It had taken hours to sew. Eileen had bought the cloth from a shop near her house in Ancoats. They had cut three of the letters and stitched them, deep purple on black sackcloth, before Tabitha raised the concern that they would simply not be visible from any distance. The pair peered down over the banner, then hung it in the kitchen window and stood at the back of Eileen’s yard, the letters hard to see. Eileen sent Tabitha off to buy the new white fabric. The draper’s in Ancoats was closed; she had to take an omnibus into the city. It was dark by the time she arrived back at Eileen’s.

  Tabitha saw Eileen reach into her skirt pocket for something, an egg, bluish and flecked with straw. Eileen hurled it towards the stage. ‘Deeds not words,’ she said under her breath, throwing a second, then a third which fell short, striking a woman on the front row who let out a yelp, as if scolded, her husband clawing the yolk from her shoulder. This had never been part of the plan. In all the hours of preparation this had never been discussed. A constable was beside the stewards now who were pointing them out.

  Tabitha felt a hand on her shoulder. The sense at first of an overwhelming weight which translated itself somewhere in her mind into strength, into force being applied directly to her. As the fingertips dug in behind her collarbone there came a sudden sense of the inescapability of what was happening. The chair being kicked out from under her, the immediate weightlessness, her legs thrown into the air. The strange sight of her boots, her flapping skirt, then the floor rushing up, banging her tail bone, her head whipped back. An ache spreading through her it as if she had eaten something far too cold. A series of discrete but somehow interlinked sensations; the weightlessness, the impact, the aching. Down on the floor, there was a ringing in her ears. Noise and commotion all around her. The police officer’s helmet had come off. It lay beside her, so close she could smell his unwashed hair. Someone was twisting her arm up her back. Nearby one of the stewards was standing on Eileen. Tabitha watched as she spat at his boots. He bent down and struck her across the mouth with the back of his hand. There was a commotion as the members of the audience turned their attention to the women pinned to the floor. Tabitha saw Eileen’s mouth, the blood glossy against her teeth, as she resisted the stewards who were struggling to hold her down. A second constable had joined them. It had all gone wrong. She saw the rage in the eyes of the men above her. Their eyes were bright with it.

  *

  Eloise inspected herself in the mirror of her mother’s dressing table. She had removed the shade from the standard lamp, leaving the bare bulb exposed. The room had been left exactly as it had been before her mother’s death, no attempt made to clear any of her possessions; even her bedside reading remained. Tabitha told Eloise it was improper when she suggested they choose some things of hers to keep; Charles was no better, and Hettie had suddenly afforded the space and her late mother-in-law a reverence she had not in life. The accommodations of those first weeks of grief had hardened into routine, into a sense that it was somehow now improper even to enter the room. Eloise had locked the door that led to the wood-panelled hallway that in turn led to the bedroom. It pleased her to be hiding inside her own home. She poured herself more hock into the hollow-ribbed stem of the green wine glass. It was, she supposed, meant to look like something from the Middle Ages. The wine was dry and very acidic. She was learning to enjoy the taste. Forcing herself. That instant uplift of the first few sips was agreeable, but not the ensuing hotness in her cheeks, which made her look clownish, those uneven red lozenges. She inspected herself in the mirror, turning across the light thrown by the bare lamp. She hung a gold locket engraved with forget-me-nots around her neck. Her hair was in a loose coil and she inserted a pin with a crown of rhinestones. She glanced again into the mirror, applied pearl powder. She walked to the bedroom window, pressed her cheek to the cold glass; the rain sounded like young wood on a bonfire. She would be drenched stepping out even as far as the high street where she might flag down a motor taxi. There was only one thing for it …

  At the turn of the stairs Eloise was met by her sister-in-law.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I’ve an engagement. Are you on your way to bed?’

  ‘Does Charles know?’

  ‘Yes, absolutely,’ she lied.

  Hettie looked at her, then placed her hand on the side of Eloise’s face.

