But Lady Clara was no fool. I could not take her measure because she had lived a life I could not imagine. She was born the daughter of an Irish peer, married young and beautiful to Lord Havering who had been rich and gouty and cross. I had a few glimpses into that marriage from Perry who spoke of long lonely years for his ma in the country, while his lordship drank and gambled in town. She knew she’d been bought and she did her duty, stony faced. While he was alive she gave him the sons he needed. When he allowed her up to town she spent as much of his fortune as she could. I guessed she must have waited, waited and longed, for his death. When she would still be young, and still be lovely, and rich and free. But when he was gone it was not as she had thought. There was money, but less than she had hoped. It must have been bitter for her then, to have waited all those years and find the old lord had cheated her at the end.

But it took a lot to beat Lady Clara. She got in a bailiff and told him she wanted profits off the land. She rack-rented the tenants – they had to pay a fee to keep their leases, they had to pay a fee to marry. They even had to pay a fee if they died. She planted wheat everywhere and she kept them on barley bread. She brought in pauper labour – and she even paid them less than she should. She was a sharp, hard master on the land, and she had made it pay its way until she had the sort of money she wanted. It was not enough – a king’s ransom would not have been enough for Lady Clara, she had a life of resentment to repay – but she had a fully-staffed Hall in the country, a beautiful London town house, a wardrobe full of dresses and a stable full of horses.

I watched her, and I learned from her. I did not like her, and no one could have loved her. But I understood her. I knew hunger and that hardness for myself. And I liked the thought of how she had taken an estate and made it pay.

I could not have chosen a more vivid contrast to my quiet dutiful guardian James Fortescue if I had ransacked the whole of England. We both knew it. I think it hurt him.

At the end of the second week when I had spent nearly every day at Havering Hall he asked me to wait a few moments before I went upstairs to bed. I went with him into the parlour and smoothed one of my new silk gowns over my knees.