‘Lift me up, Gronny!’

She heaved him onto the second rail so he and Spirit could cuff noses, his little fingers sinking into the colt’s mane, scratching and grooming while the young horse flexed his neck ecstatically.

‘When can I ride him?’ asked Kes.

‘Not for a few years. You’ll have to let Gronny’s friend win Badminton on him first. I’ve promised he can. Then he’s your ride, and you can both represent the country in… 2032,’ she calculated. ‘You’ll be eighteen and he’ll be fourteen. “The Olympic gold medal for the Individual Three Day Event goes to Kester Forsyth riding Compton Spirit for Great Britain!”

‘I’m Oliver Alexander Jocelyn Forsyth,’ he reminded her.

‘Isn’t it funny how we end up with different names? My Great-uncle Cedric was christened Cornelius Winchelsea Pitt-Dacre, imagine that? I far preferred Cedric, just as I love Kester.’ Ronnie hadn’t been invited to the christening and wasn’t quite sure the origin of the nickname, although she vaguely remembered her mother grumbling in a long-ago letter that Jocelyn had only been added at the last minute to stop the poor child bearing the initials OAF.

‘I’m named after my brother,’ he said now.

‘Your brother?’ She steadied him as he stretched to rub chubby fingers through the colt’s forehead whirl, his touch instinctive.

‘The one who was born dead. Nanaforce says he’s an angel in heaven, but it’s not true. He’s here,’ he whispered dramatically, putting a finger to his mouth.

‘Here?’

He nodded. ‘Only I can see him. Oliver does really naughty things, Gronny. He likes playing tricks on people.’

‘Does Mummy know this?’

‘She says I mustn’t talk about Oliver. You won’t tell her, will you?’

‘No, but it’s always best to be honest, Kes, not keep secrets. They can hurt terribly, secrets.’

Ronnie watched unseeing as Spirit nibbled at her cuff, remembering the letters hidden in Lester’s cottage with a pinch of conscience. Too many family secrets.

Pax had never told her she’d lost a baby before Kes – such a devastating event, and another reminder of Ronnie’s failure to be there at the moments in life when a mother was needed most of all.

‘Oliver gets me into trouble,’ Kes was saying. ‘Like hiding all of Granaidh’s reading glasses at Christmas so he couldn’t do his sodco.’

‘Sudoku,’ she corrected, holding him close.

‘Today he put stones in Daddy’s motorbike.’

‘Good for him,’ she said before she could stop herself, forced to add a ‘that was very, very naughty, though.’

‘Why did Oliver die inside Mummy’s tummy, Gronny?’

‘Sometimes these things just happen.’ She tightened her arms round him, that awkward but heartfelt Percy hug, heart thudding with pity. ‘Nature can be very cruel. But it’s also very kind. It gave us you, and who couldn’t love it for that? And for Spirit?’

She took him on a hunt for wild teasels, but he soon got distracted, charging into the woodland on the stud’s top boundary to pretend to shoot invisible enemies while Ronnie tried not to imagine how different things would be had his older brother survived for him to play with.