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from our own. Luke Gardiner had controlled the look of the square by putting covenants in the builders’ leases dictating the dimensions and proportions of the houses, the number of windows and types of door, the acceptable style of brickwork. Residents were prohibited from practising certain trades. No butchers, bakers or candlestick-makers. No distillers or soap-boilers either. I wondered what he’d make of those houses now, most of them crumbling and rotting tenements, and the residents lucky if they’d any kind of work at all.
    When the lecture was over, we stood off to the side while people filed out. Dad spoke to Miss Colclough, the latecomer. I gathered that she was one of his clients.
    ‘What did you think of the lecture, Miss Crilly?’
    I’d been mulling it over. ‘It’s strange, that something as actual as a street can come out of one person’s head.’
    ‘Go on,’ she said.
    I groped for words to express what was, after all, quite obvious. ‘To have vision is one thing, but the self-belief you’d need, to implement it – it seems extraordinary. To have so much – I don’t even know the word for it. Potency?’
    ‘What would it require, d’you imagine?’ She’d tilted her head to listen. There was a slight squint in her small, lively eyes.
    ‘Well, money.’ But that was too easy. ‘And – a sense of entitlement?’
    ‘Entitled is right!’ Dad chuckled. ‘No shortage of titles, in that family. Not to mention wealth and lands. For all the good it did them in the end. Is Miss Wilson not with you this evening, Miss Colclough?’
    ‘She wanted to come but she’s been wretchedly ill, she wasn’t quite up to it.’
    Dad said he was sorry to hear it, and asked her to pass on his regards. I thought we were about to leave, but he told me Miss Colclough was writing a book, about the public monuments of the city.
    ‘I’ve fallen terribly behind these last few weeks,’ she said. ‘I don’t suppose … would you by any chance know of someone who’d like a small job as a research assistant?’
    I fidgeted with my gloves. Dad’s eyes creased at the corners, making pleats in the skin of his face. ‘Our Katie has a degree in history – would that be of use?’
    ‘It might.’ She looked at me, longer than was comfortable. ‘If it would be of interest to you, Miss Crilly?’
    I hesitated. Was she offering me actual work? An excuse to get out and about without Mother breathing questions down my neck? But I didn’t think I’d be much use to her. It was only fair to tell her so. ‘I don’t know the first thing about sculpture, I’m afraid.’
    ‘That makes no matter,’ Miss Colclough said. ‘I suppose you can learn?’ It was a challenge.
    ‘Yes, I can learn.’
    We made an arrangement for a trial, the following week.
    Mother was livid when we went home and told her. ‘Is that the Dorothy Colclough who used to be a radical?’ she asked Dad.
    ‘What kind of radical?’ I asked. This was what she used to say about Professor Hayden, the most dignified and conservative of all our lecturers.
    ‘Votes for women,’ Dad said, smiling, teasing me. ‘About as likely as the man in the moon.’
    So Professor Hayden and Miss Colclough must know each other. There were several suffrage groups, each with
different methods and affiliations, but their paths would surely have crossed at some stage.
    ‘Didn’t she –’ Mother bit off the end of her sentence.
    ‘ “Didn’t she” what?’ I asked.
    ‘Miss Colclough is perfectly respectable, Mildred,’ Dad said. ‘I won’t hear a word against her. It’ll be an interest for Katie. It’ll take her out of herself. This book of hers is for the Academy. It’s a serious business.’
    She didn’t look convinced. ‘Mind you, don’t go bringing any of that suffrage nonsense home with you, Katie. I won’t have you turning out like those Sheehy girls.’
    On the day we’d arranged, I went to the terraced house on Percy Place, a calm stretch of