I read the letter through several times, sitting at the mahogany table in the parlour, the noises from the street very loud in the room. I was sorry James was so grieved that he had not protected me against the Haverings’ marriage plans. I could shrug that off. No one could have predicted that I would fall ill. No one could have foreseen that I would get well again. If I had died, as everyone had expected me to do, then there would have been little harm done. The Wideacre corporation, the great brave experiment of Wideacre would have been ended under a new squire, either way. It was bitter indeed that I should be persuaded of the rightness of running an estate as if the very poorest villager’s life was of value at the very moment when I had put a new man in the squire’s chair. But James was right, I would be the mistress in my house, the land would be run as I wished, and I would run Wideacre as Will had done. I made a sad little face. It would be a different place without him.

I opened the letter again and re-read the postscript. I nodded. He had said he would go when we had parted in anger, that day in the park. He had tried to warn me and I had refused to listen. He had tried to keep Wideacre safe as one of the few places, one of the very few, where the wealth of the land could go to those who earned it. Where people could work and earn the full benefits of their work – not what was left after the squire had taken his cut, and the merchant, and the parson. I had been on the side of the squires and the merchants and the parsons then. I was not now. Since then I had been as close to death as most people ever get, and I had felt someone take my sweating hand and sign away my land for me. I would never again believe that some people deserved higher wages or finer lives than others. We all had needs. We all sought their satisfaction. Some people were clever rogues, they managed to get a little more – that was all the difference there ever was.