Back from my holidays – back to the arms of my Jasper. Ah, happy times.

In the hansom cab on the way to Southwark, I looked out at the jostle of London and thought more of Jasper's darkness.

It was little in evidence now, with our hands linked and our shoulders in amiable proximity, huddling together against the cold, but the way he had spoken of it had shaken me. What could be its causes and precipitating factors? Could anything check its growth or was it destined to remain in him, a canker suffocating his hopes – and therefore mine – of happiness?

It was this shadow, lurking behind every smile, every gentler expression, that had set me against him from the start. I had sensed it straightaway and experienced the chill of it in my bones – small wonder my fingers protested when they played for him.

I cast my mind back to my earliest childhood and made an effort to remember when he might have been mentioned and in what connection. My parents and the Droods were, after all, the greatest of friends and I had misty recollections of weekend parties in the summer spent playing on the lawns of our house or theirs, Edwin chasing me about with a butterfly net until I nearly fell into the lake – such a sad foreshadow of my dear mother's eventual fate.

But Jasper was never there. I never saw him at the Droods, and they never brought him to our house, although Eddy had vaguely mentioned that he once lived with them for a spell before going to the choir school. Had they left him there over the summer holidays? Surely they must have done, or we would have met when I was a small girl, and I am sure we never did. I would remember – I imagine he would have frightened me, even before the shadow was fully formed.

Mrs Drood, who died when I was perhaps ten or eleven, was his sister – his senior by more than a dozen years. She had been my mother's great friend, but I recalled her as a rather distant figure, aloof and elegant and somewhat icy where my mother was all vivacity. I feared to speak to her and, although she doted on Eddy, one was left with the impression that she was not fond of children. Perhaps, then, the difference in their ages was simply too great for much affection to flourish between them. Yet they were both orphans, alone in the world, with nobody to depend upon but each other until Captain Drood happened along. Edwin had told me often enough that his mother had no people. He thought it rather a joke, and then at other times it irked him to have this fancied blot on his pedigree. Once he said they had been minor landowners down towards Canterbury, and then another time he said they were London people of the artisanal class. I never did draw him out about it though because, I am rather ashamed to say, I wasn't much interested.

And yet now I was, most passionately interested in the provenance and ancestry of Edwin Drood – or rather, his uncle.

Surely somebody must have made mention of him? I frowned in the effort of remembrance, but all that came back to me were hazy impressions, like the buzzing of so many bees on a languid summer day. Captain Drood, when he came back from Ceylon (or perhaps Egypt), sitting at our card table, saying something about 'the boy', and 'the boy' not being Eddy, and Mrs Drood looking perfectly tight-lipped and furious, and the subject being abruptly changed. Was that a true memory? Or did I fix it to fit my own wild curiosity and 'the boy' was some other boy entirely?

I turned my face to him and asked abruptly, "What is the first thing you remember?"

"Of what?" He didn't take my meaning and simply knitted his brow at me.

"Of your life. Your childhood."

He looked at me as if he thought me mad. "Why do you ask?"

"Why not? It is a perfectly ordinary question for a wife to ask of her husband – for any close friend to ask of another. Why should I not ask it of you?"

"Of course you may ask," he said. "But the answer will disappoint you. I remember very little indeed."

"You lived with Eddy, did you not?"

"No, I did not. Only for a month or two, after he was born."

"Oh. I thought it longer."

"For a while, before his birth. A matter of a few years. I don't know. I was very young." He chewed his lip, looking ahead as if seeing something in the distance. "I'm not inclined to talk about that young man, if you don't mind."

"You aren't inclined to talk about anything."

"Rosa, what is this petulance now?"

"I only wish to know you better."

He looked uncomfortable at that, as troubled as he had done earlier on the hotel bed.

"You may know me by my present and my future, Rosebud. Concern yourself only with how the love I bear you will shape and form our lives. What is past is gone. You had no hand in it. But the future – that is where you will know me best."

These were fine enough words, but I was not mollified.

"In other words, 'Shut up, Rosebud'," I grumped.

I was the immediate recipient of a stunningly severe look. I am rather afraid I quailed beneath it.

"Henceforth my only thought," he said in a low and serious voice, "is to be always worthy of your love. To dwell on what is past makes no progress towards that end, therefore I reject its contemplation."

