Instinctively, Caleb Crowther’s hand went to his breast, his trembling fingers searching out the tiny and delicate timepiece that had once belonged to Mary Grady, the dead woman whom he was bound to love until the end of his days. All these years since the night he had torn it from the grubby neck of that street-urchin, he had agonized over how she had come by the timepiece, when he himself had seen Thadius Grady give it to his daughter Emma on his deathbed.

Caleb Crowther had argued with himself that the urchin could have stolen it, like the thief she surely was. But then, he reminded himself, how could she have stolen it when Emma Grady had been transported from Her Majesty’s prison to the other side of the world, some years before: at least as long ago as the urchin was aged in years.

Likely as not the old tramp, Sal Tanner, had stolen it. But no, he had decided against that theory, because all the time Emma Grady was incarcerated in jail in England, she had the timepiece with her. His discreet enquiries revealed the truth of that. What then? He had asked himself time and time again: how did Mary Grady’s timepiece get from her daughter, Emma, into the hands of a street urchin? For Caleb Crowther, only two real possibilities remained: Emma had either given it to someone inside the prison or it had been stolen there, when it afterwards changed hands again, and finally fell to Sal Tanner’s thieving paws; or – and for Caleb Crowther this was the explanation that he had come to believe – the street urchin was Emma Grady’s own daughter!

Caleb Crowther had privileged information regarding Emma Grady’s last moments before she was bundled into the prison-waggon, and afterwards on to the convict ship in Liverpool Docks. It was discreetly reported to him that Emma had been delivered of a girl-child, on the cobbles, right outside the prison gates. The officer in charge, believing the child to be stillborn, had ordered Emma into the waggon, leaving the child behind at the mercy of scavenging dogs. It then happened – or so the officer thought (only thought) – that as the waggon sped him and his charges away, he might have heard the thin, painful wail of a newborn. However, he could not be sure, he said. As the years grew longer, his memory had become dimmer, until now he put it all down to a feeling of guilt and an over-active imagination.

Caleb Crowther, on the other hand, had been plagued by the whole episode ever since. After all, in the years when Emma Grady was safely out of the way, and he lived a high, handsome lifestyle at her expense, it disturbed him to think that there was at large a grubby alley urchin who was the legal heiress to everything he had robbed from Emma.

There was something else that crossed Caleb Crowther’s deep and conniving mind, as he struggled to get a good look at the dark-haired girl who was now cajoling him to ‘buy the pretty flowers’. The urchin who had long been a thorn in his side had encountered him on one other occasion, previous to his snatching her on that dark, unfortunate night when he had so foolishly lost her again.