Will shook his head. ‘If we go on as we are going, with people thinking of nothing but making fortunes and caring nothing for their workers and caring nothing for the land then they will regret it,’ he said certainly. ‘They think they can count the cost of living like that – a high rate of accidents perhaps, or no fish in a river where fish once used to spawn. But the cost is even higher. They teach themselves, and they teach their children a sort of callousness, and once people have learned that lesson it is indeed too late. There is nothing then to hold back rich people from getting richer at the expense of the poor, nothing to protect the children, to protect the land. The rich people make the laws, the rich people enforce them. Time after time we have a chance to decide what matters most – wealth, or whether people are happy. If they could only stop now, and think of the happiness for the greatest number of people.’

I smiled at him. ‘They’d tell you that the way to make people happy is to make them rich,’ I said.

Will shrugged and the horses moved forward. ‘I don’t think people can be happy unless they are well fed and well housed and have a chance at learning,’ he said. ‘And you’ll never do that by opening the market place and saying it’s all free to those with money to buy it. Some things are too important to be traded in a free market. Some things people should have as a right.’

I thought of the Havering land and the clearing of the Havering village. I thought of some of the people I had met in London who had no more skill nor wit than Da, but lived in great houses and dined off gold plate. And I thought of her, and of me, dirty-faced little children with never a farthing of a chance to get out of that miserable life and think of something other than getting and keeping money.

‘I got from the bottom to the very top,’ I said. I thought of Robert Gower’s long struggle from the failed cartering business, to the horse-riding act, and then his own show. And I thought of what it had cost him. It had made him a man with stone where his heart should be, and it had made his son a murderer.

‘It’s not the rising or falling which matters,’ he said. ‘There shouldn’t be a bottom where children are cold and hungry and beaten. Not in a rich world.’

I nodded, and we rode in silence for a little while.

‘You’re pale,’ he said. ‘Are you well?’