The tea brewed, she poured herself a cup and a milky one for Betsy and sat down, lost in thought. She’d soon be a married woman. She shut her eyes for a moment. It would be all right. The wedding night, it would be all right. Since their engagement she had been plagued by nightmares where she was in a dark room and being held down by iron-hard hands while Betsy screamed somewhere. However much she struggled she couldn’t get free, and she knew what was going to happen but was powerless to prevent it and then, when Betsy’s cries had merged with her own and she couldn’t breathe, she woke up, bathed in perspiration and trembling violently.

She took a sip of tea, the cup rattling slightly as she put it back on the saucer. It would be fine, she told herself again for the hundredth time. It was Alexander who would be making love to her, not a spectre from the past, and even in their most passionate embraces he was gentle and in control. It was him, after all, who wanted to wait until their wedding night before their union was consummated.

‘You know I’ve had women in the past,’ he’d said to her shortly after they had returned from seeing Lawrence and Estelle in Scotland, ‘but this, you – us – is different. You will be the mother of my children and I want us to start right before God and man, Rose. I want you, hell how I want you, but within the sanctity of marriage so that you have my name protecting you. Do you understand, my darling?’

She had said she did at the time, and there had even been a certain amount of relief knowing that she had months to come to terms with the prospect of full intimacy. She loved him and she wanted to be his in every sense of the word, and yet she was afraid.

She took another sip of tea, her thoughts racing.

She was afraid she would freeze when they were finally in bed together; that it would be Arthur Vickers and his brutality that she would remember; that she would disappoint Alexander and ruin their wedding night and the nights to come. In the day she could put the rape out of her mind, but at night her subconscious forced her to relive it over and over again in her dreams. What if she failed Alexander? What would it do to their love?

More than once when their lovemaking had become passionate she had wished he would forget his principles and just take her then and there so she didn’t have to think about it, rather than their wedding night building in her mind like a huge obstacle, but his control had always been absolute. So far and no further.