The serving lady reached into a great drawer in the desk and drew out a ledger. With deliberate slowness she turned over one page and then another. ‘The name of the young person?’ she asked me.

‘Rosie Dench,’ I said.

Mrs Williams looked at the seated lady and her two daughters. ‘My dear Lady Querry, I do apologize for this. I generally see applicants for work at the tradesmen’s entrance, and by appointment only. Miss Lacey has chosen to come in at the customers’ door, during shop hours. I would hate to delay you for this rather complicated inquiry. Is there anything else I can do for you?’

‘We should like to see some shawls,’ said Lady Querry. Mrs Williams nodded to the other serving lady and she brought out a box of fine embroidered shawls. I knew that Lady Querry and her daughters were merely delaying their departure to see my discomfort. I looked around for James. He had taken a seat by the door and was waiting for me, arms folded. He looked as if he had nothing to do with me at all. I shot him a look which was a clear plea for him to help me, but he just smiled politely at me as if we had agreed that he would simply drive me to the shop for my own private business.

‘Dench owes sixty-four shillings,’ Mrs Foster said languidly. ‘And if she is returning these gloves as spoiled, that will be, I suppose, eight pounds and four shillings.’

‘Spoiled!’ I exclaimed. ‘They are beautifully sewn, and all but finished!’

‘Unfinished work is called “spoiled”,’ Mrs Foster said, not raising her eyes from the ledger. ‘It is very hard, Miss Lacey, to persuade flighty young girls to complete work they have undertaken. We have to have a system of fines to encourage them in habits of self-discipline and responsibility. I hope you are certain that you are doing the right thing in encouraging Dench to throw up her work in this way.’

I gasped, and looked around for James. He was watching his horses out of the window. Lady Querry’s daughters were smothering their giggles, bending low over the box of shawls.

‘I hardly think this is the time or the place,’ Mrs Williams said grandly. ‘Tone matters so much to me. I really cannot be dunned in my own premises, Miss Lacey! Forgive me, but may I ask you to send Dench around to the tradesmen’s entrance with the money for her debt, or with the finished gloves? She is late with them already.’

There was a ripple of laughter from the sewing girls in the back room.

‘Was there anything you wished to purchase, Miss Lacey?’ Mrs Williams asked smoothly.

When I said nothing, for I was speechless with rage and frozen with shame at the way I was being treated, she nodded at Mrs Foster, who shut the ledger and glided past me with her nose in the air and opened the door for me to leave.

I could feel my face burning. Lady Querry and her two daughters had abandoned all pretence of looking at shawls and were openly staring at me. James had risen to his feet, ready to leave with me without saying a word. I took two steps, and then I spun around on my heel.

‘No!’ I said fiercely, and as I spoke I felt my anger leap up in me, and I knew I had shed the discipline of being a pretty Bath miss. I was not a pretty young girl. I was the heir to the Laceys, I was a Lacey of Wideacre. And this arrogant woman had been ill-treating one of my people.

‘That is not how I do business,’ I said. ‘I have come to return these gloves to you, which I do not doubt you will get some other poor girl to finish and sell at a usurious price. And I have taken the trouble to come and see you to tell you that Rosie Dench will work for you no more. And if I had the power, no young girl would work for you again. You pay rates which barely keep a worker alive, and then you make them buy their materials from you, and fine them, and keep them in debt so they can work nowhere else. Rosie Dench is coughing blood in a dirty room, trying to sew gloves for you in half-darkness. So don’t tell me that tone is so important to you. You are no better than a madame in a bagnio!’

Lady Querry half screamed at the insult and Mrs Williams strode around from the desk to the door.

‘You had better go!’ she hissed.

‘I am going,’ I said. ‘And I am not coming back, and neither is Rosie Dench. And if I hear one word from you about calling Rosie a thief or about this ridiculous debt, I shall tell everyone that you are no better than a slave-driver. I shall tell them how Rosie was when I found her. And I shall tell them that you pay her five shillings for her most beautiful work, and how you sell the gloves for five pounds. And I will go on doing it until I have cost you far more than eight pounds and four shillings in lost custom. I shall go on doing it until you are ruined.’