  ‘You look very pretty.’

  Eloise smiled, hoping not to be detained.

  ‘You are so lucky. Do you know that?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Eloise. Hettie did not look well. Her skin was almost translucent, she was very dark under her eyes. She was carrying a cup of beef tea, a sharp and sweetly rotting smell.

  ‘So lucky.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  In the kitchen Eloise took a candle and a box of matches from a drawer. There was no sign of Dolly or Cook. She carried the candle down into the cellar. At the bottom of the stairs there were shelves, a dozen bottles on each; on the top shelf jeroboams of Bordeaux and a mildewed wicker wine cooler. She took a bottle of Hochheimer and a bottle of port. She wiped the cobwebs from the label, pictured her and Georges sitting before the ‘tortoise’, the architecture of their conversation, her subtle disclosures, the inevitability of what would follow. She placed the bottles in a laundry bag with a soft clink.

  She made her way up a second staircase that connected the cellars to the garage. The steps were cold and smelled of rain. As she neared the top her candle flickered out and she found herself in darkness. She struggled to light another match, the damp heads crumbling on the strike strip. She climbed the stairs into the garage where she threw on the electric light. Everything was made so much more certain by the wine. The world softened, her actions easier and more definitive. It didn’t seem to matter what Charles might say if he found her in here, she felt, in fact, he might endorse it. She looked across the garage and there it was, big as a rhinoceros, under the dust sheet.

  Charles’s gloves and goggles were on the driver’s seat. She lit the headlamps, then went to the front and cranked the engine handle. Nothing. She tried again, harder this time, as she had seen Charles do it. He had allowed her to drive it once near Buxton last Whitsuntide. She remembered he had fiddled with some switches by the steering column. She tried a few at random. On the third attempt the vehicle came to life. She opened the garage doors then ran back to the automobile, released the brake and set off into the glittering black night.

  She was cautious at first, as she turned onto the street, the Imperial responding to a lighter touch than she remembered. As she drove she felt a thrill, the emissary of her own seduction, past the grand villas then the rows of cheap brick houses, following the tramlines down the unpeopled streets until she could hear the horns and funnels from the docks.

  She hadn’t thought about stopping. As it dawned on her, she felt a faint sense of panic. Suddenly the automobile that had handled so easily, so naturally, became alien and beyond her control. She glanced around her for the brake, tried to remember what she had seen Charles do. She pulled a lever, the Imperial shuddered but continued moving, she pulled another and it seemed to gain speed. She pulled three in quick succession and it came abruptly to a halt hurling her forward. She scanned the street; there was a grocer’s shop and next door to it a stationer’s. She must try to remember this, she thought, as she retrieved the laundry bag from the footwell.

  *

  When Eloise arrived at Georges’ rooms she felt a sudden hollowing. The front door was ajar. She let herself in. There was a bicycle in the hallway. Smells of fat and boiled cabbage. She could hear each tread on the bare staircase as she made her way to his rooms, stilling the bottles as their clinking threatened to betray her presence. There was a plaster model of a dancer in a plant pot outside the door. She turned the knob, felt the latch release, pushed it open an inch. There was humming from inside, then laughter.

  Georges was standing in the doorway to the bathroom, with its low sink and zinc bath. The tiny window behind him was damp. She could see him in his shaving mirror. His hair was wet, made dark by the water, falling in tendrils around his face. He had a thin towel. She watched for a moment as he tied it around his waist. The fine musculature of his body, like a skinned rabbit, reddened from the bath, his thin slightly bowed legs. She was on the verge of saying his name but instead something made her step into the room.

  Lying on the bed was Alexander Broady. He was naked. His face flushed down the bridge of his nose and in wide, uneven patches across his cheeks. His body, ghostly against the quilt. She saw the nest of umber pubic hair, his flaccid penis lying to one side, heavier than she would have expected. He moved his hair across his brow, gently, like a woman. He seemed unmoved by her appearance as if he had been expecting her.

