Once she got home that day she had faced the truth that had flooded over her the moment she heard the news. She regretted, with every fibre of her being, sending Edward away. She had been fighting against admitting it to herself for months, but even as he had driven away that snowy night at the beginning of April she had known it was a mistake. She should have swallowed her pride and gone to see him the next day or in the following days, but she hadn’t. She hadn’t. And now it was too late. A marriage between them might have been a disaster but, equally, it might not have been; now she would never know. It was a bitter pill to swallow, but swallow it she must and get on with things. The alternative was to curl up in a little ball and die, and that wasn’t an option. She had felt like this once before when she had first arrived in Newcastle after Adam’s betrayal, and she had got through then. She would do so again. But this was much worse. Before she could blame Olive and Adam for her suffering; this time the fault was hers and hers alone.

But now it was three weeks before Christmas and the weather was so cold no one would have been surprised if the sleety rain that had been falling for the last week or so had come down in ice cubes. She and her two seamstresses were working longer and longer hours as the festive season approached – it seemed all the well-to-do women in Newcastle and for miles around had parties and social functions they simply had to have new clothes for, but if nothing else it had convinced Ruby that she had to take the plunge and open another shop in the near future. It was simply a matter of finding the time to look for one, but then just that very morning one of her seamstresses, a sweet and rather shy young girl who reminded Ruby of Ellie, or the Ellie in the days before her friend had met Daniel Bell, had told her about a property that had come up for sale close to where she lived just a few streets away in Ridley Place at the back of Ginnett’s Amphitheatre. Ridley Place was only a quarter of a mile or so from her present shop, which Ruby thought was perfect. She had already decided that a new business would be aimed at women on the large size and would stock mainly outsize clothes; it seemed among the middle class there were plenty of stout matrons who would pay the prices she asked to look as though they had been dressed by a London fashion house, at the same time as appearing pounds lighter than they were.