And here they were, just as he had foreseen: unearthly figures emerging from the depths of the great pit like ghouls in a cemetery. Or like rats, circling and sniffing the air, and he took a tight grip of his whip and with his free hand he reached behind him for the cosh he carried for emergencies. This felt like it was about to become an emergency. He could see their pale faces, the light glinting in their ghoul eyes.

Perhaps the lady made some movement, for they switched their attention away from him and the horse and towards her. One made a lunge at the door and almost got it open. He heard her cry out and he struck the horse and shouted, ‘Giddup! Giddup now!’ and the horse started up, terrified, and they were gone at a trot. The driver did not slow until they had reached the lights of Crown Street.

He thought this would have frightened the lady but all she said was, ‘Take me to the asylum.’

She meant the Benevolent Asylum at the junction of Pitt and George and Devonshire streets, where the old tollgate had once stood and where the women—since as far back as he could remember and far beyond that, for the building was convict-built, he was sure—went for their lying-in, those that had no bed of their own and often no husband either. He knew the place, all the cabbies did, though most of the women who went there went on foot.

He reached the place and waited in the rain as she went inside. He crouched over his reins, pulling the collar of his coat up higher, but his coat was soaked right through and the rain ran down his neck and into his ears and filled his boots, and he thought with a kind of despair that he would die right here on this cab this very evening and that in Heaven, if there was a Heaven, it would be raining there too.

Presently the lady came out and he saw from the way she held her head she had not found what she sought.

‘Home, lady?’ he called out, because all that mattered now was getting to his own home, unharnessing the horse and getting himself into bed as quickly as possible, with a warm mug of milk and a nip of rum to help him on his way.