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chimneypots and narrow side streets of Shoreditch. Before him the intersection of Old Street, Hackney Road, Kingsland Road and Shoreditch High Street gave a sense of space in a clutter of poverty. Matthew felt suddenly pleased with the world.
    On weekdays these streets would be alive with traffic. Today, although the odour of horse dung, powder-dry from a rainless week, hung warmly pungent on the air, peace reigned. If any trams or buses ran on Sundays, there was none in sight, but a cab stood at the kerb, nosebag slung between the wheels, the nag ready to move off with a flick of the reins and the driver alert for any fare coming his way.
    Matthew decided against hailing him. He needed to stretch his legs. A stroll towards Liverpool Street station, something less than half a mile further on, would do him good. He would get a cab from there to Waterloo Junction, and then a train to Winchester. He had all day to get home.
    He had never been in the East End before. He had stayed the night with an old friend from his Oxford days, David Symonds, and had been kept awake half that time by the drunken commotion below his window, gusts of laughter, singing, colourful curses in ripe Cockney slang – and the discomfort of a strange bed. Only after midnight had peace descended, though even that had been broken by a hollow yowling of cats echoing through the alleys.
    The following morning the sight of churchgoers dressed in their Sunday best had revived his confidence enough to venture into an unfamiliar church. Sunday morning service was very much part of Matthew’s family life. David was not one for church, so Matthew had made his farewells as early as decently possible, hoping to find a church somewhere on the way home and enjoy a quiet hour or two.
    It had been good to see David again. When they had come down three years before, David had gone into his father’s firm of solicitors, Peeker, Stymes & Symonds, whose offices were in Kingsland Road. His parents’ home was in Highgate, but David had a flat near the office, needing to be independent, but for all that, was a credit to his father. Matthew had been more a disappointment to his.
    ‘A waste of good money,’ he had complained. ‘All you seem to have gained is a bit of knowledge at the expense of a lot of wisdom.’
    Matthew’s brown eyes, which contrasted starkly with his fair hair, took on a musing look as he remembered this conversation. It would have been wisdom to have let his father have his way and to have gone into law, but wisdom hadn’t come into it. A love of words – not legal words but beautiful, flowing, magic words; words to make readers shiver with pleasure – dominated Matthew. Except that he was burdened by an inability to set them down magically. So he had found others who could, and got them to do it for him. He’d started up a monthly journal; a very modest monthly journal which a small inherited trust just about managed to finance – because he was also burdened by a sympathy with those woman who for years had been demanding a right to a political voice. This sympathy having transmitted itself to his journal, that was what it became – a political women’s journal,
Freewoman
, which the general public weren’t overly inclined to subscribe to.
    A woman’s romantic paper would have been better, but having nailed his colours to the mast he could hardly tear them down now without looking a failure, especially to a father who saw his son as a complete fool and a mother who considered his venture totally misguided and was appalled by women who went about preaching female suffrage, whatever that was.
    ‘All I know,’ she dismissed, always trying to forget she was the daughter of a common ironmonger, ‘is that it makes such persons very masculine and injures the self-respect of decent women.’
    Matthew quickened his pace unconsciously as his thoughts turned to his plans for the future. The office he rented to turn out his few hundred copies a