'It's true, Devil fetch her,' said her husband, softly.

Mary's half-brother screamed. 'Milk!' The front of his mother's dress was dark in two places.

William Digot stepped so close Mary could smell the loud tang of coal. 'Who've you been meddling with?'

She found she couldn't speak.

'Who was it, hussy?' He seemed to have come fully awake at last. His fists were bunched like rats. But his wife slid between him and her daughter and wrapped her bony arms around the girl.

For a moment Mary thought it was somehow going to be all right. 'Why?' whispered her mother. Her chin pressed down on the girl's head, almost lovingly. Her sour bodice leaked onto Mary's shoulder. 'Why?'

The girl tried to remember. Her thoughts moved like mud.

'Did he have a knife?' whispered her mother, almost hopeful.

Mary shook her head. She couldn't think of a single lie. 'A ribbon,' she whispered, husky.

The word got lost in the silky folds of her mother's neck. Susan Digot moved back a little, and bent down to hear her. 'A what?'

'A ribbon.' The silence lengthened. 'He had a red ribbon,' Mary added faintly, 'and I had a wish for it.'

That night Mary learned that all she owned in the world fitted into an old shawl. Her mother packed the shifts and petticoats together as if she were mashing a potato; her fists were white. She never looked at her daughter. Her husband had stalked out to an alehouse, and the boy had been sent to bed with the heel of the loaf. As Susan Digot folded and pressed, she kept talking, as if she feared that a moment's silence would weaken her. 'We only get one chance in this life, Mary Saunders, and you've just tossed yours away.'

'But-'

'You couldn't be satisfied with your lot like every other body on this earth, could you? For all my efforts to raise you right, all my long labours, you've sold yourself into the lowest trade there is. For a ribbon!' She spat the word as if it were the name of a sin. 'For a cheap, grubby little scrap of luxury. Is that all you're worth, then? Is that the price you put on yourself?'

'I'm sorry,' sobbed Mary, and at that moment it was true. She would have done anything to reverse time and crawl back into her childhood.

'Answer me this, what did you lack?' asked Susan Digot, twisting the clothes together as if she could squeeze an answer out of them. 'When were you ever starving? What did William and myself and little Billy ever have that we denied you?' Her questions hung on the air, like a fog indoors.

'Nothing.' Mary sounded entirely meek, as if this was the response to a catechism. But the meek didn't inherit the earth, she knew. The meek inherited bugger all.

'We gave you a home, and schooling, didn't we?' asked her mother. 'Didn't we? And the chance of a good living by your needle, if only you hadn't been too proud to take it. We gave you all we could-all we had-but you've ended up in the muck anyway.' She spoke as if her mouth was full of salt, and she tied the last knot so hard that a piece of the shawl came away in her hand.

'I didn't-' But the sentence trailed off, because Mary couldn't remember what she hadn't done, could only think of what she had done or what had been done to her, five months back: the dark, foreign exchange in the alley, in the warmth of a May evening. 'I didn't mean-' But she couldn't remember what she'd meant. Besides, it didn't matter anymore. The facts stood up like boulders in a muddy field.

'You're your father's daughter,' said Susan Digot, in a voice so broken that for a moment Mary heard it as the beginning of mercy. 'I see Cob Saunders in you every time you turn your head.'

Mary crept a little nearer. She looked into her mother's reddened, watery eyes, so unlike her own. 'When he was with us-' she ventured.

Susan Digot's face shut like a door. 'You don't remember. You were too young.'

'But I do,' insisted Mary.

'He was a stinking cur,' said Susan Digot, pronouncing the words like an epitaph. 'To go off rioting on a whim, and leave me a widow and a debtor! I rue the day I ever married him.'

Her daughter's mouth was trembling, but Susan carried on, more rapidly now. 'You're Cob's all right, twisted at the root. The bad seed never dies out. You're headed for damnation in a hurry.' She picked up the small hard bundle in two fingers, and stared down at it as if it were verminous.

'What am I to do?' the girl whispered.

