Could it be a baby? It must, surely, be a bat or a possum outside. She put a hand on the bannister and a step on the first stair, listening. For a moment there was silence, but then she heard it again and she went up the stairs, though it had been five years, perhaps, since she had last gone up to the maid’s room and then only briefly to ensure the maid who had departed had taken only what was hers. She reached the top of the winding wooden staircase and stood on the little landing just long enough to understand something was very wrong. She threw open the door.

Inside the room the maid, Alice, stood wide-eyed and holding in her arms a baby. It was wrapped in a shawl of some description and its face—a tiny red, wrinkled face—was screwed up mid-scream. Its fists were clenched in fury, its limbs so diminutive they seemed little more than a doll’s. A newborn or, at most, a few days old.

And Alice gaped at her in mute horror.

Indeed, the horror seemed to rise up from the floor, it seeped out of the walls, it poured down on them from the ceiling. It drenched them and Eleanor reeled. The baby’s cries came to her from far away and the words that Alice spoke did not come to her at all. She had entered a quite different world, where the things that she had known—about herself, about the people around her—were quite false and other things were now shown to be true. She said to the maid: ‘This is my husband’s child.’

Her words cut through the fog that surrounded them both and hung there, momentous and terrible. ‘This is Mr Dunlevy’s child, is it not? Tell me.’

Alice took a step away from her, her mouth agape. And now something got through, the sound of Alice’s words, if not their actual meaning.

‘No, madam, indeed it is not!’ she cried. ‘It is my sister’s child. She has died suddenly and I have saved her child. I am sorry, madam, for I know I should not—’

‘It is my husband’s child. And you have hidden this from me, the two of you.’

‘No, madam, I swear on the child’s life—’

Eleanor put her hands over her ears and turned away from the girl’s denials. She was going to fall, or to faint, she did not know which. She put her hand on the doorknob and held very tightly onto it and the girl’s denials went on and on.

‘She went into labour because of the sentence, madam. Three years’ hard labour, it was, and I could not save her, and before I could visit her in the prison she had done away with herself, though it is a wicked mortal sin and the baby would surely perish—’

‘Be quiet!’