‘Are you not frightened to return?’ I whispered with a shudder.

‘I know who to bribe,’ he said. ‘For where there’s war there’s impoverishment, and where there’s impoverishment there’s desperation. Gents with nothing left to their name but their connections. Refugees. These are the kinds of gents who will do anything when they hear there’s money to be made from London merchants.’

Ma, Da and Joan were only down the road and around the corner, yet they lived in another world from my new one. I had thought that Joan and I would never be close again, but instead she thawed. She started to pay me visits, to get away from Ma and Da. She came over sometimes when Spencer was out. He liked to visit the Mussel Inn and go for long walks when there was a break in the weather, and I supposed he was restless to get on with his trading. I let him go out without nagging him about where he was going or what he’d been up to, for I had seen what happened when Ma did that to Da, and it never ended well.

Joan and I became more sisterly, now that we were not living in stifling proximity. She needed out of the cottage and to talk freely without Ma listening. She confessed as much one evening a few weeks into my marriage. Spencer was down at the Mussel Inn, where he had started to get in with Da’s crowd, and Joan had brought her knitting over so that we could do our chores and gab. She’d brought a bit of seed-cake on one of Ma’s second-best plates and I had poured us a small cup of coffee each.

‘Ma was all for coming along with me tonight, but I said you wouldn’t like it,’ Joan told me, her knitting flopped on her lap, barely a stitch done.

‘Why would you say a thing like that?’ I asked. Honestly, Joan was a wench sometimes.

‘Well, you wouldn’t like it.’ Joan shrugged. ‘She would only harrumph at Spencer not being here and say that he leaves you on your own too much.’

‘But Da is the same, is he not? Going away all the time. Or is that different because he’s in the fishing trade?’

Joan shrugged again.

‘Ma is getting used to it,’ I said. ‘Me marrying out.’

‘Well, she needs to get used to it. For I shan’t marry a fisherman, either,’ said Joan. ‘Not now you’ve shown it can be done so easily and you can end up living as cosily as this.’ She looked around at the pristine fireplace, shirts pegged neatly in front of it. The vase of dried lavender on the windowsill. My map of Great Britain now unfolded and pinned to the wall. The room had the scent of clean washing.