Lady Clara was pushing something into my hands, a pen. I scrawled my name as she had taught me to do on the paper she held before me. In the darkness on the land Sea headed purposefully between two open wrought-iron gates and a shadow of a man came out from under the trees and looked up at me. It was a man who was out looking for poachers because he hated gin traps. It was Will Tyacke.

‘She is smiling,’ said the rector’s voice from the foot of the bed.

‘It was her dearest wish,’ Lady Clara said quickly. ‘Where do you wish me to sign? Here? And the doctor for the other witness? Here?’

They were going. Silently in the dream Will reached up for me on the horse and silently I slid from Sea’s back into his arms.

‘We will leave her to rest now,’ Lady Clara said. ‘Emily, you sit with her in case she wakes and needs something.’

‘She will be mentioned in our prayers,’ the rector said. ‘It would be a tragedy…’

‘Yes, yes,’ Lady Clara said. The door closed behind them. In the world of the fever-dream Will Tyacke bent his head and I lifted up my face for his kiss. His arms came around me and gathered me to him, my hands went to his shoulders, tightened behind his neck to hold him close. He said. ‘I love you.’

‘Don’t cry, Miss Sarah!’ Emily said. She was patting my cheeks with a wad of damp muslin. There were hot tears running down my flushed cheeks, but my throat was too tight and I was too short of breath to weep. ‘Don’t cry,’ she said helplessly. ‘There’s no need to cry. Beg pardon,’ she added.

They were sure I would die, and they wrote to Mr Fortescue, telling him of my illness and of the wedding in the same letter. He was away in Ireland on business when the letter came, and it awaited his return to Bristol. With him away there was no one to tell them on Wideacre that they had a new master. That the London lord whom Will had warned them of had won their land indeed, and he and his hard-faced mama would run the land as they pleased. They carried on, using their own money to mend the ploughs, spending the common fund on seeds for the winter sowing, ploughing the land for the spring sowing, hedging, ditching, digging drains. They did not know they would have done better to save their money. No one in London troubled to tell them of the changes they would face, as soon as Perry and his mama arrived in the country in springtime.

No one expected me to arrive. They expected me to die.