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‘I suppose it is. Yes, a game. We were playing it in the drawing room after dinner. I’d like to know how you would respond.’

She bites her bottom lip and narrows her eyes. ‘Well, ma’am, I would say that you’re strong-willed and …’ She hesitates. ‘Brave.’ She laughs nervously, fearful perhaps that she’s being too familiar.

‘Brave?’ I ask.

‘Well, other women feel they have to marry and have children, don’t they?

Most women need a man to look after them.

But you’re not like them. You’re independent.

It takes a lot of courage to live your own life, if you don’t mind me saying, even though your father was Viscount Ravenglass. It takes guts to go it alone.’

My mind seizes upon the information like a thief.

So, my father was Viscount Ravenglass – he’s dead, of course, and so is his son, because Lester is a lord, which makes him the current Viscount Ravenglass.

That means that their family name is Fleet, hence I am the Honourable Constance Fleet, sister to Lester’s late father.

English titles are complicated, but I understand them, having studied history.

‘I appreciate your honesty,’ I say at last, because Ruby is standing in the doorway, waiting for me to respond.

She nods, relieved. ‘I hope you sleep well, ma’am. I suspect we’ll have another day of sunshine tomorrow,’ she adds. ‘It’s thrilling to be in the middle of the ocean, isn’t it?’

I struggle to find the words to reply. She has no idea what horror lies ahead.

But I smile back, as I must. I’m not here to change the course of history, even though I wish I could.

‘Thrilling,’ I say, feigning excitement.

‘A grand adventure. You sleep well, too, Ruby.’ Knowing it will be first-class women and children off the boat first, I promise myself to make sure that Ruby comes with me.

Before I settle down with the diary, I explore the bedroom for clues as to what sort of person I am.

I rifle through Constance’s clothes – she has so many dresses, I wonder how she managed to pack them all into suitcases.

I open a glass pot of cream placed on the dressing table and try it on the back of my hand.

It has the silky texture of Nivea. I spray perfume into the air and sniff it: tuberose, heavy and sweet.

I look at the books Constance has brought with her, searching for more clues about this daughter of a viscount.

Love and Marriage by Ellen Key, The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton and The Suffragette magazine are stacked on the side table, with her jewellery neatly arranged in a red velvet case beside them; can they possibly be real diamonds?

Constance Fleet is a very rich woman. If she’s not married, her wealth must have come from her father, Lester’s grandfather, Viscount Ravenglass.

I wonder why Constance is travelling to New York with Lester.

I hope the diary will enlighten me before I have to face Lester, and everyone else Constance knows, in the morning!

I seize upon a copy of the Atlantic Daily Bulletin , which is typed on A4 white paper and dated April 12th.

It lists weather on board, a review of the markets, world news, sporting news, et cetera.

But I’m most interested in the date. We have been at sea two days already and have two days to go before the ship will go down. My calculations are correct.

I’m about to climb into bed with the diary when I notice something hard and square-shaped lying beneath a dressing gown thrown over a chair in the corner of the cabin. My heart lurches. I hurry over and lift the gown to reveal the familiar blue box that contains Mrs Aldershoff’s Ouija board.

It didn’t belong to Alice Aldershoff, at least not originally. It belonged to Constance Fleet!

My heart is now thumping in my chest. I’m wide awake.

I no longer feel sick but revived by the mystery now unfolding before me.

Constance survives the Titanic , for how else would her Ouija board end up with Alice Aldershoff?

And Lester survives too, for he dies later, in England.

So, whatever happens aboard this ship in the next two days is key to him being earthbound later, in spirit.

I’m clearly here to find out something or I wouldn’t be here at all.

How am I going to do it when I don’t know what I’m looking for?

I climb into bed, settle myself against the pillows and pull the diary towards me.

Cavill Pengower steals into my mind then, and my heart burns with a terrible disappointment.

I thought there was no chance of us meeting again.

I’d accepted that. Sure, it hurt, but I had managed to endure it and get on with my life.

When I agreed to this job, I anticipated a brief and dispassionate slide.

How wrong I was! Here I am on the Titanic , of all places, with Cavill, of all people, and he doesn’t know who I am.

Unless I discover in the next forty-eight hours what I’m here to find out, I’m going to have to experience the terror of being on the Titanic as it sinks and suffer the pain of being in the same place as Cavill but unable to reach him.

It’s like a nightmare and I long to wake up.

My courage flags suddenly. I’m not sure I can go through with it.

It’s too hard. I could slide back and tell Mr Stirling that the task is an impossible one.

But that’s the coward’s way and I’m not a coward.

I haven’t been given this gift of timesliding to bail out the moment it gets tough.

I feel duty-bound to help him and Lester.

I cannot allow Lester’s misery to go on simply because of my lack of nerve. I can’t do it.

I rally and push Cavill out of my mind. There’s no point wishing things were different. He doesn’t recognise me – why would he? And I cannot enlighten him. There’s only one thing to do: concentrate wholeheartedly on my mission.

I open Constance’s diary to the first entry and am surprised to see that it doesn’t start on the first day of this year, 1912, but on 11th June, presumably of the previous year, 1911. And I laugh to myself at the first line she writes in her slanted, flowing hand:

Three reasons to be infuriated by L.

I imagine she means Lester. I’m going to have to get used to her unfamiliar penmanship, which is typical of its time and quite hard to read.

The book is fat, stuffed with leaflets, letters, dance cards and opera tickets.

I cannot possibly get through it all in one night.

I will have to find the relevant entries and sweep my eyes over the rest.

I settle back against the pillows, wide awake now, my wits sharp. I have always loved a diary. With mounting anticipation, I’m transported back into the past.

The diary of the Honourable Constance Fleet

Sunday, 11th June, 1911

Three reasons to be infuriated with L.

1. Lester and I had a row this morning over breakfast. My dear brother is dead just over a year and my nephew has taken it upon himself to gamble and carouse away his inheritance.

I have noticed that the Constable has vanished from the green drawing room here at Broadmere and even though Lester has tried to mask its disappearance by hanging the Landseer in its place, I am not fooled.

Je ne suis pas idiote ! I grew up in this great house and know every inch of it by heart.

But what can I do? He owns the estate now and has no sense of duty towards it, only a blind impulse to satisfy his own selfish desires.

Why, dear George would turn in his grave were he to see how his son is squandering his fortune and how this magnificent house is going to ruin!

But, oh, how Lester loves striding about as the new Viscount Ravenglass.

If he’s not careful, he won’t have an estate to go with that title, and then he’ll be sorry!

Bertha is unhelpful. She only thinks of the next party, the next card game, the next win – or, in her case, loss, because she’s as brainless as a hen – and is a terrible example to her son.

I am in despair. Broadmere will not survive into the next generation if Lester continues to shirk his responsibility.

Once again, I gave him a piece of my mind and he raised his voice, as he is wont to do when he finds himself cornered, and retaliated with spite.

‘Women should know their place,’ he told me unpleasantly.

‘If only you had a husband, Aunt Constance, then you would know yours.’

2. Which brings me on to my second point: women’s rights.

Lester is as terrified of my political activism as Asquith is of Emmeline Pankhurst. I have become quite vociferous in stating my position and am proud to be a member of the WSPU and a suffragette.

Lester seeks every opportunity to put me in my place, but I will not be cowed by a twenty-five-year-old whose strongest argument against women being given the vote is a belief, sadly not uncommon, that due to our lunar cycles, we cannot be trusted not to go mad once a month.

I can just imagine the inane conversations he has with his peers in White’s Club.

Truly, pigs have a grander intelligence than they do.