But he had said more than enough for one day. He nodded mentally to the thought as the maid fetched his hat and coat. And all the talking in the world couldn’t make Ruby love him or alter the fact that in her own way she was just as rigid about the class issue as his sister.

Once Clarissa was ready they walked out into the snow-dusted grounds. Godfrey’s gardeners had cleared a path that wound away from the house and into the ornamental garden past majestic old trees clad in their mantle of white, and although it was bitterly cold a pale winter sun shone in the dying afternoon. He glanced at Clarissa muffled up in her furs, and as he did so a picture flashed onto the screen of his mind of a scene he had passed on his way up from London. He had driven through a pit village in Durham just as a group of miners, the coal dust of the mine still on them, had left the pit gates after their shift. The snow hadn’t been thick, just a light covering as in Newcastle, but the contrast between the men and the white purity of their surroundings had been stark. Their caps pulled low over their eyes and their shoulders hunched against the bitter wind, they’d walked as one, their shabby jackets and big hobnailed boots creating a powerful image in his mind. To them the snow was the enemy, yet another obstacle in their hard lives to overcome, but here in the grounds of Godfrey’s estate it was merely enchanting, creating a pretty scene to be enjoyed before one went indoors to the warmth of a roaring fire in the drawing room, cocktails in the comfort of Clarissa’s comfy sofas and a six-course dinner to follow.

Ruby’s childhood sweetheart, the man she had been betrothed to, was a miner. She had grown up among such people. And the woman he had glimpsed standing at the open door of her house, a baby in her arms, looking towards the group of men, could have been Ruby if the circumstances had been different.

A weight settled on him compounded of fear of an enemy he didn’t know and had no understanding of, an enemy who was in Ruby’s blood and who had been fed into her along with her mother’s milk. Something more powerful than a mere man. A community.