I turned Sea instead towards the London road, the way we had come all those nights ago, fleeing from what now seemed like another world. The way we had come slowly, slowly, in the darkness up an unfamiliar road, drawn as if by a magnet to the only place in the world where we would be safe. Where they had prepared a homecoming for me – only by the time I got there, I was not the girl they had wanted. It struck me then, as Sea stepped lightly down the road, that I was as bitter a disappointment to them, too. They had been waiting all these years for a new squire set in the mould of my real mother: caring for the people, wanting to set them free from the burden of working all their lives for another man’s fields. Instead they had found on their doorstep a hard-faced boyish vagrant who could not even stand the touch of a hand on her arm, and who had been taught to care for no one but herself.

I shrugged. I could not help their dreams. I had my own dream of Wide, and it had not been a place where I had stared suspiciously at gentlemen and wondered if they were cheating me. My dream of Wide had been a place where the land was smiling and where I recognized my home. We had all been foolish dreamers. We all deserved disappointment.

I clicked to Sea and he threw his head up and broke into his smooth easy canter. We soon came to the London road and I checked him, wondering whether to turn north towards London or south towards the sea. While I considered a man came into sight, leading a horse.

I looked at the horse first. It was a bay gelding, prime bred. Arab stock in it somewhere, I thought. A beautiful arched-necked wide-eyed proud animal. It was dead lame, the nearside foreleg was so tender the animal could hardly place it down; and I looked with surprise at the man who was leading it. A man who could choose and buy a near-perfect animal and then work it so ill that it could be injured so badly.