Excerpt from Mrs. Engels by Gavin McCrea, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Across the table, on the sofa he shares with his books and papers, Frederick cuts his usual figure: face and fingernails scrubbed to a shine, hair parted in a manly fashion, an upright pose, feet planted and knees wide, snake pushed down one leg of his breeches; a right gorger. He fidgets round and tries to throw off my gander.

"All fine with you, Lizzie?" he says.

"Oh, grand," I says, though I'm slow to take my eyes away. I can't see the crime in it, a lady taking a moment to admire.

"Lizzie, bitte," he says, rustling his newspaper, and slapping it out, and lifting it up to hide himself, "I'm trying to read."

I click my tongue off the roof of my mouth—for him, naught in the world has worth unless it's written down—and turn to look out the window. Outside, the country is speeding by, wind and steam, yet not fast enough for my liking. The farther we get away, and the farther again, the better.

I forbade anyone from coming to the station to see us off, for I didn't want any scenes, but of course Lydia, the rag-arse, disobeyed me.

"Don't let it change you," she said, gripping my hand and casting anxious glances up at the train as if it were a beast about to swallow me. "Find a friend as'll listen to you and don't be on your own. It's no fine thing to be alone."

We embraced and she cried. I squeezed her arm and fixed the hair under her bonnet and told her she was a good friend, the best.

"Find your people, Lizzie," she said then through her tears. "I'm told St. Giles is where they be. St. Giles, do you hear?"

I sat backways in the carriage so I could leave the place looking at it. To go from a familiar thing, however rough-cut, is a matter for nerves, and I suppose that's why so many people don't move. Manchester: leastwise they know the run of it.

At Euston, Frederick stands on the platform, waist-deep in smoke and soot, and takes it all in: heaves it up his nose and sucks it through his teeth and swallows it down as if all these years in Manchester have weakened his bellows and London is the only cure. Around him, around us, a mampus of folk, mixed as to their kind. Men and men and men and men, and here more men hung off by ladies dressed to death and ladies in near dishabbilly and ladies in everything between. By the pillar, an officer in boots. Over there under the hoarding, a line of shoe-blacks. A pair of news vendors. An Italian grinding tunes from a barrel organ. And passing by now—charging through with sticks and big airs—a tribe of moneymen in toppers and showy chains, chased at heel by beggar boys so begrimed it's impossible to tell if they're Christians or coons or what.

I stop one of the railway porters and ask him to tell me what time it says on the station wall.

"Ma'am?" he says, unsure whether I'm playing a rig, for the clock is large and plain for all except the stone-blind to read. "That there says a quarter past two o'clock."

I nod him my thanks. He bides for the penny. I wave him away; a tone won't win any favors from me.

"On time," I call to Frederick. And then again to be heard over the music and the patter and the tramp of boots on the pavement: "I says we're right on time."

Frederick takes his watch from his fob and holds it up to the clock, makes sure the one isn't fibbing to the other. "So it seems," he says.

I push through to stand in front of him, my arms folded against him. "Now don't go being slippery, Frederick, and remember what you said. You said if there were no delays we'd be able to go and see the house today. If we got here before three, you said, we wouldn't have to put it off till tomorrow."

He drops his watch back in and wrestles his hands into his gloves. "We'll see."

We wait in the waiting room for our bags to be loaded onto the cab, then we wait in the weather for them to be removed to a second cab, on account of the lame nag that's preventing the first from moving off. These added minutes spent in the strangeness of this strange place—a smell of drains just like Manchester, only with a special whack to it—has given me a sick headache and has me wanting, more than ever, to get to the new house. To close the doors and be safe behind my own walls. I become impatient. I huff and stamp my foot. And by the time we climb up and are on our way, my tongue is aflame with speeches, even though I've promised not to bring them out again.

This extract is taken from the novel Mrs. Engels, which is available now from Catapult Books and appears courtesy of Scribe Publications.