James Fortescue smiled at me through the cigar smoke.

‘I don’t know enough about this life to be able to say what I want,’ I said. ‘It’s clear you don’t plan that I should run the estate like my mother did. I saw her apple orchard today and Will told me that she supervised the planting of it herself.’

‘No,’ Mr Fortescue said definitely. ‘I don’t want you working directly on the land. It would be contrary to your mother’s wishes and quite contrary to the way the estate is now run. For the past sixteen years, ever since your birth and your mama’s death, the estate has been developed by the people who work here, for themselves.

‘There is no place now for a squire of the old sort to run the land. The time when a Lacey squire was needed to keep the village together has long gone. It is run now as a joint venture by the labourers themselves and that is what your mother wished for it. She specifically told me that she did not want her daughter to be another Lacey squire. She wanted you to have the house and the gardens and the parkland – and you will see for yourself that is a handsome legacy – but she wanted the farming land, the Common land and the Downs to be owned legally and entirely by the village.’

I nodded. That was what I had thought he would say.

‘So the life you think I should live is mostly idle?’ I asked. I was careful to keep my voice neutral so that he could not shape his answer to please me.

‘As you wish,’ he said agreeably. ‘My sister Marianne works long hours and gets much pleasure out of a charitable school she set up all on her own for the education of young orphans or children abandoned by their parents. Her husband is an alderman of London and she saw much poverty and hardship. She works longer hours than I do! Yet she is unpaid. She leads a most worthwhile life. There are many good causes you could work for here, Sarah.’

I kept my lashes lowered over the gleam in my green eyes. I knew what his sister Marianne was like. When I was little we used to pick the pockets of her sort most successfully. One of us would sit on a lady’s silken lap and cry and say our da beat her, and one of us would take a sharp little knife and cut the strings which tied her purse to her belt and run off with the booty. We were caught only once and when we burst into floods of tears the lady made us promise never never to do it again or Baby Jesus would not be able to save us from hell. We promised readily and she gave us a shilling out of her recovered purse. A simpleton.