‘What folk?’ Lilian and Bridget hurried to the front window and peeped through the curtain. ‘It looks like an army of neighbours,’ Bridget said and, like Lilian, was prepared to do battle.

As it turned out, there was no need.

‘We’ve come to see how she is,’ said one proud and well-endowed woman.

‘We all know we’ve not been the good neighbours we should,’ said another.

‘It’s a poor do if us women can’t stand together in times of need,’ declared yet another.

So, all being friendly, in they came, and no one was more surprised than Fanny. ‘Well, bugger me!’ she exclaimed as they crowded round her bed to see the newborn. ‘Yesterday I were summat to be avoided, and now I’m a bloody peepshow.’ But she enjoyed all the attention, and it was another half-hour before Bridget got away, with Lilian in tow.

Before she left her at the bottom of the hill, Bridget thanked her. ‘Look after her,’ she said, ‘and don’t take none of her cheek.’

‘She’ll get as good as she gives if she starts on me,’ Lilian promised. With that, and a fond embrace, the two of them parted.

Bridget watched Lilian walk away. She was a fine figure of a woman, well built, with wild red hair and sure green eyes, and there was something about her that gave Bridget confidence. ‘Fanny won’t get all her own way with that one,’ she chuckled. Then she turned her steps towards King Street. ‘I wonder what Tom will have to say about all this.’ A shadow crossed her face. ‘He’ll have nothing to say, same as always.’

When Bridget came in through the front door, she knew the house was empty; it had that cold, bleak feeling about it. She went through the house calling his name nevertheless, but there was no answer because no one was there.

‘That little sod!’ Her first thought was that Danny had not delivered the note as he’d been paid to do. ‘He probably went off and spent his sixpence and forgot all about the note. I expect Tom came home, found I wasn’t here and no tea for him, and off he went in a sulk.’

Dropping into a fireside chair she sighed. ‘One of these days I might just pack a bag and leave.’ But she knew she wouldn’t. Not when she still harboured a hope in her heart that, in spite of everything, all would come right between them.

Her gaze wandered round the room as she thought about how she and Tom had loved this place, how they chose the furniture and arranged it together. Her eyes spotted a note on the table.

Scrambling out of the chair, she plucked the note up. ‘So, he did deliver it, after all,’ she murmured. ‘And Tom went out anyway.’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘I don’t suppose he’ll go hungry. He’ll be at the pub, tucking into a pork pie and not caring tuppence where I am, or if he never sees me again.’