‘And she was too young!’ Sir Edward cried out, as if in agony. He rose, crossed the room, loomed over as if he might strike her. ‘Far, far too young. Have you understood nothing? Did you merely watch on in ignorance all those years that I suffered? I loved her. Oh, how I loved her – truly, profoundly. Yet still I can only regret it.’

This was too far. He had taken them both to a moment most terrible. There was no turning away now. Half awed, half greatly outraged, Mary stood to confront it.

‘Regret, Papa?’ she asked carefully. ‘You speak of regret that you loved my mama?’

He began to shake with some violence. ‘I regret that she left me too soon.’ Purple veins stood out on his forehead. ‘I regret my own lot in having to raise our infants alone. Can you begin to imagine it? Demented with grief, yet shackled by duty?’ He choked at the memory. ‘God’s will be done, and ’tis not my place to question, but He shall not take you, Mary.’ Tears sprang from his eyes now. ‘While there is breath in my body, He shall not take you from me. Not into the arms of that scoundrel.’

But she could give no thought to his message, for now the sound of his sobbing was piercing her heart. All steel left her young body; her spirit was dust. She was six years of age again: returned to Mrs Grant’s parlour in Albion Place.

Taking him into her arms, she pressed her own face to his. ‘There, there, Papa.’ Mary could do nothing but comfort him now. She knew no other way. ‘There, there, dear Papa.’

But even as she repeated the well-practised mantra, her poor mind was consumed with the import of that which she had heard: he had regretted her whole existence; he had regretted the lives of her brothers.

Her own father wished his own children had not been born.

For the whole month of January 1826, a great cloud of bitterness hung over Mersham-le-Hatch.

Sir Edward’s fury showed no sign of abatement. Though he had broken two hearts, crushed two lovers’ dreams and triumphed completely, he could only brood over the fact that he had been wronged in the first place. Even the ludicrous conviction that he had Right on his side – mentioned daily at breakfast and over dinner – did not seem enough to placate him.

Lady Knatchbull, the most obedient of wives and yet devoted of sisters, seemed to be in dismay at the position in which she now found herself. She would not quarrel with Sir Edward, of course, but nor could she join in his hatred of her own brother, so instead she blamed Mary. Any maternal warmth she had previously mustered – and it had never reached higher than tepid – was turned unto frost.