Her husband’s hand clenched in time with the bobbing of his Adam’s apple. ‘I came in to pray for him. I do so every night. When I … when I found him, I could see there was no help. So I prayed, like I always do. I stood by him and prayed.’

And then Charlotte broke, a sheet of salt tearing from her eyes and nose as she scooped up the body, not yet cold, but long since past the warmth of a living child. She clutched him to the breasts that had nurtured him, a process that had given them both such delight, happy animal satisfaction on his part, pangs of more complicated joy on hers. She stroked the long little fingers, with nails like soap bubbles, that would never slide trustingly into her hand again. She kissed his neck, soft and pliant under the weight of his head, palmed his sturdy back, fixing the familiar scent of his skin in the atoms of her body. For one moment, the world slid sideways and righted itself: he still smelled like Tom, he couldn’t possibly be dead, they would prove all the surgeons wrong, he would wake and burble ‘Mama’ and she would kiss him and kiss him, all over his chubby hay-fragrant little body and face, and the globe would resume spinning on its everyday axis.

But the child in her arms did not wake. And looking across at her openly weeping husband, she knew that he never would.

A small mercy: it was a mild, soft day, the sky a bowl of curds. Charlotte could not have borne the mockery of sunshine, or the misery of rain and spiteful wind, as they stood, a cluster of crows, in the churchyard. She adjusted Laura’s weight on her hip. Her second daughter’s warm body was the only thing anchoring her to the earth, to this place. Nothing else made sense, not the sexton, not the grave into which the pitifully tiny coffin was being lowered, not the words being intoned by the parson, not even the grief coming off her husband so thick she could almost taste it catching at the back of her throat.

He stood by her side, allowed on this occasion the role of the bereaved parent. Not even the most stoic clergyman could be expected to bury his own child, and so Lady Catherine had sent for a parson from a neighbouring parish to conduct Tom’s funeral.