‘No,’ I said. ‘Don’t waste your hopes on me. Will Tyacke. I am dead inside. There is no place for me to be happy, not in the Hall, not in the village, not at Havering nor Wideacre. Don’t look like that and don’t talk like that. You are wasting your time: I have nothing for you and nothing for the village either.’

He dropped his hand and he turned away. I thought he was going to walk from me in a rage but he took only a few steps and then he turned to face the stream and dropped down to his haunches and watched the flow of it go past us. Sea had stirred up the mud of the river bed and as we watched it grew clearer and then flowed clean again.

‘I’ve just walked back from Havering village,’ he said. ‘Some of them have moved into Acre, sharing cottages. One lass wanted me to see if I could find something she had left behind, but they have burned it out.’

I said nothing.

‘They even carted the stones away,’ he said wonderingly. ‘In a few months’ time you won’t be able to tell there ever was a village there. They have wiped the land clean of the people who lived there for hundreds of years.’

‘Were you there with the cart?’ I asked.

Will looked quickly up at me. ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘I didn’t see you.’

‘I was riding, up on the Common behind,’ I said. I suddenly remembered that I had been with Perry and that we had laughed at the woman who clung to the doorpost. ‘I wasn’t allowed to come near,’ I said. It was a weak excuse. ‘They had the typhus fever.’

Will shook his head. ‘Nay,’ he said. He was angry but his voice was so low and soft no one but me could have guessed it. ‘There was a woman there who was feverish and delirious through hunger. She didn’t have typhus, she was dying in a fever. She had been giving her smallest child the breast to try and keep her alive and so when there was no food to be begged or bought it hit her the hardest.’

‘Did she cling to the doorpost?’ I asked.

‘You saw that, did you?’ Will asked. His voice was thick with condemnation of someone who could see that naked need of a woman and leave her to the mercies of paid wreckers. ‘Aye, she clung to the doorpost. She had nowhere to go. She was afraid of going to the poorhouse and the babbies being taken off her. I’ve taken her into my cottage and her three children. It’ll do for them for a while.’