"Dear Lord, Jasper, you make it all sound so mysterious." My flippant tone had an edge of sulk that only the most blockheaded would not have detected. "I simply asked for some reminiscence of whipping a top or chasing a cat. But you were born with whiskers and a long face, it seems."

"And you, madam, are much too pert for your own good. I know I didn't want to discuss Ned, but he was right in that respect, at least."

"O! He said that of me?"

Jasper half-smiled, the shadow lifting from him for a moment of seductive wickedness.

"He said it. I remonstrated at the time, but I wonder at myself now." His arm crept about my waist, his fingers digging into my side in a way that was both ticklish and mildly uncomfortable. I squirmed and tried not to squeal. "Do you feel so free to cheek me now, hmm?" His fingertips drummed dangerously on my ribcage, ready at a second's notice to subject me to an attack of the ticklish kind.

"Oh, get off me, you beast," I protested, trying as I might to extricate myself from him, but in vain. "It is unfair!"

His hand slipped inside my cloak and now he held me fast, so tightly that I was immobile. Bending his lips to my ear, he whispered, "Go on, confess your fault. Apologise for your wicked little tongue, or I shall…"

"Pax! Pax!" I yelped, rather thankful for the thunder of the cab wheels and horse's hooves and thousand other noisy distractions offered by the London streets.

He was having none of it, though, and his devilish fingers worked their way into the grooves between my ribs and then reached up for my armpit, which I knew for sure I would not be able to bear and, gulping down unwilling laughter, I gasped out an apology. But this was merely one defeat. I was not prepared to let the subject of John Jasper's beginnings in life go unmentioned forever.

The cab pulled up at the junction of a narrow street in the Borough. Taking care to disengage myself from Jasper after he had helped me down, I stood on tiptoe and whispered into his ear, "My fingers were crossed."

By the time he had made a lunge for me, hampered by our luggage, I had flitted across the cobbles away from him, darting a challenging grin over my shoulder.

Hanging on to the bags for only as long as it took him to catch up with me – confessedly, this was not long at all – he then dropped them and manhandled me into a narrow alley between the street and a small courtyard.

He had me there, pinioned against the cold brick, his mouth busy showing mine what it should be doing rather than passing impudent remarks, when I caught sight of a figure from the corner of my eye and tried to end the kiss. The shape had already melted back into the street by the time I had bitten Jasper's lower lip so hard he staggered, protesting loudly, if indistinctly, and pressing fingers to his mouth.

"Somebody was there," I hissed. "Watching us."

He looked around.

"They've gone now," I explained, somewhat redundantly.

"I shall choose to believe you," he said, raising an eyebrow, having removed his fingers from his lip and found no blood on them. "And will exact, therefore, no immediate retribution."

I pouted at him. "I would never deliberately hurt you."

"So speaks the girl who put a fork in my leg."

"You deserved that, for your boldness."

He loomed over me, one hand braced against the wall at the side of my head, half-smiling with a slightly ghoulish air, as if he were amused by my well-disguised tendency to violence.

"Little Rosa Bud," he said caressingly. "Butter wouldn't melt. But I know her better than that, don't I?" He stroked my cheek and, heaven help me, I would have lifted my skirts then and there and let this wall be my support for a second time that day.

But I knew someone loitered in the yard beyond, so I turned my face and said, "We must find your friend."

He shut his eyes, trying to hide his disappointment, I perceived, and took me by the wrist.

"You're right," he said, and when we walked into the courtyard we found a young woman with a very swollen belly, making much of turning some clothes through a mangle. From the way she blushed when she looked up at us, I knew it had been she who saw us kissing.

"Charles told me to expect you," she said, stepping away from the mangle. "You must be Rosa."

She made to kiss me, and grimaced drolly at the way her bump in front obstructed her.

"Are you Tilly?" I asked, offering my cheek.

"That's right. It's too bad of your husband not to introduce us, though. Where's your tongue, John?"

Jasper and I looked at each other, uncomfortably stricken by the thought of what she had seen that very tongue doing only moments earlier.

"Ah, indeed, very remiss of me," he muttered, putting a hand in the small of my back in a proprietorial manner. "This is my wife, Rosa. Rosa, this is Mrs Matilda Richardson."

