‘Thank you.’ Margaret smiled and walked slowly along the room. She loved coming in here, seeing all that went on. As she had grown used to the place, the more she loved the busyness, the drive towards production of what in the end were all beautiful things. She was still astonished by it. For a second she thought about Christmas, about going home as they surely must, to return to their old life. A bleak feeling filled her. Though she loved her home, the meadows and hills around the village, it all seemed rather quiet and slow now, compared with the life here.

Uncle Eb was talking with Tom Haines, one of the drop stampers, their heads bent over something that Uncle Eb was holding. Tom, a dark-haired, stocky man, had been doing the work for twenty-five years and he had the uneven gait of a drop stamper to prove it. Margaret felt self-conscious as the two of them looked up and eyed her coming towards them.

‘All right, wench?’ Uncle Eb said. ‘Anything up?’

‘It’s just . . . Aunt Hatt says could you come into the office? Mr Lieberman has come in with . . . with the portraits for . . . Herr V.T.’ She felt herself blush with embarrassment at the impossibility of saying the man’s absurd – in English – full name.

‘Oh – ’ere already, is ’e?’ Uncle Eb said, handing the die they had been examining to Tom. ‘I’ll ’ave to go and see ’im, Tom. I’ll be back.’

In the office, Sam Lieberman, a small, middle-aged man with a dapper appearance and neat moustache, opened a box and brought out the seven portraits one by one with impressively precise slowness, laying them on the desk.

‘Oh!’ Margaret could not help exclaiming. ‘They’re so beautiful!’

The men who had created them, Caleb Turner, other men who had stamped them out and Sam Lieberman, had worked a miracle from the tinted photographs. From each of the little oval shapes, set on a different-coloured pastel background, looked out the face of a young woman. While there was a similarity in their pale plumpness, the portraits each captured something individual: the sheen on the brown hair of one, the shape of the lips, angle of eyes; a bow here, the shading of a cheek and a different hairstyle there. Each wore a gown of a separate, gorgeous shade – a deep red, peacock green or golden yellow – colours, the very sight of which filled Margaret with an excited joy. And each of the young women surveyed the world with a sweet, blue-eyed expression all her own.

‘My, my,’ Eb murmured respectfully. He picked up each one and peered closely at it before moving on to the next. ‘Well, Sam – you’ve done a fine job here, I must say. These are marvellous – some of the best I’ve ever seen.’ He chuckled. ‘I’ll tell yer summat – these wenches look a darn sight better on here than they do in those photographs.’