She could not think where it had come from, certainly not direct from either of her parents, and she took no notice when she overheard her Auntie Irene saying something one day about "tinker hair" and giving that nasty laugh of hers. From the start her mother would not let her hair be cut, even though she always said she took after her Da's side of the family, the fair-haired and blue-eyed Wards, and Ma had no time for "that crowd," as she always called them, when Da was not around to hear her. To amuse themselves her brothers pulled her hair, grabbing long, thick ropes of it and wrapping them around their fists and yanking on them to make her squeal. That was preferable, though, to the way her father would smooth his hand down the length of it, pressing his fingers through it and caressing the bones of her back. She wore emerald green for preference, knowing even as a child that this was the shade that best suited her coloring and set it off. Red hair like that and brilliant blue eyes, or a bluey sort of violet, more like, that was unusual, certainly, even among the Wards. Everyone admired her skin, too; it was translucent, like that stone, alabaster she thought it was called, so you felt you could see down into it, into its creamy depths.

Though she was perfectly well aware how lovely she was, she had never been standoffish. She knew, of course, that she was too good for the Flats, and had only bided her time there until she could get out and start her real life. The Flats… They must have been new once, but she could not imagine it. What joker in the City Corporation had thought to give them the name of Mansions? The walls and floors were thin as cardboard-you could hear the people upstairs and even next door going to the lavatory-and there were always prams and broken-down bicycles in the bare hallways, where the little kids ran around like wild things and stray cats roamed and courting couples fumbled at each other in dark corners. There were no controls of any kind-who would have enforced them, even if there had been?-and the tenants did anything they wanted.