"Tilly, like I said." She smiled, her initial embarrassment fading. "We are so pleased to see John married. Charles quite despaired of him. Do come inside. It is so cold, I am certain this laundry will never dry out here."

She picked up her washing basket and carried it under her arm to an open back-door, one of several that looked out into the common yard.

The door led into a small scullery and then, up a step, to a larger kitchen, cluttered but warm. At the counter, a girl chopped carrots. Tilly led us past her without comment and into a passage, off which another door led into a small and rather stuffy front parlour.

"It's not much," she said apologetically, "but it's the best room. I'm sorry it isn't quite warmed up yet – Charles only told me you were coming half an hour ago. I've been at the market, you see."

"Oh, we are quite warm already," I said, and then I burst into flaming blushes again. Everything I said or thought seemed to refer back to that indiscreet embrace. "Please do not trouble yourself."

"Good. Then do take a seat and I shall fetch Charles. I hope you aren't famished – lunch will be a few minutes more, if Ellen can manage it."

Ellen was the girl in the kitchen, I surmised.

When Tilly left, I looked about the room, at the large, heavy furniture which seemed to fill it so that one hardly wanted to breathe the scarce air it left. In pride of place stood the pianoforte, a slightly battered model but a good one. It was by far the most expensive thing in the room – in the whole house, most likely. The blind was drawn at the window, despite the absence of sunlight, allowing only two inches of glass to be seen. It looked out on to a dark street, the facing houses only a few feet away.

"Charles is a cathedral organist, you say." I looked up at the ceiling, which was cracked in several places.

"Yes."

"Does this house belong to the cathedral?"

"No, it is rented."

"Your house belongs to the cathedral."

"If you'd call it a house…Rosa, what are you really asking?"

"I am merely making conversation."

But I wasn't. I was trying to assess what kind of life we would have if he left Cloisterham and must pay our own way in the world. This house was dreary, but at least Tilly could afford a girl to help out. Surely choirmasters must earn more than organists, mustn't they? Especially in a cathedral, where they were responsible for all the music.

Jasper gave me a searching look and seemed about to say something I might not want to hear, but I was saved by the entrance of the Richardsons.

Jasper leapt to his feet, suffering himself to be clapped on the back by his friend, who was a short, mild-looking young man in wire-framed spectacles.

"And your fragrant wife!" he announced, beaming at me and extending his hand to shake. Without rising from my chair I took it and allowed him to shake it, inclining my head gracefully as I had been taught. Tilly took the third chair while Charles had to make do with standing with his back to the fire.

"Well," said Charles, still grinning at me. "Here's news I never expected to hear, though I'm much the better for it, I'm sure."

"Charles had condemned me to permanent bachelorhood," said Jasper.

"Oh, but why?" I asked, though I had done exactly the same thing myself not a sixmonth since.

"Please don't ascribe any intention of giving offence to me, Mrs Jasper―"

"You must call me Rosa," I cried, unable to suppress a little laugh at being addressed in this manner.

"Rosa," he conceded. "And I, of course, am Charles. But Jasper was always such a…well, how can I put it kindly? Such a profound type of fellow, you know?"

"Whatever do you mean by that?" But I could not help giggling – Charles' manner was so open and easy he seemed to invite confidence.

"Deep," said Charles, in a resonant boom. "Deep as the sea, and dark as the night sky." He broke off, laughing. "No, I mean no unkindness. Jasper is and was always a capital fellow and I couldn't esteem him more highly. He is a lucky man and, by the same token, you are a lucky young lady to have won his heart. And now we know that he is a human creature, of flesh and blood, like the rest of us, which clears up one of life's great mysteries."

I wasn't quite sure Jasper was a man to take such joshing in good part, but he gave no appearance of being anything other than tranquil, so I felt justified in joining Charles and Tilly in their chuckles.

Over lunch, there was much discussion of the impending addition to the Richardson family, and then Charles and Jasper talked endlessly of new developments in music, a conversation which was by no means dull, but I was scarcely qualified to contribute.

Instead, I noticed things. I noticed how threadbare was their cloth and how thin the soup. They had a grate but no fire blazing in the tiny dining room, presumably for reasons of economy. Again, I felt an upsurge of panic when I considered our prospects. If Jasper should lose his post, then what? And even if he didn't, how could we both live in that doll-sized place above the arch in Cloisterham?

