There was a bigger pile, of proper paper, not crumpled scraps. Now I started on this. They were receipts from moneylenders against security and charging usorious rates of interest. They took me a long time to struggle through, I did not understand the words they used, nor some of the terms. I pulled my wrap around me and settled back with my back against the chair in the wreckage of the room. The deeds might be among them. They might be hidden among them. The bed was piled with papers, the chair heaped with Perry’s shirts, the floor covered with his coats. It looked as if someone had wrecked his room in anger. But I was not angry. I had been looking for the deeds of Wideacre. I cared for nothing in the world but my land. And as the clocks struck two all over the house in sweet muted tones I sat again in silence and knew what I should have known all along. That I loved Wideacre, that it was my home. And the man who tried to take it from me was my enemy. That whatever I had lost in the past, whatever I might cling to in the future, Wideacre was my source and my roots. I needed it like I needed air on my face and water in my cup. I had loved my sister and lost her. Wideacre I would keep.

I sat very still and gazed into the fire as if I could see my future there. I thought, for the first time ever, about my mother, my real mother, and thought how she had planned for me to be found and brought to Wideacre to be raised there as a country child. I thought of what James Fortescue had told me, that she had loved the land and loved the people. I thought that one of her friends had been a Tyacke, kin to the first man I met when Sea took me to my home. And for the first time my hardened roughened heart reached out to her memory and forgave her for letting me go, for throwing me out into that dangerous world. I forgave her for failing me then, when I was new-born. And I gave her credit for trying to do the best for me by putting me in the care of the man who loved her, and bidding him teach me that the land belonged to no one.

I felt that now…I smiled at myself. The moment the deeds were held by someone else I felt that no one should hold them. But I thought it was not my simple quick selfishness which made me feel thus, I thought it was something more. A sense of rightness, of fairness.