a passage down the side of the house. The grocer’s boy used it, and the coalman and the butcher’s boy and everyone, really, who came to the house who was not Mr or Mrs Dunlevy or one of their guests. Mrs Flynn had used it an hour or so ago, wrapping a shawl over her head and clutching some of the leftover loaf and some of the side of beef and wishing Alice a good night and hurrying out into the darkness.

Alice shivered, for the nights had grown darker. She no longer saw the twinkling of lights on the harbour from her attic window, she no longer saw the stars on a cloudless night. Or perhaps they were still there—the lights on the harbour, the stars in the night sky—and it was simply that Alice no longer looked for them.

She went to the back door and she paused, drew breath and opened it cautiously, just a crack, and peered through into the night and only then standing aside and letting the damp figure who was outside come in.

‘Why’d you leave me out in the rain?’ said Mrs Renfrew indignantly, and she handed her bundle to Alice and shook the raindrops from her shawl.

Alice took the bundle and cradled it in her arms. Then she began to cry, silently and piteously, turning away so that she might not be observed. After a moment she stopped. She lifted the blanket from the baby’s face and stared at it. Its face was a mottled yellowish-pink hue, the dark fuzz of hair on its head a little thinner than it had been. The baby stirred and snuffled, balling up a fist and screwing up its face, but otherwise made no sound.

‘Is he alright?’ she asked dubiously.

‘Blessed if I know,’ said Mrs Renfrew. ‘He’s alive, ain’t he?’ She stood, looking about her. ‘Coo,’ she said.

She may or may not have noticed Alice crying silently a moment or two earlier.

Alice looked around her. ‘This is the kitchen,’ she said, feeling some explanation was required.

Mrs Renfrew had brought with her an odour, something earthy, pungent, like the thunderboxes of the many houses Alice had lived in as a child. It was a smell the Dunlevys would notice at once, if they had a mind to come this way. She must hurry Mrs Renfrew out again, though she hesitated to do so because it was something, wasn’t it, having someone here to visit her? Not someone delivering the groceries or the meat or the coal but here to see her, Alice Nimrod.

‘You been to see her, then—your sister?’ said Mrs Renfrew.