“Ah!” she said, giving a slight whisper of a smile and raising an eyebrow. “You must be Thursday.”

She returned her pistol to a holster that was strapped to her thigh beneath several layers of her large brocade dress and started to rummage in the cupboards.

“Do you know where your mother keeps the booze?”

“Suppose you tell me who you are?” I demanded, my eyes alighting on the knife block as I searched for a weapon—just in case.

The woman didn’t give me an answer, or, at least, not to the question I’d asked.

“Your father told me Lavoisier eradicated your husband.”

I halted my surreptitious creep towards the carving knives.

“You know my father?” I asked in some surprise.

“I do so hate that term eradicated,” she announced grimly, searching in vain amongst the tinned fruit for anything resembling alcohol. “It’s murder, Thursday—nothing less. They killed my husband, too—even if it did take three attempts.”

“Who?”

“Lavoisier and the French revisionists.”

She thumped her fist on the kitchen top as if to punctuate her anger and turned to face me.

“You have memories of your husband, I suppose?”

“Yes.”

“Me too,” she sighed. “I wish to heaven I hadn’t, but I have. Memories of things that might have happened. Knowledge of the loss. It’s the worst part of it.”

She opened another cupboard door, revealing still more tinned fruit.

“I understand your husband was barely two years old— mine was forty-seven. You might think that makes it better, but it doesn’t. The petition for his divorce was granted and we were married the summer following Trafalgar. Nine years of glorious life as Lady Nelson—then I wake up one morning in Calais, a drunken, debt-ridden wretch, and with the revelation that my one true love died a decade ago, shot by a sniper’s bullet on the quarterdeck of the Victory.”

“I know who you are,” I murmured. “You’re Emma Hamilton.”

“I was Emma Hamilton,” she replied sadly. “Now I’m a broke out-of-timer with a dismal reputation, no husband and a thirst the size of the Gobi.”

“But you still have your daughter?”

“Yes,” she groaned, “but I never told her I was her mother.”

“Try the end cupboard.”

She moved down the counter, rummaged some more and found a bottle of cooking sherry. She poured a generous helping into one of my mother’s teacups. I looked at the saddened woman and wondered if I’d end up the same way.

“We’ll sort out Lavoisier eventually,” muttered Lady Hamilton sadly, downing the cooking sherry. “You can be sure of that.”

“We?”

She looked at me and poured another generous—even by my mother’s definition—cup of sherry.

“Me—and your father, of course.”

I sighed. She obviously hadn’t heard the news.

“That’s what I came to talk to my mother about.”

“What did you come to talk to me about?”