‘Oh, bless the boy!’ Jethro had swept and dusted. The glass was gone, the stained patch of wall gleamed newly white. The pearls had been collected up into a bowl on the dressing table and the doors of the presses were shut. He had even opened the window an inch and the chill air had driven away the musty smell. It was an empty, unthreatening room once more. He was a good lad, sensitive beyond his years sometimes. Hester smiled, recalling John’s doubts when she had returned home with her filthy waif. ‘You will regret it,’ he said, studying the lad with a cynical soldier’s eye, but she never had.

She drifted back to bed, reassured and suddenly too tired either to plan or to remember. As she snuggled under the sheets her thoughts flickered to tomorrow’s encounter. What would the earl think of her? she wondered. Strange that it was not his wife who had made the first call. Perhaps he was unmarried…

Hester slept. Across the road in the red brick house Guy Westrope stood in his dark bedchamber, the book he had strolled upstairs to fetch in his hand. He could see in the dark uncannily well and had not troubled to pick up the branch of candles from the landing table when he entered. Now he stood waiting to see whether that slender ghost of a figure in white would cross the room opposite his again. But the window in the Moon House went dark as a candle was extinguished.

Who was she? Not that quaint maid, not in what must be the best bedchamber. The lady of the house? Or simply a phantom of his imagination? No, not that, for the ghost he would expect to conjure up would have blonde hair, not a tumbling mass of brunette curls.

Cursing himself for a fool, not for the first time that day, Guy strode out of the room and downstairs to a solitary meal. The most entertainment he could hope for would be his attempts to catch his butler Parrott betraying by so much as a quiver his utter disapproval of the village, the house and the entire enterprise.