After lunch, Charles and Jasper left for the cathedral, where they meant to find and look in the ecclesiastical papers for vacancies. There was also some talk of putting in a good word for Jasper with the Dean of Southwark. I had no desire to live in this place, though, and I rather hoped no posts would be vacant in the whole of London.

"You keep a maid," I said, once Tilly and I were alone.

I suppose she found this an odd topic for our first conversation in private, but she nodded.

"Yes. Poor Ellen is a workhouse girl. Such a doleful creature she was when she came here, but she is happier now. We give her as much freedom as we are able and…" Here Tilly lowered her voice. "Workhouse girls are not expensive."

"How much do you pay her?"

"Three pounds and six shillings a year."

"Then perhaps we could afford a girl like her," I thought aloud. I leant closer to her and whispered. "Please tell me – how does one run a household? I have not the smallest idea."

"Oh, Rosa," said Tilly with a sad smile. "How like you I was. I was brought up for a life of gentility. I imagine you were too?"

"I was brought up in a school for young ladies of good breeding. They did not teach mangling or dusting or anything of that kind. Nor yet how to make accounts balance. I am very afraid I shall make a terrible mess of everything and then Jasper and I shall be turned out of doors and he will be so disappointed in me, because, you see, he would still have a comfortable living if he had not run away with me and…"

To my horror, my chest heaved and I felt myself on the verge of a sob.

"Oh my dear!" Tilly threw her arms around me and gave me the best embrace she could, given her impediment. "You mustn't fret, truly, you mustn't. I thought I should never be able to manage, but I do, and quite well, I think. And I know the house isn't much, but it is more than many have, and we are young, with our health and strength and wits. And more than all those, which is love. You love him, don't you, and he loves you?"

I nodded, smiling through the silly tears which had fallen on my cheeks.

"That much is extremely clear," she said, almost winking at me. I thought again of our kiss in the alleyway, and this time the memory warmed rather than shamed me.

"It's the uncertainty that overwhelms me," I confessed. "Ever since I was seven years old, I have known nothing but certainty. The rules and regulations and rituals of school, without interruption, for ten years, at the end of which I knew exactly where I was going and with whom. And now all is changed and…I am lost. And yet, although I am lost, I am also found, because I have found him and he has found me. It is so confusing."

"You poor thing. Charles told me the circumstances of your meeting – unusual indeed, and you must expect some difficulties at first, I think. But you must stand together and face them and all will be well. Trust my judgement on this."

"You sound as if you speak from experience," I sniffed, dabbing at my nose with a handkerchief.

"My parents considered I married beneath me and they disowned me."

"Oh, that is so hard." I thought of my ghost-father. Would he have disowned me? Would he haunt me, as Kitty Mason had suggested?

"But I wrote them about the baby and they have had a change of heart. All's well that ends well."

"I do hope so."

Jasper and Charles returned from their excursion in good spirits and I felt a leap of optimistic faith as we sat down to dinner. Tilly had spent the larger part of the afternoon showing me how to balance household account books and perform mysterious tasks such as shining silver and pressing clothes. Things didn't look quite so impossible any more and I was quite lighthearted.

Jasper said he had heard of several possible openings for him and he meant to write letters of application the very next day and send them off.

"So you see John Jasper in fine fettle," announced Charles, helping himself to boiled potatoes. "A sight for sore eyes it is."

"You think this unusual?" I accepted the dish from him.

"Oh, you should have known him at school, Rosa."

"I am grateful that she did not," interposed Jasper, "And Rosa cannot possibly be interested in my schooldays."

"Yes I can. What was he like?"

"Like the cathedral ghost, gliding around in his choristers' robes, with a scowl that would sour the milk."

"Charles," reproached Tilly, but he was in full flow, possibly having drunk a little too much wine already.

"We were all quite afraid of him and we hoped he would be thrown out, but he did have the most beautiful voice, so that was never a real possibility. Absolutely extraordinary effect – when he sang, he was like a different boy, dropped from heaven, instead of the little refugee from hell we saw in the schoolroom."

"Charles!" Tilly was sharper this time. "Sorry, John. He gets overexcited in company."

"Well, he was! My God, such an angry child, so remote and hard to fathom."

"Then how did you become friends?" I felt such a tenderness towards Jasper at that moment that I wanted to take his hand. But it would be unseemly at the dinner table.

