Molly shrugged her shoulders, collected her order and began weaving her way in and out of the tables. From the corner of her eye she saw the man that Nell Casey referred to. He was obviously a seaman, young, bold-looking, and just as the other girl had described, he was deliberately watching Molly, following her every move with sly, calculating eyes.

Molly was suddenly gripped with fear. The way he was staring after her was not the usual flirtatious way in which a man might hanker after a woman. His manner was too furtive, too curious. Beneath those sly, narrowed eyes, Molly felt her heart shrink inside her. Who was he? Why did he seem so interested in her? And what devious game was he up to?

‘Hey! Watch what you’re doing, me beauty.’ The laughing, surprised face peered up at Molly as she disentangled her feet from the chair leg that had protruded across her path and nearly brought her tumbling to the man’s lap. As it was, the bowl of soup on her tray slid dangerously to the edge and would have spilled over the protester’s ginger curls, if he had not been quick enough to steady Molly by the arm. ‘Are ye trying to ruin me love life, or what?’ he chortled, much to the delight of every manjack there. ‘By God… there’s no telling what dreadful damage a bowl o’ hot soup can do to a fella’s pride.’ When Molly mumbled her apologies and hurried away, he huddled towards the group of men close by and began whispering. Molly heard their lewd laughter echo across the café, and her lovely face burned with shame.

It was some time before Molly had time to glance again towards where the seaman had been sitting. When she did look across, it was to see his seat empty. He was gone, and she should have felt relieved. Somehow, she did not. In fact, his abrupt disappearance unnerved her almost as much as the knowledge that he had been watching her so intensely.

Molly tried to console herself with the knowledge that she had never seen him before and, so far as she could recall, he had never seen her. Besides which, her enemies were not here in Liverpool, but some miles away in Blackburn town. ‘You’re being foolish,’ she told herself, ‘letting your fear and imagination run riot.’ All the same, she could not shake off that insistent little warning voice – the same voice that told her how one waterway led to another, and how waterways carried vessels, vessels carried men, and men carried all manner of talk. How was she to tell whether the Justice had not put spies out after her?… Or offered a substantial reward? It was the kind of thing such men might stoop to. So the whisper might have been put out, and that whisper carried far and wide. Molly’s terrible fear was heightened. Dear God, was there no safe hiding hole?

From his place behind the counter, Bill Craig also watched Molly. He saw how suddenly nervous she was, and how her anxious dark eyes kept flitting towards the spot where the young seaman had been. Mistaking Molly’s anxiety for interest, his own appetite was teased. He thought she looked especially bewitching tonight, with that blush on her face and those exquisite black eyes so filled with secrecy. Her short coal-black hair was thick and incredibly rich… the kind a man was tempted to run his hands over. Unashamedly, he feasted his eyes on Molly’s trim little figure, thinking how it should be dressed in silks and furs, instead of a worn-out dress of brown calico that covered her ankles and stole the colour from her face. Even the apron she wore was ill-fitting – having belonged to his own rather too ample wife. But when Molly leaned forward to serve at table, the glimpse of her slim and shapely ankles more than compensated for the ungainly manner of her dress. Even in the calico smock and the small, worn boots, he thought Molly to be the loveliest creature he had ever set eyes on.