‘Thank you, Hannah. Please tell Cook that it all looks delicious.’

‘Yes, Mrs Feilden.’ Hannah curbed the instinct to curtsey and went back downstairs.

‘Well tha can kiss goodbye to thy washhouse,’ said Titus as he hung his cap and jacket behind the door.

‘Tha’s late. I were worried,’ said Jennet. ‘What happened? It sounds like there’s trouble.’

‘Aye, there is that. Bowring were beaten and folks have no more sense than to chuck rocks through the windows of all the pubs and beerhouses.’

‘At least tha stayed out of it,’ said Jennet. She’d been twitching at the curtains for the last hour, watching for him and wishing that he’d come home. The night he’d been arrested was still fresh in her mind, even now, and she’d been terrified that he’d got caught up in the rioting again. ‘Sit down,’ she told him. ‘I’ve kept thy tea warm.’ She fetched the dish of potato pie from the little oven at the side of the range, holding it in a towel, and put it down on the table. It looked a bit dried up, but it was his own fault for not coming straight back.

‘I never thought Turner’d get in,’ he told her. ‘It goes to show how easily men can be swayed.’

‘If they were swayed by owt it were the amount of free drink he handed out,’ said Jennet, thinking that Titus was right: Mr Turner would have no interest in her demands for washing facilities for the poor.

‘That were a part of it,’ said Titus as he blew on his food to cool it before putting it into his mouth. ‘But Turner has influence over too many tradespeople and they weren’t going to vote openly for Bowring in case he took his custom elsewhere. There’ll never be a fair ballot until it’s done in secret so men can vote with their consciences without risking their livelihoods.’

‘Dost tha think that’ll ever come about?’ she asked. ‘Folk are doin’ themselves no favours by rioting. Gentry’ll use it against ’em when they ask for a vote. They’ll tell ’em they’re not fit to have it.’

‘Aye. But gentry need to understand that folk are unhappy and they won’t just sit back and say nowt like they used to. We have to keep fighting,’ he said.

Jennet didn’t reply. She’d been hoping that once this election was over Titus would lose interest in politics, but it seemed that he wasn’t prepared to let it drop. He was like a dog with an old bone. Not that he didn’t have a point, she admitted, but she just wished he’d leave it to others now and pay more heed to her and the children.

‘This result’s a travesty,’ he told her. ‘Bowring should have got in. He would have made sure things were different around here.’

Jennet took the pots into the back kitchen to wash them up. She was bitterly disappointed about the washhouse. It would have made such a difference to so many families, but laundry wasn’t a man’s business and promises of boilers and mangles would never have influenced their votes. It was a pity no one was campaigning to give a vote to women as well. Now there was an idea, she thought as she scrubbed the last stubborn bits of baked potato from her earthenware dish. And why not? Plenty of women were working in the mills now, so why shouldn’t they have their say as well?