The gentleman stepped up to the front door of the warehouse which was clearly home, business, and store combined, and lifted the ivory handle of his riding crop and rapped loudly. He waited, hearing footsteps approaching, echoing down a wooden hall, and then the door opened and a maid stood before him, in a stained working apron, staring aghast at the glossy pelt of his French hat and his highly polished boots.

“I should like to see—” Now that he had got this far, he realized he did not know what name she used, nor the name of the owner of the warehouse. “I should like to see the lady of the house.”

“Which one?” she demanded, wiping a dirty hand on her hessian apron. “Mrs. Reekie or Mrs. Stoney?”

He caught his breath at her husband’s name and the mention of her daughter, and thought that if he was so shaken to hear this, what would he feel when he saw her? “Mrs. Reekie,” he recovered. “It is she that I wish to see. Is Mrs. Reekie at home?”

She widened the gap of the front door, she did not open it politely to let him in, it was as if she had never admitted a visitor. “If it’s about a load, you should go to the yard door and see Mrs. Stoney.”

“It’s not about a load. I am calling to see Mrs. Reekie.”

“Why?”

“Would you tell her that an old friend has called to see her?” he replied patiently. He did not dare give his name. A silver sixpence passed from his riding glove to the girl’s work-stained hand. “Please ask her to receive me,” he repeated. “And send the groom to take my horse into your stables.”

“We don’t have a groom,” she answered, pocketing the coin in her apron, looking him up and down. “Just the wagon driver, and there’s only the stables for the team horses and a yard where we store the barrels.”

“Then tell the wagon driver to put my horse in the yard,” he instructed.

She opened the front door just wide enough to admit him, leaving it open so the men on the quayside could see him, standing awkwardly in the hall, his hat in one hand, his riding crop and gloves in the other. She walked past him without a word, to a door at the rear, and he could hear her shouting from the back door for someone to open the gate to the yard, though there was no delivery, just a man with a horse that wouldn’t stand on the quayside. Miserably embarrassed, he looked around the hall, at the wood-paneled doors with their raised stone thresholds to hold back a flood, at the narrow wooden staircase, at the single chair, wishing with all his heart that he had never come.

He had thought that the woman he was visiting would be poorer even than this. He had imagined her selling physic out of a quayside window, attending births for sailors’ wives and captains’ whores. He had thought of her so many times in hardship, sewing the child’s clothes with patches, stinting herself to put a bowl of gruel before him, turning this way and that to make a living. He had thought of her as he had known her before, a poor woman but a proud woman, who made every penny she could; but never begged. He had imagined this might be some sort of quayside boardinghouse and hoped she worked here as a housekeeper; he had prayed that she had not been forced to do anything worse. Every year he had sent her a letter wishing her well, telling her that he thought of her still, with a gold coin under the seal; but she had never acknowledged it. He never even knew if she had received it. He had never allowed himself to find the little warehouse on the side of the river, never allowed himself even to take a boat downriver to look for her door. He had been afraid of what he might find. But this year, this particular year, on this month and this day, he had come.