She stands looking at me. Waiting for an answer. Miss Lister can be quite fearsome sometimes. She reminds me of someone else who looked at me like that once. I feel myself tremble. But she softens. Her face calms and she comes to sit next to me on the bed. She takes hold of one of my hands. She is so patient with me. She tells me not to fret and gives me until April to decide, but even April seems too soon. Then I realise that I need to tell her something. The reason I am so fearful, so doubtful, and it all finally comes tumbling out.

Miss Lister

She tells me something happened between her and Mr Ainsworth when she was just seventeen, just after he was married to her friend. She says she did not wish for it but poor innocent thing that she is, didn’t realise until it was too late what his intentions were. Despite none of it being her fault, she takes the full weight of the guilt upon herself, as if she had sought out his attentions behind her friend’s back. But from what she says, I think he contrived the whole situation. Saw an innocent young woman who could easily be taken advantage of. All I can do is sit and hold this naive and trusting young girl in my arms as she weeps and shakes and blurts out her account of him seducing her, though she barely understood what he was doing. I hear how he orchestrated an evening where the two were alone, and he gave her one too many glasses of wine and convinced her that it was not a sin to have a playful kiss. Then a playful touch of her neck, her back and her thighs. She had wanted to please and believed the way to make him stop was to show little resistance and hope it would end, and he would laugh and say he had just been teasing – but it did not end. He was not teasing.