‘Anyone fancy a game?’ he would offer. ‘Playing for beer only, I don’t want to be taken for a ride, I just want a fair game, a bit of sport.’ One after another they would come. Plump farmers with rents in their pocket. Middling tenants with their wives’ butter money burning a hole in their jackets. One after another Da would pluck them. Drunk or sober it was one of the things, perhaps the only thing, that he did quite well.

‘Sarah will restore the family fortunes in cash as well as in land,’ Peregrine said lazily with a smile at me. He did not see the sharp look his mama shot at him. I did. It warned him to be silent about the Havering debts.

She was wrong to fear me knowing, I was no fool. I would tell my lawyers to ascertain how much the Haverings owed before I honoured my promise to marry. Mr Fortescue was a careful man and would make sure that the capital of the land was entailed upon my children in such a way that no husband, however spendthrift, could waste it on gambling. Perry and I smiled at each other with easy knowledge. We needed each other, we liked each other, we trusted each other. We neither of us wanted very much more.

We walked that evening in the garden. It was getting colder at nightfall and he put his silk embroidered evening jacket around my shoulders and offered me his arm. I took it. We must have made a pretty sight, the two of us, my auburn ringlets brushing his shoulder and my head held high. My green gown hushing the grass and Perry as golden and as lovely as an angel. We walked together in the twilit garden and we talked of money and friendship. We did not talk of love. It never entered our heads. When Perry saw me to my bedroom door at night he stooped and kissed me on the lips and his touch was as cool as his mama’s social pecks.

I stopped him as he turned to leave. ‘Will you never feel desire, Perry?’ I asked.

He looked frankly alarmed. ‘I doubt it, Sarah,’ he said uncomfortably. ‘Would you ever want me to?’

I paused. It was as if there were two people inside me: one the girl who could not bear to be touched except by one other person, the girl who had seen too much and heard too much at too young an age to ever think that love could have anything to do with a heaving bunk and a rocking wagon. The other was a girl growing into womanhood who had seen a man look at her as if she had murdered him by leaving him. A man who looked at her with passion and love and then turned and walked away.

‘No Perry,’ I said honestly. ‘I would never want desire from you.’