As though sensing her ambivalence, Rochester screwed up his face, turned a rather disturbing shade of puce, and began to cry again. His crying this time was loud and insistent, not easily soothed. Mrs Quinton reached for a bell on the side table and summoned the nursemaid to take him away. The poor girl looked harassed and Sarah wondered if her pay was sufficient recompense for the demands placed upon her.

Mrs Quinton indicated that Sarah should sit again and then began to enquire about her own situation. Sarah was becoming used to this. She was a conundrum, representing a deviation from the norm that seemed to cause a degree of disquiet in the bosoms of those wedded to the notion of a rigorously imposed social hierarchy. In some this disquiet was expressed as curiosity, exposing her to probing questions that she was sure her interlocutors would find inappropriate should they be similarly interrogated. In others, her effrontery at presenting herself as above stairs when her origins were unequivocally below provoked outright hostility, so she put up with gentle questioning as best she could.

‘So, you were a housemaid?’

‘Yes.’

‘But no longer?’

‘No. I work as an assistant to Dr Simpson.’

‘I don’t understand. I would have assumed that the doctor’s assistant would also be a medical man.’

‘He has one of those as well.’

‘So, what do you do?’

Her tone was becoming imperious, as though she was beginning to doubt the veracity of Sarah’s claims.

‘I help to organise the patients in the waiting room—’

‘If his waiting room is anything like his account books, I imagine it is in grave need of organisation. But you are married, are you not?’

‘Yes.’ And here it was, the thorniest part of the issue.

‘And what does your husband say about you continuing to work? Mr Quinton would never permit such a thing. It would reflect very badly on him. Very badly indeed. What would people think? I will tell you what they would think, and more importantly what they would say. They would say that he had utterly failed in his duty to provide for his family.’

She stopped suddenly, her diatribe interrupted. She put a hand to her mouth, a look of concern upon her face. ‘Is he terribly poor, your husband?’

Sarah was sorely tempted to make something up, something salacious about gambling debts or misappropriated funds that she felt would gratify this woman more than the truth. But she thought better of it.

‘My husband is a doctor and understands the value of what I do,’ she stated, her even tone belying the irritation she was feeling.

‘A doctor? Really? Well, that is most irregular.’

‘Yes, I suppose that it is.’