The night lengthened. It was as unending as such nights must be. Alice walked and hour followed hour, unmarked and forgotten as soon as it was past, for each was the same as the last. She walked and she clutched the baby. They seemed to have become one, she and the baby, and she would not abandon it now even if it meant they both must perish. But she had thought this vaguely, in an abstract way, while she was lying on the cot in the asylum. The reality of walking the dark streets in the rain with a baby was quite different. She feared for her resolve.

‘Zat Miss Nimrod? Thought it was.’

A face emerged out of the night so suddenly and at such close quarters Alice started backwards. The cold and the wet and the distress of her situation had dulled her thoughts, and for a time she could not place the face or the words it spoke. And when her numbed thoughts assembled themselves and she saw that it was Mr Renfrew, clothed in the remnants of a suit that had once belonged to someone else and with the water cascading from his hat, she was confused. The only other time they had met he had struck his wife and demanded money from her.

She stared at him, dumbly, helplessly.

‘Look like you could use some help,’ he said, as though a young woman clutching a baby in obvious distress on a dark night was the natural state of things, and in the world the Renfrew’s inhabited no doubt it was. But kindness came in all packages, the Bible taught you that—though if you read a few pages further on the Bible told you something else again, or that was Alice’s recollection of it.

Mr Renfrew had frightened her a little the only other time they had met, but Alice had lost too much to remember her fear. He was a man with a wife and a clutch of children whom he had not entirely abandoned, which put him above most men. He was a little drunk, she saw. A glistening in his eyes, a slight unsteadiness to his step, suggested this was so. And the fumes of some sly grog consumed illicitly, yes, she could smell this now. Some men were better after a drink or two, it softened their raw edges, and Mr Renfrew was, perhaps, one of these. It hardly mattered, she realised.

It took all her strength not to fall at his feet.

‘Come on home with me, lass,’ said Mr Renfrew, patting her arm. ‘My missus will take care of you. You are among friends now.’

And he gathered her up and led her to salvation, of a kind.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR: BITTER

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

BITTER