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Uncommonly tricky.’
    ‘I don’t say it’s not. But we must take our chances. What have we to lose? If nothing else, it will be a holiday for Sue.’
    John laughed. ‘A holiday,’ he said, ‘it will be. A fucking long one, if you get caught.’
    I bit my lip. He was right. But it wasn’t so much the risk that troubled me. You cannot be a thief and always troubling over hazards, you should go mad. It was only that, I was not sure I wanted any kind of holiday. I was not sure I cared for it away from the Borough. I had once gone with Mrs Sucksby to visit her cousin in Bromley; I had come home with hives. I remembered the country as quiet and queer, and the people in it either simpletons or gipsies.
    How would I like living with a simpleton girl? She would not be like Dainty, who was only slightly touched and only sometimes violent. She might be really mad. She might try and throttle me; and there would be no-one about, for miles and miles, to hear me calling. Gipsies would be no use, they were all for themselves. Everyone knows a gipsy would not cross the street to spit on you, if you were on fire.
    I said, ‘This girl—what’s she like? You said she’s queer in her head.’
    ‘Not queer,’ said Gentleman. ‘Only what I should call fey. She’s an innocent, a natural. She has been kept from the world. She’s an orphan, like you are; but where you had Mrs Sucksby to sharpen you up, she had—no-one.’
    Dainty looked at him then. Her mother had been a drunkard, and got drowned in the river. Her father had used to beat her. He beat her sister till she died. She said, in a whisper:
    ‘Ain’t it terribly wicked, Gentleman, what you mean to do?’
    I don’t believe any of us had thought it, before that moment. Now Dainty said it, and I gazed about me, and nobody would catch my eye.
    Then Gentleman laughed.
    ‘Wicked?’ he said. ‘Why, bless you, Dainty, of course it’s wicked! But it’s wicked to the tune of fifteen thousand pounds—and oh! but that’s a sweet tune, hum it how you will. Then again, do you suppose that when that money was first got, it was got honestly? Don’t think it! Money never is. It is got, by families like hers, from the backs of the poor—twenty backs broken for every shilling made. You have heard, have you, of Robin Hood?’
    ‘Have I!’ she said.
    ‘Well, Sue and I shall be like him: taking gold from the rich and passing it back to the people it was got from.’
    John curled his lip. ‘You ponce,’ he said. ‘Robin Hood was a hero, a man of wax. Pass the money to the people? What people are yours! You want to rob a lady, go and rob your own mother.’
    ‘My mother?’ answered Gentleman, colouring up. ‘What’s my mother to do with anything? Hang my mother!’ Then he caught Mrs Sucksby’s eye, and turned to me. ‘Oh, Sue,’ he said. ‘I do beg your pardon.’
    ‘It’s all right,’ I said quickly. And I gazed at the table, and again everyone grew quiet. Perhaps they were all thinking, as they did on hanging days, ‘Ain’t she brave?’ I hoped they were. Then again, I hoped they weren’t: for, as I have said, I never was brave, but had got away with people supposing I was, for seventeen years. Now here was Gentleman, needing a bold girl and coming—forty miles, he had said, in all that cold and slippery weather—to me.
    I raised my eyes to his.
    ‘Two thousand pounds, Sue,’ he said quietly.
    ‘That’ll shine very bright, all right,’ said Mr Ibbs.
    ‘And all them frocks and jewels!’ said Dainty. ‘Oh, Sue! Shouldn’t you look handsome, in them!’
    ‘You should look like a lady,’ said Mrs Sucksby; and I heard her, and caught her gaze, and knew she was looking at me—as she had, so many times before—and was seeing, behind my face, my mother’s. Your fortune’s still to be made. —I could almost hear her saying it. Your fortune’s still to be made; and ours, Sue, along with it . . .
    And after all, she had been right. Here was my fortune,