She’d taken the dishes up for dinner and placed them on the table in a glum silence, escaping quickly when she heard the voices of the family coming through for their meal. She didn’t want to see them and could hardly bear to hear their merry voices when they’d caused her so much misery.

Back in the kitchen she toyed with her own food. She wasn’t hungry. Everything had gone horribly wrong. She’d lost Mary. She was about to lose her job. Her family would be furious, and even if she went back to her mother and father, she would be nothing but a burden to them.

‘Hannah!’ She looked up when Horrocks said her name for the second time. ‘Mrs Feilden wants to see you. Upstairs in the drawing room.’ So this was it, she thought. She’d be out on the street before suppertime.

She went slowly up the back stairs, one step at a time. She would be sad to leave the comfort of this house where everything was new and clean and go back to sharing a bed with her nieces. Peggy wouldn’t be impressed either. And now that she was walking to school by herself Hannah wouldn’t even have an excuse to see James Hindle. Though maybe that was a good thing, because he wouldn’t want to associate himself with a lass who’d disgraced herself so much that she’d been dismissed – especially when he was friendly with the Feildens. And the worst part was that she’d done nothing wrong.

She knocked on the door of the drawing room and listened. Mrs Feilden called her in.

‘Hannah. Thank you for coming up so promptly.’

Mrs Feilden was smoothing invisible creases from her skirt and didn’t look Hannah in the eye straight away, and when she did glance up she soon looked away again. She reached out and touched a book that lay on the table next to her chair. Hannah didn’t recognise it.

‘The book has been found,’ she said.

‘Was it at the pawnbroker’s?’ asked Hannah, unable to stop herself.

‘No.’ Mrs Feilden looked embarrassed. And so she should, thought Hannah. ‘No. My husband had lent it to Mr Hindle, the schoolmaster. He hadn’t told me.’

‘So it weren’t stolen after all?’ Hannah was surprised by her own insolence.

‘No. I’m sorry if you thought that you were being accused.’

‘Well, it did seem that way.’

‘But you have to understand, Hannah, that it is very valuable. It had to be found.’

Hannah didn’t reply. She was in fact quite enjoying Mrs Feilden being so unnerved at being forced to give some sort of apology, although she would have liked a better one. The accusation of theft she could have dealt with, but the loss of her writing she would never forgive.