She changes the law, single-handedly, but it’s too late for her. The elder boys at ten and eight are beyond the law’s reach; the youngest, so long as his father keeps him in Scotland, is beyond its jurisdiction too. Little William Norton dies of lockjaw – tetanus – one Monday in September, aged just nine, after falling from his horse and cutting his arm. The boys are alone and unsupervised at their uncle’s house, the only servant the gamekeeper’s wife, a hunched old woman who opens gates and locks doors. Willie makes his way to the nearest neighbour, Chapel Thorpe Hall, where he collapses and is put to bed. By the time Caroline’s told that he’s unwell, he has already died. She learns that he was conscious when he died, and begged for her, again and again.

The doctor tells Caroline that young Willie bore the painful spasms with a degree of courage which he has rarely seen in so young a child, as if this offers any consolation.

I am tired. I try to make my mind let go. This moment, and this, and this. Here, now; my baby’s silky hair and milky smell. A-duh, she says, when she wakes in the night and wants milk. Online, a mother was alerted to breast cancer when her six-month-old started refusing to nurse from one side. Online, another, still nursing twins, died ten days after her diagnosis. 100It is the night before the biopsy results. Somewhere, in windowless rooms, cells have been scraped and splayed on slides, dyed and magnified and studied, pronounced upon. I have finished the biography, and the letters, and now I read the poems until I know sections of them by heart.

If the lulled heaving ocean could disclose

All that has passed upon her golden sand,

When the moon-lighted waves triumphant rose,

And dashed their spray upon the echoing strand:

If dews could tell how many tears have mixed

With the bright gem-like drops that Nature weeps,

If night could say how many eyes are fixed

On her dark shadows, while creation sleeps!

The blue light of my phone gives me a headache. The day slides into dawn.

The hospital again, the staircase, the waiting room; a chair by the window, the rack of leaflets on the wall. The women with gypsy-style headscarves, or attached to IV drips; the occasional solitary man. Another young woman sitting stricken with her silent mother. My name is called. Everything you take for granted may yet be overturned.