I shall work on it, I said. Like a telegram. And I drew the notebook back and licked my pencil.

Ambrose lifted the lid of the teapot and peered at the dregs within. I gestured to the clean cups and he took one and filled it.

He was a decent fellow, Musgrave, I said. He was well-to-do – he had a professional standing. And property, plenty of it. Didn’t have to throw his lot in with us. What was it to him whether the commoners kept their land?

Top-hat agitator, in other words. A faint smile spread over Ambrose’s features. He was all right. And he liked his name in the papers and a bit of notoriety.

*

Ella came with us to pace the boundary in advance of the ceremony, checking that we remembered it and that all was well. I didn’t entirely approve of their set-up (and privately I thought Ella a snooty sort of Communist), but Ambrose was nothing if not consistent. We traipsed in silence.

I looked back over the field and remembered those August evenings of the nineties. Police horses and pickaxes and failing light. Myself a young man of nine-and-twenty, with a wife and three children.

I stopped. It was brave of us, was it not? I said, and they laughed. Our courage was eclipsed by the next generation’s – we all knew that. But at the time, on our own no-man’s-land, dismantling by night what was done by day, and at the end of our own day’s work, with no sense of how long the game might continue…

Perhaps it was not particularly brave, I assented – and they laughed again.

Ambrose had had only himself to think of, as he always had. And Ella wasn’t there, in those days. She didn’t know what it was like.

*

I rapped on the gate of the stonemason’s yard and pushed it open.

I called in earlier in the week.

Mr Pittam. Come in.

The mason sat down on an unfinished capital and perused the draft inscription. Ah yes, Mr Musgrave. Sir Christopher, I should say. I did his headstone a few weeks back. A sad loss. A nice commemoration, this.

That’s what I thought.

Gold leaf?

If – that is to say – it is to be funded by the ratepayers, as the inscription says.

I have the list of charges here, in this ledger. He took up his chisel and turned it over in his hands.

*

We spread the cloths out on the field.

This is a good spot. Nice and visible. Make sure the banner can be seen from the lane, George.