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would not.”
    Frances didn’t tell him that she would do everything in her power to please her cousins if it would save her from living as a servant in her aunt’s house. She saw that he wouldn’t change his mind, and her pride had been wounded enough. “Please write to Dr. Matthews and tell him I can’t accept his offer.”
    “If that is your decision.”
    She nodded. How could it be otherwise? She couldn’t marry a man for whom she felt no affection, a man who was prepared to use her sudden fall in fortune as an opportunity to coerce her into marriage. She turned to go, and her uncle said, as if piqued that she was leaving so soon, and in a sudden remembrance of magnanimous generosity prompted not so much by Frances’s situation as by paternal pride, “You must come and see the family before you leave London. They are very generous, my girls, and I know they will have all sorts of things they will want you to take with you to Manchester.” She glanced back once as she walked out of the door, and saw her uncle deadheading a geranium bush that was beginning to droop, his attention already diverted to the safe running of his household.
    •   •   •
    I T WAS LATE in the afternoon by the time she got home. Her aunt stood in the doorway of the morning room clutching her youngest child. She was a stout woman with wiry red hair streaked with gray, and a red rash that crept down her nose and across her cheeks when she was upset. Frances could see herself dimly reflected in the older woman’s features, and wondered whether this was what age had in store for her.
    “What on earth took you so long?” her aunt asked, casting a neat, sharp slap across her cheek. Before Frances could react, the woman had thrust the child forward. She had no choice but to take the placid weight of him in her arms. His face was white and shiny like a porcelain jug, and a thin mucus streamed from his nose. When he made a grasp for her mouth with a wet hand, she smelt the creases in his fingers, damp and sour like soft cheese.
    “Poor Jimmy! What he needs, Frances, is a nurse who can keep the time. Honestly, you behave as if I weren’t doing you a favor, taking you with me. Heaven knows it’s only out of the goodness of my own heart. It’s not as if you know the first thing about bringing up children. Just look at you!” she cried as Frances struggled to keep hold of the wriggling boy. “You’re no stronger than a child. You’ve never done a hard day’s work in your life.”
    Frances bent down and placed the boy on the floor and, ignoring her aunt’s protests, walked quickly upstairs to her bedroom. She locked the door, barely registering the howl which had started up downstairs. For the first time since her father’s death she felt something stronger than grief take hold of her.
    Her father had taken her once to her aunt’s house; a small terraced cottage in a street so long you couldn’t see to the ends of it. There were so many people crammed inside its four rooms, wailing and crying and climbing up her skirts, that Frances thought her head might explode with the noise. It was winter and the windows dripped with condensation. The walls were covered with a cheap imitation wallpaper which the gas lamp had turned from orange to black, and the rug was matted with damp. The maid had red eyes that streamed as if weeping were a fact of life. Frances had stepped out to the privy in the backyard. Its door had frozen shut and she had to kick at it to loosen the hinges. Cockroaches nestled their wriggling bodies between thin cracks in the wood. She had stood there, hands pressed together, renouncing this place as a kind of personal hell.
    Now her father was dead, his protection was gone, and she was being sent back to where he had come from. Unlike him, she didn’t think she would ever escape. It wasn’t unusual for a household to keep an overworked relation, who sweated for her keep and had no family of her own, until she was