Cissy enjoyed keeping the flat spick and span and seeing to Alice once the child was home from school, and at the weekends Ruby often joined the three of them for Saturday afternoon high tea when her mother would bake an elaborate spread that could have fed the whole street. Alice had settled well into her new home, and although she often spoke of her father there were fewer tears as time went on.

By the summer, when Ramsay MacDonald formed a new Labour government with a woman in the Cabinet for the first time as Minister of Labour, Ruby knew the second shop was as great a success as the first. With her bank balance steadily increasing and her order books full for months ahead, so much so that she was well on her way to paying off the first mortgage, her mother and Olive contented and fulfilled and Alice doing well at school, and her Sundays with Clarissa now and again keeping her in touch with her friend, Ruby knew she ought to be the happiest woman alive. And she was – she was happy, she told herself on those nights when she tossed and turned until the early hours. It would be terribly ungrateful to be otherwise. True, there was an Edward-shaped hole in her life that grew more painful and not less as time went on, especially when she thought of him in the arms of another woman. And yes, in spite of how close she had become to her sister and her mother over the last months, she knew there would always be a gulf between her and them now. It was she who had changed and become a different person, but that didn’t make it easier to bear. And even with Clarissa she could never truly be herself. Perhaps she didn’t know who she was, come to that, so how could anyone else really understand her? She didn’t fit in anywhere, that was the thing. It was the price she had paid for following her dreams. And that was all right, it really was – most of the time.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Edward drove through the open gates of the Kingston estate but brought the car to an almost immediate stop. Leaving the engine running, he gazed at the huge stone house in the distance set on an incline within the six-acre parklands and gardens surrounding it. The first time he had seen it he’d thought it looked like a grand Virginian house – tall, haughty, almost isolated from the land around it. He’d later discovered that Verity’s grandfather had hailed from Virginia and when he had moved to the outskirts of New York and bought the land, he’d had the house built almost to a replica of the one he had been brought up in.