Jinny was proving a great help with Betsy as well as the twins. The friendship which had sprung up between the two early on had strengthened as the months had gone by. After the garden incident Rose had decided to confide in the nursery maid about Nathaniel, confident that she would not gossip to the other servants. Betsy was spending more time with Jinny and the twins when she was at home than anyone else, and often took walks in the grounds with the nursery maid, Jinny pushing one pram and Betsy the other. Rose felt that if Nathaniel should materialize, unlikely though that was, she wanted Jinny to be fully aware of who he was and his intent. To that end she had given Jinny a detailed description of him and Jinny had promised she would keep her eyes skinned at all times.

‘One of me sisters had trouble with a man like him,’ Jinny had told Rose at the time. ‘He was double her age and her only fifteen, but he wouldn’t leave her alone. Worried me poor mam to death, it did, ma’am. Then me da and some of his mates paid him a visit in the middle of the night. When he come out of hospital he took off to pastures new, and good riddance, we all said.’ She’d smiled at Rose and Rose had smiled back, but inside Rose had wished that Nathaniel could have been got rid of so easily.

But now it was June, and after a late spring the lanes and byways were in full leaf as the trees luxuriated in the sun and the scent of flowers was everywhere. Rose was hoping that Alexander’s long-awaited leave would finally happen; twice he had been going to come home and twice it had been cancelled at the last moment. He had written in his last letter that it was common knowledge among the officers that there was dissension among the generals as to tactics, and that Lord Kitchener was at loggerheads with certain politicians, which all made for confusion and error at the front. General Joffre, the French commander-in-chief, had been told by Kitchener to instruct the British Army but as there were British commanders who didn’t speak French and had to take their orders through an interpreter, this had added fuel to the fire among the generals and Kitchener’s critics.

We don’t know what the situation is from one day to the next, Alexander had written, his frustration clear on the page, and it’s a recipe for disaster. We advance a few hundred yards and then we pull back, and I have to pretend to my men that we know what we’re doing.