At last, Ed put the phone down. On the scribble pad beside him, he saw that he’d written the word ‘Compensation’ in elaborate, illuminated letters, and sketched a picture of an ear of wheat.

He sat back in his creaking sheriff’s chair, and rubbed his eyes with his fingertips. Then he looked around him at the leather-bound books on the bookshelves – The Farmer’s Frontier, by Gilbert White, The Great Plains, by Walter Prescott Webb – and at the pipe-rack his father had left and at the bronze statue of plough horses from the early days of dry farming. Stacked on the corner of his desk were the accounts books for the past five years at South Burlington, and as Ed had come to learn since he moved into the farmhouse last fall, these books told the whole story of his father’s greatest successes and his greatest failures.

He heard a slight noise at the door, and he swivelled around in his chair. His mother was standing there, in her white bathrobe, her hair done up in curlers.

‘Mother,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d gone to bed.’

‘I heard you talking,’ she said. ‘I came along to say good night.’

‘All right,’ he said, nodding. ‘Good night, then.’

She remained where she was, her face shadowed by the half-open door. ‘Was that true, what you said to Senator Jones?’ she asked him.

‘Was what true?’

‘You know what I mean, Edward. Was the farm really on the edge of ruin?’

He stood up, and ripped the doodles off his notepad. ‘Sometimes you have to say things just to put pressure on people,’ he said. ‘Whatever happened, it’s all past, and Daddy’s dead, and that’s all you have to worry about.’

‘But I want to know.’

He turned around and looked at her. ‘You didn’t know when Daddy was alive. He kept it all hidden from you. Why should you want to know now?’

‘Because he was my husband. Because I want to understand some of the problems he had to face.’

Ed picked up one of the accounts books, and flicked through it. ‘You can look if you want to. You may not understand what it all means, if you don’t have any training in reading accounts. Henry Pollock will tell you what went on, because Henry was Daddy’s right-hand man. But what it all amounts to is over-spending, under-capitalisation, arbitrary investment and near-sighted financial planning.’ Ursula Hardesty slowly shook her head. ‘I don’t understand it. He was such a good farmer.’