Beyond the rose garden was a smooth green paddock with Sea, very confident, cropping the grass with his tail raised, a stream of silver behind him. He looked well, perhaps even a little plumper for his stay in a good stable with fine hay and spring grass to eat. Behind the paddock was a dark mass of trees in fresh new foliage, copper beeches red as rose-shoots, oak trees with leaves so fresh and green they were lime coloured, and sweet green beeches with branches like layers of draper’s silk. And beyond the woods, ringing the valley like a guardian wall, were the high clear slopes of the Downs, striped with white chalk at the dry stream beds, soft with green and lumpy with coppices on the lower slopes. The sky above them was a clear promising blue, rippled with cloud. For the first time in my life I looked at the horizon and knew that I was home. I had arrived at Wide, at last.

There was a clatter of horse’s hooves and I looked along the drive and saw the man who hated gin traps riding up towards the house, sitting easily on an ungainly cob. A working horse, a farmer’s horse, able to pull a cart or a plough or work as a hunter on high days and holidays. He scanned the windows and pulled up the horse as he saw me.

‘Good morning,’ he said pleasantly, and doffed his cap. In the morning sunlight his hair showed gleams of bronze, his face young, smiling. I guessed he was about twenty-four; but a serious young man appears older. For a moment I thought of Jack, who would have been a child at forty as long as he was under his father’s thumb; but then I pushed the thought away from me. Jack was gone. Robert Gower was gone. Meridon and her sister were gone. I could remember nothing.

‘Good morning,’ I said. I leaned out of the window to see his horse better. He sat well, as if he spent much of his day in the saddle. ‘A good working horse,’ I observed.

‘Nothing like your beauty,’ he replied. ‘But he does well enough for me. Are you feeling better? Are you well enough to dress and come downstairs?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I am quite better. But that woman took my clothes.’

‘That’s Becky Miles,’ he said. ‘She took them and washed them and ironed them. They’ll be in the chest in your bedroom. I’ll send her up to you.’

He turned his horse and rode past the front door round to the back of the house to the stables. I shut the window and opened the chest for my clothes.