Titus was going around filling up everyone’s cups with ale. He’d found the money from somewhere to buy a barrel and James had helped him to roll it down the street the day before. Everyone was hugging her, congratulating her and kissing her cheeks.

After a while James came to find her. ‘Shall we go home?’ he asked. ‘Shall we just slip away whilst no one’s looking?’

Hannah nodded. It seemed a good idea. The only person she wanted to be with was him. They went out of the door unnoticed and walked across town together. As they turned the corner into Thunder Alley, James took the key to the schoolhouse from his pocket. He went ahead of her to unlock the door; then he lifted her in his arms and carried her over the threshold.

‘We don’t want any bad luck!’ He laughed. ‘So we’d better do things right.’

He set her down on the floor and Hannah glanced about as he got the fire going. New curtains, she thought, cushions, a nice tablecloth. She’d get the stuff from the market and sew and stitch until she made this bare room into a home. And then, who knew? Clothes for a baby maybe?

She watched his broad shoulders as he coaxed up a blaze and then went to stand beside him as they both warmed their hands.

‘Welcome home, Mrs Hindle,’ he said.

Dear Reader,

I hope that you enjoyed reading about Hannah and Mary in A Lancashire Lass now that they are a few years older than when we left them in The Cotton Spinner. In the previous book they managed to escape the smoke and grime of the mill town when they went to work as maids at Henry Sudell’s manor in the nearby countryside at Mellor. I don’t suppose their lives there were easy. They would have worked hard for long hours, but at least the air would have been clean, they would have a decent bed to sleep in and adequate food. It must have been very hard for them to lose their jobs and have to return to Blackburn just as a cholera outbreak took hold.

Keen-eyed historians may have spotted one or two discrepancies in the dates when compared to the actual historical timeline. Although it’s true that Henry Sudell did lose a huge amount of money speculating on the cotton market, his flight from Woodfold Hall took place in 1827, whereas A Lancashire Lass is set in 1832. But I thought the story of what happened to Henry Sudell was too interesting not to use. It was an ideal way of forcing Hannah and Mary back into Blackburn when they thought they had escaped the worst of the poverty and hardship that was still apparent there, and it shows that even the gentry were not safe from the fluctuations of the cotton trade.

Blackburn’s first election following the Representation of the People Act took place in December 1832. The book doesn’t specify a date and it may seem that the election was earlier in the year. I hope that these small changes didn’t spoil anyone’s enjoyment of the story.