‘Though it brings pain to admit it, true domestic happiness is now behind me forever. I have little more to look forward to – until I, too, am called up to heaven and by her side once again. I can only pray I will not be left long in my agonies.’

‘Oh, Papa, no!’

‘And, until that moment of blessed delivery, it falls to you, dear child, henceforth to devote yourself utterly to the comfort and succour of your afflicted parent.’

‘Of course, Papa.’

‘Your brothers are yet young, but then soon to be absorbed into their own lives and futures. You alone I can count on.’ He laid his heavy head upon her crisp, white cap, and left it there. ‘You are all I now have.’

‘Thank you, Papa.’

‘And you must always remember, the more you endeavour to be a good girl, so the prouder I shall become and the better I will love you.’

‘I shall try my hardest, Papa.’

‘Then that is the only source of contentment I can foresee.’

And with that, he abandoned himself to a loud and violent demonstration of his own misery.

Mary was gripped by paralysis. Her neck hurt with the weight of him. His tears spilled on to her pinafore, making her shoulder uncomfortably damp. Somewhere inside of her something was breaking, like a bone china teacup being dashed to the floor.

And yet even then, there grew in its place another sensation: the niggling feeling that she had some pressing commitment. What was it now? While her father sobbed, Mary worried away at it. She was sure there was something. Until gradually it dawned what was required, what was expected, indeed.

‘There, there, Papa.’ At first, Mary was tentative, shy even. After all, she was barely seven years of age, and had never had occasion to soothe anyone before, beyond a pet or a doll – or herself. But: ‘There, there,’ she said again, ‘there, there.’

And then simply continued to repeat it like a mantra, while clasping his much larger hand.

Though Mary was, from that moment, forever changed, she was no more than a mere member of a substantial herd while still at school. Even motherlessness – though new, livid and red raw – was not enough to set her apart from the rest of Mrs Grant’s girls. A good number had been sent to Albion Place for that very reason. Many a mama was lost to childbirth, of course, and many a family the victim of those cruel, common diseases that stole into the home like a thief in the night. There was also a pupil whose mother had run orf, as Matron liked to put it in her scandalised whisper, but – as the woman could just as easily run back again at any moment – that pupil was more an object of envy.