Daisy raised her eyebrow but didn’t comment. All she ever thought about was getting married, having her own little home and having babies, but then she supposed it was each to her own and thankfully she stopped teasing about it.

A couple of days before Christmas, Mrs Temple allowed Amber to have a few hours off to go and do a little Christmas shopping and she set off with Daisy in a happy mood. Amber bought small gifts for each of her family and once again, as she thought of being away from them at Christmas, she felt a severe wave of homesickness. She had decided some time ago that she would never want to live in London. Compared to Whitby it was sooty and noisy and nothing like she’d imagined it would be. She missed being able to stroll up to the ruins of Whitby Abbey on a balmy evening to watch the ships out at sea and feel the wind in her hair. And she missed the sounds of the waves lapping on to the beach and the good clean salt air. But she also wondered what she would do when she got home.

It was hard to believe that not so long ago she had been happy in her job at Greenacres, until the master had started to take an interest in her and everything had changed. Now she knew that her life was never going to be the same again. She would never be able to trust another man and fall in love and even if she did, she knew that it could only end in tears when they discovered that she’d given birth to an illegitimate child. So what did the future hold for her? At the moment it looked very bleak indeed. Not a day went by when she didn’t think about her baby and yet deep down she knew that she had done the right thing by letting her go. What sort of life could she have offered the child? But it didn’t stop her hurting, and so she just took it a day at a time as she counted down the days until she could go home again.

The one good thing to come out of this job was that after a not so good start she had now got a good rapport going with Harry and George and surprisingly she knew that she would miss them when the job finally finished.

When she and Daisy got back from their shopping trip, Amber took the gifts she had bought up to her room to find Harry waiting on the landing for her. She smiled and went to walk on but he fell into step beside her asking, ‘Did you get everything you wanted?’