‘Give it ’ere,’ said Titus to Peggy, holding out his hand for the slate. ‘Let’s see whether Auntie Hannah’s any good at it.’ Peggy passed him the chalk and he began to make marks with it, faster and with more ease than the child. ‘These are vowel sounds,’ he said. ‘Tha can begin with them.’

Hannah pulled out the bentwood chair and sat down beside him, staring at the marks as he told her the sounds they represented. It wouldn’t really matter if she found she couldn’t do it, she told herself, but she really wanted to try. She wanted to learn to write too. In fact, it was the writing that interested her most because she longed to save the stories that she made up in her head. When she was little, they’d been childish tales about the sprites and elves that lived in the brook at Ramsgreave. As she’d grown they’d changed and become about animals and then about people. When she’d come to live with her sister in Blackburn, the stories had become darker as she witnessed the hardship and the starvation of the people who had no work, but as things improved her imagination had taken a new turn and now the stories in her head were mostly about romance. Her latest one was about a handsome and wealthy young mill owner who visits one of the grand houses up on Revedge and falls hopelessly in love with one of the maids there, becoming determined to marry her and give her a life of wealth and privilege. Hannah thought that she had never liked one of her stories better.

She stared at the letters that Titus had drawn, trying to commit to memory the sounds that they represented. He’d gone back to reading his pamphlet. He was always reading something in his spare time. And when he wasn’t reading he was talking about what needed to be done for the working man. He hadn’t been the same since he’d spent time in the House of Correction and Hannah sometimes wondered if she didn’t prefer the old Titus: the one who’d teased her when he was courting her elder sister; the one who’d given no thought to reading or writing or what went on in London and the Parliament; the one who’d been content to weave on his loom and tend his patch at the back of the cottage at Pleck Gate. But everything had changed when the mills came and he’d moved his family into town, and although she’d thought it was exciting at the time she knew now that working in the mills wasn’t the life she wanted. She’d seen the wives of the gentry with their lovely clothes and beautiful houses and she thought that she’d like a bit of that for herself.

‘Shall I put t’ kettle on for tea?’ she asked after a while as she guessed it was nearing five o’clock.

‘Hast tha somewhere to go?’ asked Titus.

‘I thought I might go to evensong,’ she said. ‘The rain seems to have eased off now.’ It wasn’t that she was particularly keen to sit through one of the Reverend Whittaker’s tedious sermons in the parish church, but it was one place she could meet up with Mary without raising any eyebrows.