They glared at each other, Nathaniel’s face red with fury and the alcohol he’d consumed, and then he swore viciously as he hurled his glass into the range where it shattered into a hundred pieces. He brushed past her, almost knocking her off balance as she’d had a few while she’d been waiting for him, and she heard him going up the stairs and then the bedroom door slamming which wouldn’t go down well with the other occupants.

‘That told him,’ Polly said out loud, before sinking down onto a hard-backed chair and bursting into tears. After a minute or two she reached for her panacea to all ills, the whisky bottle. She poured herself a good measure, knocking it back in three gulps before filling the glass to the brim.

All the men she’d had in her time, she thought bitterly, and she had to go and fall for the biggest swine of ’em all. More than one of her lodgers would have married her if she had said the word, and though she’d discovered she liked her independence and didn’t want to be tied to one man, all that had changed the day Nathaniel came knocking. He treated her as less than the muck under his boots most of the time and he didn’t even pay his rent or buy her the odd thing, so why couldn’t she tell him to sling his hook? She had worked herself up to do just that more than once, but then he’d be nice and sweet-talk her and before she knew it she was putty in his hands. More fool her.

She sat drinking and crying into her glass for more than an hour, and by the time she staggered into the front room she was so drunk that she fell on the bed fully clothed and was snoring within seconds. She didn’t hear Nathaniel leave the house at just after midnight.