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gave every appearance of having put out of her mind the fact that Katie was really her child. Hannah wasn’t really fit to be a miner’s wife, that was the truth of it. Kitty had remarked on it to Noah more than once.
    ‘Why man, leave her alone, Kitty,’ he usually said. ‘She’s our Tom’s choice an’ that’s all about it.’
    Katie would hear him and wonder. Why hadn’t she been her da’s choice, she wondered. She asked her gran once but Kitty had simply said she was
her
choice and that was all that mattered. And Katie did admit she would rather live with her gran than in the untidy, higgledy-piggledy house her mother kept.
    Katie left school on her fourteenth birthday and went to work in the Meadow Dairy, a grocer’s shop in Newgate Street in Auckland. But as she counted out eggs, sliced bacon and weighed out pats of butter, she dreamed of better things. One day, one day, she told herself, she would become a nurse. A proper nurse, trained, and for that she had to have a better education. So her evenings were taken up in studying and in attending classes in adult education. She hadn’t time to go around with the other girls in the rows, she was determined to make something of her life. And that meant she had no friends. At least not friends she could call close.
    ‘We will re-open the mines which are idle next week,’ said Matthew.
    ‘Will you, dear? That’s nice,’ Mary Anne replied.
    Once again they were sitting over the breakfast table but now they were living at what had been Dawson Hall and which Matthew had re-named Hamilton Hall. For not only had the Dawson Ironworks been swallowed up by the Hamilton works, but Dawson’s private property had been mortgaged to Matthew. Dawson had died the year before and Matthew had done what he considered to be the decent thing. He had provided his widow with a decent little house in Ormsby and moved himself and his family into the Hall. It was far away from the smells and dirt of the ironmasters’ district of Middlesbrough on the North York moors.
    He glanced irritably at his wife now. He was sure she hadn’t heard a single word he had said. And if she had she hadn’t understood, she was as dim as a Toc H lamp in his opinion.
    ‘I said we were going to open up the pits, Mary Anne. Don’t you know what that means? The business is picking up at last.’
    Mary Anne glanced quickly up at him then returned her gaze to her plate. All he thought of was money, she told herself. That and begetting an heir. He wouldn’t come to her bed but for that. Oh, God, how she hated it when he did. She lay there night after night, trembling with terror, going through the awful experience over and over in her mind until she heard him come upstairs and go into his dressing room. She would strain to hear the creak of his bedsprings as he climbed into bed and only then would she shudder and sigh and settle herself for sleep. It hadn’t been like that with her first husband, dear Robert.
    She had not been prepared for the rough way Matthew would take her with no preamble, thrust into her rigid body so that she had to bite her tongue to stop herself screaming out loud with pain.
    She moved on her chair now, trying to ease the soreness in her vagina, the aching in her thighs.
    ‘The miners will be glad, dear,’ she said. Matthew snorted in disgust and got to his feet.
    ‘Well, I’m going over there, I can’t say when I’ll be back,’ he said. He went out into the hall and took his overcoat from John, his newly acquired manservant. Then picking up his hat and gloves before John could do it for him he strode out to the waiting car. A purposeful figure, Mary Anne thought as she watched through the dining-room window.
    ‘Mama! Mama!’
    Mary Anne turned, her whole demeanour transformed now that her husband had left the house. She opened her arms and Robert and Maisie ran to her; something they would certainly not have done if their stepfather had still been in the house.
    ‘What