Mr Beech looked at me and seemed surprised, but then I saw relief creep in. I wondered for a moment if it would turn to anger, but he simply shook my hand, tutted quietly and then walked away. I could have lain down on the ground with the relief of it.

It became a week of confessions. After leaving Langton Hall and the Norcliffes behind me after a few days of catching up, reminiscing, and a pleasurable fumble with Isabella for old time’s sake, I head over to Lawton Hall in Cheshire to see its mistress, Mariana.

No sooner had I told her about the Langton Hall incident and how relieved I felt to have finally spoken with Mr Beech, than Mariana was itching to tell me something herself. I think she felt guilty at her choice over the years, her naive hope that Charles would not live long, but it turns out that there was another reason that she left me. She wants to tell me so I will not continue to think that it was due to a personal shortcoming of mine. She reassures me that I am perfect and was all she ever wanted, except – and she lands a heavy blow – that I could never give her a child.

The still childless Mariana stares at me with her wide beautiful eyes and I see this has burned away in her since she married Charles over fifteen years ago. She hasn’t told me before because she’d hoped it would happen for her, she tells me. Then it would have been self-evident. However, many years later, childless, for her to voice that this is what she wanted all this time, opens up a grief for what she has not been blessed with. From Miss Walker’s grief to Mariana’s, I seem to be the one others cry on at the moment.

I can see from her tears how much she wanted a child and to be denied the one thing that would have justified her decision, fifteen years of putting up with Charles, of breaking her own heart by leaving me, seems cruel. She cries as if she has actually lost a child. I imagine it is the idea of it, of what could have been, that grieves her. She sobs that if she’d had one straight away, when Charles used to take his pleasure with her regularly, the child would be fifteen years old, an individual learning their place in the world, talking to us now, looking like a young version of her.