Susan Digot's shoulders shrugged as if wrenched out of their sockets. 'If ribbons are what you like, then try living on ribbons!' she spat. 'Try depending on your fancy menfriends instead of your kin. See how far you'll get on your own! And soon you'll be dragging another soul into this world of pain,' she added, her forehead contracting. 'I only hope it never opens its eyes.'

Mary tried to speak but nothing came out. 'What's-what's going to become of me?'

'Maybe you'll wind up in the workhouse, or maybe you'll swing from a halter at the end of the day,' Susan Digot said formally, holding out the bundle. 'I just thank the Maker I won't be near to see it.'

The girl's throat opened. 'If you let me stay a while, Mother-'

'Don't you use that word.' She shoved the packed shawl into Mary's arms.

'One more chance-'

'You've used up all your chances.' The woman strode over to the door and pulled it open, so the October night was sucked into the house and tainted the air with smoke.

'Mother,' repeated Mary faintly.

But the salt-blue eyes looked right through her. 'You have no mother now.'

In all her fourteen years Mary Saunders had never been out past midnight. Gradually it came to her that the night only began when the decent folk barred their doors. There was a whole other festivity of darkness, for which the twilight was only a rehearsal.

She saw an unconscious man dragged out of a cellar on Dyott Street by his collar, and the wig stolen off his head; he had only patches of hair underneath, the colour of dishwater. On High Holborn a drunken boy tried to snatch her bundle but she ran. 'Poxy jade,' he called her, and other words she didn't know. Later she hid in a doorway on Ivy Lane, twitching with cold, and an old woman crawled by, her bare breasts hanging down like rags. 'The birds has got under my skin,' the creature screeched, over and over. Mary shut her eyes so she wouldn't be seen. A while afterwards, she heard grunting behind the door and bent down to look in the keyhole; two people were face down on the floor together, juddering backwards and forwards, and both of them were men.

There were puzzles she couldn't begin to solve and horrors she could only guess at. Mary tramped on fast enough to keep her feet from going numb and tried to think of any door she could knock on at this hour of an October night. She had no relatives in London. Cob Saunders must have made some friends in the city, Mary supposed, but he'd never brought them home, and she'd have been too young to know their names.

Her feet automatically led her the way she walked every morning, to school. Its narrow windows were black. Mary stared through the iron gates. Could it have been only this afternoon that she'd passed out through them freely, a child in uniform like a hundred others? There was no refuge for her here. The girls she'd known were all gone from London. And if she stood here all night, the teachers wouldn't take her in tomorrow morning, not even if they found her half-frozen on the step; not once they'd made her tell them why she had no home to go to.

She clung to her bundle now as if it were a dying thing. She was lost; she didn't know the names of these streets. At a dark corner she tripped over something, and crashed to her knees; when she put out her hand, it met the icy hide of a dog, half hollowed out. Maggots between her fingers; she screamed, then, and slapped the hard ground to get them off her.

A lantern, swinging by; in its narrow circle Mary saw a watchman with his club and rattle. It occurred to her to cry out for help-but what would she say? She crouched in the shadows and watched him pass. If she was sunk so low that her own mother wouldn't give her shelter, what use was it to appeal to strangers?

On her feet, moving faster. There was the spire of St. Giles again, or was it another church? The moon had fallen out of sight, and Mary was so drunk with weariness she couldn't see where she was putting her feet. Mighty Master, Mighty Master, she chanted in her head, she chanted in her head, Mighty Master, please. Mighty Master, please. But if he was there, he wasn't listening. But if he was there, he wasn't listening.

She climbed down into a ditch at last and slept as soon as her face touched the cold ground.

She woke to pain like a long knife in her guts. Her smock was up around her waist and the night had got in. There was something on her back, a beast, its scalding breath on her neck, and laughter far away like the shreds of a dream. When she twisted her head, the beast's teeth met in her ear. Mary screamed then, belatedly, the way she should have done five months before, in the alley. She found her voice, the depth and fury of it, and what she roared was 'No!'

But the man-because now she was awake she could tell that this was nothing but an ordinary man-he hit her in the jaw, harder than she'd ever been hit in her life, and again, and again. This time wasn't quick or simple like it had been with the peddler. This man didn't want relief; he wanted to crush her entirely. He pulled her head back by the hair and banged her face into the cold ground, then held it there until she couldn't make a sound, couldn't breathe, couldn't do anything but feel his pain inside her.

