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.

My bedroom door opened and I stirred in my sleep and saw poor little Emily the kitchenmaid with her hands swiftly washed and her cap pulled straight and her dirty pinny swapped for a clean one.

‘Please’m,’ she said. ‘They said I had to give you this.’ She held a bottle of laudanum in one hand and glass of water in another. ‘They said I should be your maid while you’re ill, until her la’ship gets a nurse,’ she said. ‘But please’m I ain’t never done it and I don’t know nohow what’s to do.’

I tried to smile and nod her to the bedside, but I could not move my neck at all now. I must be getting worse very quick for I had been able to speak earlier in the morning and now it had gone altogether.

She was made bold by my stillness and silence. ‘Are you very bad, miss?’ she asked. I blinked my eyes and she came a little closer.

‘Bloody hell,’ she said.

I gave a little croak of laughter and she jumped back as if I could bite.

‘Beg pardon, miss,’ she said hopelessly. Then when I made no more sound she held out the bottle at me. ‘They said I was to give you this,’ she said.

I could imagine how a strong dose would take the pain away. I forced my head to nod, the movement made my senses swim and I closed my eyes while the room swirled and the bed heaved like a ship in a rough sea.