‘You’ll know at once,’ he said. He nodded to James Fortescue, ‘He’ll tell you in a moment.’

Mr Fortescue put down his cup and took some papers and a pen and ink-pot out of a little case beside him.

‘I have to ask you some questions,’ he said.

Ask he did! He asked me everything about my life from my earliest memories until the time when I rode up the drive to Wideacre Hall. After two or three slips I dropped the pretence that I could not remember and told him all he wanted to know: all that I could remember of my ma, what her family name had been, where her gypsy family travelled and where they stayed. Then I shook my head.

‘She died when we were just little babbies,’ I said. ‘I can hardly remember her at all.’

Then he asked me everything I could remember of my early life. I told him about Da, and the travelling around. The grand projects and the few jobs. I glided over the bad horses and the cheating at cards. And I found, although I tried to say her name once or twice, that I could not say it at all. Even to think of her was like scratching at an unhealed scar on my heart.

I did not want them to know about Gower’s Show and Mamselle Meridon, so I told him only that I had been apprenticed to a man who trained horses, that I had chosen to leave him, and found myself here. I came to a standstill and trailed into silence. James Fortescue looked at me over the top of his coffee cup as if he were waiting for more.

‘There are things I do not want to talk about,’ I said stubbornly. ‘Nothing criminal. But private.’

He nodded at that, and then asked to see my string and clasps and asked me once more where I had got it. He looked at it carefully through a special little glass he took from his pocket, and then finally he handed it back to me.

‘Do you have none of your baby clothes?’ he asked. ‘Did you never see them?’

I screwed my eyes up with an effort to remember. ‘I saw them,’ I said hesitantly. ‘We shared them, of course. I saw a white lace shawl, very fine, trimmed in lace. Someone must have given it to us.’ The memory of the white lace shawl slipped away from me as if it had disappeared into darkness. ‘Everything was sold after Ma died,’ I said again.

Mr Fortescue nodded, consideringly. Then he said, very softly. ‘You say “us”. Who was the child who shared your childhood?’

My chair scraped as I suddenly pushed it back. My hands on the table had started their trembling again. I looked at them carefully until they were still. Then the man who hated gin traps leaned over and put his large calloused hand over mine.