‘Will you play nursemaid to three little babies?’ I said laughing. I wanted to hurt him, I wanted him to flare up at me since he thought I was so much in the wrong. I was angry with him for taking the woman and her children in. I did not like the thought of him living there, like a husband and a father with a sickly wife and three babies.

‘I’d rather live with three babbies than up at the Hall with one great baby and his ma,’ Will said, scowling at me.

‘You mean Lord Peregrine?’ I said in a tone as near to Lady Clara’s disdainful drawl as I could manage.

Will got to his feet and met my eye squarely. ‘Don’t speak to me like that, you silly slut,’ he said. ‘I’ve heard you learn to talk like that and I’m damned if I know why you want to turn yourself into something you’re not. I’ve heard Ted Tyacke talk about your ma, Lady Lacey she was, and she once rolled in the mud cat-fighting with one of the Dench girls. Her best friend was a village girl and she was in love with James Fortescue. She’d never have talked like that! And your grandma Beatrice swore like a plough boy and would have tanned your backside for talking to a working man like that.’

I dug my heels in Sea and turned him so sharply that he nearly reared. He plunged down the bank into mid-stream again and from there I turned and yelled at Will: ‘You’re sacked, Will Tyacke!’ I shouted. ‘Sacked and you can get off my land and go to hell! You’ll pack up today, you and your cottage-full of drabs. Get off my land all of you, and don’t you dare come back.’

He put his fists on his waist and shouted back at me. ‘You don’t own this place or run it, Sarah Lacey. You’re a minor still, you can sign nothing, you can appoint no one, you can sack no one. I takes my orders from James Fortescue and I will do for another five years. So take that back to Lord Perry with the compliments of his neighbour.’

‘I’ll have you off the land in a twelvemonth,’ I shrieked back at him, all my grief and anger and frustration boiling over at once like a pot with a lid forced on too tight. ‘I’m marrying Lord Peregrine as soon as the deeds are drawn and the Season over! Then he and I will own all the land from Midhurst to Cocking and we’ll see then who gives orders and who takes them, and whether you can ever find work in west Sussex again.’