Eleanor, some paces behind, would have lost her quarry right there had not a fraught young woman of the lower classes with a baby at her breast and two resistant little boys at her skirts spent such a time boarding that Eleanor had time to catch up and enter the tram by its rear door. Here she took a seat and, because she wore a veil and no other woman on the tram—or, indeed, on any tram—wore such a thing, every pair of eyes at once flew to her. Except those of Miss Trent. She sat a few rows in front and seemed intent only on her own thoughts. Eleanor fixed her gaze on Miss Trent’s vulgar little hat and where they were bound she did not know, but she paid a fare to the conductor that he did not challenge and resigned herself to the ride.

The tram continued on its way down Elizabeth Street for a time before swinging into Oxford Street so that it seemed Miss Trent’s pressing appointment must, after all, be in the pleasant and leafy eastern part of the city. But abruptly the tram turned south down Crown Street and in no time at all they were in Surry Hills, and the elegant four-storey houses and newly built offices became, instead, the mean streets and warehouses of the poorer part of the city, and suddenly Miss Trent’s appointment took on a very different hue altogether.

Just before the tram reached Cleveland Street Miss Trent stood up and, as the tram slowed, stepped off. A moment later Eleanor followed.

This was a place of market stalls, of street sellers pushing their wares before them in barrows, of public houses and places purporting to sell gin and very little else. The window of a butcher’s shop on the corner was broken and glass littered the pavement and was crunched beneath the feet of the passing people. Beside the butcher’s was a tobacconist’s and a small non-conformist church tucked in between a pawnbroker and a dusty antiquarian bookshop, and on the far side of the street an apothecary and a doctor’s rooms, all of which, if not exactly prosperous, did at least suggest an air of ordinary mercantile respectability amid the poverty. The women who inhabited this part of the city wore shapeless, grime-encrusted garments and clutched parcels of shopping or small children or wares for sale, and the men wore boots that let in the daylight. They slouched against walls and on corners and regarded Eleanor in a way that made it clear she was the interloper. A smell hung over the place of three-day-old fish and discarded oyster shells, of cheap gin and cheaper tobacco, of straw and sweating horses and manure.