Adaline had sat with her a year ago. Eleanor remembered how the curtains in her bedroom had been half closed against the daylight and the room had smelled, oddly, of lavender, a smell she abhorred, but someone had brought something—a handkerchief or a potpourri—and placed it in her room. The doctor had come and gone again. She had lain in a fug of morphia and Adaline Jellicoe had come and had sat for a time at her bedside. Adaline had not talked but she had reached out and taken Eleanor’s hand. That had struck Eleanor at the time, Adaline taking her hand. It was not something she would normally do, one felt. But Eleanor had a great wound newly stitched across her abdomen and somewhere a baby—the doctor had not said boy or girl—lay blue and lifeless and bloodied and wrapped in a cloth. She had not seen it and they had not offered it to her. It had nestled, this dead thing, in her womb for some days before they had cut it out of her. The horror of it—a dead thing inside her—had eclipsed, at the time, her horror of her first, her only, child’s death.

She had barely had time to get used to the idea of her confinement, of motherhood, and it was over.

Cecily Pyke had visited her, too, and one or two others—Cecily’s presence unsettling, her smugness at her own effortlessly expanding clutch of children. Though perhaps the smugness was only imagined.

She had been in a fug of morphia for many days.

Alasdair had returned home on one of those evenings to say the vote was lost. The Federation had failed. She had felt she must be to blame. The Federation lying dead inside her.

Alasdair had moved into the second bedroom at around this time. It was unsafe to risk another pregnancy, the doctor had suggested. A hushed, one-sided conversation with more left unsaid than said, and Eleanor could not remember now if the doctor had spoken these words to her or to her husband. Alasdair had remained there in that second bedroom and something else had died—though, like the baby lying lifeless in her belly, she had not realised it at the time.

The frightened horse had been freed from its harness and was being calmed by its owner and a group of men had organised themselves into a gang to raise the upended dray. They were in their element now, these men. Shouting orders at one another, putting things to rights, their faces red, their shirts damp with sweat.

She flung open the door of the cab and jumped down, tossing a coin at the driver and stepping gingerly, skirts held off the ground. She set off on foot, avoiding the chaos of horse and men and wagons, heading north in the direction Alasdair’s cab had taken, though it was long gone by now.