I tell her I have read there is cholera in York and I know I have just the ill luck to catch it, but she tells me that we will keep ourselves to the clean streets and away from any sickness.

Doctors before have told me they could cure me. Not just for the pains in my back, but for pains inside my head and heart which Miss Lister knows nothing of.

I’d been a happy girl with such potential. I used to be brave, but at seventeen I made a decision to visit my childhood friend who had just married a Mr Ainsworth in Derbyshire. In that one choice, that one trip, which should have been delightful, my world crashed down around me.

My family tried so many ways to move me past the turmoil which drew from me all my strength and tears and took me into silence for a very long time. I lost myself as they tried different medicines and methods. They took me up to Harrogate to bathe in cold waters. I was given tonics, talked at, kept warm, kept cold, given lots of certain foods and denied others, kept in my room, made to sit outside, watched at all times, doors locked; and through all of it, it was as if I was not there. No one talked to me as others answered on my behalf. I became ensconced inside a shell of myself, just waiting for the day when I would have the strength to crawl back out again.

Despite all the trials and different doctors, it was not a cure that saved me; I just came back into myself. One day, with no more tears to fall, I woke. I rose and washed and dressed and ate breakfast and carried on. For what can any of us do in truth but carry on? Over the next few months my strength returned. I walked to the edge of the woods and back. I began eating and writing letters again. I ordered some new novels to read and lost myself in their stories. With each one I became more awake, more myself.

Then, just a few years later, it all happened again when my parents died. I managed to get through it eventually with help from my siblings but then both of them married and left me. It was as if my recovery allowed them to move on. They had both been dutiful and patient, so I was happy for them to have found love. But we would never see John again, his widow left carrying his child. I wonder where she is now? The Walkers cared little for her after the stillborn child. Elizabeth is gone too, so far away from me. I always knew she would leave me one day; I just wish she were happier.

Miss Lister