I rounded on Lady Querry as she sat, mouth agape, drinking in every word. ‘And when you repeat this to all your friends, your ladyship,’ I said scathingly, ‘remember to tell them that their gloves and their stockings and their shawls are embroidered in filthy rooms by girls with consumption, and smallpox, and fevers. That the shifts which you buy to wear next to your skin have been touched, every inch of them, by girls with sores on their hands. That they are sold to you at a price which would make all those girls well, and well fed if they saw even half of it.’

I spun round then and marched to the carriage and climbed up on to the seat, still trembling with rage and my head still ringing with things I wanted to say. In my fury I saw James sweep a low bow to Lady Querry and even to Mrs Williams.

‘Good day, ladies,’ I heard him say pleasantly, and then he strolled out to the phaeton, and climbed on to the box and took up the reins.

I said nothing until he had turned left into George Street.

‘How could you just sit there?’ I said through my teeth. ‘You said you would speak to her, and you left it all to me. I felt an utter fool and they were all laughing at me and you did nothing, nothing! And then you said, “Good day” to them when we left. “Good day, ladies.” Ladies! How could you?’

James waited for a sedan chair to get out of the way before turning up the hill to Gay Street. ‘I wanted to see how you would do,’ he said. ‘I wanted to see how you would stand up to her.’

‘What?’ I shrieked.

‘I wanted to see how you are when you are being a squire,’ he said. He pulled the horse to a standstill and got down from the seat and came around to my side to help me down. I scrambled down on my own and pushed past him. If I could have knocked him down and walked over him, I would have done so. He seemed to me entirely part of the unfeeling Quality world who laughed like Lady Querry. I would never, never forgive him for saying, ‘Good day, ladies.’

I stormed up the steps and found I could scarcely see the door knocker for the tears of anger in my eyes. James reached over my shoulder and tapped at the door for me.

‘I wanted to ask you something,’ he said as we waited for Meg to come to the door.

I shot him one angry look which should have warned him that nothing he could say would draw a civil response from me ever again.

‘Will you marry me, Julia?’ he asked.

I could not believe my ears. ‘What did you say?’ I demanded.

‘I asked you to marry me,’ he repeated. I could hear from inside the house someone coming down the stairs to open the front door. I was still boiling with anger towards Lady Querry, towards Mrs Williams and her beastly shop and shopgirls and the whole unjust unequal cruelty of the Quality world. But more than anything else I was in a blind rage with James Fortescue, who had promised he would speak to Mrs Williams and then left me all alone to look a fool in front of the most fashionable modiste and the biggest gossip in Bath.

Meg opened the door, dipped a curtsy and held it for me.

I turned to face James and put out my hand to him. I was still trembling with anger and my hand shook. He took it and carried it to his lips. I could feel the warmth of his kiss through the glove. I could tell by his eyes that he was smiling.

‘Don’t be cross,’ he said, oblivious of Meg, blind to the people on the street who were watching us with curiosity. ‘Don’t be cross. I love you much too much to want to make you cross for long. I wanted to see how you would handle old Williams. And I wanted you to know that you could do it. Because you will have to handle Dr Phillips, and perhaps your uncle and your cousin. But I will promise to help you with them. And on that occasion I will not leave you all on your own. Will you marry me, Julia?’

I felt the anger flow away from me as if I had no temper at all, and I forgot that Meg was watching, and the people on the street. I put my other hand up to his face and cupped it around his cheek.

‘Yes,’ I said simply. ‘Yes, I will.’

16

‘Your mama is in her bedroom,’ Meg said. ‘She asked after you and thought you had gone to the doctor’s on your own.’

‘I’ll go on up,’ I said, moving towards the stairs.

‘She’ll have heard the carriage,’ Meg said in warning. I turned back to look at her. She was smiling, certain she had caught me in some clandestine courtship.

‘Thank you, Meg,’ I said pointedly. ‘That will be all.’

I waited until she had curtsied and gone to the kitchen stairs before I went to knock on Mama’s door.

She was obviously unwell. I don’t think I ever saw her ill more than twice in all my childhood. Although she was so slight-looking, she was strong, and she seemed incapable of taking fevers or colds, having nursed Richard and me through every sort of childhood ailment.