Jenny turned away to hide her smile. As well as being her dresser, she was Hannah’s trusted friend and advisor. No woman was closer or knew her better. She remembered only too well that, during rehearsals for a new work at Drury Lane Theatre, Hannah had developed such a loathing for the man who wrote it that she threatened to tear her contract to bits. Because she had no compunction about letting him down, her antics had reduced the manager to a gibbering wreck. Her headstrong behaviour had been carefully erased from Hannah’s mind but it was an indelible memory to her dresser.

‘The house is full again tonight,’ said Jenny.

‘It always is when I grace its boards.’

‘Dorothea Glenn told me that she wished she could be in the audience one night so that she could watch your performance.’

‘Then she needs to be reminded that she is an actress. Her place is onstage. She cannot only enjoy my performance there, she’s in a position to enhance it. I like the girl very much,’ said Hannah, ‘but she still has much to learn.’

‘Dorothea is fortunate. There’s no better teacher than you.’

‘It’s one of my many virtues.’

Jenny sighed.

Peter Skillen was highly conscious of his companion’s unease. Seated in a mail coach with three immaculate gentlemen, Seth Hooper was squirming. He had neither the confidence nor the education to take part in a conversation with the others so he sat there in silence and cursed his social inferiority. The coach stopped every ten or fifteen miles in order that the horses could be changed. It was at the third stop that Hooper finally found his voice again. He and Peter were in the courtyard of a coaching inn, stretching their legs and getting some fresh air.

‘I were shaken,’ Hooper confided. ‘When they told me where Sir Roger had been killed, I simply had to go straight to the place where it happened. Honest, I were that shocked.’

‘Was there a pool of blood?’

‘No, Mr Skillen, it weren’t the area outside the stage door that upset me. It were Covent Garden itself. I’d never seen the like. I’ve been to markets before but not like this one. It were full of beggars and thieves and wild-eyed men, not to mention women wi’ no shame. I’m a married man, sir,’ he went on, ‘and I go to church every Sunday wi’ my wife on my arm. I blushed at some of the things those powdered harlots offered me – in broad daylight, too. It were indecent, Mr Skillen. If this is what London is really like, I’m glad I don’t live here.’

‘Parts of the city have become the haunts of pleasure-seekers,’ admitted Peter, ‘but there are many respectable districts. I’m sorry that your first visit to the nation’s capital was so disappointing.’