“Esme! Good Lord, what happened?” Rosfrith saw us as we walked in through the gates of Sunnyside. She looked to Gareth for an explanation.

“The procession to the Martyrs’ Memorial got out of hand,” he said.

Gareth and I had barely spoken on our walk up the Banbury Road. Tilda had unsettled us and rendered us both shy.

“This happened at the procession?” said Rosfrith. She looked me up and down. My skirt was torn and soiled, my hair had come loose, my cheek smarted from where I’d continued to rub it to remove the filth of that man’s hatred. “Oh dear,” she continued. “Mamma was there with Hilda and Gwyneth. It was wise of you to go together, though it doesn’t seem to have helped you,” she said.

I found my tongue. “Oh, no, we met quite by accident. I don’t know how Gareth came to be there.”

She looked from Gareth to me, sceptical.

I was unable to hold her gaze and turned to Gareth. “Why were you there?”

“Same reason you were,” he said.

“I’m not sure why I was there,” I said, as much to myself as to him.

Just then, Mrs. Murray walked in through the gates with her eldest and youngest daughters. All three were unscathed and excited. Rosfrith ran to them.

Gareth walked with me to the kitchen and I introduced him to Lizzie. He helped explain what had happened.

“Let me give you something for that lip.” Lizzie dampened a clean cloth and passed it to him.

He removed the scrap of paper and held it up for us both to see. “Stopped me bleeding to death, this did.”

“What on earth is it?” asked Lizzie, peering at it.

“The edge of a slip,” Gareth said, smiling in my direction.

“I really am grateful, you know,” I said. “That man was terrifying. It was unfair of Tilda to mock you.”

“She was just testing me.”

“What do you mean?”

“Making sure I was on the right side.”

I smiled. “And are you on the right side?”

He smiled back. “Yes, I am.”

He seemed more sure than I was, and part of me felt ashamed. “Sometimes I think there may be more than two sides,” I said.

“You’d do well not to take the side of the suffragettes,” Lizzie said. “They’re slowing things down with all their mischief.” She handed Gareth a glass of water.

“Thank you, Miss Lester,” he said.

“You call me Lizzie. I don’t answer to anything else.”

We watched as he drank it down. When he finished, he took the glass to the sink and rinsed it. Lizzie looked at me in astonishment.

“People have always taken different roads to get to the same place,” Gareth said when he turned back to face us. “Women’s suffrage won’t be any different.”