"I was in quarantine for scarlet fever over one summer holiday and couldn't leave the dashed school. Jasper was the only person to talk to. And, slowly and steadily, I came to realise that he was actually rather worth talking to. He even talked back to me. On occasion."

And now Jasper smiled and shook his head.

"Only when strictly necessary," he said.

"No doubt. I was an awful ass, after all. And Jasper was fearfully clever."

"Not so," he said, waving his fork.

"We all still remember your feats of calculus, Jasper. You could have gone to Cambridge."

"As a sizar," he said bitterly. "Which is not to my taste."

"And it would have made little difference in the end, perhaps," said Charles. "For many a Cambridge man can only dream of being a cathedral precentor."

"Who knows how long I shall be one?" Jasper was all gloom again, staring into his wine glass.

"Now, now, Jasper. We foresee bright skies ahead, remember."

Charles' bluff jollity seemed to have its effect on Jasper, who turned the conversation away from his schooldays – rather to my chagrin, for I found this line of discussion quite fascinating – and towards the subject of recent concerts at the Hanover Square Rooms.

After dinner, the Richardsons made Jasper sing while Charles played. He sang some of Schubert's Winterreisen and how he seemed to inhabit them, as if he had truly lived the story. It was one of the most compelling performances I had ever seen and Tilly sat throughout with her hand on her bump as if she felt it respond to the music. Perhaps she did.

To my undying relief, nobody called upon me to sing or play, though both the Richardsons turned their hands to the instrument.

While Jasper played and Tilly sang, Charles took the opportunity to lean over to me and mutter, "Jiggered if you haven't saved the old fellow from eternal moroseness. He is actually happy. How on earth have you done it?"

I could scarcely answer this but simply coloured and simpered a little and looked down at my hands.

"Well, whatever it is, keep doing it."

I took this advice to heart once the candle had lit us to our bed in the upstairs back chamber. After placing it carefully on the nightstand and saying goodnight to Tilly, who showed us in, Jasper came to stand behind me, his hands clasped on my stomach, his chin on my shoulder, his lips at my ear.

"I have wanted my hands on you since before lunch," he murmured. "I have never seen Richardson struck as dumb as he was when he saw you. I think he'd been expecting Lady Macbeth, or some other consort more befitting his image of me."

I twisted my neck to look up at him, finding his lips for a kiss.

"I was so apprehensive of meeting them, but they are quite lovely. Tilly has been such a comfort to me today."

"You needed comfort?" His hands tightened around my waist.

"I had some silly fears about practical matters. Just foolishness really. Do not look so grave. None of them concern you. I am so very, very proud and happy to call myself your wife."

For a moment he looked as if he thought I trifled with him. Then his arms almost crushed me in the force of his embrace and he covered my face and neck in a profusion of kisses.

"You cannot feel one quarter of the pride I do, my love," he said. "And you cannot imagine how it touches me to hear you say so. Now, I have been picturing the removal of this dress all the way through the soup and meat courses. By pudding it had disappeared and I had turned my attention to your undergarments. I think you and I are for bed, my lady."

"The walls are so thin," I whispered, glancing nervously at the one that partitioned us from the Richardsons. I could hear their low voices beyond.

"Then we shall be quiet," said Jasper implacably, pulling at a stay-lace.

He had me undressed in scant minutes – so much more quickly than I could disrobe myself – and put the garments over a chair before gathering me in his arms and dropping me gently upon the bed.

It made the most deafening creak! I put my hands to my mouth and widened my eyes at him. He had also covered his mouth, stifling dismayed laughter.

"Very quiet," he amended, putting his hand on my breastbone and pushing me flat on my back.

"We can't!" I whispered while he undressed.

He simply nodded, smiling at me and flashing his eyes.

"It will be far too noisy."

"Not necessarily."

I was at a loss to understand how we could possibly do anything without rousing the entire street, but Jasper continued to unclothe himself, never taking his gaze from me. I wanted to reach out and touch him, but he stood apart, deliberately, until he was completely naked.

Slowly and with great self-control, he climbed on to the bed and straddled me, his knees abutting my thighs. The candlelight flickered on his face and chest as he leant down to kiss me, teasing me, licking my lips, grazing them with his teeth, slipping his tongue inside with inexorable ease. I wanted to squirm, but every move I made set off a symphony of rusty squeals from the bedsprings.

