In an old-fashioned way Margaret had been well brought up. So when she was shown into Lady Teaser’s drawing room she gave a bob curtsey and said politely, ‘Good afternoon.’

Lady Teaser noted with amusement how well Katie’s coat suited Margaret, but she also noticed that it had been beautifully altered.

‘Good afternoon,’ she said. Then she pointed to a chair. ‘You may sit, or is the coat too tight to sit down in?’

Margaret sat.

‘It was tight to begin with but Sarah – who I live with – she’s let it out and now it is lovely and comfortable. I wish Hannah, who brought me up, could see me now. She wished she could send me to the orphanage with nice clothes but we had to wear uniforms there, it was wicked what we looked like. These are the first nice clothes I ever had.’

Lady Teaser gave a gracious nod, accepting Margaret’s unspoken thanks. ‘Is it true you were found in a basket?’

Margaret was delighted to find a new audience. She was careful this time not to embellish the story as she often did, adding coronets on her baby clothes, for there was a look in Lady Teaser’s eyes which made Margaret feel she would notice any exaggeration.

‘It was the rector really who found me, it was on the church steps and he got the two old ladies, Miss Sylvia and Miss Selina Cameron, to adopt me and arranged that Hannah would look after me, but they got old and the fifty-two pounds a year, which had always come for my keep, stopped coming.’

‘So you were sent to an orphanage?’

‘Yes. The Archdeacon had a brother who was a governor of one. I was sent there but it was more terrible than you could dream it would be, so I and the boys ran away.’

Lady Teaser raised her eyebrows. ‘Boys! What boys?’

‘Well, at first they were just orphans like me, we hid on a canal boat and …’

Lady Teaser held up a hand. ‘Do not gabble, child. Who were the boys?’

‘Well, they were Lavinia’s brothers, Peter and Horatio Beresford. The boys were in the orphanage like me, but Lavinia was fourteen so she was found a place in Lady Corkberry’s kitchen.’

Lady Teaser was a great reader of social gossip columns so she knew where the Corkberrys’ stately home was. ‘At Sedgecombe Place?’

‘That’s it, so when the boys and I ran away from the orphanage that’s where we went, for I thought we’d find Lavinia and she would know where to hide the boys.’

‘Why did you want to hide the boys?’

Margaret, when telling people her history, usually left out the part about the elder of the two boys, Peter, but now she had to explain.

‘We’d been to tea with the Archdeacon’s brother, the one who got me into the orphanage, and we were driven over to tea in one of the Corkberry traps. I sat in front which was how I got to know Jem, because he was driving the trap. It was his father who had a canal boat, so when we escaped from the orphanage, Jem took us to his mother. Ma Smith she is called.’