I thought of the nine guineas I had in my little purse and the work I had done to earn them. I thought of her dancing with her skirts up for pennies, and of Da selling us in a job lot with a young pony. I thought of Jack, so fearful of his father’s ambition that he killed to keep his favour, to inherit the show. And I thought of myself, flint-hearted and hungry…and wealthy beyond anything I could ever have dreamed.

I blinked. ‘It is mine?’ I asked.

Mr Fortescue nodded. ‘You are the heir to the whole of the Wideacre estate,’ he said. ‘All the debts on the land are paid, you own it entire. Your mother wanted it gifted to the village, I have a letter she wrote to me in which she makes clear that is her intention. She died before she could write it into her will. She wanted you to have the Hall as your home. The Hall, the gardens and parkland. We have set up a trust so that you could sign your rights to the land over to the village as soon as you wish. But while you are a minor,’ he looked at my confused face, ‘until you are twenty-one or married, then you may draw an allowance from me, and I shall act as your guardian and run the estate as I think fit. When you are twenty-one or married it is yours.’

I rose slowly from the table and went to look out over the cobbled yard. There was a man there mucking out a stable, I watched him fork over the soiled straw.

‘That man works for me,’ I said slowly.

Mr Fortescue, in the room behind me cleared his throat and said, ‘Yes.’

‘And Becky Miles,’ I said.

‘And Mistress Miles,’ he repeated. ‘Indeed,’ he said, ‘if the village were run in the usual way with the workers hired by the quarter and paid wages instead of our profit-sharing scheme you would have something like a hundred people working for you.’

I leaned my head against the coldness of the thick glass and thought what this sudden wealth, what this sudden power meant. I need never go hungry, I need never go cold, I need never work in the wind or the rain or the cold. I need never work again at all. I would have a meal on the table, set before me by someone else, a servant, my servant, more than once a day, four times a day! I had won through to what I had always wanted, to what I had always thought was impossible. I had not had to whore, I had not had to trap someone into marriage as Robert Gower had foretold. I had inherited as easily and as naturally as if I were one of the Quality.