‘Listen, Brothers . . .’ It was Benjamin West, his voice placating. ‘Who’s to say he hasn’t done it, eh? He can’t tell us himself, but perhaps that’s how he got isself into this state. Perhaps it were the girl’s dying curse, like.’

‘I don’t know . . .’ Leadingham’s voice was doubtful. ‘It don’t sound likely to me. Who would’ve taken him to the market, if she was dead? It doesn’t make sense. But I’m willing to postpone judgement until we know for sure.’

‘But it don’t make sense either way,’ West said plaintively. ‘What’s the alternative – they found him out? Why’s he not dead then, answer me that?’

There was a silence, a long uncomfortable silence, as the men turned the question over in their minds. Then William spoke, his voice flat and hard.

‘None of it makes sense. But I’ll not see the lad dragged before the council in the state he’s in, and there’s an end to it. If you can’t find the girl alive then Luke’s job is done, as far as I’m concerned. Now, leave him alone.’

Luke heard their muffled voices as they took their leave, and then the house fell silent. He sighed, tracing with his gaze the familiar cracks in the bedroom wall, as he’d done on sleepless nights ever since he was a small boy. The years were still there, stretching back in his memory, but there were gaps, like the cracks in the wall. A gap around his parents’ death and his coming to live with William. Where they had died there should have been memories – and pain. He could feel the shape of its absence, but try as he might, the memory itself was gone. And gaps, too, throughout the years, things he could not remember, gatherings with men he knew, faces he remembered, but whose reason he could not recall. And worst of all was that great aching gap of the last month, like a hole punched in his mind. He could remember nothing. Nothing. What had he done? Who was the girl they had been talking of, downstairs? Had he killed someone, was that what they meant?

He sat up and put his hand to the wound on the back of his head. It was healing, slowly. William had cropped his hair short to help stop infection and he felt the unaccustomed bristles against his palm as he rubbed his hand across the back of his skull. It was closed up enough not to need a bandage now, although it seeped sometimes at night, a clear pink fluid that stained his sheets. His skull was in one piece and that was something. William said it was concussion and the memories would come back in a day or two. He had said that yesterday and the day before. Luke no longer believed him. This was not concussion, this was permanent, as if his memories had been burnt away, cauterized like an infectious lesion of the brain.

He swung his legs over the side of the bed, shivering at the cold on his bare skin, and began to dress, pulling on the clothes his uncle had laid out for him two days ago in the hope that he might get up. As he buttoned his shirt he felt the skin on the back of his shoulder pull tight, as if there was a new-healed scar there, but he had no recollection of a wound. He twisted his head to look. There was a mark, the flesh turned thick and shiny where it had healed. He could not quite see what it was, but it looked like – a hammer, perhaps? He had never seen it before and it chilled him. Here was something else that had fallen into the cracks in his mind, lost for ever. What had he cared about so deeply that he had let it be branded into his skin? Whatever it was, he had forgotten it, along with everything else.

He made his way slowly down the stairs, half hoping to find his uncle already gone to the forge. But he was there.

‘Luke!’ William turned, his mouth open with astonishment. Then he pulled a chair out from the table. ‘Luke, lad, I didn’t think to see you down today. Sit down, sit down.’

‘I’m all right,’ Luke said gruffly, but he sat and allowed William to put a bowl of broth in front of him, and half a pint of ale. William watched anxiously as Luke tried to eat the soup.

‘Come on, lad,’ he said at last. ‘You’re not going to mend by picking like a fussy maid.’

‘I’m sorry, Uncle. I can’t, I’ve got no heart for it.’ He laid down the spoon. ‘I heard them, downstairs. What was John Leadingham on about? What task?’

‘Never you mind,’ his uncle said fiercely. ‘John Leadingham’s an officious fool. I’ll not have him bothering you. It’s . . . business stuff. Nowt to do with you.’

‘It didn’t sound like business,’ Luke said warily. ‘And it seemed to be a lot to do with me. What were they on about? What girl? And what killing?’

‘Never you mind,’ William snarled, so fiercely that Luke only sighed and picked up his ale.

After a long draught he spoke again.

‘I thought I might call past the dairy after work, see how Minna’s doing.’

William looked uncomfortable at that and he pushed his chair out from the table and walked to the window, to look out into the cobbled lane.

