Esther‘I didn’t want that horrid woman to tell us any of it,’ Esther said. They were tramping south along Queen Street, away from the harbour. Muddy streets sucked at their boots. Men hauled carts through the sludge, women picked up their skirts and leaped over puddles. A group of young women nearby, clutching baskets of white flowers, giggled and shrieked as one fell to her knees in the dirt.
‘Do you mean Bessie?’ Isobel hopped across a wide sluice of water and reached out to help Esther.
‘She couldn’t wait to betray the girl, could she?’
It was impossible to march, not with the weight of her belly and the malevolence of the streets, but Esther pounded her anger down into her boots. She had sat in the kitchen on Queen Street with an old familiar pain in her chest, the type she used to
