Her voice seemed to come from a long way away. I did not believe it possible that this could be the end for me. I felt as if I had hardly lived at all. I had been raised in such a rough poor way, and I had been less than a year in luxury with the Quality. To die now, and of a disease which I could have taken at any time in a damp-clothed hungry childhood made no sense at all. The drug began taking hold and I felt the familiar sense of floating on a golden sea. If she was right and I died now I should have died without knowing a proper childhood, without knowing a proper mama, without knowing what it is to be loved honestly and truly by a good man. And worse of all, I would die without knowing what it was to feel passion. Any slut on a street corner might have her man; but I had been cold as ice all my life. I had only ever kissed the man I loved in my dreams. In real life I had whipped him around the face and told him I hated him.

I gave a little moan – unheard among the hoarse scraping noise as I breathed. Lady Clara came in and looked down at my face.

‘Is there anything you want?’ she asked.

I could not reply but I knew truly that there was nothing she could buy for me, or sell to me, or barter with me, which I could want. The only thing I wanted could not be bought. It was not the ownership of Wideacre, but the smell of the place, the taste of the water, the sight of that high broad skyline.

She looked at me as if she would have said far more. ‘I hope I have not treated you badly,’ she said. ‘I meant well by you, Sarah. I meant Perry to marry you and to live with you. I thought you might have suited. I did need Wideacre, and I am glad to have it, but I wanted it to be your free choice.’

She looked at me as if she thought I could answer. I could barely hear her. Her face was wavering like water-weed under the Fenny. I felt as if I could taste the cool wetness of the Fenny on my tongue, as if it were flowing over my hands, over my face.

She stepped back from the bed and Perry was there, his eyes red from weeping, his curls awry. He said nothing. He just pressed his head on my coverlet until his mother’s hand on his shoulder took him away.