It was true, the baker had not done such a thing before, but today, if anyone cared to look in the pantry, they would see that two loaves were missing. A more thorough search of the house would find the missing two loaves carefully stowed away beneath Alice’s bed, but Alice was reasonably certain Mrs Flynn would not undertake such a search. Would not do anything, in fact, that was of the slightest deviation from her regular routine. Mrs Flynn was a thin, sharp-edged woman of late middle years and very rigid rules who went about her work with a furious look in her eye as though someone had once done her an injustice and she was not about to forget it. But she was not an unkind woman, and she was fair.

‘I am only here,’ she had announced darkly a week after Alice’s arrival in the house, ‘on account of my grandmother, a Scot, a wee lass from the Highlands, who poisoned her husband on their wedding night.’

Mrs Flynn had said this as she prepared a fowl for a luncheon and Alice, fourteen years old and still finding her way, had silently scraped mud off the potatoes.

‘They did not hang her, on account of they needed women in the new colony. So they put her on a convict ship, and on that there convict ship she was ravished by a dirty marine whose throat she cut and whose blood-soaked corpse she tipped over the side of the ship.’

It was a grim tale, but Alice had been unmoved. Anyone could say their grandmother poisoned her husband, couldn’t they? Anyone could say their grandmother cut a man’s throat and tossed him overboard. Though why you would make it up, she could not say. Alice had got on with scraping the potatoes. There had been no ending to the story, and whether Mrs Flynn’s grandmother had flourished or perished was unknown, though her family lived on—for here was Mrs Flynn, her granddaughter—and that was something, Alice supposed.

Mrs Flynn put down her rolling pin and shook her head.

‘That daft lad is not likely to realise his mistake and return with them missing loaves.’

No, he was not likely to do that.

‘There is nothing for it but you will have to go out and fetch them missing loaves yourself,’ she announced as though the idea were hers.

‘I shall leave at once,’ said Alice. ‘And I shall be as quick as ever I can.’

CHAPTER SIX: A DEAD CLERK

CHAPTER SIX

A DEAD CLERK

Alasdair Dunlevy’s mother had been a Sussman, a fact that had caused him some disquiet in the early years of his political life, though the notoriety that accompanied this name had diminished as the century drew to its close. And in a penal colony notoriety was rarely a bad thing. Indeed, it was rarely a thing at all.