‘Why haven’t you time?’ asked Mary Kate as she came through the door. She walked straight over to the dog, Jet, and patted his head. ‘Your breakfast next,’ she said, whispering in case Joan heard her. ‘Looks like it’s scrambled eggs.’

‘Because I have to call into St Angelus to see Dr Gaskell about a patient first.’

Mary Kate followed him up the steps to the front door. They kissed again before he opened it. ‘Are you going to invite William and his wife then?’ she asked.

‘I will, and I promise you this, if I detect even the slightest reproach, I shall rescind the invitation immediately. Is that a deal?’

She grinned and kissed him back on the tip of his nose. ‘It’s a deal,’ she said, her stomach turning to water at the thought of entertaining in a way she was wholly unused to.

‘I love you,’ he whispered in her ear. ‘Again and again and again. I cannot tell you enough, my love. I spend all my day dreaming about coming home to you and bed.’

She blushed furiously, her heart light and her head even lighter. ‘Get away with you. I am sure there must be an Irishman somewhere in your family. Full of it, you are, and to think, I came all the way to Liverpool to hear that,’ she called after him as he ran down the path to his car.

The cold wind ripped into the hallway. She wrapped her cardigan tight across her chest and shivered as she stood and waved until the car had fully turned out of the drive and disappeared from sight.

*

‘Thank you so much for fitting me in so early,’ Nicholas said as Dr Gaskell pulled out a chair for him. Instead of settling himself down behind the desk, as was his custom, Dr Gaskell then dragged his own chair around to sit next to Nicholas. Nicholas raised an eyebrow as he removed his hat and placed it on his lap. Dr Gaskell was avoiding his eye. Being a trained and sensitive doctor himself, Nicholas knew the signs; he could sense the significance. He unbuttoned his coat, too fearful to speak. Dr Gaskell was the most renowned chest doctor in the northwest of England, a man no one could imagine retiring because if and when he did, the residents of the dockside area of Liverpool would be all the poorer for it. Both he and his son, who’d been in Nicholas’s year at medical school, were friends of Nicholas.

Nicholas had at first ignored the pains in his chest and the shortness of breath, believing them to be the consequences of his ongoing worries about what Lavinia might do next and his guilt about Mary Kate having to remain forever an exile from her home village because of him. It was obvious she missed Tarabeg greatly – she even spoke its name out loud in her sleep, though he’d never told her that. He had put the congestion in his lungs down to the pea-soup fogs, and the Mersey mist and dampness. The pain was often relieved by a cigarette. But when he’d coughed up blood into the basin, even he knew it was time to seek advice.