One morning in early October, while the nurse was out wheeling baby George around the lower lawn in his perambulator, Caroline came to call.

‘Is my brother at home?’ she enquired.

‘No, I believe he’s gone down to the timber-yard. He is so busy these days, I barely see him. Oh, do stay and wait for him here, an hour with you would be such balm, for my head is full of nothing but lullabies. Should you care for coffee, or chocolate?’

‘Nothing, thank you.’ Caroline paused to draw in her breath. ‘It is in fact yourself I have come to see. My dear, we have an enemy.’

Alice felt her face grow cold, as if she had opened the casement on to a frost.

‘William has been to visit me. It seems that this widow has been dripping poison into his mind. He sought to discover from me how frequently you visited with your aunt at Cheltenham while he was in the Crimea, and thereby to establish the nature of your association with Dr Nolan.’

‘With Dr Nolan! But William knows the man as well as I do,’ said Alice. ‘Surely you have mistaken his purpose.’

‘He was in an agitation about the doctor. She has convinced him that your relations with him go beyond … go beyond fraternization.’

‘But this is absurd!’ Alice protested. ‘I am the mother of a new infant; nothing could be further from my mind than – I hardly know how to put this delicately – fleshly pleasures.’

‘I don’t know that it is your current virtue which is in doubt. It is the infant himself whom she has most cunningly brought into question. William asked me if I thought George looked to be very much a Gale. When I opined that I thought him just exactly his own little person, he said that this was his point entirely.’

All at once Alice sat down. She felt utterly defeated, her accustomed vitality drained quite out of her.

‘How is it possible that he could interrogate an innocent child in this way? Why has he not spoken to me?’

‘He purports that Mrs Lockjaw, or whatever the wretched woman’s name is, had mentioned that the boy looks unalike to William and that she had then enquired – he thinks in all innocence – whether you had not been friends with Dr Nolan during your husband’s time at war.’

‘What in the name of Heaven would induce someone to turn a man against his own son, a mere babe in arms? That woman knows full well that I became acquainted with Dr Nolan while William was away: she accepted the hospitality of my aunt and met the doctor at her table.’

‘Precisely. I know this also, as does my brother. But she has sown this seed of doubt in him as to the nature of your friendship with the man. I believe her purpose is to create discord between you.’