The riddle of the destruction of the dressing table was a mystery until Mo asked if she might get someone to mend it, and her father had agreed. ‘Though why Cyril was chopping it up is beyond me,’ he admitted frankly. ‘Was there anything of value in the locked drawer, when the carpenter got it open?’

‘No, nothing,’ his daughter assured him. ‘Just a box full of stage jewellery. Dad, did you know Mrs Rathbone was quite a well-known music hall artiste when she was young? The carpenter said his mam had been her dresser at one time, Mrs Rathbone’s I mean, only she was called Miss Tilly, Songbird of the North, then. He said that when you’re on the stage real jewellery looks insig – insigni . . .’

‘Insignificant,’ her father supplied. ‘Cyril must have believed the jewels to be real. He’s quite stupid enough to go stealing something worthless.’

Glenys found it difficult even to pretend sorrow at the old woman’s fate, for she remembered the two little waifs, skinny as sticks, who had come to her room on that dark December night. She had thought them delightful children, and had she not intervened they might never have escaped the Huxtables’ brutal rule. Glenys sighed, but decided that the Huxtables had got what was coming to them; and anyway, she had more important things to think about.

So now, at the end of September on the actual eve of her wedding, Glenys was trying to be calm and sensible. She had spent the afternoon scrubbing the cottage and rearranging the furniture for the hundredth time. She had made up the bed with lavender-scented sheets from Nain’s linen press and she had helped put the finishing touches to the wedding breakfast which would be held, after the church ceremony, at Weathercock Farm. She smiled across the kitchen at her husband-to-be, who was placidly darning socks. Glenys had giggled but Sam had assured her that seamen were past masters at many of the tasks she had once thought to be women’s work.

Sam looked up from his task and smiled lovingly at her. ‘These past few weeks haven’t been as hard for you as they have for me,’ he observed. ‘It’s been like sitting at a table with a wonderful meal spread out before one, unable to take so much as a mouthful. Tomorrow . . .’

Mo had been sitting on the floor stitching away at the rag rug she was making as a wedding present for Glenys. It was almost finished, only needing half an hour’s work to complete, but as she dug her needle into the braiding she raised a frowning face to her father’s. ‘I don’t get it,’ she said plaintively. ‘It isn’t as if we mean to eat Auntie Glenys tomorrow, so what do you mean?’

Glenys intervened quickly. ‘It’s what we call a figure of speech,’ she explained. ‘We wanted to get married months and months ago, but I didn’t want an army wedding and neither did Sam, so I stayed with my section until they decided to demob me . . .’