  Eloise stood in silence for a long moment. She heard the horn from a barge on the canal. Then she began to laugh. It was a deep laugh from down in her stomach, a panting almost, bringing her hand to her mouth, as she tried to hold the laughter back. Alexander was watching her, cautiously at first, then he was laughing too. He covered his legs with the quilt. Georges continued to towel himself then took his soap from a little dish, slathering his face with foam, looking over his shoulder in the mirror to the figure of Eloise looking over to Alexander Broady.

  ‘Oh, I have been a fool,’ Eloise said, tears in her eyes. Her laughter cut through with the occasional rootless sob. Georges drew the razor down his throat leaving raw pink oblongs. She felt like someone who had lost a fortune in the space of an afternoon and yet been lightened infinitely by it. She felt free. Yes, for the first time in her adult life she felt free.

  *

  The telephone in the hallway rang: the bells pinned to the lacquered box sounding, for a moment, like a frenzied exchange between two cyclists. Charles heaved himself from the chair in the drawing room where he had been dozing. His final meeting had run on longer than expected; there was a dispute with Ainscough’s, regarding an outlet they claimed was depositing wastewater onto their property. He had given McDonald instructions not to budge despite their threats of legal action. ‘He can threaten us all he likes. I was down there every day, and I can assure you there in no way on God’s earth that water is coming from our pipes.’

  ‘That’s the spirit,’ Charles had said, feeling as ever the indispensability of McDonald. He had sent a note to Cecil Ruislip informing him of their position, asking him to draft a letter to Ainscough. It had been seven before he left the office.

  The telephone was still ringing, persistently, getting louder it seemed, if that were possible. It would be McDonald, he had been warning Charles for the past month that he needed to replace one of the vats, no doubt one had chosen this evening to catch light. Or he was calling to tell him about some new suppliers of japan wax he had found or a piano machine that was no longer cutting to size. The endless, incessant detail of it all. He often wondered how McDonald marshalled his informants across the various premises, those discrete streams of information. He had a genius for it. He would try and judge from McDonald’s tone what was urgent and what was advisory. Though it always meant one thing – increased cost, week on week, month on month. As he approached the telephone, Charles speculated as to how much the conversation might cost him.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Mr Wright, this is Cecil Ruislip.’

  ‘Yes, hello.’

  ‘I’m calling regarding your sister, Miss Tabitha Wright.’

  ‘What?’

  *

  Charles hurried down the steps, the stairwell curling sharply, his heels ringing on the stone. There were barred windows cut into each turn in the stairs, letting in a feeble yellow light from elsewhere in the building. A strong smell of urine and pumice. He walked briskly past a line of empty cells. In the final cell Tabitha sat alone.

  ‘Charles, you must find out what happened to Eileen,’ she called out.

  ‘Are you here for her?’ a constable asked, setting down the receiver on the telephone on the wall opposite her cell. He was squat man with a toothbrush moustache; the loose skin below his jaw was pockmarked.

  ‘Husband, are you? You’ll have to sign these.’

  There was a ledger on the desk; the constable took a seat and removed his helmet. There was a line across his forehead where it had been pressing.

  ‘Hasn’t stopped rabbiting since we got her in. Last hour she’s only had me to listen to her. Not stopped, have you, madam?’ He shoved his tongue into his bottom lip; it became swollen like toad’s neck. ‘Be lucky to avoid the courts, won’t you?’

  ‘Can we hurry this along, please?’

  The constable squinted at Charles. It was a look that seemed to contain both physical menace and legal threat.

  ‘I trust you have the necessary documentation?’

  Charles offered him the chits, signed and stamped upstairs where Cecil Ruislip was waiting, along with the cab driver Charles had insisted park and accompany them into the police station. There had been a delay as they attempted to locate Tabitha, the duty sergeant having no record of her arrest, dispatching an officer to find her who returned and explained she was being held in one of the basement cells.

  The constable took the chits from Charles and examined them carefully, slapping them down like something poor quality and counterfeit he had recently confiscated.