The laughter, Mary realised soon enough, was coming from the other soldiers, who were leaning on their bayonets, waiting their turn. Afterwards she could never be sure how many of them there'd been.

A lifetime later, Mary woke to fingertips on her eyelids. She cringed, but the hand didn't go away. Light came under her lids like a needle. She twisted, but the probing fingers followed. She bit blindly.

A screech of laughter. 'None of that, you nasty thing!'

Mary was so numb she barely knew she had a body. Only when she began to curl up on her side did she recognise this stiffness as cold. A stranger's silhouette stood above her, blocking the watery sun. Mary tried to sit up, but then the shaking started.

The stranger was sucking her bitten finger. She took off her cloak and dropped it over Mary. 'I'll be wanting that back, mind,' she remarked, as if they were in the middle of a conversation.

The world swayed round Mary as she dragged herself to her knees. Her bundle of clothes was gone. The smock she wore seemed made of mud, stiff and dented as a shield. The spire of St. Giles winked down at her. In the morning light everything was laced with frost: the railings, the cobbles, the nettles that edged the ditch. She could feel the print of dirt like a complicated map across her face. And deeper, under her frozen skin, in her nose, beneath her jaw and ribs and above all between her legs, the pains massed like an army.

'Ain't you a sight.' The stranger grinned down and her scar crinkled in the terrible light.

It was her, the harlot with the red ribbon in her powdered wig, the one who was to blame for making Mary think there could be more to life than work and sleep. At that moment Mary felt rage like a spike running through her.

'Fancy a bite of breakfast?'

Mary started to cry.

The harlot was called Doll Higgins. Mary followed her up stair after stair, half-dragged by the girl's hot hand, to a dark room at the top where Mary lay until the mattress beneath her face was soaked through. There was a pain inside her that moored her to the floor. She tried to say where it was but her voice came out like a rook's caw.

'Been made a woman of, ain't you?' said Doll.

Mary woke and thought the room was on fire. The light was dim, but colour poured down the walls. She blinked until she had convinced herself that these were only clothes, hanging on rusty nail-heads that protruded from the walls. Only gauzes and silks; nothing but jade and ruby, amber and aquamarine.

A warm, yeasty smell beside her. A face on the pillow, softened in sleep and obscured in brown wisps of hair. At first Mary didn't recognise Doll without her silver wig. Finally she managed to open her dry throat and whisper. 'Where am I?'

'My room, of course,' yawned Doll with her eyes shut, 'in Rat's Castle.' Her breath made a cloud on the chilly air.

'But where's that?'

'The Rookery. Where else?'

At first these words made Mary's heart pound. The Rookery was a lawless place where a girl could be robbed, beaten, raped. But then, with a little tremor like mirth, Mary realised that the worst was over and she had nothing left in the world to fear.

Doll sat up on the straw mattress, and stretched her hands above her with a great creaking of muscles. Up close, she had rough edges, dusty hems, but still the loveliest face Mary had ever seen. 'Now then,' she said, all business. 'Where's home?'

Mary shook her head, and felt tears press behind her eyes. She squeezed her lids shut. She'd be damned if she'd cry for the Digots.

'You must have come from somewhere,' Doll pointed out.

Mary let herself imagine the way back to the basement on Charing Cross Road. Ten minutes' walk, and an impossible distance. Today Mary was not the same girl who'd whimpered, Help me, Mother. Help me, Mother. Her soft stuff had been fossilised into something stony during the night in the ditch. Never again, she swore to herself, would she beg so feebly. Never would she let herself be thrown out like trash. Her soft stuff had been fossilised into something stony during the night in the ditch. Never again, she swore to herself, would she beg so feebly. Never would she let herself be thrown out like trash.

'Well?' asked Doll impatiently.

'I can't go back,' she whispered.

Doll shrugged. 'Any friends, then? Any kind gentlemen?'

Mary shook her head vehemently.

