During the weeks that Titus had taught her how to read and write she’d made good progress and been surprised at how easy she’d found it to read. At first she’d delighted in reading the names above the shops and the street signs. Then she’d discovered that she could also read the words in the Bible that Titus kept wrapped in a small blanket in a drawer of the dresser. It had belonged to his father and was the most valuable thing he owned. She’d been flattered when he allowed her to look at it and turn some of the pages. Some of the longer words she would never have been able to decipher if she hadn’t already known the passages off by heart, but she’d always loved the sounds of the words and the way they made shapes in her mind as she rolled them around on her tongue. But writing she’d found harder. She could form the letters but they looked more like printing and she wished she could learn how to write the flowing hands that were shown in this book.

She lifted it to her nose and breathed in the scent of it. It smelled of ink and other things she couldn’t define. It reminded her of the precious sheets of paper and the pencils that she had in her little box upstairs in her room. She’d gone to Mr Tiplady’s printing shop on Church Street for them. The purchase had made her feel guilty. There were more sensible things that she ought to have spent her money on, but the thrill of asking for them at the counter and seeing them wrapped up in a brown paper parcel had made her feel special, and clever, as if she was someone of importance because she knew how to read and write. She guessed that the shopkeeper thought she was buying them for her employer, but that didn’t matter. It was better than being questioned about why she wanted them. She’d brought them back, clutched to her chest as if they were worth all the tea in China, and hidden them away, reluctant to use them at first, for fear of spoiling them and for fear of the words in her head looking silly when they were put down on paper in her shaky, unsure hand. But eventually she’d begun to write, unable to prevent the words from overflowing, and she’d sneaked a chopping board out of the kitchen, hoping that Cook wouldn’t notice it was missing, so that she could use it to lay the paper on and kneel at the side of her bed, not saying her bedtime prayers in the last minutes of her day but writing down the story that was constantly forming in her head about the maid and the schoolmaster – the one to which she could give a happy ending.

Hannah put the book back on the desk and went to the shelf where Mrs Feilden kept her other books. She scanned the titles to see if she could read what they were. There were three volumes with the same title: Ivanhoe by Walter Scott. Glancing around to double check that she wasn’t being watched, Hannah eased the first one off the shelf and opened it. The printing was close set and she brought it near to her face. She’d only meant to see if she could read any of the words but she found herself drawn into the story, turning page after page, until she heard the sound of Mr Horrocks’s footsteps in the hallway and guiltily returned it to the shelf and picked up her duster.