She started to cry then, her little shoulders heaving inside the nice white lawn nightdress with the pink bows that she had been so delighted with, had loved to think she owned.

Mrs Horlock held her while she cried bitter tears. When she quietened, the old woman went from the room to make her a strong hot whisky with lots of sugar in. She would ensure the child slept. It was a great healer.

Alone in the room, Briony looked around her. At the brocade curtains and bedspread, the carpeted floor, and the pictures on the walls. Above the bed was a tapestry, worked by her own hands in the long afternoons of her pregnancy. It was a proverb from the Bible and read: ‘For whom the Lord loveth, he correcteth.’ It was one of Mrs Prosser Evans’ sayings and Briony had always remembered it. Now, though, she knew exactly what it meant.

All that she now had - this house, the money that was being given to her, the fact that her mother and sisters would benefit from her giving away her little child - meant nothing. All the nice clothes and all the good food and all the warmth would never replace the feeling she had experienced when she had looked at her son.

Her son. He was her son, her son and Henry’s.

But he would live with his father, a man who only wanted little children. A man who had taken Briony and abused her, tempted her with his promise of luxury and warmth and three pounds a week.

Now he had everything and she had nothing.

She had lain racked with pain, had pushed a life into the world, and at the end of it all she didn’t even know what they were going to call her son.

She didn’t even know his name.

Isabel looked down at the well-shaped head in the crib and sighed with contentment. The baby moved, snuggling into the warmth then, snuffling through his button nose, drifted back off to sleep again. Sally, his nurse, looked on and smiled to herself. Her own baby, born two months previously, had died after a week as if he just couldn’t be bothered to breathe in the slum he’d been born to. She had made sure of keeping her milk by letting her sister’s children suckle her, now she was ensconced in this lovely house, had been bathed and given two uniforms. She had her own room with three guaranteed meals a day, and milk and beer as and when she fancied it. Even if talk in the house was rife, if they did say that the child was the master’s by a whore, what did she care? As long as she kept her position she would look after the child of the devil himself.