Immediately below the window was the cottage garden – a little chequerboard of hard labour. One main path, and then a score of others like a grid so that the garden was divided into square, easily reached beds. I could see clumps of lavender, and mint, and thyme and a great pale-leaved sage bush. There was some rue and fennel and whole beds of other plants I did not know. I would have to learn them. Someone in the village would teach me. I knew I would learn the country remedies as if I had known them all my life. I was no longer little Miss Lacey who could be drugged and tricked by a London charlatan.

A wood-pigeon called softly, as sweetly as a cuckoo. Beyond the garden was a rich paddock of good grass and as I looked I saw Sea walk from one end to another, ears pricked, moving like a waterfall. They must have brought him in late last night, he had taken no hurt from the journey. I called softly to him: ‘Cooee, Sea!’ and he looked towards the window with his grey ears pricked up towards me, and then nodded his head as if in greeting before turning back to crop the grass. He looked pleased to be in the little field. He looked at home.

A floorboard behind me creaked and a broad arm came around me and the man who hated gin traps lifted my thick mop of curls and kissed the nape of my neck.

‘Mmmm,’ he said by way of greeting, and then his other arm came around me and I leaned back against him and closed my eyes, and let the sunlight and the cool morning, and the greenness of the fields and the warmth of his body against my cool skin wash over me in a great wave of delight.

He slid his hand down my flank and cupped one rounded buttock gently in his hand, then without hesitation his hand went between my legs from behind and his fingers, skilled and knowledgeable, parted my gentle flesh and found the core of the little maze of my body, and stroked me so that I sighed again and again until, still holding me with my back pressed against his warm chest, he entered me and I clung to the window-sill and rested my head against the cool of the window frame and thought for one moment, ‘I have never never felt such delight.’

Then we tumbled down together on the hard floorboards, giving and taking pleasure, moving and seeking, demanding and contented in a great frenzy of happiness until I sighed out loud – and then there was a silence and nothing but the birdsong and the wood-pigeons calling in the silence and the sun was very warm on my shoulder and on my rapt face.