‘Well . . . as to that . . .’

Luke looked up. There was something in his uncle’s voice, something uneasy. ‘As to what, Uncle? Is Minna all right?’

‘I suppose there’s no use beating round the bush,’ William said heavily. He came back to sit at the table and clasped his hands. ‘She’s gone, Luke. D’you remember Bess got sick?’

Luke strained his memory and then shook his head angrily.

‘Well, she did. If I told her once, I told her a thousand times, she should’ve sold the mare while the going was good, got a donkey, put the money in the mouths of those kids. But she wouldn’t. And then Bess got ill and Minna poured good money after bad taking the nag to a horse doctor who told her the case was hopeless and took her shillings all the same.’

‘Where’s she gone?’ There was a feeling of fear, bordering on panic, rising in Luke’s gullet. He knew, he knew, somehow, that this was connected with the great gaping void in his memory – and yet the memories wouldn’t come. The more he grasped at them, the more insubstantial they became.

‘We don’t know. She went for a factory job, that’s all we heard. Nick Sykes couldn’t tell us where or who; she had a card, that’s all he knew, but he didn’t see it. He can’t read anyhow.’

‘And she never came back?’

‘No. She sent back two shillings by a messenger boy and promised more the next week, but it never came.’

‘Who’s looking after the kids?’

‘They’ve gone to the workhouse two days ago. Don’t look at me like that, Luke. What could we do? I’ve not got the time nor space to house those kids; neither have any of our friends. Times are hard. We did what we could – whipped round to give them a square meal, sent money and clothes, but you could see the way it was going, Nick Sykes took the money and drank it away, and the food and clothes he sold. There was nothing for it. They’re in the workhouse orphanage until Nick mends his ways or Minna comes back.’

He did not say what he was thinking, but Luke knew his uncle well enough to read it in the sadness in his eyes: the one was as unlikely as the other.

The engagement was not supposed to be announced until the spring, but somehow all London seemed to know, and overnight the Greenwood name was good for credit at the drapers’ and dressmakers’. Alexis found his application for a secretaryship at the Ealdwitan miraculously approved and when Rosa’s face healed she spent her days trailing miserably round department stores, milliners’ and haberdashers’ after Mama and Clemency, watching her trousseau grow ever larger, second only in magnificence to Mama’s own wardrobe.

She knew that Mama was growing impatient with her misery, but Sebastian, strangely, did not seem to mind her reluctance to talk about their wedding, her refusal to set a date. In fact she had hardly seen him since they had become engaged. His father had died, unexpectedly, and he was very busy at the Ealdwitan and at Southing, trying to sort out the endless tangles of legacies and entailments and death duties. Rosa was ashamed that her first feeling on hearing the news had been not sorrow for Sebastian but relief, that here was a reason to postpone the wedding – a reason that even Mama could not possibly object to, nor blame on Rosa.

She saw Cassandra, once, in town. They were waiting under the canopy at Fortnum’s for the carriage to come round, when a voice spoke at her elbow.

‘Rosa? I’m not mistaken, am I?’

Rosa turned and saw Cassandra’s small white face at her elbow, her deep-blue eyes as wide and startling in London as they had been at Southing.

‘Cassie! What are you doing here?’

‘I’ve come up to town with my governess.’ She indicated a pinched, grey-faced woman who was standing by the road anxiously scanning the thoroughfare for a carriage. ‘We are buying winter woollens. Are there any two more dreary words in the English language? I’m so glad we’ve met. I didn’t have a chance to tell you how very glad I am that we are to be sisters.’

‘Are you glad?’ Rosa said doubtfully. ‘I had the impression at Southing that you didn’t approve.’

‘I did not say I am glad you’re marrying Sebastian,’ Cassandra said gravely. She looked at Rosa with her penetrating blue eyes and Rosa had the impression once again that Cassie was seeing right through her, to her past and perhaps even future. ‘Are you?’

‘I’m sorry about your father,’ Rosa said miserably. She wished she could have answered the question without evasion, but there was something about Cassie’s clear gaze that made it very hard to lie.

‘I’m not,’ Cassie said bluntly. For a minute Rosa couldn’t speak and before she could recover Cassie went on. ‘He was a bully and a brute. He broke Mama and he broke Sebastian too, in a different way.’

‘A-and you?’