He crossed the platform and got into a carriage; the door closed, the whistle blew and before he had even sat down the train was moving. She saw his face at the window and mouthed, ‘I love you,’ and then he was gone and she was standing on the platform, alone.

She stood for a few moments more, trying to pull herself together, and didn’t notice the big blowsy woman further down the platform who was staring at her with such interest. After she had wiped her eyes and blown her nose, she made her way out of the station to the waiting car, Hammond opening the door for her as she slid into the leather-clad interior.

He had gone, and she didn’t know if she would ever see him again. How could she bear it? But she’d have to, the same as countless women in this country and all over the world were doing, though somehow that didn’t make it any easier. But she had the twins, a part of him, and already her breasts were telling her they were due for a feed.

She stared silently out of the window on the way back to the Hall, not seeing the snow that had started to fall, her whole being on the train with the man she loved.

‘How do you know it was her?’ Nathaniel stared at the woman in front of him. He had arrived back at the lodging house already the worse for drink after stopping at the Pied Piper on his way back from the works with a bunch of his cronies.

Polly Stamp stared back at him, hands on hips. ‘I’ve seen him, the Bembridge son and heir before, haven’t I, and it could only have been her with him the way they were carrying on.’

She took a perverse pleasure in throwing that in Nathaniel’s face. She’d lost her husband twenty years ago after only a few months of marriage, but those months had been enough for her to discover that she liked the intimate side of marriage, she liked it very much, and furthermore she didn’t intend to do without just because her husband had been foolish enough to walk in front of a tram when he was three sheets to the wind. Along with ‘obliging’ the four male lodgers who slept two to a room upstairs, she had what she called ‘gentlemen callers’ in her bedroom which was the front room of the two-up, two-down terrace in Pitt Lane. All this enabled her to pay the rent, live comfortably and indulge her addiction to hard liquor which she’d been introduced to as a child back in Ireland. And then Nathaniel had come knocking at the door seeking lodgings, and she’d fallen for him like a ton of bricks.