‘He was in shipping, a client of my father’s at the bank. Though you’d have thought it was my mother who was marrying him, so overjoyed was she at all her ambitions, schemes and stratagems coming to fruition. But her hopes were dashed. Colin became ill on a visit to the house, on a Sunday afternoon just like this one. He was dead by the morning.’

She looked away with an expression of equanimity that must have taken many years to attain. Raven could not disrupt that by explicitly voicing his suspicions, but nonetheless, he needed to know.

‘Did Mary nurse him?’

She smiled. ‘Of course. That is my great consolation: that he was cared for by someone who knew all that he meant.’

Raven finished his tea in the growing silence, Martha lost in her recollection.

He put the cup down, the sound enough to bring her back to the present.

‘Martha, how did your parents die, if it is not intrusive to ask?’

‘Not at all. After all, you are far from the first doctor I have encountered. My father passed away first. He became ill very suddenly. He had seemed in the peak of health, but as I had witnessed with Colin, disease can strike down anyone at any time. Poor Mary allowed herself no rest, tending to him every hour she was not working at the hospital, but it did no good. Our doctor did not know what ailed him. Nobody was able to help him.

‘My mother was devastated. He was her sun and her moon. More than that: being his wife was what gave her purpose and status. She was such a proud woman, fiercely outspoken, so haughty in how she carried herself, and yet she was so diminished after that. She became poorly and took to her bed, never to leave it again. After that, though we were stepsisters, Mary and I were the closest people each other had. The only people each other had.’

Raven had to suppress his reaction, for there it was, a mirror of events he had already heard about this very day: a cruel and spiteful matriarch who died last, only after seeing the people she loved pass away beneath her own roof and her family’s future annihilated. Long before working for the cantankerous Mrs Eddlestone, there had been Mary’s stepmother. Mary had killed her daughter’s betrothed, and with him her dreams, then killed the husband she adored, before killing her last.

But as he looked at Martha, calmly contemplating her painful past, he asked himself why Mary had spared her. Would she not have wished to inflict that bereavement upon Mrs Dempster too: the death of her only child?