With my room paid for, Clarke Street was the safest place I could be. I was glad to be off the roads. I didn’t want to run into anyone I knew, least of all a Blackbird. The best thing would be to keep myself to myself until I could get away again. I lay down in my bed for the night, swatting at the fleas that fed on me and wondering about the other people who had rested their bodies on this mattress. The sheets showed signs of stains, something that had never bothered me before, but now I knew what life was like outside St Giles, it was harder to come back here.

How had she managed, my mother? She’d lived in St James’s, but as a slave, a servant, so she wouldn’t have known what it felt like to sleep in a room like the beautiful one I shared with Vincent. Or did she? Had she been taken to a room like that when I was conceived, lighted candles and promises made, or had she been accosted while going about her duties, forced into a stairway, defiled and then made to carry on with her chores – cleaning, making up fires, serving tea – while all the time my father’s seed slickened the inside of her thighs? She’d never said who he was – the master of the house or his son, maybe even a guest – but one thing she’d always told me was never to be a maid. When she’d left me here in St Giles, she’d been clear on that. My conversation with Lucien had brought it all back.

We’d followed many twists and turns to find Mrs Bradley’s house. When my mother had knocked, it took a while for her friend to answer but when she pulled back the door and saw us, she clasped my mother into a long embrace and the two of them clung to one another.

‘You left them, Beulah, well done,’ I heard her say.

She ushered us into the house and my first impression was that it was small and cramped, nothing like the home I’d known until now. It smelt strongly of starch and the air was damp and heavy with drying clothes. We followed Mrs Bradley down the passage into the main room and she cleared a pile of laundry from an old easy chair so my mother could sit down.

‘Come over here, child, let me see you,’ Mrs Bradley said, but I held on tightly to my mother’s hand and wouldn’t go to her.

‘She’s like you, Beulah. No face for serving, far too pretty. How old now?’

‘Seven, just a year younger than your boy.’

‘His, too?’ Mrs Bradley asked, but my mother acted like she hadn’t heard and Mrs Bradley gave a rueful smile.

‘Tell me how you got away?’