"Perfectly still," he whispered, breaking off. He brought down his elbows to rest on the mattress so that he hovered only an inch or so above me. His manhood lay alongside my thigh, pushing blindly at the crease of it. I felt a dab of moisture there, the forerunner of that which he would later deposit within me.

The springs protested, but mildly.

"It's not possible," I whimpered, aware of his fingers between my nether lips and his tongue on my nipple. How could I keep still? How could I keep quiet when he brought me to this pitch of pleasure?

"We shall test the proposition," he said. His fingers glided further within me, his hand moving hardly at all, yet providing such melting delights. I longed to buck my hips, to grind against him, but I did not dare. All I could do was rely on his exactitude of touch. Fortunately, it was most reliable.

I could do no more than breathe heavily in response to the burgeoning of heat and intensity at my core.

"Sweet witch," he rasped into my ear, "tell me you wish to be taken."

"Oh…yes…" I gasped, no longer mindful of the vagaries of the bedsprings. "I do…please take me…"

From some rational spot within the maelstrom of sensations, I wondered how he could do this soundlessly, but my body gave him my full confidence, my thighs parting to admit him without demur.

How slowly, how maddeningly slowly, he eased himself inside me. The effort of exerting so much self-control told in the beads of sweat that gathered on his forehead and in the preternatural focus of his gaze. I lay with my hands loosely on his hips, guiding him in what little way I could, powerless to do much except yield and stretch.

At the last inch or so he became impulsive and the springs groaned in reply to his final drive forward. They covered my little cry of satisfaction, though, so perhaps it was as well.

And then all was a languid, delicious upward spiral through the shallows and onwards into the deepest reaches of pure pleasure. How different it was, taken so very slowly, compared to that frantic coupling of the morning. Indeed, my quim must have been quite grateful for the altered pace, for it could not have withstood a similar ravishment. But this suited it perfectly, much as I could have wished to be allowed to expend my frustrated energies in moving and driving him on.

He pushed my thighs close together so that each tiny move felt so much the larger. There came a point when the springs tiny little mewls grew more frequent and attained a kind of rhythm, but by then, I was beyond caring. Perhaps the Richardsons were asleep anyway.

The tremors began to flow through me, and I showed him by my panicked breathing and the fluttering of my fingers against his flank that I was very close to my end. The position we were in seemed to enlarge his manhood and make it rub against some point of enormous stimulation as if he struck a match each time he crossed it.

In the instant before the flood, I felt I might leap bodily into the air, but he held me down with his weight on me and put his hand across my mouth. Unable to cry out or writhe, I bit his finger and flexed my ankles, battering my heels into his shins.

The spilling of his seed, some few minutes later, involved his burying his head in my breasts and muffling a moan into my nipple. The springs creaked. We had not been able to achieve that silence to which we had aspired.

But I do not think we cared so much about that.

My head was on his chest and the delicious blurring of sleep lapped at the corners of my consciousness when he spoke.

"I was not truthful with you earlier."

I lifted my eyes, blinking some of the fatigue from them. The candle was very low now, its light only sufficient to outline the contours of his face.

"When, love?"

"When I said I remembered nothing of my childhood."

"Oh." My heart contracted, a kind of tender fear filling it, fear for him, fear of what he might have to say. I held my palm to his cheek. "You do not have to tell me. What you said about knowing you best in the present and the future…"

"No. I understand why you want to know. My earliest memory is of being in a carriage, with Captain Drood, on the way to his house."

"How old were you?"

"Four, perhaps three. I felt as if my heart was broken. I can't explain it any better than that. My heart was broken and my head hurt, because he had boxed my ears when I wouldn't stop crying. That's my earliest memory, Rosa. That and some indistinct impressions of comfort, softness, gentleness that came before it. But I never can recall her face."

"Whose face?"

"I suppose some foster mother or wet nurse. I really don't know. My questions on the matter were never answered."

"So you ―" I struggled to sit up a little, but he put a finger to my lips and made me lie back down.

"Hush, you need to sleep. I simply thought your question deserved an answer. I have no particular wish to dwell on the memory, especially tonight when happiness has been mine."

"It shall be yours always," I vowed, kissing his brow.

"I hope so, my love," he said, and he blew out the candle.