Much as she enjoys seeing him play, he should be above games by now. They take boys into the navy at the age of twelve and can you imagine one of those little midshipmen disobeying an order or running around with a hoop and stick? It is partly her own fault. She has indulged him, bought him Penny Dreadfuls instead of sending him out to work as other families would do. But she thought his father would have made plans for him by now.

Cedric should have an education. An apprenticeship. He is likely to get neither unless the widowed Mrs Boyle coughs up some coins.

She picks up her parcel, unfastens the front door and squeezes herself through the smallest opening, taking care to snap it shut behind her so Cedric does not see the magpie’s gruesome work.

Yesterday’s shower has left puddles on the streets. No rain yet this morning, but filthy rags of cloud strewn across the sky pose the threat. The abbey clock chimes ten. Already nurses are wheeling the crippled and infirm to the Pump Room. One man with a bald pate slides his vacant eyes in Agnes’s direction and she feels a jolt of his confinement. To be trapped, in that manner. Unable to walk where you will. She remembers the days lying sick with pneumonia and quickens her pace, just to prove that she still can.

By Union Street she regrets it. Her lungs protest with a spasm and her heart gives that great swoop that often proceeds a fainting fit. Chastened, she relapses into her habitual dawdle and turns away from the shops of Milsom Street and Bond Street. A cart has spilled some of its vegetables into the road, where they lie, rotting; a heap of bulbous shapes so dirty that Agnes cannot identify them. The same might be said for all around her. Dull, hopelessly dull. Gritty ash in the air. Birds wheeling like charred scraps from a fire.

How can bright young Cedric find his future in a place like this?

Beneath her glove, she twists the ring on her finger. It is the only way she can believe that Montague ever walked these streets. Montague, that man of vivid and impossible colours. He carried something of the places he had seen: a certain spice that spoke of the West Indies, even Africa. He told her of an ocean like aquamarine, so clear you could see the fish swimming in its depths. Rocks where the coral grew orange and pink at the waterline. Miraculous things she would scarcely credit from another mouth, but they are real and they are still out there, somewhere. Beyond her reach, because Montague has left her; left her with nothing but black and white.