At the foot of the stairs, she sniffed; what was that smell? She peeked into her dad’s study and noticed the vase of flowers her mum had been sent for her birthday. They were almost dead; she’d forgotten Dorothy had told her to throw them out once the pollen started dropping on the floor. She went over and inhaled. It was the smell from the night before, which she thought was the face paints. The smell was sickly, almost musky. It was the smell of jasmine, the scent her mum associated with death.

CHAPTER 43

Chapter 43

Thursday 8 January 1880

‘Mrs Donaldson to see you, Mrs Craig.’

‘Good morning Ann,’ said Margaret, as she swept past Jessie and went to take her friend’s hand. ‘How are you?’

‘Fine, thank you, Margaret. Please take a seat.’

Margaret tucked her dark grey skirt around her legs and peered at Ann. ‘You do not look well. Are you sleeping?’

‘Sleeping? Oh yes, like a baby.’ Ann forced a smile. ‘I have a bout of melancholy, but it will go. It is all this black.’

‘Ah yes, I recall my mother feeling the same when she was in mourning for my father. She told me that simply putting on her black clothes every day sent her into a deep depression. She told me it was like sitting under a heavy black rain cloud.’

Ann nodded and brushed at her black silk gown.

‘Did your mother mourn your father’s death in such a way, my dear?’

Ann suppressed the urge to laugh. ‘Of course, just as one is duty-bound to.’ She remembered her mother rushing into the kitchen where ten-year-old Annie had been scrubbing tatties. Her mother was beaming. ‘He is gone, gone at last!’ she had shouted. ‘The prison just sent me the news. Now we are free.’ Ann then remembered vividly how her mother drank herself into the sort of stupor her father had been prone to, the drunkenness that caused him to kill a man and put him in prison for life. Her mother’s spree, in contrast, meant they had no money left and had to exist on porridge, made from oatmeal handed in by Mattie across the street.

She turned back to Margaret, trying to dismiss the feeling of jealousy bubbling within. Her childhood had been hard, every day a struggle, whereas this woman opposite had been brought up in the lap of luxury. ‘Will you take some tea?’