Mrs Greaves chuckled. ‘Think I’m blind, child?’ she asked me. ‘My tea doesn’t have great lumps in the pot, yet night after night that poor lad has drunk down God knows what nonsense. Is it working for her?’

My face was guarded. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

I did know. And it was working. The love potion, or the boredom of the short winter days and the long winter evenings. The flattery of two pretty girls or the importance of being their catcher. Something was calling Jack over to our little room above the stable for evening after evening while his father pored over maps and over almanacs of fairs.

We would hear his step on the foot of the stair and then his low: ‘Hulloa!’ and Dandy would call back: ‘Come up, Jack!’ in a voice of lazy sweetness.

She would toss a handful of lavender seeds on the fire so it smoked with an acrid sweetness. She would kick a pair of soiled clouts under the mattress, and she would loosen the top of her bodice so that it showed the creamy curves of the tops of her breasts. Then she would wink at Katie and me and say, ‘Ten minutes, mind,’ in quite a different voice to the two of us.

Night after night Jack’s head came through the trapdoor wearing his half-rueful, half-roguish smile.

‘Hello Meridon, Dandy, Katie,’ he would say. ‘I brought you some apples from the store room.’

He would hand them out and we would sit and munch the icy fruit and talk about the work we had done that day. The tricks that had worked or failed and our hopes for the season ahead of us.

After about ten minutes or so Katie, who had now seen the golden guinea she was to collect at Easter, would prompt me.

‘I’ll help you water-up, Merry,’ she would say; and the two of us would go down the stairs to check all the horses had water and hay for the night and that they were safe in the paddock. Snow and Sea were kept indoors and we would check them too. Sometimes we would idle then, in the loose-boxes, giving Dandy and Jack time to be alone together. I would half listen to Katie’s chatter about lads in Warminster and one time a real gentleman from as far away as Bath, but most of the time I would lean my cheek against Sea’s warm neck and wish we were far away.