‘Pah! I wanted to.’ Miss West rubs at her jaw. ‘Time was I would’ve given my right arm to talk to my parents again. I was desperate. So was Pearl’s dad.’ She shakes her head. ‘But it didn’t work. So I took that desperation, and I used it. Got to thinking how much other desperate people would pay for a show.’ Her glance slides to Simon. ‘Because people are stupid, aren’t they, Doctor?’

A bell rings. Turnkeys come forward and the lawyers begin to shuffle their papers. Visiting time is over.

‘Miss West, I am burying your sister,’ Simon declares bluntly. ‘I should like to know her date of birth before I leave.’

She remains silent. She looks tired, broken by the concept of a return to her solitary cell. Only when the turnkey comes and seizes her by the arm, ready to frogmarch her back to captivity, does she speak.

‘Look up my mother’s death in Bow. It’s the same date.’ She glowers at Agnes. ‘I want you to read her name. My mother. Clara Meers, née West, née Montague.’

The last name lingers even through the clamour and the scraping chairs.

For the first time in her life, Miss West has produced a genuine ghost.

But before she can savour its effect she is gone, swallowed back into the dark bowels of the prison.

CHAPTER 36

Agnes expected Simon would speak to her as they made their way downhill towards the burial ground at Walcot Gate. She would welcome the distraction. It has been many years since she last visited a cemetery and her nerves are strung taught; she cannot decide whether it feels like she is approaching the gallows, or slipping out for an assignation with a lover.

But Simon descends Guinea Lane with solemn determination. There is nothing unkind in his silence: he still shows her the attentions of checking his pace and occupying the side of the pavement nearest to the road, yet he offers no words of reassurance. Occasionally he eyes her, as a horse that might spook.

Following the prison visit, he made Agnes spend more time cocooned inside Constance’s room to ‘collect herself’. She kept abreast of the news with Mrs Muckle’s help. More speculation and dross surfaced around Miss West, and most of it wallowed in lurid detail: accounts of her soldier father’s death, although they could not agree whether it was in China or Afghanistan; reports of the debts Mr Meers left behind him in London when the family relocated to Bath; the amount of compensation granted by Livingstone’s Match Factory. Many conjectures were formed as to how Miss West could afford the residence on Walcot Street, none of which painted her in a chaste light.

To think that such a detestable woman would have become her niece, had Agnes’s marriage to Montague gone ahead!