‘How dare you say such a monstrous thing!’ Their father towered before them, his eyes blazing with rage and disgust. ‘I don’t know from where you could have dreamt up such a wicked and vile idea! You, Annie – I have warned you against the kind of reading material you indulge in – yes, don’t think I don’t know. And you, Margaret – I thought you were good and pure. Perhaps you are still sick after all – much sicker than we realized!’

Margaret bowed her head under these verbal blows, so full of pain she could find no words.

‘But Father!’ Annie clamoured at him. ‘I was there. I saw him – he was—’

‘Quiet!’ he roared. ‘How dare you take issue with me like this? Nothing would have induced a man like Charles to stray from the path unless it was the work of a woman, toying with his fancy. It’s not the first time this has happened – he is the sort of man who has an effect on women. But I would have thought you were stronger, better . . .’ His face twisted with revulsion and he turned away.

‘No, Father,’ Margaret wept. ‘It wasn’t like that . . .’ She was trembling with shock, too weak to defend herself. And the extent of her father’s rage – the father whom she had idolized – crushed her.

‘The trouble is,’ she sobbed to Annie in their bedroom, ‘he can see no wrong in Charles. He’ll never see.’

‘What did he mean?’ Annie said. ‘That it’s happened before?’

‘I don’t know.’ Margaret had hardly taken this in. She was so hurt by the betrayal of both these men that in her shocked state she felt it like a physical injury. Nausea rose in her, she felt bruised between her legs and her body ached with sorrow. ‘Charles is like Father’s son, isn’t he?’ she wept. ‘He thinks Charles is like him and he wants to set him on his way to the great mission that he feels cheated of himself.’

William Hanson was adamant. He saw the world as a battle between darkness and light. She was at fault. She was the temptress; Charles, injured and felled, the innocent party. And his accusations instilled in her the most agonizing doubts, with which she had been wrestling ever since. Had what happened been her fault, somehow? Was she ill and flawed in some way?

They told the Davises, in whose house Charles lodged, that he had been taken ill at their cottage and they had thought it best to care for him there and then. No one was allowed near him except William Hanson, who nursed him like a son; not even Alice Lamb, their housekeeper.