‘I can’t tell your fortune,’ she said to me quickly. ‘I can’t tell you nothing you don’t already know.’

‘Why not?’ I asked. ‘Because I’m Romany too?’

She looked up at that and she laughed, a high old-woman’s clatter. ‘You’re no Rom,’ she said. ‘You’re a gorgio through and through. You’re a landowner, a daughter of a line of squires and you’re longing for their land all the time, aren’t you?’

‘What?’ I exclaimed. It was as if she had peeped into my head and seen the childhood dreams which I had never told anyone except Dandy.

Her face creased with mocking laughter. ‘They’ll think highly of you!’ she said. ‘You with your gypsy sister and your dirty face and your common ways! You’ll have to break your back and break your soul and break your heart if you want to become a lady and rule the land like them.’

‘But will I get it?’ I demanded in an urgent whisper, one look over my shoulder to see that Robert had not heard. She was pulling herself to her feet and picking her basket up, moving away from me into the crowd. I put a restraining hand on her shawl. ‘Will I become a lady? Will I find my home?’

She turned, and her face which had been hard was no longer laughing but gentle. ‘They’ll bring you safely home to their land,’ she said. ‘In the end, I think they will. Your true ma, and her ma especially. It’s their hunger you feel, silly little chavvy. They’ll bring you safe home. And you’ll belong to their land in a way they never could.’

‘And Dandy?’ I asked urgently. But the fringe of her shawl slipped through my fingers and was gone.

I waited for a moment, looking into the crowd. Then I saw her, bow-backed, slipping her way through to another corner of the square, spreading her cloth, arranging her basket, hunkering down on the cold stone. I looked around for Robert, afraid I had lost him in the crowd, but he was only a few yards away, talking to a red-faced man with his hat pushed far back on his forehead.

‘A killer,’ the man said emphatically. ‘That horse is a killer. I bought him from you in good faith and he near killed me. He’s untrainable.’

‘No such thing as an untrainable horse,’ Robert said slowly. He was talking very softly, keeping his temper well in check. ‘And I sold him to you in good faith. I told you I had bought him for my son to ride in the show but that we could not manage him, nor waste the time training him. We were travelling through the town as you well knew, six months ago, and I warned you I would not be here to take him back if you misliked him. But you were confident you could handle him and you paid a paltry price for him because I warned you fair and square that he had been badly broken and handled worse before he ever came to me.’