They had avoided each other since Friday evening, and five days was a long time for a servant to avoid her mistress and an even longer time for a mistress to avoid her servant, but they had managed it. This was, in large part, down to Alice, who spent a great deal of her time scurrying back up the stairs and darting into rooms and turning about and walking back the way she had just come, and she did this because she had no wish to witness her mistress’s shame for she had found that, inexplicably, she shared in it.

This was confusing to her and she wished Mr Dunlevy would return from his trip, though she could not see how this might improve things. But she felt the awkwardness of her situation.

The one o’clock gun sounded at Fort Denison and the second post came and then the third, and in the scullery Mrs Flynn’s apple pie cooled on a tray. The clocks in each room chimed and chimed again, marking another hour, marking the end of another day. Five days had already passed since Alice had handed over the baby. The moon came up before the afternoon was even half done, for the June days were almost at their shortest, and soon it would be six days. When she saw the moon, when she counted the days that had passed, Alice was filled with such a great terror she forgot to breathe.

Mrs Dunlevy dined alone and did not eat even a single slice of the apple pie so that Alice took it back to the kitchen.

‘What can be done?’ she said to Mrs Flynn, and she was not referring to the uneaten pie. She rarely asked anyone for anything, for you almost never got what you wanted or, if you did, then the cost was likely to be more than you could afford. But tonight she asked Mrs Flynn.

Mrs Flynn, who thought the baby was already dead, said, ‘Go and get it back, Alice Nimrod, if you are able.’

‘And then what?’

‘Leave it outside the orphanage where it should have been all along.’

‘And never see it again?’

‘And know it lives.’

At half past midnight on platform 14 of Sydney Terminal Station everything was as it had been five nights before—the rain came down in sheets, a porter stalked the empty platforms with a lamp held high, the last trains arrived and the passengers moved silently about in the great billows of steam and smoke like exhausted, ancient ghosts. And a girl with a baby waited in the shadows, shivering with cold and fear as though she did not know if she feared salvation more than she feared death.

Though neither came.