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her even more than an unwanted pregnancy, for all her mother would have scalped her alive had it been true.
    Now Lily forgot her vehemence about not wanting to be shackled by children. She forgot how they had dreamed of escape and making a fortune together. For now she would never have Dick’s child ever, any more than next summer she would be his bride? The Clermont-Reads had denied her all of that.
    Her darling Dick was dead and gone, and she’d never see him again.
    It was in that moment that Lily made her pledge. One day, no matter what the sacrifice, she would take her revenge. She took Edward’s card from her pocket and ground it into the mud under her heel.

Chapter Three
     
    1911
    Over the next two years Lily and Rose became almost inseparable. Lily never enquired into the true nature of Rose’s relationship with Dick, nor did Rose ever fully explain it. They were content to enjoy their burgeoning friendship and bring what comfort they could to each other.
    Rose had recently come to live on Fossburn Street, quite close to the churchyard where the two girls had met. And if, on the occasions when Lily visited, there were more comings and goings than seemed quite normal for a modest cottage, she made no comment upon the matter. None of the many men who tramped up the narrow wooden stairs in their heavy boots made any trouble or stayed very long.
    Rose’s mother Nan, rake-thin and little more than a girl herself, had a pretty face beneath a thatch of none-too-clean red hair, soulful eyes and a big laugh.
    After her latest visitor had gone she would come downstairs in a silk dressing-gown, as if she were a music hall artiste, and sit and roll her own cigarettes, a habit which Lily considered dreadfully daring and modern. Then she’d prop her slippered feet on the brass fender and blow smoke rings while she passed on the juiciest bits of gossip she had picked up, and describe her men friends with such hilarious accuracy it made the two girls weep with laughter.
    Nan was more than generous. Lily did not fail to notice that unlike her own family, who survived mainly on thin soup and bread when the fish weren’t running, Rose and her mother ate well.
    Lily was sick of fish. Even on those rare occasions when the catch was a good one, the best part of it - the char - was sold to Agnes Lang, who potted it in fancy little pots and packed them off to London to be enjoyed by the well-to-do. The Thorpe family lived mainly on eels, small perch and brown trout.
    ‘Here, lovey, go and buy three pennyworth of meat and potato pie from Mrs Edgar’s Cook Shop,’ Nan would say. And off the girls would run to the corner shop where a fat old lady with a toothless grin stood sentry over a huge pot from which she doled out platefuls of the best steaming hot meat and potato pie Lily had ever tasted: the pastry golden and crisp, the meat succulent and tender. It made Lily’s mouth water just to stand there and breathe in the appetising aroma. Or they would buy Cumberland sausages, fat and spicy and dripping with hot fat.
    ‘We’ll take a drop of stout to wash it all down,’ Nan would say, sending Rose running next to the Cobbles Inn with a jug.
    Nor did she worry about tidying up the mess when the delicious meal was over.
    ‘We’ll see to it tomorrow,’ was her favourite phrase. Oh, so unlike my mam, Lily thought, only too aware that Hannah could never sit still for a minute if there was a cup to be washed or a hearth swept.
    Arnie was fond of telling his wife: ‘If the good Lord himself were to come calling you’d tell him to wipe his feet first.’
    ‘He wouldn’t need to be told,’ Hannah would say, at least able to laugh at herself. ‘He’d have more sense than to come in with dirty boots on, unlike some chaps I could mention.’
    But for all her mother’s cheerful disposition and Arnie’s good heart, Lily told her parents little of her new friend’s home life. Hannah would not have approved of the goings on in