‘I did … perhaps I still do. Love is a strange thing. It can burn so brightly one minute and be gone the next.’

‘Like fireworks.’

‘Yes, just like that. Something so intense and beautiful, so full of promise … reduced to a disappointing wisp of smoke. All my hopes gone. And now I’m trapped with a husband who is increasingly not the man I thought he was and I have no way out.’

‘You could leave him.’

She laughs. ‘Just like that.’

‘You have money, means …’

‘Are you suggesting divorce? And be treated like a pariah? No, I think not.’

‘Well, you should …’ Gwen nods towards her face, thinking of the whispered gossip Muriel has shared with her over the years; the pitying shakes of her head as she speaks of some poor woman whose husband is quick with his temper and even quicker with his fists, and how no one steps in to stop it. She finds herself sharing the housekeeper’s stark warning. ‘If he’s done it once, he’ll do it again.’ She sees fear flicker across Helen’s face and feels a desire to press her point. ‘When a dog mauls a sheep, you have to put it down, because it won’t stop – they get a taste for it, you see, a taste for blood. You should watch yourself. Gordon may well be the same.’

Helen winces, as if reliving her husband’s hand landing its brutal blow. Her expression hardens.

‘Put him down …’ she echoes thoughtfully. ‘He was drunk.’

‘That’s no excuse.’

‘I didn’t say it was.’

‘He’ll be drunk again … and then what?’

Helen regards her with detached curiosity. ‘And can you honestly say that your husband – drunk or otherwise – would never lift a finger to you?’

‘No, he wouldn’t,’ says Gwen, her voice hitching with surprise at how obvious her answer is, and how resolute. She thinks back to the unfettered fury Jack admitted unleashing upon Gordon earlier, and then to the time he interceded with her father. ‘My husband would never hurt me. But I do know this … he’d kill any man who tried.’

Chapter Fifty-Four

Gwen is not sure how she makes it through the rest of the day but somehow she does. She milks the herd alone, while Jack continues to work with Ted at depleting the ricks. The thresher rumbles deep into the evening, until they labour under an apricot sky. When it finally falls silent, they sweep up the carpet of chaff and loose straw and the scattering of lost grain, and lug the full sacks into the barn, where the bales have been stacked to the rafters.