“Yes.”

She had always known this would happen, that marriage and childbirth were the events to follow her childhood, so why, she wondered, was she so saddened and horrified by the prospect? It was not as if any alternative had ever been offered to her, except in her own flimsy dreams, so why this sudden desolation at a fate she had been expecting for so long? She glanced at Scammell, provoking a nervous smile, and she could not believe that she was to marry him. She thrust the thought away. Her sense of difference was the basis of her daydreams and it was a sense that had betrayed her. She was neither special nor different, just a daughter to be disposed of in marriage.

Where the road turned north at the tip of the ridge there was a shadowed space beneath the great beeches, a place of old leaves, for beech leaves are slow to decay, crossed by a fallen trunk. Scammell turned into the shade. “May we pause, my dear?”

She stopped at the edge of the road.

Scammell wiped the sweat from his brow with a handkerchief, then brushed at the smooth, barkless wood of the fallen trunk and gestured for her to sit down. She could see that he planned to sit beside her, close beside her, so she shook her head. “I will stand, Mr. Scammell.”

He pushed the handkerchief into his sleeve. “I wished to talk with you.”

She said nothing. She stood at the road’s edge in the bright sunlight, refusing to go into the green shadows with him.

He smiled his unctuous smile. The sun was behind her, making it difficult for him to see her. He stood awkwardly. “It will be a joy once more to have family. My dear mother, God bless her, passed away last year to be buried with my father. Yes, indeed.” He smiled, but she did not respond. He moved heavily from one fleshy leg to the other. “So you see I am quite alone, my dear, which means my joy is doubled by uniting myself with your dear family.” He sat down, plumping his large bottom up and down on the fallen trunk as if to demonstrate the comfort of the smooth wood. He subsided slowly as he realized that the gesture would not entice her from the dusty road. “Indeed and indeed.” He seemed to sigh.

I could run now, she thought, run through the poppies and the wheat to the great stand of oaks that marks the southern boundary of father’s land, and then keep running. She had the thought of sleeping wild like the deer that sometimes came to the stream, of feeding herself, and she knew she could not run. She knew no one outside Werlatton, she had never travelled more than four miles from the house; she had no money, no friends, no hope.

Scammell leaned forward, elbows on knees, hands clasped as if in prayer. He was sweating in the heat with his thick broadcloth clothes. “Your father suggested I talk to you of the future.”