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our Empire. I have correspondents as far-flung as Kabool and New York.’
    ‘Oh?’ This was promising. Without taking his eyes off his daughter, he rang the bell for the housemaid, as the room wasn’t as warm as it should be. ‘Might some of these correspondents be of the male sex?’
    ‘Oh, the majority of them, Father,’ grinned Emmeline. ‘Males are in far more desperate need of salvation than females, I’ve found.’
    She was quite winsome when she smiled. Her lips still had something of the childish rosebud about them, and there were dimples in her cheeks. Her eyes were bright, her face unlined, her hair glossy. Five years, at most, she would retain these qualities, then the sap would begin to drain out of her, and she would be left only with the aquiline nose and the Curlew jaw. Moreover, arithmetic would be against her; she would strike any potential suitors as unfeasibly old. Dear little Emmeline could prattle all she liked about modern Society and how unrecognisably different it was from when he was a young man, but some attitudes were eternal.
    The maidservant padded into the room and, without needing to be told, perceived at once what the trouble was. She got on her knees in front of the hearth and started coaxing the flames. Worth her weight in gold, that girl.
    Once Emmeline had declared that she was writing to many mysterious gentlemen all over the world, her father was naturally curious to know if this were true, and, if so, who these mysterious gentlemen might be. Emmeline was clearly not going to tell him, so he had a word with Gertie who, in addition to her other duties, also had the task of walking to the pillarbox to post Miss Curlew’s letters.
    ‘Yes, sir,’ said the servant. ‘Never less than one a day. Sometimes five or six.’
    ‘Always to the same person?’
    ‘No, sir.’
    ‘Replies?’
    ‘Sometimes, sir.’
    ‘From … from what part of the world, usually?’
    ‘America, sir.’
    ‘How tantalising.’
    ‘Yes, sir.’
    In point of fact, most of the letters that Emmeline sent went unanswered. She tried to write at least half a dozen each afternoon, but sometimes her wrist grew weak or she got the urge to go out walking. It really would be a great boon to mankind (and womankind!) if someone could invent a mechanism for making automatic copies of a page of text. All this fuss in the newspapers recently about Mr Sobrero inventing nitro-glycerine! What did the world need another method of destruction for, when there were all sorts of useful things yet to be invented? However, she would scribble on regardless. There was a war to be fought – her own just and gentle war. The war against slavery.
    The gentlemen to whom she wrote were mainly located in Louisiana, Missouri, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, Arkansas, Georgia, Florida, the Virginias and the Carolinas. Modifying a generic text with a sprinkling of local details gleaned from imported newspapers and journals, she would address each man as well-informedly as she could, imploring him to renounce slave-owning and allow his hard heart to be penetrated by the love of Christ. She quoted passages of Scripture. She quoted Charles Dickens’s American Notes . She hinted that if the recipient should be inspired to recant his sinful behaviour and set his slaves free, there would, in this world, exist at least one person – Miss Emmeline Curlew – who would venerate him as a hero. Moral courage, she argued, is the manliest of virtues, and few men possess it.
    Most of these letters vanished into a void. A small proportion provoked replies, slim envelopes arriving weeks and months afterwards, single sheets suffused with varying strengths of nasty temper.
    I will thank you to keep your ignorant and impudent babblings to yourself , said one.
    Has it occurred to you, Miss , said another, that the very clothes you are wearing as you pen your imperious missive may have their origins in my cotton fields?
    Our postal system , averred