The next Mrs Ruffin knew of it they had stopped at a coaching inn for refreshments. As Barnaby helped his wife down from the carriage, she stared at the inn disapprovingly.

‘I hope they do hot chocolate here,’ she whined. ‘How much farther is it now? I don’t recall it being such a distance!’

‘We’re about halfway. All being well, we should be there shortly after lunch and Mrs Reed has agreed to have a meal waiting for us.’ He tucked her small hand into his arm and side by side they entered the inn. There were a number of people inside, many of them farmworkers who had taken a break to sneak a quick tankard of ale, and they stared at the couple curiously. The air was fuggy with tobacco smoke and Louisa noticed that the sawdust on the floor didn’t look any too clean.

‘I hope the water closet is cleaner than this room is,’ she said with her nose in the air. ‘Surely, we could have stopped somewhere a little more salubrious, Barnaby?’

He stifled a sigh as he led her to a table at the side of an inglenook fireplace where a log fire was crackling. ‘I’m afraid if we hadn’t stopped here, we would have had to go on for at least another hour,’ he told her as patiently as he could. ‘And you did say that you needed to relieve yourself.’ He left her then to go to the bar to order a tankard of ale for himself and Jimmy, and a pot of hot chocolate for Louisa and Mrs Ruffin.

‘Well, I must say this is nice,’ Mrs Ruffin said as she took a seat and removed her gloves. ‘It’s like going on holiday, isn’t it?’

Louisa sniffed disdainfully. ‘I hardly think so, I only chose to go to the cottage because . . .’

When her voice trailed away, Mrs Ruffin felt a rush of sympathy for her. She knew that her young mistress didn’t want to give birth to this child back at Greenacres in case it went the same way as the previous two she had lost and she could understand it, so she was prepared to be patient with her.

The hot chocolate was surprisingly tasty when it came, served by the landlady who was a great Amazon of a woman with ruddy cheeks, hands like hams and a ready smile.

‘Off on ’oliday are yer, me lovelies?’ she queried.

Louisa chose to ignore her and looked away, so, embarrassed at her mistress’s rudeness, Mrs Ruffin told her, ‘Yes, something like that. And thank you, this looks very nice.’