‘Now what shall we do?’ she asked her mother. ‘Poor Ivy only has the clothes she had on when this happened. They’ve taken absolutely everything she owned.’

‘So we’ll buy her new ones!’ Emma replied stoically. ‘If the ones she was wearing the other night were anything to go by they weren’t up to much anyway.’

They left and slowly made their way home through the fog. As soon as they were safely indoors Emma filled the kettle. ‘We’ll have to tell her that he’s gone now. We have no choice,’ she said.

‘But what will happen to her and the baby? I’d be more than happy to have her back here but Ivy is fiercely independent. And I should let her work know where she is too. They’ll be worried that she hasn’t turned up. I’ll push a note through the suffragettes’ office door on my way to work first thing in the morning.’

Holly did just that the next day and when she popped into the ward later that afternoon to see Ivy she found two of her suffragette friends at her bedside, highly indignant at what had happened.

‘It’s appalling that a man should be allowed to do this to a woman,’ a tall, plump, red-haired woman declared angrily. ‘It just goes to show that we’re right to fight for rights for women and when you’re well enough to come back your job will be waiting for you, Ivy.’

Deeply humiliated, Ivy nodded. She would rather they hadn’t found out what had happened but supposed that this wasn’t something she could hide as she told Holly when the women left.

‘I thought you’d want them to know why you weren’t in work,’ Holly apologised.

Ivy sighed. ‘You did right,’ she admitted grudgingly. ‘They were bound to find out one way or another. But Jeremy still hasn’t been,’ she ended fretfully.

Holly took a deep breath. It was time to tell Ivy the truth, much as she hated to do it.

‘Ah, well … actually me and Mother went round to see him last night to tell him where you were,’ she began and her heart broke at the hope that flared in Ivy’s eyes.

‘An’ what did he say? Is he comin’ to see me?’ Ivy interrupted before Holly could get another word out.

‘Er … I’m afraid not … You see he’s gone.’

‘What do you mean gone!’ Ivy was struggling to sit up and Holly gently pressed her back against the pillows. She knew that she had to be cruel to be kind now.

‘Just what I say, he’s gone. Apparently he left the morning after you were brought in here and no one has seen him since. Your rooms are empty. And that’s not the worst of it, you see …’ She gulped deep in her throat, hating what she was having to tell her. ‘Dora told me some time ago that Jeremy Pilkington-Hughes isn’t his real name. He comes from Whitechapel and his real name is Jimmy Sullivan. He preys on vulnerable women, wealthy ones usually. Lady Hamilton, one of the clients from Miss May’s shop, is the latest one apparently.’