I did as I had said I would, and everything followed on from that almost without my choosing. I wrote and told Mr Fortescue of my decision and I waited and read his reply without emotion. He was concerned and unhappy but there was nothing that he could do. His honest, anxious, stumbling reply made me feel that I was running very fast in the wrong direction, but Lady Clara insisted on seeing it, and read passages aloud, and rocked with laughter.

She composed for me a cold-hearted rejoinder which thanked him for his advice but said that my mind was made up. It referred him to the Havering lawyers if he had any queries.

‘You had best remind him that he is a little late in the day breaking his heart over your happiness. He never made much effort to find you in all the sixteen years when you were lost, by all accounts. Too busy re-creating Eden at Wideacre, I daresay.’

That made me angry and resentful, and the letter I sent to Mr Fortescue was cold and ungenerous. I did not hear from him again.

I heard no more from Will, either. I often seemed to see his face looking at me with that especial sharp anger. Once I dreamed of him trudging away from me, heavy-footed with wet boots. In my dream I called out to him and when he turned around he was smiling in a way I had never seen him look. But when I woke I knew that I had not called out to him, that I never would call out to him. That a gulf had opened between us which was too deep for mere liking and sympathy to bridge.

Perry and I grew closer, he was my only comfort in the late summer days while Lady Clara taught me how to pour tea and how to deal cards like a lady and not like a card-sharper. Perry would sit with me now during my lessons and when his mama praised me for doing well he would beam at me like a generous incapable student watching some bright friend do better.

‘You will be the toast of the Season,’ he said to me idly, as he watched his mama and me take a hand of picquet.

‘I don’t know about that, but she will be the gambler of the Season,’ Lady Clara said, discarding cards and finally conceding the game to me. ‘Sarah, whatever hell you learned to play in must sorely miss you.’

I smiled and said nothing, thinking for a moment of Da and his seductive pack of greasy cards on an upturned beer-keg outside a country inn.