I turned from him and walked towards my horse, Sea. I slid the bridle on his head and opened the door to let him out in a daze of anger and hatred. I walked past Robert – Robert who had been so kind to me and had held me when the surgeon pulled at my arm – I walked past him and I hardly saw him. There was a hot red haze around my eyes and I think if I had spat on his boots as I passed it would have come out as blood. My pulse was thundering in my head and my hand on Sea’s lunging reins gripped by instinct, not care. In the back of my mind I knew it was Dandy’s folly that had led me into this idiot’s babble of marriage and sharing. But I knew also that the warm summer days in the wagon and the hard wintry work at Warminster had led me to see Robert’s interests and ours as running in harness. Dandy’s foolish lust for Jack had blinded me as well as her. She had convinced me she could have him. She had nearly convinced me she could keep him. I had needed Robert’s coldness to sober me.

He had looked in my face and had spoken to me as a man of substance speaks to a servant girl. Worse. He had spoken to me as a freeholder and a citizen speaks to a dirty travelling slut. All the work I had done for him and the knocks I had taken for him had not served to alter the fact that he had bought me from Da as a job lot in with a pony and a girl they both knew was a slut. I walked away from him, and I walked away from the tiny growing hope I had felt that there might be bridges which I could build from the world of the people who belonged, who slept soft and kept clean, and mine. There were no bridges. There was an absolute division.

As I led Sea down to the paddock I longed for Wide with as much passion as if I were still in my lice-ridden bunk listening to Da humping Zima. I had not belonged there. I did not belong here. I felt as if I would belong nowhere until I could own my own land and command servants of my own. There was no middling course for me, there was no staging place. It seemed I was condemned to the very ditch of society unless I could somehow scramble my way, all alone, to the top. I had to get to the top. I had to get where I belonged. I had to go to Wide.