She found a sulky and unwilling pupil. I was not naturally gifted at housekeeping. I did not want to know how to scour a brass pan with sand so that it glittered. I did not want to take a scrubbing brush to the front step. I did not want to peel potatoes so that there was no waste at all, and feed the peelings to the hens that we kept in a little garden outside the city walls. I wanted to know none of these things, and I did not see why I should learn them.

‘As my wife you will need to know how to do such things,’ Daniel said reasonably enough. I had slipped out to waylay him where his road home from work crossed the market place before the great Staple Hall, so that I could speak with him before he entered the house and we both fell under his mother’s rule.

‘Why should I know? You don’t do them.’

‘Because I will be out at work and you will be caring for our children and preparing their food,’ he said.

‘I thought I would keep a printing shop, like my father.’

‘And who would cook and clean for us?’

‘Couldn’t we have a maid?’

He choked on a laugh. ‘Perhaps, later on. But I couldn’t afford to pay wages for a maid at first, you know, Hannah. I am not a wealthy man. When I set up in practice on my own we will have only my fees to live on.’

‘And will we have a house of our own then?’

He drew my hand through his elbow as if he were afraid that I might pull away at his answer.

‘No,’ he said simply. ‘We will find a bigger house, perhaps in Genoa. But I will always offer a house to my sisters and to my mother; to your father too. Surely, you would want nothing less?’

I said nothing. To tell the truth, I did want to live with my father, and with Daniel. It was his mother and his sisters I found hard to bear. But I could hardly say to him that I would choose to live with my father but not with his mother.

‘I thought we would be alone together,’ I said mendaciously.

‘I have to care for my mother and sisters,’ he said. ‘It is a sacred trust. You know that.’

I nodded. I did know it.

‘Have they been unkind to you?’

I shook my head. I could not complain of their treatment of me. I slept every night in a truckle bed in the girls’ room and every night as I fell asleep I heard them whispering in the big bed at my side, and I imagined they were talking about me. In the morning they drew the curtains of the bed so that I should not see them as they dressed. They emerged to comb and plait each other’s hair before the little mirror and cast sideways glances at my growing mop of hair only half-covered by my cap. My dresses and linen were all new and were the focus of much silent envy, and occasional secret borrowing. They were, in short, as spiteful and as unkind as girls working in concert can be, and many nights I turned my face into my hay mattress and cried in silence for sheer frustrated anger.