Will nodded. ‘This was set up as a school by your mother’s mother,’ he said. ‘When they started setting the place to rights and handing over to the workers. Before that it was a tithe barn.’ He looked at the height and length of it. ‘It makes you realize how costly are the benefits of a spiritual life,’ he said wryly.

‘I don’t understand,’ I said.

Michael flashed a smile up at me. ‘This was a barn where they stored the share of the crop they had to give to the church and to the vicar,’ he said. ‘We still have a vicar but he is supported by a small fee from the estate. We do not allow him to take his share of wealth when he has neither ploughed nor sown.’

I nodded. ‘He’ll like that,’ I said.

Michael choked on a little crow of laughter and Will grinned at me.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘He does.’

‘Anyway, now it is a school in this end of it, and the other half is lodging for Michael and for the children whose parents are dead or run away. We have three at the moment.’

I nodded. I knew enough about village life to know this was unheard of. Orphans and pauper children should be taken to the local poorhouse where they dragged out a miserable childhood and were sold to employers as soon as possible. Rea and Katie had agreed that the poorhouse was worse than anything. ‘They hit me all the time,’ Rea had once told me, surprised at violence which was not done in anger but as routine. ‘Every morning before breakfast. For being a Rom.’

‘And in the middle section,’ Will went on, ‘is where the old people work who are no longer fit for outside work. They spin together, they mind the babbies when the mothers are away in the fields, they do some carving, they make up herbs. And we pay them a little for their work and sell the goods for the Wideacre corporation.’

An idea struck him. ‘You were brought up gypsy, weren’t you, Sarah? Could you show them how to carve those wooden flowers and dye them the pretty colours? We could sell them at Midhurst fair.’

I chuckled. ‘The only skills I learned were thieving and gambling,’ I said. ‘You don’t want me teaching a load of old women how to sharpen cards.’

Will laughed as well. ‘Nay,’ he said. ‘I don’t want you sharing those skills.’

‘And here,’ Michael said, gesturing to the open doorway, ‘this is my model school. When I came here there was a dame-school, it taught the children to be servants, to be farm-hands. Only a few learned to read, hardly any to write. They taught the girls to be house-servants and the boys to be ploughboys.