All I ask, Margaret, is that you come home for a time, so that I might speak to you in person, to try and explain myself. I beg you to find forgiveness in your heart for a loving man who holds you in nothing but the highest regard, but who is at once and the same, a weak vessel.

She gazed at the ornate handwriting, rage like a flame leaping to life in her. Her first impulse was to screw up both letters and throw them into the gutter outside. But she had to let Annie see them first. She could well imagine Annie’s wrath. He has no recollection of what happened, she thought. Well, how convenient for him. She slammed the front door as she left. Her father’s words angered her even more than Charles’s own. I am, of course, disposed to forgive you . . .

Forgive me! she raged inwardly. All the conflicting, painful feelings rose in her, almost stopping her breath. Her sense of guilt even though she knew, really, that she was not in the wrong, her feeling of being soiled, betrayed, wrongfully accused and – by her father – loved less than Charles, this man who he had taken to him as his son and whose word he had believed before that of his own flesh and blood . . . It was her father towards whom she felt the most hurt and rage.

She was glad of a job to do; something to try and keep her steady.

Hands trembling, she let herself into number twenty-four. As she went to the stairs, her eyes were drawn immediately to Philip Tallis’s half-open door. She could hear voices – both male. But Mrs Flett was pushing her broom along the hall and Margaret did not want to be seen hovering. With the letters folded tightly in her hand, she hurried up to Caleb Turner’s room.

‘The pictures have arrived,’ she told him. ‘From that German gentleman.’ She could not bring herself to say the name, even to Caleb Turner.

He looked round at her from his workbench, eyebrows raised. ‘Those wenches of his, eh?’ he said. ‘All right – give us half an hour and I’ll be round.’

Margaret leaned down for a moment to admire the die he was working on – something floral, complicated – before leaving. Mrs Flett had disappeared from the hall and as Margaret went downstairs, unable to help herself, she paused halfway down. There was a silence, then hushed voices, as if whoever was in there with Philip Tallis was leaning over to examine something. She heard a few muffled exchanges and was about to carry on down the stairs when a voice came louder, as if the man had straightened up.