SNOW HAD BEEN FALLING ALL DAY, and Helen was glad of the open doors at Grace Church, where she could sit for a while when she became too cold where she was begging under the awnings further along Broadway. The pickings were slim, passers-by bundled up against the cold, rushing to get home to their warm fires. Helen would give it half an hour, no longer, and then she would head for Union Park where she knew a watchman who would let her huddle by his brazier for warmth, and share his dinner with her too, taking his payment in kind.

A team of horses struggled past in the slush, pulling an omnibus, and Helen watched as a group of passengers dismounted further up the street. Among those who walked her way was a little girl of perhaps six or seven, dressed in a velvet cloak the colour of a sugar plum, with fluffy white fur around her hood and throat. She had neat leather boots buttoned on her feet and her hands were thrust deep inside a furry muff. As Helen watched, she stopped and stared upwards into the sky.

Helen looked up, herself, to see snowflakes falling again, thick and soft. She looked at the little girl again, just in time to see her put out her tongue and catch a flake. The child laughed at her cleverness, looking round to see whether anyone had seen, and caught Helen’s eye. Helen waved and she grinned, twirling round as she walked towards her.

‘My name’s Olive,’ she said, without preamble.

‘Hello, Olive,’ said Helen. ‘It’s nice to meet you. But where are your parents?’

‘Mama is dead,’ the child said, ‘and Papa is on his deathbed. Do you have any children?’

‘I did,’ Helen said. ‘Two little girls, although they aren’t little anymore. And I am sorry to hear about your parents. What ails your Papa?’

‘No one knows,’ the child said, with a weary puff of her cheeks she must have seen an adult do. The effect was comical, even if the words were sad. ‘Mama sickened suddenly, and no one knows why. Papa was strong and vigorous, but then he began to sicken too, and now the doctors say he is like to die, but they are baffled why and cannot explain it.’

‘You’re not on your own, though, are you?’ Helen asked. ‘It’ll be dark in half an hour.’

The child laughed. ‘No, I’m with Peggy. Peggy is my nursemaid. She says Papa will leave the house to me, and in his will he has said she can care for me there till I am grown. I’ll always be safe with Peggy, that’s what Peggy says.’

‘Where is Peggy, then?’ Helen asked.

The little girl’s eyes sparkled. ‘Peggy has a gentleman,’ she whispered, ‘but we mustn’t tell!’ She pointed over Helen’s shoulder and Helen turned to see a woman in a dark cloak break away from an embrace. The woman looked over towards them, and Helen’s heart thudded in her breast, so hard she might believe it had stopped forever. She stood there, frozen, a mouse trapped in the gaze of a snake.

She would know them anywhere.

‘Peggy’ is Margaret Laird. Margaret Logue. And the man is William Hare.

Helen turns and runs, slipping and sliding in the slush. She doesn’t see the omnibus until it is too late. The last thing she knows are the great hooves of the horses, Clydesdales like the long-ago plough-teams of Redding, and it seems to her she is there again, tumbling back through the years to a place before pain or fear or regret, where there is only the hush of the snow and the iron of the sky.