‘I won’t touch her! I’ve seen typhus before,’ she hissed defiantly. ‘It’ll be a blessed miracle if we don’t all of us get it. Besides, you just look at her face! She’s not long for this world, she’s grey already. Sponging ain’t going to bring down that fever. She’s a goner, Miss Rimmings, and I ain’t going to nurse a dying woman.’

‘Her la’ship will hear of this Sewell – and you’ll be out on the streets without a character!’ Rimmings boomed, her voice seemed to echo again and again in my head.

‘I don’t care, it ain’t right! I’m a lady’s maid, hired for a lady’s maid! No one can say I don’t keep her clothes right and it ain’t my fault that she wears riding habits all the time. It ain’t my fault she’s been so peaky ever since she came to London. I’ve dressed her right and I ain’t ever said one word about her coming up out of the hedgerow. But I won’t nurse her. It’d be up and down those stairs twenty times a day and certain to take it and die too. I won’t do it!’

My cracked lips parted in a little smile as I heard them wrangling, though my head was thudding like an enlisting drum. It had all gone wrong then. Sewell was right with her sharp servant’s eyes and her quick wits. I was worm’s meat already, she had seen the look in my face which I remembered from my ma. When the typhus fever puts its hot sweaty finger on you, you are gone. Perry would not clear his gambling debts with my dowry, I would never be Lady Havering. Her ladyship would never have an heir from me.

All our work and lies and lessons would be for nothing. I had always thought they were good for nothing, and now nothing would come of them, except that I should have a fashionable funeral instead of being tossed into a common grave. But I would die in this beautiful London town house as surely as I would have died in that dirty little wagon if we had taken the infection when we were chavvies. The disease which had taken my weary travel-worn ma in her poverty and her hunger could slip past the butler and take me too.