‘It’s not what I was bred to,’ I said frankly. ‘I don’t know anything about it.’

‘Not too late to learn,’ he said gently. I guessed he was thinking of my scream at James Fortescue that I had come to Wideacre too late. ‘If you were the son of the house, a Lacey, you’d be coming home from school at your age, ready to learn about the land,’ he said.

‘If I was coming home from school I’d have had a gentry childhood and I’d know how to read and write,’ I said.

‘Not the schools I’m thinking of!’ Will said smiling. ‘Real Quality schools teach lads to be as ignorant as peasants!’ He shot a little smile at me as we rounded a curve of the drive and came within sight of the little box of the gatehouse and the great iron gates which stood permanently open with white flowering bindweed entwined up the hinges. Will nodded to the left.

‘That’s one of our new crops,’ he said. ‘Strawberries. We’re harrowing now, to make the soil nice and soft. We’ll be planting later. I reckon we’ll sell in Chichester. There’s a growing market for soft fruit. Wideacre strawberries could be famous.’

I glanced over the hedge. Two great shire horses were pulling a harrow, a little lad walking behind them, yelling instructions, the earth turning sweetly under the tines.

‘We planted it when the land was handed over to the people,’ he said. ‘It’s a crop which needs a lot of careful work. Weeding, and especially picking and packing. A casual paid workforce could waste more than they earned. But when people know they are working for themselves, they take more pride.’

I nodded. I was trying to get used to the strangeness of it all. I was wondering if it were not really a dream. I might wake up at any moment to the rocking caravan roof and the bitter hard life of my childhood; and look over and see her…

I shook my head to clear my thoughts and saw that Will had pulled his horse up at the end of the drive. The door of the lodge house opened and a woman with a babby in her arms came down the garden path and dipped me a low curtsey when she reached her garden gate.

‘Good day, Miss Sarah,’ she said.

For a moment I did not smile. I did not reply. She had called me Miss Sarah. Miss. Not the only other handle to my name I had ever had – Mamselle Meridon the bareback rider – but Miss Sarah. As though I were gentry born and bred. As though it were natural to her to call me thus, and natural to me to respond to it.

I nodded my head awkwardly at her.