I nodded in silence. But Dandy was angry.

‘That’s awful!’ she exclaimed. ‘Your ma most likely had to go on the Parish and they’d have taken her children away from her. She was ruined! And she had done nothing wrong!’

Jack swung up into the wagon and started stowing blankets and bedding for the journey.

‘He thought she’d done wrong,’ he said from the dark interior. ‘That’s enough for me. And she was cheating, getting a belly on her like that. Women always cheat. They won’t do a straight deal with any man. She got what she deserved.’

Dandy would have said more, but I touched her on the arm and drew her away from the step, around to the back of the wagon to help me hump feed.

‘I can hardly believe it!’ she said in a muttered undertone. ‘Robert always seems so nice!’

‘I can believe it,’ I said. I was always more wary than Dandy. I had watched Jack’s unquestioning obedience to his father; and I had wondered how that round-faced smiling man could exert such invisible discipline.

‘Just remember not to cross him, Dandy,’ I said earnestly. ‘Especially at Warminster.’

She nodded. ‘I’m not going to be left on the road like his wife,’ she said. ‘I’d rather die first!’

That odd shudder, which I had felt when Jack started talking about his mother, put icy fingers down my spine again. I put out my hand to Dandy. ‘Don’t talk like that,’ I said, and my voice was faint as if it were coming from a long way away. ‘I don’t like it.’

Dandy made an impudent laughing face at me. ‘Miss Misery!’ she said cheerily. ‘Where are these buckets to go?’

It was sunset before we were packed and ready to leave – the sudden red sunset of autumn. Bluebell was between the shafts, her head nodding with pretended weariness. Jack was in his working breeches and smock. He was going to ride Snow the stallion, who was too valuable to be tied for a long journey like the ponies. He offered me the ride, but I was tired and felt lazy. If Robert did not order me to drive the wagon I would lie in my bunk and doze.

‘You’re getting as lazy as Dandy,’ Jack said to me in an intimate undertone as we tied the ponies in a string at the back of the wagon. Da’s little pony had settled down with the others and went obediently into line.

‘I feel idle today,’ I confessed, not looking up from the halter I was knotting.

His warm hand came down over my fingers as I tied the rope, and I looked up quickly to see his face, saturnine in the twilight.