The perfume shop is as I once imagined ours might be in London. Glassy and musky. It is furnished with cabinets of a dark, expensive-looking polished wood, almost the colour of cherries, the like of which I saw in Dr McTavish’s apartment. On the shelves are all sorts of stoppered bottles. Spencer is doing well for himself.

He is alone. I take a deep breath and walk inside. I shut the door behind me and wait for him to notice me. The scent is intoxicating and brings me straight back to our cottage, his smuggled packages, our first kiss. I almost walk straight back out again, but I mustn’t. He is intent on arranging things on the counter and he looks just as he always did, except that now he wears a velvet waistcoat in a deep burgundy to match the wood of his shop. I am much changed, and he is not. I wonder, uneasily, if he has a woman upstairs, lying abed, taking her Women’s Tonic. If he does, I imagine her to be viciously pretty with an accent like cut-glass. A soft delicate throat, unscarred, with a hint of expensive musk about it.

Finally he looks up and clears his throat, expecting a well-heeled gent or the neatly turned-out maid of someone from a top-storey apartment. When he sees me, he gulps and then quickly recovers himself.

‘I wondered how long it would take you to find me,’ he comments.

I say nothing for now, just slide open a cabinet door, pick up a bottle of something and take off the stopper, then put it to my nose. I hope he does not notice that my hands shake.

‘I can only apologize for disappearing the way I did,’ he adds.

Well, that makes me cross.

‘Apparently that was not your fault,’ I tell him, my blood rising. ‘They said you were dragged off by a press gang.’

‘That was part of what happened,’ he replied. ‘I was taken onto a boat, but I was able to bribe one of the Navy men. Another boat came into the port, from Gothenburg, and I was expecting a consignment on it, so the Navy man took that in lieu of me. I would never have made a decent Navy officer anyway.’

Oh, he never even made it out to sea! And I had spent all those days and nights pining and aching, and wondering if he might be whipped or drowned. But I don’t pine and ache now, I just twirl the glass ring on my finger. It is light and cheap and thin.

‘So why did you not come home?’ I can hear the fury in my raised voice rattling off the cabinet-glass.

He shifts from one foot to the other and fiddles with his waistcoat pocket.

‘I think I had got myself in a bit deep,’ he replies. ‘What with one thing and another. Marrying you so soon.’