‘Oh, you won’t be sorry, I promise you,’ Cook assured her. ‘Me and Amy… we’ll have the busiest tea-rooms in the whole of Blackpool.’

‘I should think so, too!’ Nelly was eager to see the women gone now. She had other, more important matters on her mind. ‘Go on then. Off yer go.’ She stepped towards the door, leaving Cook and Amy with no choice but to follow her.

In the outer vestibule, Cook hesitated, before venturing seriously, ‘I hope you don’t mind me saying, but I’m so glad that things turned out right for Mrs Tanner, what with finding her daughter and her grandchildren. It fair broke my old heart to see the way she was betrayed.’ Her eyes misted over, and she made a strange, coughing sound. ‘Emma… I mean Mrs Tanner… well, she were always a very lovely, amiable girl.’

Suddenly Nelly felt ashamed. ‘O’ course! You knew Emma long afore I did.’

Cook nodded. ‘Her father was a good man.’ Her voice cracked with anger. ‘And to think how he met such a terrible end.’

‘There are some things best not talked about,’ warned Nelly in a sombre voice.

Cook was at once repentant. ‘No, no, of course not. All the same…’

‘Good day to you.’ Nelly began closing the door.

‘Good day. And thank you again.’

Long after the two women had disappeared down the lane, Nelly gently propelled herself back and forth in the rocking-chair. Cook’s departing words echoed in her troubled mind. What a wicked, wicked fellow the Justice had been. Not content with shooting himself and his unfortunate wife, he had put his hapless daughter Martha through such a devastating experience that she might never recover from it; not even with her son’s tender care, nor with her husband on his way from Australia at this very minute. Although to Nelly’s mind – and from what Cook herself had been given to understand by hearsay – that particular marriage was long dead and gone. It would be to her son Edward that Martha would turn for strength and comfort. No doubt Silas would return to the arms of his Australian comforter.

What the Justice had confessed to his own daughter were crimes of the most evil and sadistic nature. Into her unwilling ears he had poured out the most vile and corrupt secrets, which he had carried in his black heart these many long years – the illicit love affair with Mary Grady, even while his own wife was heavy with child. The fact that he had pressed a pillow into Thadius’s face and suffocated the life out of him while the wretched man lay weak and helpless. How he had later abused that same man’s trust, and prematurely married Emma off. Then when she was unjustly accused of murder, he had shamelessly blackmailed a fellow Justice in order to engineer Emma’s transportation from these shores, so that he could take over her inheritance. An inheritance which had provided him with the means to gamble and keep the company of whores.