‘I have to be growed up, don’t I, Mammy… ’cause I’m older than Tom and Peggy, aren’t I, eh?’

Getting to her feet, Molly nodded, and actually laughed aloud. What a little madam you are, my Sal, she thought proudly. But then, as they rounded the corner of Dock Street, Molly’s ‘pride’ turned to shame. What would her daughter say when she discovered that her mammy meant to take her away from the only home she had ever known – miserable though it was – and that they had no other place to go? Molly had been heart-stricken at the loss of her precious clasp; now she was more frantic at the daunting future that lay ahead. Here she was, with only a few shillings to her name, three children – one of them a cripple – and being hounded by a Justice and his spies, who all wanted her blood. Hounded on to the streets; forced to find a safer place.

Molly’s thoughts came back to Nelly, and for a moment she was saddened. But then her sadness quickly turned to anger. That woman had almost duped her. Almost! But Molly thought she had her measure now all right! No wonder she was able to persuade the authorities to release a pickpocket into her custody. Why! She probably told them that she was acting on Justice Crowther’s instructions. Right from the start it must have been a devious plan. Nelly had been playing with her all along; probably getting little Sal’s confidence too, so that she could lay claim to her for the Tanners. Molly could not fathom out why the Justice was not summoned to move in on her before today. Perhaps he, like his niece, had been out of the country, or possibly he had been trying to discover where she lived, so they could take the whole family into custody. But here Molly had taken precautions because, being made by nature and circumstance a suspicious person, she had cleverly varied her path home, dodging this way and that, in case she was being followed.

When the front door of her small, dilapidated house was in sight, Molly breathed a sigh of relief and gave thanks to whoever had watched over them that day. She and her family were still free, in spite of the woman called Nelly. With a sense of disgust, Molly imagined the scene that had taken place in the Tanner household when the Justice had come to collect his quarry, only to find it had flown. The thought of his fury gave her a small rush of satisfaction.

As Molly went into Tilly Watson’s home to collect the children, her feeling of satisfaction at having outwitted both Nelly and the Justice might have turned to regret if only she had been aware of what had actually taken place between Nelly and Caleb Crowther that morning.

Caleb Crowther was beside himself! Having heard nothing all these weeks, except notification that the court case was postponed he saw the delay as being another trick by Emma Tanner to unnerve him. When he could stand it no longer, and against the advice of his solicitor, he had gone to the house on Park Street with the intention of thrashing the whole thing out once and for all. How infuriated he had been to be told not only that Emma Tanner had gone blithely off for an indefinite period. On top of which the common and repulsive creature she had left behind had actually ordered him from the premises. Him! A distinguished Justice of the Peace, albeit retired. He would not have budged one inch were it not for the awful uproar she was making, and the threat he knew she would not hesitate to carry out – ‘to shout and yell blue murder and fetch the bleeding authorities down on your head!’