Alice Nimrod, kneeling before the stove scraping and cleaning furiously, sat back on her haunches. She waited. But Mrs Flynn said nothing. She had said nothing for five days, and after a moment Alice went back to her work.

It was only once the pastry had been completed to Mrs Flynn’s satisfaction and laid inside a pie dish with stewed apples, when two cloves had been placed just so and a dusting of cinnamon sprinkled on top and the pie deposited into the oven, that Mrs Flynn spoke. ‘I hope you do not live to regret it, Alice, and that’s all I have to say on the matter.’

‘And why should I regret giving the baby a chance of a better life?’ cried Alice all in a rush and jumping to her feet, for these words had been ready and straining to be released these five days and more.

‘Because that baby is no more on a farm in the country with cows and sheep and what have you than it is with Her Majesty at Windsor Castle.’

‘You do not know that!’

‘Don’t I?’

For a time neither spoke. Mrs Flynn pulled out a chair and sat down on it. She sighed—and she was not, as a rule, a woman who sighed; she was a woman who got on and did what needed to be done. But today she sighed. ‘You have lived on those streets, Alice Nimrod. You know what kind of place this is, same as ever I do.’

And Alice did know. But sometimes to know a thing did not help. Sometimes it made things worse.

Alice went upstairs and she beat the curtains in Mr Dunlevy’s room and she dragged the carpet sweeper over the rugs and flung open the windows to air the place, and the rain thundered onto the roof and the guttering and onto the sill so that she had to close the windows again almost at once.

Mrs Flynn thought the baby was dead.

Alice pulled the layers of bedding from Mr Dunlevy’s bed and bundled them up and placed new ones on. She put away the gloves and collars and shirts that had returned from the laundry and noted which had a mark on them the laundry had missed and which were not starched just right. She polished the bedheads and she dusted the desk and the shelves and the drawers and the pictures on the walls and the photographs in their frames.

And she saw that everything had been moved about in Mr Dunlevy’s room. The dust was disturbed, things had been taken up and replaced in a slightly different way: drawers, books, everything. She wondered if Mrs Dunlevy had done it, though why Mrs Dunlevy might do such a thing Alice did not know.