Robert kept the reins as we trotted into Salisbury and drove accurately to the Black Bull near the horse market. The streets were full of people and everywhere the warm smell of hot horseflesh as string after string of every sort of animal trotted down the street. The pavements were crowded with pie-sellers and the muffin men rang their bells loudly. Flower girls were selling heather and bright-berried sprigs of holly, and everywhere I looked there were match girls and boot boys, porters and urchins, people selling horses and people looking at them, and on one corner a gypsy telling fortunes.

I glanced across at her. I was always drawn to my own people, though I could remember next to nothing of our language and our laws. But I had a dim memory of my mother’s dark-framed face and her smile, and her strange-tongued lullabies.

The Rom woman was selling clothes pegs and carved wood flowers and fairings out of a big withy basket at her side. Under her shawl she had a little mug and a well-wrapped bottle, and I noticed many men stop and give her a penny for a swig from the mug. She’d be selling smuggled rum or gin, I guessed. Strong spirits which respectable publicans would not touch but which would keep the cold out on a raw day such as this. She felt my eyes on her and she turned and stared frankly at me.

I would normally have drawn back to Robert Gower’s side at such a challenging stare. But I did not, I took a couple of steps forward. In my pocket I had six pennies dedicated until this moment for ribbons for Dandy and sweetmeats for myself, but I stepped forward and held out one of them to her.

‘Will you tell my fortune?’ I asked her.

She bent her head in its dirty red headscarf over my palm.

‘Give me another penny,’ she started. ‘I can’t see clear.’

‘Tell me a misty fortune for a penny, then,’ I said shrewdly. But she suddenly pushed my hand away and put my penny back into it.

‘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.