‘Sea,’ I said, and at my voice his ears went forward and I felt him shift a little beneath me. I knew he remembered me, remembered the red-faced man who had been his owner before I had come to him. Remembered the little stable in Salisbury behind the inn, and how I had sat gently on him, half the weight of his usual rider, and spoken to him in a quiet voice. I thought he would remember the journey home, tied to the back of Robert Gower’s whisky cart, with me dripping blood and drooping with tiredness, my head on Robert’s shoulder. I thought he would remember the little stable at Warminster, and how I would go down to him in the morning, clattering down the little wooden staircase to greet him before going in to breakfast and bringing him back a crust of a warm roll. And I was sure he would remember that night when there had been no one on the land but him and me. No one in the whole world but the two of us going quietly through the sleeping Downland villages. Me, as lost as a child without its mother, and him quietly and certainly trotting along lanes where he had never been before, drawn like a compass point to our home.

I reached down and patted his neck. He straightened and obeyed the touch of my heels against his side. He moved with his smooth flowing stride out of the stable yard and into the mews lane, then down the busy roads towards the park. The groom fell into step behind us, watching me nervously, certain that I was not well enough to ride, that Sea would be sure to throw me at the first sight of a water cart, or a shrieking milk maid.

He did not. He went as steady as a hackney-horse with blinkers. Past open doors and shouting servants, past wagons, past delivery carts and street sellers. Past all the noise and bustle of a big city to the gates of the park. And even then, with the smooth green turf before him and the soft furze beneath his feet he did nothing more than arch his neck and put his ears forward as we trotted, and then slid into a smooth steady canter.

He would have gone faster, and I was finished with the conventions of polite society for ever: I would have let him. But I could tell by the light buzzing in my ears, and the strange swimmy feeling, that I was pushing my new strength too far, and I should go home.

We turned. Sea went willingly enough though I knew he longed for one of our wild gallops. He went back through the streets as gentle as he had come, and pulled up outside the front door as sweet as a carthorse on a familiar delivery round.