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confidently expected. She eyed those who had wandered in to look at the items for auction with only moderate interest. As soon as the rain ceased, they would wander out again, she felt sure of it.
    She found herself looking at the items for sale through their eyes, imagining how unimpressive they must seem. The largest item was the dilapidated platen press Will had used for years. Even the new one he had bought only five months ago wasn’t drawing the interest she had thought it would. She watched reams of paper being inspected, type moulds, printing blocks, composing frames, inking rollers, guttering – all those things she couldn’t have put a name to until the auctioneer, Mr Jones, had told her – being fingered; took dismal note of the speculative downturned lips.
    ‘We’ll soon shift this lot,’ Mr Jones had said, full of cheerful confidence, but she had lost faith in anything he said. Even the latest arrival, a tall, thin young man in a damp ulster, remained hovering by the door as if ready to slip out again. She would be lucky to make anything from this auction – might as well have kept the business.
    Will had left about three hundred pounds in cash. Clara and Annie’s eyes had gleamed, but she was going to have to live on that, and the rate money was going out … The christening had set her back a tidy penny. The funeral had cost even more: an oak coffin – five pounds; hearse, black horses, black plumes, black harness – eight pounds all of fifteen shillings; pallbearers’ fees – fifteen shillings; not to mention the carriages for the mourners, and the undertaker to settle up. In all, she’d spent over twenty pounds to bury a man who had used her so badly that she had grown to hate him.
    The meagre attendance this morning after the numbers who had seen him off seemed like a retribution, God’s punishment for her part in sending Will to his grave. Harriet gave a visible shiver, then smiled hastily as Clara cast her an enquiring glance.
    ‘The auctioneer’s looking impatient,’ Clara whispered.
    ‘It’s all a bit of a farce anyway,’ Harriet whispered back.
    Everything had been a farce. The christening, thanking God for her deliverance more than for the baby’s; her smile so false that her face ached. Holding the baby as a fond mother until, professing weakness, she had given it to her mother to hold. Clara, Annie and Annie’s husband as godparents cooing at it all through the ceremony. Aunt Sarah remarking, ‘She’s the image of Will. She’ll be a beauty.’ Her father’s two sisters, bosoms shuddering over the tragedy of it all as they planted moist kisses on her frigid cheeks. Her father himself being bluff and hearty.
    She had been glad when, christening over, she’d dropped the baby back into its crib. Sarah Mary Porter – to her the baby was still an it. The passing of time had dulled her initial loathing, leaving her now with no feeling at all. She wouldn’t neglect the child, but there was no motherly love for it in her, and that was how it was.
    She didn’t relish living above the business on her own with it, but what else was there to do? Braced to decline another invitation to live with her parents, she still felt deeply hurt that they’d not pressed again.
    In defiance she had even considered keeping the business going, but as a woman she was handicapped. Those unaware of her circumstance would ask for the proprietor, and then be disconcerted to find that they were already talking to the proprietor, this woman with the small, wan face, dressed in her mourning crepe. An older woman with arms like hams and coarse features beneath a man’s cloth cap would have fared well, but not her. And so she had finally agreed to the auction, and to dispensing with Bert Higgins’s services, since the shop would probably be used for something other than printing.
    ‘What’s wanted is a grocer’s,’ said Mrs Hardy. ‘Ain’t none till you get nearly to Cambridge Road. Tobacconists,