The few men unloading the pallets carried on their business without taking any notice of the carriage, or of Rosa herself, and she was just wondering what to do when a voice came from the other side of the courtyard.

‘Rosa!’

‘Sebastian.’

He helped her from the carriage, his tanned face still bearing its Indian colour, incongruous against the smoke-stained grey of the building and the pale, drawn faces of the workmen unloading the barge.

‘What are they doing?’ she asked.

‘Unloading the shipment of matchsticks. We don’t split them here, that’s done at another site. Here they are only dipped and packed for sale. Now, where shall we begin?’

He looked up and Rosa saw a giant clock fixed in the middle of the longest side of the courtyard. It read half past eleven.

‘Perhaps with the soup kitchens, for they will be quiet at this time of day since they do not open until noon. If we wait until later the stench and crush will be unbearable. This way. Watch your step. The cobbles are rough, I’m afraid.’

He took her arm and led her carefully across the yard, skirting round the puddles in the cobbles and the drains. They were about to pass under an archway, through a door, when there was the sound of an altercation at the gate.

‘You know the rules, Fishwick.’ A man’s voice raised in anger. ‘Now, out, before I summon the guvnor.’

‘Pleash, Mr Wyndham, shur.’ The other’s voice was thin and hopeless, and slurred as if he were missing teeth. ‘My wife, she’s very bad . . .’

‘What’s going on?’ Sebastian strode across and the gatekeeper immediately pulled off his cap and knocked his stick against the other man’s arm, who hastily pulled off his own. He too had a scarf around his face and jaw and Rosa noticed that his hand was missing three fingers and the last was cut short at the knuckle.

‘Bill Fishwick, shir,’ said the second man in a dull voice. ‘Which I arsht pardon, milordship, sir, but it wan’t idlenesh, truly. My wife took ill, I couldn’t leave her . . .’

‘Fishwick’s late for work, Mr Knyvet, sir,’ said the gatekeeper gruffly. ‘For the second time this month. Which I told him, the first time was the warning, the second time the sacking.’

Sebastian looked at Fishwick, at his pinched face. There was no hope in the man’s eyes – they looked dead and lifeless already.

He shook his head.

‘You know the rules, Fishwick.’

‘But—’

‘See him out, Wyndham.’

‘Please!’ Rosa heard the man’s desperate shouts from behind her, as Sebastian walked her away, still holding her arm. ‘Please!’

‘I know what you’ll say, Rosa,’ Sebastian said calmly, as they passed under the arch and through a doorway. ‘But they all have a sob story. And if I made an exception for him it would be grossly unfair to all the other workers – men, women and children – who struggle in with circumstances just as bad, or worse. There are a hundred workers for every vacancy, a hundred waiting in line for the soup kitchen. How is it fair to keep a worthless man in a job while conscientious workers wait in line for charity?’

She nodded numbly, trying not to let her feelings show in her face. He had said she would be shocked. She was determined not to be.

‘Here is the soup kitchen.’ Sebastian opened a door and Rosa went inside an echoing hall, filled with close-packed trestles and benches. Three women were laying out cups and bowls at one end and just next door, through a serving hatch, Rosa could see a sweating cook stirring a huge steaming vat over a range. It smelt strongly of cabbage and something bitter that she did not recognize.

As Sebastian came in the women looked up and their eyes widened in shock, then one by one they dropped into stiff curtseys.

‘Please don’t worry.’ Sebastian raised a hand. ‘There is no need to stop work. My fiancée here,’ he patted Rosa’s arm, ‘wanted a tour of the works. We shall not detain you.’ He turned back to Rosa and explained, ‘The facilities here are quite separate from the factory. Those two doors lead to the street; one is the entrance and the men and women queue there to be allowed entry.’

Rosa nodded. The ragged queue she had seen around the corner of the factory made sudden sense.

‘If they are decent and not drunk, they are fed and then go out through the second door to the street. On the other hand, if we have work – and we try to provide as much employment as we can – they are taken out the way we came, through the third door, to sign on for a trial day. If they are any good, they are told to come back the next day to the factory gate for paid work, like all the others.’

‘I see,’ Rosa said. The smell from the range was beginning to make her feel ill, but she was determined not to let Sebastian see it. She put up her chin. ‘Where now?’

‘Now I will show you the factory.’

Rosa’s head was spinning as he led her along a passageway, up some stairs and opened the door to a huge, long hall, painted dull workhouse grey. The windows were high; they let in a little light, but there was no view except grey clouds. Beneath, a great clattering conveyor belt transported a river of matches along in front of a row of bent women and girls, who scrabbled the matches into bundles and then packed them into boxes. There were dozens of them, perhaps a hundred, Rosa thought. Sebastian let her watch for a while, his eyes on her face as she took in the scene.

‘Ready to move on?’ he shouted over the roar of the machinery. ‘Next the matches are bound into parcels.’

Rosa followed him into the next room. Again, the same ceaseless clatter, the conveyor belt with its load of boxes going round and round. Boys and girls, some of them barely ten or twelve, bound the boxes into parcels of twelve and stacked them on pallets. They worked in complete silence like automatons, their faces grey and expressionless. Many of them too had rags and scarves around their faces and Rosa wondered why – surely it was risky with the machinery so fast and near?

They are poor, Rosa told herself, trying not to give way to the horror she felt at the sight of their blank eyes and lifeless movements. This is what the poor are like – isn’t it?

But Luke was not like this, nor his friend – what was her name? Minna? She remembered the girl’s wicked, laughing face, bright with mischief. The women and children working the packing lines seemed to have had all spirit crushed out of them, leaving just the shell of their bodies working, working, working endlessly.

