My voice was as steady as a ballad singer, but the tears seeped out from my eyelids and rolled down my cheeks in an easy unstoppable flood as if I had waited for a year to cry them away. I told him of Dandy’s plan, and how she trapped Jack. How she teased him and courted him until she had him, and how she got a belly on her which she thought would bring us to a safe haven with the Gowers. That she thought Jack would cleave to her, and that Gower would be glad of a grandson to inherit the show. That she was always a vain silly wench and she never troubled herself to wonder what others might want. She was so anxious to seek and find her own pleasures, she never thought of anyone else.

I should have known.

I should have watched for her.

And I confessed to Will that I had known in some secret shadowy way, I had known all along. I had been haunted. I had seen the owl, I had seen the green ribbons in her hair. But I did not put out my hand to stop her and she went laughing past me, and Jack threw her against the flint wall, and she died.

We were quiet for a long time then. Will said nothing and I was glad of that. It was silent but for the creak, creak noise of the wheels and the steady jolting of the cart, the clip, clop, of the dray horses and the carter’s tuneless whistle. A wood pigeon called for a few drowsy last notes, and then hushed.

‘And then you came to Wideacre,’ Will said.

I turned in his arm and smiled at him. ‘And I met you,’ I said.

He dipped his head down to me and kissed my red swollen eyelids, and my wet cheeks. He kissed my lips which tasted of salt from my tears. He buried his face in my neck and kissed my collar-bone. He reached into my little nest of straw and hidden by my cape his hands stroked me as gentle as a potter moulding clay, as if he were shaping my waist, my breasts, my arms, my throat, my cheekbones. Then his hands slid down over my breasts to the baggy waistband of Gerry’s breeches, and his flat hand stroked down my belly to between my legs.

‘Not now,’ I said. My voice was very low. ‘Not yet.’

He leaned back with a sigh of longing, and pulled my head on to his shoulder. ‘Not long now,’ he said in reply. ‘You’ll come to my cottage tonight.’

I hesitated. ‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘What would Becky say?’

Will looked puzzled for a moment.