I blushed deeper and dropped my head. If she noticed she chose not to say anything, and we walked for a while without talking. The surface of the stream was alive, and I felt the bite of a mosquito on the back of my neck. “How is the narrowboat, Till, now the weather has warmed?”

“Oh, God. It feels like living in a sardine tin left out in the sun. We’re all a bit off.”

“You’re welcome to stay with us, you know. I’m sure Da won’t mind the extra company.” I offered, knowing she would turn me down again.

“It won’t be for much longer,” she said. “My deployment is almost over.”

“You make it sound like you’re in an army.”

“Oh, but I am, Esme. Mrs. Pankhurst’s army.” She made a mock salute. “The WSPU.”

“I’ve started going along to some of the local suffrage meetings Mrs. Murray and her daughters attend,” I said. “And there are a number of men, though the women do most of the talking.”

“Talk is all they do,” Tilda said.

“I don’t think that’s true,” I said. “They produce a journal, and they organise all kinds of events.”

“It’s all talk though, isn’t it? The same words over and over again, and what’s changed?”

I remembered Gareth asking why Tilda was really in Oxford. I’d long worked out that it wasn’t for me, but I thought maybe it was for her friend in the narrowboat. Now I realised it was something else altogether. But I didn’t want to know what.

“How is Bill?” I asked, not looking at her.

Tilda had mentioned Bill now and then. It was always fleeting and I was always grateful. But she would be leaving Oxford soon and I suddenly needed to know how he was.

“Bill? That rogue. He broke my heart. He got some silly girl knapped and stopped being at my beck and call. I was furious.”

“Knapped?”

She grinned. “I know that look. Do you still carry those slips of paper around in your pockets?”

I nodded.

“Get one out then.”

We stopped walking, and Tilda laid her shawl on the grass beside the path. We sat.

“This is nice,” she said as I readied the slip and pencil. “It’s like before.”

I felt it too, but I knew that nothing would ever be like before. “Knapped,” I said as I wrote it on the slip. “Put it in a sentence.”

She leaned back on her elbows and raised her face to the first day of summer. She took her time as she used to, wanting to get the quotation just right.

“Bill got some silly girl knapped and now he’s a daddy, working all day and half the night to feed his squalling babe.”