I’m thinking that this could be perfect. Our lives fall together, and it turns out she does have some business acumen. The more she learns from my running of Shibden, the more she takes stock of her own estates and incomes. She visits her collieries now too, and we are seen about town. She joins us in the Lister pew with my sister, aunt and father. Let others stare if they will, for what are we but four single women in each other’s company? Surely, they must all see that it makes sense, all of us probably too old to marry and happy to remain spinsters. Why should we suffer loneliness because of it?

The world around us changes quickly and Halifax seems to prosper. The Walkers and their kin cannot help but be ever more successful. Ann struggles to spend her money, so I gladly oblige to help her. We shop together and treat ourselves, replacing all the curtains and bedding; we order the new dinner service we wanted from York and she agrees to all my plans for Shibden. The work is set in motion; a small piece at a time so as not to annoy my aunt or father with too many workmen at once.

My father, aunt and sister are all finally in agreement about knocking out the ceiling in the main hall and raising it to the full height of the roof. We will only lose one room upstairs for it, and the new staircase will be grand. I show them the drawings and I do not think they even mind me adding the initials A. L. into the woodwork. I later realise that the initials are also now my wife’s and so in a way we are all three – my Aunt Anne, myself and my wife – immortalised in the woodwork with the Latin words Justus Propositi Tenax inscribed between them; our Lister motto, ‘Just and true of purpose’. I order some finely turned posts for the stairs before they can change their minds, and add wooden figures for each of the banisters, including a lion clutching a shield with the Lister family crest. I shall make this a grand house yet.

I bring out of storage some portraits of our ancestors and have them repaired and reframed, so that we can adorn the new high walls with our family heritage when they are complete. I commission a local painter to capture Aunt, which she delights in, whilst Marian and Father both refuse to sit for portraits. Instead, I commission a landscape of Shibden for Marian and I leave my father to his newspaper which he reads as if he will be tested on it later and achieve a degree for the astute reading of it. He tuts and shares with us the parts that pique his interest as if he wrote the news or caused it himself.