I nodded. And Will was right. Only a couple of days later, when I was turning over the earth in the front garden with Lizzie helping and getting in the way with a spoon in her grimy hands, and mud on her face, the post-boy came down the street with a letter addressed to Lady Sarah Havering, care of Will Tyacke, which I thought a masterly compromise between postal accuracy and scandal.

James Fortescue was brief and to the point: ‘I am more happy than I can say to know that you two have found happiness together. Please do not think of the opinions of Society. You are building a new world on Wideacre, you cannot expect to be welcomed by all those who live in the old. You have my blessings on your brave attempt to break free.’

I tucked the letter into the pocket of my breeches to show Will when I met him in the fields at midday.

It was good to know that I had not disappointed James Fortescue. He was the only contact with the mother I had never known, Julia Lacey. If he could see that we were trying to build a new world, to be new people, maybe she would have understood too.

It was only Mr Fortescue who had worried me. I did not think of Perry at all. All of the Haverings, all of their bright talkative social world, had fallen away from me as if it had never been. They had gone, I could barely remember the meaningless lessons I had learned from them and the empty life I had lived with them.

Lizzie and I returned our attention to the flowerbed. Will had promised me a rose bush in the middle of the patch of earth and Lizzie and I were turning over the soil and digging in muck. My thoughts were running so much on James Fortescue and his letter, that when I heard hooves coming up the lane and the noise of carriage wheels, I straightened and scooped Lizzie up and set her on my hip to go down to the little garden gate, thinking I would see a hired post-chaise, and James smiling out of the window.

It was a bright morning and I put up my hand to shield my eyes, the other hand clasped around Lizzie’s little body, her chubby arms around my neck. With a shock of sudden surprise I saw that it was not James’s carriage pulling up outside my little gate. It was the Havering crest, and as the footman lowered the steps I saw it was Perry on his own.

‘Sarah?’ he asked in bewilderment. He came down the steps, blinking in the bright sunlight. ‘Sarah?’

I saw he was so bad with drink, that he could hardly recognize me. He was shaking, and his eyes were clogged with sleep and screwed up against the light. The footman was standing like a block, eyes straight forward. A man trained so well that he could appear deaf and dumb, especially when dragged into scandal such as this. Perry put a hand out on the footman’s shoulder and leaned on him like one might lean on a gate.