Walking into the sitting room, she tucked one pouch into each of her two bags, thinking it wise to separate them. The few pounds she’d been able to save while working for the miller she had already put in her purse. She stood for a minute, her heart racing. She’d made her decision for right or wrong. Now she had to live with it.

Would Davey have agreed with what she was doing? The answer brought her chin lifting, and in reply to the accusing voice in her mind, she said, ‘But you’re not here, are you? And I’ve got to do what is best for me and Betsy now.’

She ran a hand across her brow, telling herself she was daft to talk to thin air, but hearing the words out loud had emphasized how much she had changed since Davey’s death. She was a different person now, she had to be, and she wouldn’t apologize for it either. Nathaniel had acted as though she was his property, the miller too, and she would never again put herself in a position where a man could do that. This money had given her two precious things – power and independence – and it was up to her now to capitalize on it.

Chapter Eleven

Nathaniel stood staring at the man in front of him, the excitement tingling through his veins not showing in his face. All these months of looking for her and now at last something. Keeping his voice steady and even, he said, ‘And you say this woman with a child that stayed with your sister for a few weeks was called Mary Shelton?’

‘Aye, that’s the name she gave, all right.’ Hubert’s voice was wary. ‘And she said her husband was dead, killed in an accident, so I don’t think it’s your wife, lad.’

It was Rose. He knew it. ‘It was about the time she upped and disappeared and there’s not many who look like Rose,’ he said quietly. ‘I’ve been looking for her and the bairn ever since.’

‘And you say you’d had a row?’

‘Aye. She’d got it into her head that I was carrying on with another woman. Some poisonous old biddy in our street had told her so but I swear there was nothing in it. Before I met Rose I’d courted this woman’s daughter and the whole family took umbrage when I finished with her.’

Hubert surveyed the young man who had been asking around about the lass he knew as Mary Shelton. One of the other cab drivers had told the man to have a word with him as he remembered a young woman and baby who fitted the description getting into Hubert’s cab well over a year ago. She’d stood out, he’d said, a beautiful young lass travelling alone with a little’un.