And then all the babies die, another little coffin lowered into the ground. Scrubbing, pumping water, rent overdue – tough Victorian life with only the occasional shag to brighten the gloom – every single one of which results in a baby. And soon hubby number one is gasping and spluttering and dissolving on the inside.ĭark Angel settles into its pattern. Into which a few drops of you-know-what can be snuck. At first glance, just an ordinary brown family teapot, given to Mary Ann by her own mother, because nothing says home more than an old brown family teapot. Mary Ann’s stepdad George (he lasts the distance, so he can have a name, and an actor, Alun Armstrong) sorted the life insurance for the first one, but after that Mary Ann develops a taste for monetising her fellas and makes sure they’re insured herself. Also life insurance in place – that’s important. Next bedmate (and potential fatherer of further children) lined up: check. We won’t bother with the names of Mary Ann’s husbands or children – they’re temporary, as I mentioned.Īll set then. He’s called Joe Natrass – sounds like mattress – also infested by the look of it, though he scrubs up well, he says flirtatiously. “Remind me not to get on the wrong side of you, love,” says the handsome bit of rough who’s just then walked into the store. “They’d be no husbands left,” jokes Mary Ann. įirst she has to write her name down in a book: the government doesn’t allow them to hand out arsenic to anyone who wants it any more, the chemist explains.

“This is arsenic it’s poisonous – that’s why it kills the bugs.” Not just bugs. Got that? Arsenic – the well-known deadly poison? But just in case you missed it, Mary Ann tells her daughter to stay away. “Arsenic, it’s the only thing that works against bed bugs that I know of,” says the chemist. While scrubbing out their squalid rented room, she finds the supersized insects in the mattress. Mary Ann ( Joanne Froggatt, Downton Abbey’s Anna) has come to Sunderland from Seaham, down the coast, with unemployed husband number one and their only remaining child (Mary Ann’s offspring tend not to last very long, like her husbands).

Dark angel on masterpiece