'Well you can't stay here, Miss, so don't give it a moment's thought!' said Doll, almost laughing as she clambered out of bed. 'I'm as good a Christian as the next girl, and I don't hold it against you that you near bit my finger to the bone, but I don't go picking up strays.'

Mary stared into the harlot's eyes.

'It's every girl for herself, you understand?'

She nodded as if she understood.

The fact was, though, that Doll Higgins made no immediate move to evict Mary. Not that day, nor the next, nor even the next.

Mary lay limply in her sleeveless shift, wrapped in blankets to ease the shivering. Her bruises were red and blue and purple. Her broken nose looked monstrous in Doll's triangle of mirror. 'A clean wholesome break,' the girl assured her; 'it'll heal with barely a bump.' Mary stared into the mirror and waited to see what her new face would be.

As for her belly-surely what the soldiers had done to her would have disposed of that. She thought it seemed a little flatter already. Besides, there were signs. She knew it was all over for sure when she investigated the pain between her legs on the fifth morning. 'I'm leaking, Doll,' she whispered in the ear of the woman who lay snoozing beside her. 'Strange stuff.'

'Yellowish, greenish?' asked Doll, rolling onto her back with a great heave that sent up a cloud of warm perfume.

A shamed nod.

'That'll be the clap.'

The girl's eyes prickled at the word. She didn't know what it meant exactly, but she'd heard it before.

'Comes to us all, sooner or later,' said Doll merrily. 'Just about every rogue in London's clapped or poxed or both, the dirty hounds! But your luck's in, if it's Madam Clap. Compared to the pox, you know, the clap's a doddle.'

A tear slid down Mary's jaw. She blinked hard.

'You'll live!' said the harlot, passing over her gin bottle.

Mary stared through the brown glass at the oily liquid, then raised it to her lips. It went down her throat like a knife, and at first she choked. After a few more swallows she felt better.

Doll Higgins was always saying brutal things as if they were jokes. But for all her talk about every girl for herself, every girl for herself, she did let Mary stay in her room for a fortnight, sharing her mattress, and brought her the occasional plate of bread and Yarmouth herrings, and the odd basin of icy water with a rag to clean herself as best she could. Mary took everything gratefully. She had nothing of her own; she had lost her grip on the world. she did let Mary stay in her room for a fortnight, sharing her mattress, and brought her the occasional plate of bread and Yarmouth herrings, and the odd basin of icy water with a rag to clean herself as best she could. Mary took everything gratefully. She had nothing of her own; she had lost her grip on the world. A girl that loses her virtue loses everything, A girl that loses her virtue loses everything, repeated her mother like a wasp in her head. repeated her mother like a wasp in her head.

Rat's Castle was the biggest, most ramshackle house in the strange world that was the Rookery. There were four small rooms in the garret, and Doll's was the one with no lock. While Doll was out on the town, Mary lay curled up on the mattress and waited for her to come home. Down below, the third and second floors were occupied by a rabble of porters, chandlers, brandy merchants, and small-time thieves. The best rooms, on the first floor, were rented by bully-men who ran a stable of a dozen Misses each, Doll said. One of the dark ones, Mercy Toft, was a very civil girl, who'd been brought back from India by a Company man and abandoned when he went off to Holland. Down in the basement were thirty Irish, squeezed in with their donkey.

It was a wizened Irishwoman who owned the whole lodging-house and twenty like it; half the parish of St. Giles drained into Mrs. Farrel's red hands. The rooms were always dim. When Mary asked why the windows were filled with balled-up brown paper, Doll explained it was because the old bitch Farrel was too cheap to glass them, 'and I'd rather the dark than the howling winds. Besides, night air is well known to be noxious.'

'So does Mrs. Farrel ... is it to her you answer, then?' asked Mary confusedly.

'What, does she pimp for me, you mean?' Doll's smile was scornful. 'Not at all. All I owe her is the rent. I'm a free agent, I am; I answer to no one.'

The Indian girl, Mercy Toft-who put her head in the door once in a while to say good day to the newcomer-thought Doll Higgins was mad. 'It's a hard life without a madam or bully-man to drum up trade and keep you out of trouble!'