‘Married?’ I asked.

Will flushed a little. ‘Nay,’ he said awkwardly. ‘I’m not courting either. I had a lass but she wouldn’t stay in the village. She wanted to go into service and me go with her. I’m handy with horses and she wanted me to try for a job as coachman with the Haverings. I wouldn’t leave Acre. I’d not leave Acre for any lass, however bonny. So she went without me. That was last summer. I’ve had no one serious since then.

‘We go this way up to the Downs,’ he said, and turned his horse away from the church up a little track which climbed the hill.

The horses went shoulder to shoulder up the track, but I loosened the rein and let Sea increase his speed and go ahead of Will so that I could ride alone without him watching my face. The singing noise which I had heard in my head from the very first time I had come to this land, through the dark and the cold, lit only by the moon, was now louder. I was riding up the track which I had seen so many times in my dreams. We were clear of the planted fields and the tall quiet beech trees were crowding close around us. The horses’ hooves were silent on the damp earth and on the leafmould. Sea’s ears pointed forward at the bright circle of light where the trees ended and we would come out…out to what?

I knew how it would be and yet I was suddenly afraid that it would not be as I thought it should. That so much else in this place was so different from my dream. Instead of finding a warm house and a father and being a copper-headed beloved daughter I was a gypsy who had come in out of the darkness, a stranger, an intruder. James Fortescue might say he loved me for my mother’s sake, or because it was his duty, or because he felt guilty that he had failed to find me – but those things meant nothing. In my world none of those things would make a man lift his hand to brush away a fly.

Will Tyacke might take an afternoon to show me around the estate and make me welcome – but I could see that this private little world had run perfectly well without me for sixteen years. They were used to having no one at the Hall. They preferred it that way. I was not a welcome heir, finding her way home at last. I was an unwanted orphan. My so-called guardian and the foreman of my village had done well enough without me all this time.