I waited. He was slow. Perry turned back and poured himself another of the little glasses. I looked at him, but he was careful not to catch my eye.

‘The intention of the entail is quite clear,’ he said. He looked at the papers. ‘Harold Lacey set it up,’ he said. ‘Your grandfather, Miss Lacey.’

I nodded.

‘A solid document,’ Mr Fursely said, complimenting the long-dead lawyers who had drawn up the entail. ‘The wishes are clear. The estate goes to the next of kin of the Laceys whether male or female. I don’t think it can revert to the Havering family in the event of your death.’

Perry turned back from the window and seemed to waken to the discussion.

‘That’s all right,’ he said, dismissing a fortune in good agricultural land with a wave of his glass. ‘We can agree to that. Mama said we could. If we have a male heir first, then he gets both estates. If we have a girl first she gets Wideacre. If we die without children then Havering goes to Havering kin, and Wideacre goes to the Lacey next-of-kin.’

Mr Fursely blinked at this sudden explosion of information from Perry. ‘I should prefer Wideacre to come to the Haverings,’ he said. ‘It is Miss Lacey’s dowry so Wideacre is really part of the Havering estate once you two are married.’

There was a high cool singing noise in my head, the sound I had heard when I first came to Wideacre, that lonely night in the dark. It was as if Wideacre was calling me, calling me home to the house which waited for me in the burnished woodland of the autumn trees where the lawns were white in the morning with frost and where the sun was bright red when it set at early evening. As if Wideacre should belong to me, and to no one else.

‘It’s fair enough as it stands,’ Perry said expansively. ‘Mama said we could take it as it is. Don’t you think, Sarah? Wideacre comes to the Havering estate as Sarah’s dowry, but it’s entailed on our first-born child. If we have no children it goes back to the Laceys.’

I shook my head to clear my ears of the calling noise. It was too late to think that I was signing the land over to Perry and to Perry’s family. I wanted us to be away from London, I wanted to take Perry away from the clubs and the gambling hells. I wanted to be back on the land with the money and the authority to run it as I pleased.

‘I agree to that,’ I said.

Perry went to the table and brought the decanter towards me. ‘We’ll drink to that!’ he said happily and poured us all another glass. I noticed his hands were quite steady.

‘And will Mr Fortes…Fortescue’s lawyers agree?’ he asked, slurring his speech a little.