I climbed between the cool sheets and sat up and sipped the posset she brought me. I slept at once but jerked awake when she came to stoke my fire.

‘It’s five o’clock, Miss Sarah,’ she said. ‘Her ladyship has come in and changed and gone out again. She said you and Lord Peregrine could follow her in the second carriage. I told her you were lying down.’

I nodded. I pushed back the sheets but they seemed heavy, my arms were weak. I put my feet down to the floorboards and the very wood seemed to sway beneath me.

‘I have a fever, Sewell,’ I said stupidly. ‘I’m not well enough to go. Ask Lord Peregrine to take my apologies. I shall stay in bed tonight and be well tomorrow.’

My eyelids were hot. I fell back against the pillows.

‘Will you dine up here?’ she asked indifferently.

‘No,’ I said. Poor little hungry wretch that I had been. I felt now that I never wanted to eat again. ‘No. Bring me some lemonade and then leave me to sleep please.’

I heard her rattle the fire irons in the grate and then I heard the floorboard creak as she crossed the room for the door. I dimly heard her voice speaking to Perry and then the sound came and went in my ears like the sound of the sea, like the sounds of the waves that last day at Selsey.

Then I fell asleep again and I dreamed that I was not in London at all. It was a dream of the fever all fractured and short with strange frightening ideas lost in the darkness as I struggled awake and was rid of them, then they came back when I was drowsy again. I thought I was back in the wagon and I was calling and calling for her to bring me a mug of water. My throat was parched and I was so afraid it was the typhus and I was going to die. In the dream I could see her humped back and hear my thin child’s voice begging her to wake and fetch me a mug. I was disturbed because I was feverish. I did not know myself. In the fever dream I thought that I was angry that she had not wakened for me, and I called out to her: ‘I’ve waked for you often enough, you lazy slut!’ And I thought of all the times I had waked for her and served her, and how she had repaid me with a smile and perhaps a touch, but often with nothing at all. And, though it was like the tines of a rake over my heart, I thought that there were many and many times when she had taken much from me and given nothing in return. That she was a selfish young silly tart, and if she had listened to me she would not have gone up the ladder that day. If she had listened to me she would not have tried to trap a lad who was not fit to wed. If she had had anything in her head but vanity and wind she would have seen that she was sailing gaily down the wrong road, the worst road of all. And if she had listened she would not be dead now, and I would not be ill now, ill and lonely and so out of joint with myself that I was all wrong.