Doctor Player’s urbane voice held a gleam of amusement. ‘I should be happy to testify that she was fit, if there should be any dispute,’ he said softly. ‘Especially to oblige you, my dear Lady Havering. I have always thought so highly of you…and always loved your part of the world. How I have longed to be a neighbour of yours, perhaps a little house…’

‘There’s a pretty Dower House on the Wideacre estate,’ Lady Clara said. ‘If you would do me the honour…rent free, of course…a lease of say, thirty years…?’

I heard his stays creak as he bowed, and I heard the smile in Lady Clara’s voice. The special smile, when she obtained what she wanted.

‘Doctor Player, you have been most helpful,’ she said. ‘May I offer you a glass of ratafia? In the parlour?’

He took a little bottle of medicine from his bag, I heard it clink against the brass fastening.

‘I shall leave this for her, she should take it when she wakes,’ he said. ‘I can tell Nurse on my way out. And as for her marriage with your son, I should risk no delay, Lady Clara. She is very ill indeed.’

They went out together, I heard them talking in low voices as they went down the stairs and then I was alone in the silence of my room with only the soft ticking of the clock and the hushed flickering of the flames in the fireplace.

I slid into a hot daze, and then I woke again seconds later, chilled to the bone. If I had any voice other than a rasping breath I should have laughed. I had thought my da a big enough villain but even he would have balked at marrying his child off to a dying girl. He was a rogue but he had given me the string and the clasp of gold because his dying wife had asked it of him. In our world we took the wishes of the dying seriously. In this Quality world where everything looked so fair and spoke so soft, it was those with land who gave the orders, who had the world as they wished. Nothing was sacred except fortune.

Lady Clara did not dislike me, I knew her well enough and I knew that had I been her daughter-in-law she would have liked me as well as she liked her own Maria – probably better. She neither liked nor disliked anyone very strongly, her main concern was with herself. In her eyes it was her duty to preserve her personal wealth, her family’s wealth and name, and to increase it wherever possible. Every great family on the land had made itself rich at the expense of hundreds of little ones. I knew that. But I never knew it so clearly as that evening when I watched the ceiling billow like a muslin cloth as my hot eyes played tricks on me, and I knew that I was in the care of a woman who cared more for my signature than for me.