He laughed and said he was only teasing, and I said that was plenty from both of them. I’d had enough of her company by then. I yawned, saying it was time for bed and we were keeping Joan up too late. I told Spencer to walk her round the corner and make sure she got home safe, and not to fall out with her on the way.

I washed, then waited for him to come to bed, and I was happy to wait too, for he had introduced me to the marriage act in a way Ma would no doubt say was wanton. Our nights ran into the soft hours. I know not how long we lay together; all I remember is the grey, gritty feeling of not getting enough sleep because of all the things we were doing. Feeling quite thrilled about it all. Spencer seemed to know his way around my body in a way I had not even known myself. I was sure he must have lain with a dozen women before me, to know such things. Before my marriage, a bed was a place for sleeping and snoring and the poking of ribs. Where unwashed bodies sweated, and blankets stank. Now my bed was a place of pleasure and clean, fresh sheets that I had washed and perfumed with the packets that Spencer gave me. It was a place of nakedness and lust.

‘Did you learn your ways in a whorehouse in Gothenburg?’ I asked him one night, half joking, but half serious because I was jealous of all the other women who might’ve been before me.

‘Of course not. I am just finding out as I go, same as you,’ he said. ‘But there’s no shame in the pleasure, is there?’

But we both knew he was sparing me the details. I tried to put the thought of these other women out of my mind, but it unsettled me to know that there were girls in London or Sweden with feathers in their hats and white silk gloves, whom he had admired and bedded. I did not like that feeling at all.

Another thing Spencer had no shame about was the physic preparations that he gave me to take, now I was a married woman. They came in packets and were a concoction of powders, which he assured me was perfectly safe, but would stop us from becoming a ma and da ourselves just yet. On this we were in agreement. I was as averse to becoming a mother as I was to becoming a fishwife. I had never forgotten the blood on the bed when Ma had her miscarriage, or the look in her eye when she talked of her lost babes, or the worn-out state of her as Joan and I bickered.