‘Yer too late,’ said this neighbour, Mrs Renfrew, dully, as though such calamities—if such this should prove to be—were to be expected. Her head shrunk back inside.

‘Too late?’ Alice felt her heart fluttering. ‘Please, where is Milli?’ The head reappeared, a weary face, a face so ground down it did not seem capable of words.

‘You’re her sister,’ said Mrs Renfrew at last, as though the thought cost her a great deal. One of the rescued chairs from Milli’s shack was balanced perilously on the ledge on which Mrs Renfrew stood. The makeshift table was wedged in beside it.

Mrs Renfrew frowned as a second thought now occurred to her. ‘She ain’t long gone. Perhaps you will catch her?’

‘I seen her, missus,’ said a child, one of the Renfrew brood, its small head appearing suddenly beside its mother. The child held in his hand a small, hard potato at which he had been gnawing. ‘I seen her,’ the child said, ‘goan up Crown Street.’

Crown Street is just the other side of Riley Street, a busy thoroughfare connecting Cleveland Street to the south and Oxford Street in the north, gateway to prosperity or poverty, depending on which direction the traveller chooses to go. On that June morning Alice Nimrod turned south towards Cleveland Street and Redfern and the crumbling tenements and warehouses and railway works that lay beyond.

She hurried, as much as any servant might hurry in a uniform that reached to her ankles and was made of some unyielding material that resisted movement, and in a pair of lace-up boots that had uneven heels and thin soles. But the notion that this was the moment when she might save her sister drove her on, it filled her heart with both fear and courage so that she could not catch whatever breath the obstinate and constricting uniform might allow her to take. And so Alice ran, this way and that, the length of Crown Street all the way to the junction with Cleveland Street and back up the other side, passing the pub and the brewery stables and weaving between the drays and carts that crowded the street.

When it seemed to Alice that she was too late, and the hope that had sprung up inside her and allowed her to imagine a future where she, alone, might be her sister’s salvation had begun to fade, she saw her.

Milli stood on the corner huddled in her woollen shawl and clutching a single bag of belongings in one hand. She stood quite still, heavy with the child she carried, and the busy and diverse populace of Crown Street surged and swarmed about her.

That she was leaving was as clear as the child she carried in her swollen belly, and for a moment the utter dismay of her sister’s betrayal took the breath from Alice’s lungs and she could not find her voice.

‘Milli?’