“I was a bride at eighteen. Our parents wanted us to wait, but Frederick was committed to his army career, and we were very much in love. All we cared about was being together. I knew nothing of the life of a military wife, and I was next to useless when it came to homemaking. Poor Frederick would come home to a fire that refused to light, a dinner that hadn’t been cooked, and a wife in tears, but he never once complained. Fortunately, army wives are a tight-knit little band, and to my astonishment—and Frederick’s—I eventually proved to be most adept at making do.”

“You were obviously very happy,” Margaret said, touched by the other woman’s tender smile.

“Oh, very, right up until the end. He was—Frederick was wounded in the battle to take the Great Redan and lost a limb. It’s a horribly common occurrence, when facing cannon fire. Unfortunately, gangrene set in, and in the end, he was too weak to survive.”

“You were with him?” Margaret asked, a lump in her throat.

“To the bitter end. In that sense, I was more fortunate than many other wives. Now,” Susannah continued brusquely, “your nose will have informed you that is the vinegar works over there. Here we have one of the parochial schools run by our church, and just across the road another, a British school which is run by Nonconformists. Through there, you can see Nelson Square, which is a little oasis of greenery and has some of the better housing in the area, but we are headed further over to the more deprived streets.”

Margaret scurried after her, her eyes wide, her ears assaulted by the clatter of barrows, carts, and horses; the screeching of the trains rattling overhead; and the rhythmic hammering from the many building sites. Her nose had grown accustomed to the smell of horse manure, which was all-pervasive in every corner of the metropolis, but it mingled here with the smoke from factories, the mud that oozed between the cobble-stones, and the sickly sweet smell of rotting vegetables in the gutters. Surreptitiously, she took another sniff of the lavender sachet.

“And here,” Susannah announced, “we have the workhouse.”

The huge building stood at the far end of the market where Margaret had first encountered Father Sebastian. The red brick was tarnished almost black in places, and the many windows were mean and small. An imposing gate led to an even more imposing portico.

“The size of the building, unfortunately, is testament to the extent of the need,” Susannah said grimly.

Margaret shuddered. “It looks like a prison. You would have to be absolutely desperate to summon the courage to knock on that door.”

“Homeless, penniless, and usually starving. Everything possible is done to discourage supplicants and to make them as miserable as possible while they are in the workhouse.”

“That’s barbaric!”