It was most confounding that the qualities which had at first drawn him to his wife were now those very self-same traits which so much vexed him. He had liked her spirit, her independence of thought: she had seemed very alive to him, when compared to the docile young women he had met before. Her parents had both died before she came of age: she had had no father to check her. She spoke her own thoughts, gleaned from her own reading, where most of the young ladies of his acquaintance seemed only to parrot the opinions of their older brothers or fathers. Alice laughed frankly, where propriety had it that young ladies more properly hid their amusement behind their hands, or the flutter of a fan. If she did not possess a certain womanly softness, he had not at first rued its lack. To those who cared for her, Alice was deemed captivating; a flame of a woman. To those who did not, she was thought to want the reticence becoming of her sex.

It was not in any case only Alice’s character which he had admired. Her neck was pale and slender and there was a little dark mole upon it, just below one ear: he could still remember how he had thought to have been driven to madness if he could not kiss her in that place. The particular tilt of her head spoke to him of merry complicity and a delightful sense of mischief. To marry her – to possess her – had been the one object of his life.

But a Radical! There was no crime in a woman holding an opinion, provided she kept it to herself; but it was unseemly, at best, for the wife of an officer to speak out against the campaign in which her husband was actively engaged. It was impossible. A man’s prospects would be dashed if it were to come out that his wife held such views. Promotion would be out of the question. Discretion was essential. Some dreadful stories confided within private letters sent back from Crimea had been finding their way into the press, to the contempt of the commanders here. It simply did not do.