‘They work from six in the morning until six at night,’ Sebastian shouted in her ear, ‘and would work longer if we let them; they need the money.’

Rosa saw a child dart until the conveyor belt to retrieve a fallen box of matches and she had to shut her eyes for a moment at the sight of the girl’s plait so close to the roaring machinery. All it would take would be one slip . . . Her fingers clenched involuntarily on Sebastian’s arm.

Sebastian saw her face and shook his head.

‘I told you you would be shocked.’

‘I wanted to come,’ she managed. So this was where Sebastian’s family made their money. The graceful beauty of Southing was sucked from the bodies of these men, women and children. The thought made her feel ill and she loathed herself for the weakness. Was this what Luke had gone back to? Was this what she had sent Minna to? She scanned the faces of the women on the packing line, but none of them had Minna’s thin, sharp face and laughing eyes.

‘Where next?’ she asked, and she was proud that her voice remained steady. ‘This is where the matches are packed – you said they are dipped here too?’

‘Yes, but I won’t take you there,’ Sebastian said. ‘The dipping room is no place for a lady. The fumes are very unpleasant.’

‘I want to see everything.’

‘No.’

‘Sebastian!’

‘You know nothing about it and you will accept my authority on this.’

His voice was calm, but his blue eyes were colder and harder than she had ever seen. Rosa knew that she had lost.

‘Let us have tea instead,’ Sebastian said. It was a statement, not a question, and Rosa nodded: better to pretend to acquiesce than admit the fact that she had no choice in the matter at all.

He led her through more passages, an office crammed with clerks scratching figures into ledgers, and then opened the door into another world, a room panelled in walnut and lit with a softly fringed lamp. The door closed behind them and she might have been at Southing, or a gentlemen’s club, or some other place where comfort and luxury reigned supreme.

‘Please have a seat, my darling.’ Sebastian showed her a silk-upholstered chair and she sank into it, her head still spinning with the faces and fumes. He moved to the fire and rang a bell; almost instantly a messenger appeared.

‘Tea, please. For two.’

The boy hurried away and Sebastian came and sat next to her.

‘It’s shocking, I know. Even I was horrified the first time I came here – and I was a child at the time, with a child’s acceptance of the brutal realities of life. There is much that I would like to improve, but at least we provide honest employment – these are men and women who would otherwise be without means of sustaining themselves and would turn to crime or, in the case of the women . . .’ He hesitated.

‘Prostitution?’ Rosa said bluntly. ‘Is that what you mean?’

‘Yes, though I don’t like to hear the word on your lips.’

‘But, Sebastian, would it be so hard to pay them a shilling more here or there? Or work them a little less hard?’

‘What you see is not the effect of the work, Rosa. It’s their upbringing. It is the fact that they have grown up in these poisoned, stifling streets without light or morality.’

‘But that’s not true!’ She clenched her fists. ‘I—’

‘Yes?’ Sebastian said. There was something dangerous, watchful in his eyes. Rosa held her breath. She had almost made the mistake of mentioning Luke’s name. As if by agreement they had both avoided any mention of that terrible night at Southing, when she had kissed Luke. It was as if by pretending he did not exist, the whole horror could be wiped out of existence too.

‘Nothing,’ Rosa said miserably. ‘But would it be so impossible to pay them a little more? Enough to move out of poverty, to somewhere with a little light and clean air?’

‘They would take their filth with them,’ Sebastian said softly. ‘If you gave them a bath, they would not wash in it, for they have never been taught how. It is the people who live here who create these neighbourhoods, not the other way around. Besides, what do you think would happen if I paid ten per cent more than our nearest rival? Our matches would cost ten per cent more, people would cease to buy them and the factory would end up having to close. Ten per cent of no wage is nothing.’

‘But if you explained that the cost was in order to give a humane wage . . .’ she tried despairingly. Sebastian only shook his head.

There was a rap at the door and Sebastian stood up.

‘That will be the tea. Come in!’

But it was not the tea. It was a small messenger boy, stunted and anxious. He shook his head as Sebastian asked him for his message and beckoned him outside with a look at Rosa. Sebastian sighed, but followed him into the corridor and closed the door. When he came back inside, he was holding a tray.

‘Rosa, there is a matter that requires my attention in the dipping room. I’m sorry to leave you, but it’s urgent. Here is the tea . . .’ He poured her a cup and added milk and a lump of sugar with silver tongs. ‘When I come back I’ll escort you down to the carriage.’

After he left, Rosa sank back in the chair. She felt numb. She knew she should drink the tea, that Sebastian would be angry if he came back and found she had not touched it, but she could not bear to think of consuming anything in this dark, poisoned place. He had not even asked her if she took sugar. Was this what her life would be like from now on, dictated to not by Mama’s whims and Alexis’ moods, but by Sebastian’s instead?

She took a forced sip of tea. It was sickly sweet and she pushed the cup away.

Today should not have changed anything – everything she had found out about Sebastian’s nature she had known already. She already knew that he was cold, that he was dictatorial, that there was a streak of brutality that frightened her.

But it had. It had changed everything.

She had been prepared to sacrifice herself. But she saw, clearly now, that it was not only her sacrifice. This factory had paid for Southing, its pastures wrung out of the suffering of men, women and children. Their happiness and health had paid for the bricks and stones and glass and paddocks. Every horse in the stable, warm and shining and well fed – how many matches did it represent? A thousand? A million? Each one whittled and dipped and packed by those desperate, grey-faced, blank-eyed workers.