He and Catherine exchanged worried looks then got dressed quickly. Wrapped up against the thick mist and fretting wind that always seemed to linger on the moors, he held up a lantern to light their way across the yard and along the muddy lanes. He guided Catherine by the hand as they picked a way over hazardous marshy ground to a makeshift dwelling.

It was a hovel, partly a natural cave, no more than scavenged timber and boulders of granite and scraps of furniture and tatters of cloth. Stinking moisture was running down over the stones. All that served as a fireplace was a makeshift grate of moor stone and, with no proper chimney, the peat-burning fire gave some warmth but filled the air with smoke, making them cough.

Catherine looked down in horror at the girl writhing in agony on a filthy sack of straw. They had heard her screams for quite some distance back in the lane. She was just twelve years old, her child conceived before the legal age of consent. A simpleton, a child herself. Yet her body was developed past puberty and it could be seen, even in her anguished and unwashed state, that she was extraordinarily pretty and, to Catherine’s eternal shame, one of her stepson’s conquests.

‘I gave you money, Nollie Skewes, to look after your daughter,’ she rounded angrily on the woman who had fetched them here. ‘What did you spend it on? Gin? I was a fool to expect different. There was enough to provide her with bedding and warm clothes and food. Oh God, Philip, why didn’t you let me come here? Why didn’t you tell me it was this bad?’

The girl, and that was how she had always been referred to, so Catherine had no knowledge of her name, howled with pain and blubbered in fear.

‘Hold the lantern up high, Philip. Nollie Skewes, have you no candles? I need more light if I’m going to help her to deliver this baby safely. What on earth is her name?’

‘Ruth, and that’s the truth.’ Nollie Skewes cackled at her joke.

She lurched aside to avoid Philip cracking her across the neck with a blow of his hand. She scrabbled about in the semi-darkness and finding two candles, lit them and placed them on a granite ledge.

Catherine was on her knees, trying to comfort the girl. Ruth had no understanding and fought her off, kicking and punching and scratching, her mouth opening and clamping down as she sought to bite her helper.

‘Ruth, can you hear me? My name is Mrs Trenchard. If you’ll just become still it will lessen the pain. I’m here to help you. The sooner we can get your baby out the sooner the pain will stop.’