When the flurry of clouds quickly shifted to reveal a bright, smiling sun, Nelly took it as a sign that the good Lord had heard her, and was thinking on it. With a lighter heart, she followed the path to where Emma was being helped into the carriage. In that moment, it struck Nelly how slow and pained were Emma’s movements; not only bowed with grief, but something else. ‘Yer ain’t no youngster no more, Emma, me old darling,’ she murmured with affection, ‘we none of us are.’ Old age has a nasty way o’ creeping up on a body, she mused, because here they were, her and Emma, well into their forties. It was right what they said… ‘time and tide wait for no man’. ‘Nor no woman neither,’ she murmured with a sigh. It seemed like only yesterday when she and Emma first met, in a dingy prison cell. Ridiculously young, they were, and terrified of what life might have in store for them. Well, they had come through those terrible times and found some sort of peace here in Blackburn: she with Emma’s stalwart friendship over the long hard years and Emma with Marlow and their son. ‘Oh, Emma, Emma!’ Nelly could only guess at Emma’s heartache and, beside it, her own sorrow paled in comparison.

On the slow, respectful journey back to Park Street, Nelly glanced often at the stiff little figure of Emma, with its straight, narrow shoulders set against the world, and her pale, drawn features that were like cold marble. She dared not imagine the fire that raged beneath.

Nelly thought about the accident that had taken the life of Emma’s son, and she still could not shake off the feeling of guilt that had haunted her since that awful day only a week ago. It was a day bursting with all the warmth and colour of a splendid summer. A day when Emma and young Bill had jumped at Nelly’s suggestion that they should picnic in Corporation Park… ‘go right to the top where the Crimean guns were sited’, and afterwards meander the long winding path down. It was on the way down that the accident happened.

Against Emma’s light-hearted warnings to ‘stay on the footpath’, the excited boy had clambered on to the brink of a dangerously steep cliff-face, whose surface made a deep and sheer drop to the rockeries below.

Nelly thought she would hear Emma’s unearthly scream for as long as she lived. When they rounded the corner to see him balancing on the jagged protrusions above the slate face, it was something she would never forget. The mischievous smile on his face as she and Emma dashed forward. Then, in an instant, the boyish smile turning to horror as he lost his balance and went crashing to his death. It was instantaneous, or so they said. But not to Emma, and not to Nelly, for those few fleeting seconds seemed like a lifetime. A nightmare that would go on.