Queen Square is quiet. A few tortured-looking oaks occupy the garden at the centre. Wind has already stripped them, burying their roots in the brown compost of their own leaves. A squirrel watches her from a naked branch, so still it might be a taxidermy model.

Agnes finds the Boyles’ residence almost at once. There is the telltale straw laid out before it to deaden the sound of wheels and the windows are shuttered fast. She adjusts her grip on the package. Perhaps this was not a wise notion, after all.

Black material swaddles the brass knocker. It makes a muted, pathetic sound as she lets it fall. Some moments later, the door opens like a tender wound. Behind it is a squat woman dressed in mourning, but the expression upon her face is one of harassment, not grief. Her hands show coarse and red – evidently, Mrs Boyle is comfortable enough to keep a servant.

‘I am here to offer my condolences to your mistress.’ Agnes inserts her calling card through the narrow opening before the domestic has a chance to demur. ‘She will not recognise my name, but I was acquainted with her late husband.’

The woman frowns at it, as if the letters mean nothing to her, but the thick quality of the card must make some impression, for she bids Agnes step inside.

‘Don’t know if she’s up to receiving,’ she warns. ‘I’ll check.’

Still staring at Agnes’s card, she walks through an inner door and shuts it behind her. Agnes can hear the servant’s clomping footsteps and the rumble of voices in conversation.

She had forgotten all of this: the stale, oppressive atmosphere that follows a death. Unaired rooms, mirrors covered in black fabric. A clock hangs on the wall, but its hands are stopped at ten and she wonders where this time has come from. Mrs Boyle cannot know the minute her husband breathed his last. Is this the hour they discovered the body, or when she received the news?

It was a mad, half-baked scheme to come. What is she doing here, uninvited, trespassing on a stranger’s grief? She is tempted to slip back outside when the domestic returns, this time without the card.

‘She’ll see you. This way.’

Queen Square has not been a fashionable address for many a year. No one would suspect the Boyles of being wealthy, but they exude respectability. Agnes eyes the covered shapes of paintings and the nap on the drawn curtains, feeling the contrast with her own home forcibly. It was not always so. When her father was alive … But perhaps Mrs Boyle will find herself overcome by a similar onslaught of retrenchments and economies. Perhaps her days of keeping this dumpy servant are numbered.