Again Rose said nothing. She felt Mrs Harper wasn’t fond of children; she and her husband had travelled and entertained often and Rose had got the impression that a family had never been on their agenda. Which was fair enough, she supposed. Certainly the landlady had shown no interest in Betsy whatsoever. And that was fine, of course it was, but it would have been nice to think she might be able to leave Betsy with the landlady for an hour or two while she looked for work. But something would turn up, she told herself bracingly as she finished her breakfast quickly, before Betsy started to stir in her cot upstairs. The baby was teething again and she’d been walking the floor with her in the early hours to keep her from crying and disturbing Mrs Harper, but at least this meant that by eight o’clock, when breakfast was served, Betsy was ready to go down for a nap. Yes, something would turn up. It had to.

By the end of January her optimism had faded and she was sick with worry. She had visited the agency Mrs Harper had spoken of, but the woman behind the desk had made it plain she could place her somewhere ten times over but not with a child. A housemaid; a companion-maid; a nursery maid in a big house on the outskirts of Bensham – the list had gone on but Rose had noticed each position had the word ‘maid’ in it, and she wasn’t sure if she wanted to go into service. Anyway, as the lady had made clear, it wasn’t an option for her, and she had left the agency somewhat dispirited but telling herself there were always the newspaper advertisements and cards placed in shop windows. She followed them all up, even the most obviously unsuitable positions like ‘laundry checker’ or ‘female bar staff required’, but to no avail. In fact she nearly came to blows with one sour-faced man who was looking for a machinist in his small clothing factory when he suggested she should put Betsy in the workhouse for a while until she was ‘in a fit state to provide for a bairn’.

It was on the last Friday in January, after another fruitless visit, this time answering an advertisement in the local paper for a cook-cum-housekeeper at a vicarage, that Rose was given a ray of hope.