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worth, often found that the market had dried up on them. Gone were the days when cornering the market in pans or shovels could make the seller’s fortune quicker than a bonanza strike. Nowadays the man who cornered the market in cast-iron stoves was more likely to have to sell below cost to cover his shipping costs, or in the more extreme cases, see his undertaking go bust and his iron stoves, chamber pots or kegs of nails dumped into the mud pits or dustholes of the big towns to become the foundations of some of the major thoroughfares.
    With a sigh of relief she lowered herself on to an upturned barrel on the dusty sidewalk and opened the bag, listening to the auctioneer while she and the child finished the food. After the boots, the auctioneer began to sell off lamps and candles, before moving on to a stock of old-fashioned clothes, male and female, that some shipper back east had had the happy thought of unloading on the ignorant westerners. Eagerly, Alicia fished out the purse she had concealed in the skirts of her old black dress. There were no ladies out on the streets that dusty afternoon and she was able to buy a dove grey silk dress with the old style leg o’mutton sleeves and rather over-ornate trimmings, two bonnets and a couple of pretty shawls and a petticoat for the expenditure of only one of the quarter eagles she had had from the man at Tresco. The rest, over and above the fare to Sacramento, she was determined to send back.
    Nothing else in Sacramento proved as good a bargain as the clothes, however. After trailing around the town for a couple of hours, she was forced to take a room in a far from salubrious building behind the Embarcadero warehouses. All the decent lodging houses were far beyond her means until she could get work and earn. She was forced to concede the justice of the minister’s remarks.
    She was no more successful with her attempts to find work. As she emerged from the third milliner’s to turn her down, she suddenly caught sight of herself in the plate glass window. She stopped in her tracks and passed her hand wearily across her brow.
    ‘What is it, ‘Lisha?’ asked the child tiredly.
    ‘Good God!’ she said under her breath. It was hardly surprising no one would take her on. She had barely recognised her own reflection. This shabby, stooped figure was not Alicia Langdon! Wearily she abandoned the search.
    The first night in Sacramento, she was too tired to do more than wash and fall into bed, but her landlady, the Widow Grey, made up in other respects for her lack of home comforts: she knew just what work there was available in the Golden City and promised to give Alicia the names of several stores that were short-handed.
    She woke next day feeling well rested. It was many weeks since she had slept a night through, despite all Kai’s concoctions. It had taken weeks to get the drugs out of her system, weeks when she had been so unnerved by the silence of the wide open spaces after the raucousness of the claustrophobic prison cell that she had turned to drink for comfort, stolen and lied to Kai to get her hands on a bottle. But now she was over the worst and as each day passed, she felt a little more able to face the world.
    Remembering the shock of that reflection, she took the time to wash herself from head to foot and clean the thick dust out of her hair. She dried it and brushed it till it shone. She put on her spare black skirt and the brighter of the acquired shawls and, with one of the gay new bonnets swinging by the ribbons from her fingers, looked at herself gravely in the fly-blown mirror.
    She drew herself up and straightened her shoulders. It was as if she had peeled off the old layers acquired in prison and drawn on a new personality. Behind her Tamsin bounced on the bed.
    ‘Now you looks like my Lisha again!’ she exclaimed excitedly.
    Alicia hugged the child, but when she turned away again her face was grim. If only she felt like the old Alicia, she thought. But