Much later, when the crowds at the Domain had begun to disperse and the platforms on which the speakers stood had sunk into the mud and were beginning to be dismantled, Mrs Dunlevy came into the kitchen. This, like her husband’s bedroom and the maid’s attic room, was a space into which she rarely ventured, but it seemed that all such demarcations within the house had broken down.

She stood for a time in the doorway and when Mrs Flynn, who was engaged in a tricky manoeuvre with a leg of lamb and the stove door, realised she was there she almost dropped the lamb and the tray and burned herself.

‘Lord, missus, you gave me a start!’ she exclaimed with a jollity she did not feel, for Alice was gone and the poor wee baby too, and here was Mrs Dunlevy in the kitchen doorway and it was all very unsettling. And then she said, ‘Oh, Mrs Dunlevy, are you sick? You do not look at all well,’ though it was not something she ought to have said to the mistress of the house. But the mistress did look unwell, all grey and fainting, as she described it later to Mr Flynn. ‘Though I oughtened to have said so,’ she had added.

And what Mrs Dunlevy had asked her was, did she know where Alice might have gone to?

Just as though Alice had upped and left of her own volition—and perhaps she had, for now Mrs Flynn was no longer sure of anything.

‘And so I told her, Surry Hills, Mrs Dunlevy. That is what I said,’ she reported to Mr Flynn later that evening, ‘and then she was gone. What do you make of that?’

But Mr Flynn, who worked on the wharves and was enjoying the last few hours of his Sunday off, did not make anything of it.

Eleanor left the kitchen and went up the stairs to her room and softly closed the door. The room was quiet, dark. She made no attempt to turn on a light or to light a candle.

Alice was gone and she was responsible for the girl’s sudden departure. This was not in dispute. Her accusation of the child’s paternity, her utter belief that the girl had colluded in a sordid affair with her husband, these now appeared … less certain. It was possible—likely, even—that the child belonged to the girl’s sister. And that this wretched female was indeed now deceased.

But still, it made no sense to Eleanor how the child had ended up here, in the upstairs attic room.