Not a soul about. No train waited at the platform, no passenger came or went. On the neighbouring platform a solitary station official carrying a hurricane lamp, checking and locking up, glanced at her across the deserted railway tracks but did not stop, and he was too far distant for her to see his face nor him to see hers.

The baby began to cry. If it was hungry it was no wonder. She had tried to give it bread soaked in water to suck on, and who knew if that was enough to keep the poor little thing from perishing? The baby did not thrive but it was not dead. She held the little bundle close to her own shivering body but, as she was soon to hand him over, she held him a little less tightly. She turned her face away from him. She placed herself far away, on that train to Emu Plains.

‘Miss Hills?’

It was strange to be addressed by a name that was not your own and Alice started and for a moment could not speak.

‘Mrs Flowers?’

For here finally was the name in the newspaper, the illegible signature on the bottom of a scrawled note, the person who, until this moment, existed only in the imagination, as a saviour, perhaps.

Salvation, yes, but did the person who offered salvation also offer damnation? It seemed so to Alice.

The reality of this Mrs Flowers was a stout, black-clad figure, short and squat, in a large shapeless bonnet of no obvious colour and tied beneath her chin by a tattered ribbon, with a heavy black coat that reached almost to the ground and beneath which the toes of mud-plastered boots were visible. Her face was at first in shadow and seemed at home there but she lifted her head and the light caught her then let her go, for there was something a little curious about her eyes, blankly hidden behind little round spectacles that yet summed up in one swift glance all that there was to know about Miss Hills (not her real name) who had got herself into trouble and was desperate enough to arrange this meeting. Having appraised Miss Hills, she pulled back her lips in a smile that showed one or two teeth, no more, and she nodded as though she had seen all she needed to see.

‘How old is the baby?’

‘Five days.’

‘Boy or girl?’

‘It is a boy.’

Mrs Flowers nodded. ‘Good. It’s easier to place a little boy.’

‘You said there is family all ready for him?’

‘So there is. A good Christian couple out in the country. On a farm. Childless. They are awaiting him this very moment.’

It was exactly what the advertisement in the newspaper had said: a good Christian family of moderate but honest means. It was exactly what Alice wanted to hear.

But she hesitated.