  *

  Eloise made her way along the drive. The wet brick looked dazzling in the moonlight. She had yet to think of a plausible story to tell Charles about the lateness of her return or the whereabouts of his prized motor car. The Imperial was safe at least; Georges and Alexander had helped push it to a disused stable block at a dairy near Georges’ lodgings. Alexander had promised to look in on it the next day. Nothing had been said about the scene into which Eloise had walked. Alexander had eventually risen and dressed, heaving his trousers up to his naked waist, looping the braces over his bare torso, retrieving his shirt from the floor. Georges had come in after shaving and offered her a small glass of astringent red wine. The three sat around the table and talked, as if her presence were the most ordinary thing in the world.

  Eloise was sober now, or so she thought, but still she admired the glittering night hung around the leaves. She could hear an owl somewhere. Inside she clumsily removed her boots and stood for a moment at the entrance to the drawing room, peering at the gloom. There was a lit candle on the hearth.

  ‘Tabitha? What are you doing up? Where’s Charles?’

  ‘He went to bed.’

  She shifted on the sofa with a sharp intake of breath through her teeth.

  ‘Tabitha, what’s wrong? What’s happened?’

  She began to tell Eloise about the events at the Town Hall, her evening in the cells.

  ‘I suppose you think I’m rather an idiot, don’t you?’

  ‘Will anything come of it?’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Of tonight, I mean, will you have to go to court?’

  ‘Cecil Ruislip seemed to think not. We are to return to the police station tomorrow, I’m to present myself at one o’clock.’

  ‘How did Charles take it?’

  ‘Not entirely well.’

  ‘No, I suspect he wouldn’t.’

  ‘He barely spoke a word to me on the way home.’

  ‘I tell you what, shall we have some tea?’

  Eloise returned a few minutes later carrying a tray on which was balanced a pair of mugs, a gravy boat and a sieve for removing soil from garden vegetables.

  ‘I can never find anything without Cook,’ she said, looking slightly ashamed.

  The loose tea floated to the top of the gravy boat, the sisters carefully poured the contents over the sieve and into the mugs.

  ‘And what on earth happened to you?’ asked Tabitha.

  ‘Oh, long story. I’ve made a decision.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I’m leaving England.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘This summer.’

  ‘With Monsieur Verstraeten?’

  ‘Oh no.’

  ‘How advanced are these plans?’

  ‘Oh, fairly,’ Eloise said.

  ‘And have you spoken to Charles about this? Surely you won’t leave without his blessing? You’ll cause a scandal.’

  ‘Well, yes, you’ve done me a favour in that respect.’

  The clock on the mantelpiece chimed one. The pair sat quietly together. An owl called from somewhere high up in the garden. There was the cold smell of old cigar smoke.

  ‘Do you remember, Tab, when Mama first took us to the house on Windermere?’

  ‘When it was still owned by her uncle?’

  ‘We must have been six or seven. I remember her telling us that one day this would be in ours, that it was our duty to look after it,’

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘I resented duty. My duty is whatever I decide. I can’t stomach the idea that it’s someone else’s place to decide it for me.’

  ‘You don’t have to worry about the house, Charles has it all in hand.’

  ‘If anything is to be in anyone’s hands I’d like those hands to be mine.’

  Eloise held up her hands as if she had newly discovered them.

  ‘I’m sure tomorrow Mr Ruislip will take you to the police station, Charles will speak to some high-ups, and pfffff all will be well.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘Throw yourself from any height, fire yourself from any cannon, there will be a net to catch you.’

  ‘I take it you wish to live a life divested of any of the comforts of your station?’

  ‘Tabitha, you sound like Mr Ruislip.’

  She paused then clutched a fist to her breast as if she had just driven a dagger into her own heart.

  ‘I want the tightrope and the sheer drop. The fall that might kill me.’

  ‘You are so dramatic.’

  Eloise cupped her hand to her ear.