She had told him her father had been a watchmaker with a shop in Tunbridge Wells—though he could just as well have been a publican or a tailor or a cobbler. The family had lived above the shop and done quite nicely; there had been a servant who did the manual work. But the family’s fortunes had declined as the father had aged and was finally forced to give up the business, so that they had found themselves in lodgings in a not so pleasant part of town. The servant had been let go. They had sunk and then they had sunk lower. Alasdair had seen all this in the moments after he had first gone to her assistance and he had been relieved (he did not wish her to be a lady, for this would make their arrangement impossible), but the specifics—the father who was a watchmaker, the servant who did all the work—these things he had learned later and they made very little difference.

She was not a lady, yet there was something about her that lifted her above the common class. For Miss Trent had that rare ability to adapt. Was this it, then, the thing that had attracted him? She could look about her at the ladies strolling with their parasols in the botanic gardens, seated with their straight backs and shoulders high, and she did the same. She listened to their phrases, she heard the words they used, and she used them too. It was a skill that was beguiling, for he could not decide if it were deliberate or instinctive, if it were a mask or a parody.

‘I had thought to see you before your appointment,’ he said.

Miss Trent, standing in the doorway and dressed for an imminent departure, hesitated and her lips moved silently then became still and she looked at him then looked away. She had pale grey eyes that occasionally offered him glimpses of who she was but for the most part remained obscure and closed from him. It left him often floundering in her presence. He raised his chin, consolidating his position in her doorway.

‘Come in, of course,’ she said, as she must, and she stood aside to let him enter.