He set the wine glass back on the table, his eyes narrowing. Aye, he’d stayed nine months now. Too long. It was high time he moved on. He wouldn’t have stayed this long in spite of the comforts of life with Maria if it hadn’t been for the pleasure he took in knowing just how much it got under the skin of her brothers-in-law. Dolts, the pair of them, but he enjoyed lording it over them and rubbing their nose in it. He knew they imagined he was after getting Maria to marry him, and if things had been different he might have done just that. He’d be in clover sure enough and Maria would marry him tomorrow, he knew that. She’d dropped enough hints over the last few months. He’d become a wealthy man by some folk’s standards if he wed her, and he could probably have put up with her possessiveness and neurotic need of him if it meant a life of ease. If she was his wife he wouldn’t stand for her tantrums anyway – she’d soon learn who was master. But marrying her had never been an option because there was Rose. Always Rose.

He slid out of the too-soft bed with its heaped thick blankets and inches-thick eiderdown and walked across to the bay window. He pulled the drapes slightly to one side and stood looking down into the dark street below. It was snowing and at two o’clock in the morning no lights pierced the blackness. The inn was situated in Front Street to the south of the town, not far from the grim confines of the Union Workhouse. Chester-le-Street was more spread out than some of the places he had been to over the last years. Most of the township population was concentrated in the built-up area around where the inn was and a second pocket of houses and buildings to the south-west, and he had searched them carefully in his first weeks of arriving in the town, asking his usual questions and taking nothing for granted. Someone as beautiful as Rose with a young child would have attracted interest and speculation, but no one had seen or heard of her and eventually he’d had to admit defeat.

‘Where are you?’ he breathed softly, gazing out over the white rooftops. ‘Where did you go and what did you do?’ Many times over the long frustrating years he’d wondered if she had, in fact, fled South, maybe even to the capital, but something in his gut told him Rose was still in the North of England. He felt it in his marrow, that was the only way he could describe it to himself. And it was this same feeling that told him she was alive and well.