I made my way up three flights of rickety stairs, past paintings of swans and ducks and men catching trout. When I got to the top I was puffed out. The other bed was occupied, but whoever my room-companion was, she was out when I arrived. This lady had left a gold-coloured cloak on the stand, which I thought an extremely bold bit of colour, and a collection of pots on the table filled with face-paints. At this gaudiness and finery I panicked again at whether I had everything I needed for London. After inspecting myself in the dusty looking glass above the washstand I concluded that I could not arrive in London in such a dull bonnet as this, and I decided to see if there was a milliner selling decently priced hats. Oh, and this lady’s marvellous pots! I examined them. One contained rouge and another was half full of a heavy-looking white paste, and there were two wool pads sitting beside them. Beside all of that was a small brown bottle with a cork stopper and a handwritten label on the side. The ink was faded and thumbed, so even if I could have read, I would not have known what liquid it contained or what to do with it. I did not much like the look of the bottle. It looked powerfully medicinal.

The pots intrigued me, though. I had never worn rouge or face-paint of any kind, merely imagined myself with a spot of it on my cheeks as a London girl. Joan had secretly mixed her own rouge once, in an oyster shell, from some ingredients she had bought from the apothecary in Musselburgh. When she waltzed into the parlour with two bright-pink cheeks, Da had been onto her straight away and taken it out to the midden and said that only whores wear paint. But there I was, in a new town, newly heartbroken, and I supposed I might dab some on to brighten me up, so to speak, and I was sure the lady who owned the rouge would be none the wiser.