Lord Dandish spoke with a vindictive spitefulness and, listening with a kind of sick horror, Thalia realised that the stories about his meanness and his avarice were all too true.

Mrs. Burton had always said that he was the one person among her customers whom she dreaded seeing in the shop, knowing that he would beat her down to the very last penny and then deduct his inevitable ten per cent from the bill.

‘A thousand pounds!’

For her father to owe so much to a man like Lord Dandish was as terrifying as being faced with the National Debt or a bill for the entertainment at Carlton House.

Everything that could be sold had gone from The Manor in the country and, living only on what she earned, Thalia thought that she would find it impossible to produce a thousand pennies, let alone the same number of sovereigns.

Her father would receive no mercy from Lord Dandish.

At the same time he had been seen in America. He was well and, she reflected, perhaps making plans to return home now that the three years of his exile were over.

She felt as if there was a conflict within her that tore her in pieces, gladness that her mother’s fears that her father was dead were wrong and horror at the idea that once he set foot on English soil, he would be arrested and taken to the Fleet Prison.

Lady Wentmore was not the only person who had heard of the terrors of the prison where men who could not pay their bills languished amongst the criminals, pickpockets and prostitutes for years on end.

How could she contemplate her father being in such a place?

And yet she knew that Lord Dandish would make good his threat and, what was more, enjoy humiliating a man who had not only lost to him at cards but, in his opinion, had deliberately defrauded him.

It was difficult for the moment, to realise the full horror of what she had just heard, but of one thing she was quite certain, that, if as Lord Dandish intended her father was arrested the moment he arrived, it would kill her mother.

She would not be able to stand the shock or the humiliation after what she had suffered already.

‘I must do something! I must do something immediately!’ Thalia thought frantically.

Vaguely, as if from the end of a very long tunnel, she heard Lady Wentmore say,

“I will take the blue bonnet. I think I look better in that than in any of the others. Do you not agree, Arthur?”

“Yes, the blue suits you admirably, my dear.”

“And it was very sweet of you to say you would give it to me as a present,” Lady Wentmore said. “Thank you very much.”