‘Em’ly?’ my maid asked. ‘Of course! The kitchenmaid should do it. Will you wake her la’ship and tell her about this?’

‘This’ was me on my deathbed, not a fit subject to broach to Lady Havering before she had woken in her own good time and rung the bell for her morning chocolate.

Rimmings hesitated. ‘I suppose so,’ she said slowly. ‘She’ll have to send for the doctor for her, I can’t take the authority. But I doubt he’ll be able to make much difference, she’s that far gone.’

She looked at the clock on my mantelpiece. ‘I daren’t wake my lady before eight,’ she said. ‘Not even if she was breathing her last already! It won’t make much difference to her whether she waits till nine or later. I’ll give Emily some laudanum to give her.’

She came back to my bedside and stood a judicious three feet away. ‘Can you hear me, Miss Lacey?’ she asked. I gave a painful nod.

‘I shall send Emily to nurse you, she shall give you some laudanum. That will make you feel better.’

I nodded again. Emily or Sewell, it made little odds. Sewell was right. The fever had me in its grip like a hard rider forcing a horse at a gallop towards a cliff. I did not expect to leap across.

They took themselves off then, still fretting, and I lay in the throbbing hot pain of the stuffy little room and let my red eyelids close on my hot eyes, and I dozed.

At once I dreamed of a girl who looked like me and rode like me, but dressed in bulky uncomfortable clothes. She had a riding habit of grey velvet, but thicker and heavier cut than my smart outfit. She had eyes even greener than mine, as green as mine are when I am happy. She looked happy enough. She looked as if she had never shed a tear in her life.

I heard her laugh, I saw someone lift her into the saddle and I saw her smile down at him with love. But though her face was warm I knew that all the time she was teaching herself to be cold and hard, that she would throw him away, she would throw away anyone who stood in her way. I knew she was my grand-dame. The great Beatrice Lacey who made the land grow and made it eat up the people who worked it. Beatrice whom they had stopped with fire and anger. Nothing else would have made her even pause. I knew then, that I was a Lacey indeed, for that bright hard smile was my smile when I stood in the ring and knew I had an audience in the palm of my dirty little hand. And that coldness which she swung around her, like an icy cloak, was the coldness which I had been born and bred to. The coldness which says: ‘Me! Me! Who is going to care for me?’ It seemed odd, that this moment when I was galloping like an arrow towards my death should be the time when I saw her, when I knew at last that I was a Lacey through and through.