I thought he was foolish and proud and I decided to ignore him. So I made no effort either to challenge or reconcile with him. Instead I was as haughty and as ill-tempered as he through all the hot summer days when the birds called for their mates and the swallows dipped and dived in the lingering lonely twilights. When I was alone at the top of the Downs, with Sea cropping the grass around me, I knew that I was missing my friends – not just her, but James Fortescue whom I had sent away, Will whom I had put at a distance, and all the people of Acre who had welcomed me with smiles and bright curious faces, and who had then learned that I would not live at Wideacre Hall, that I would not stay with them, that I was hard set on changing things, on changing everything.

I knew myself then to be bereft, but I had been so lonely and so hungry for so long that I did not jump up on Sea and ride down to Acre to seek Will out and make things clear with him. Instead I hunched up my shoulders and hugged my knees and watched the sun set redly in the sky, and huddled my feelings of loneliness and sadness within me, as a familiar longing.

In Will’s absence I rode with Perry, and sometimes Lady Clara took me around her own fields, or ordered her bailiff to drive out with me in her pale-blue lined-landau. He was a sharp hard-faced man; I could not like him. But I could recognize his ability to price a crop while it showed just inches above the soil, or to adjust a rent in his mind during the walk from the gate to the back door.

Will was right about the hardship on the Havering land. I saw it on every drive. Havering village was more like a campsite than a village. The houses were ready to tumble down and half were down already with their tenants sheltering in the lee of a wall with a half-thatched roof over their heads. The slops were thrown out in the village street, the stink under the hot summer sun was enough to turn your stomach. The people worked from dawn to dusk for wages which were as low as Lady Clara and Mr Briggs could keep them. More and more work was being done by the wretches brought in by a jolting wagon daily from Midhurst poorhouse. ‘It’s a service to the community to save them from idleness,’ Mr Briggs explained to me, smiling.