‘He said she was up and down each row twenty times,’ Will said, a laugh in the back of his voice. ‘And at the end of it, all the trees were in and she looked around and there was one left on the cart! They laughed until they cried and she swore that she would give the sapling to the village to keep so the children could have apples off it.’ He paused. ‘She planted it on the green,’ he said. ‘The tree is getting old now, but the apples are very sweet.’

I felt a rush of tenderness for the mother I had never known, for the other Tyacke who had worked with her and laughed when she ended with one tree too many, for all the people she knew who worked with her to set this land on its feet again so that it could grow rich and fertile.

‘Thank you,’ I said, and for that moment I was simply grateful that he had taken the time and the trouble to bring me down here, to show me the orchard, and to explain to me what the land had meant to my mother. How she had been when she had been a young girl with the rights and duties of a squire. How she had been when she had loved and owned the land.

Will nodded and clicked to his horse so that we rode on beside the river, past the orchard. ‘She wanted to end the line of the Laceys,’ he said gently. ‘She told them that in the village one day. When her husband Squire Richard was bringing in day labourers and paying only the poor-rate wages. She said there should be no more squires.’

I felt myself stiffen, and the cold hardness which had been around me all my life came back to me.

‘Then she should have drowned me in the river as she planned, and not given me away,’ I said. ‘She should have had the courage to do the thing properly, or not at all. She gave me away and I was lost for all those years. So now I do not understand the land, and the village is used to having no squire.’

Will looked very attentively at the path ahead of us, at the stream moving so sweetly and easily across the land.

‘We could become accustomed,’ he said. ‘We will both have to change a little. We will become accustomed to having a Lacey in the Hall again. You will learn how to be Quality. Perhaps this is the best way. For she did not end the squires, but here you are, a squire who knows what it is to be poor. It is different for you, because you were not bred to it. You’ve seen both sides. You’ve not been trained in Quality ways, you’ve not learned to look away when you see beggars. Your heart is not hard in the way they learn.’