‘’Tis just a few lines that’s been running through my head all day, sir.’ He handed the paper to Oliver. ‘As you can see I’m in need of a word to rhyme with cavalcade.’

Rosie rubbed her leg above the injured ankle to ease the pain, watching the two men with a keen eye as they conversed. Alice entered with the bowl of water with Jessica trailing behind her. She clucked around Rosie having heard the tale from Clem on her way through the yard. Adding her thanks to Oliver she offered him a dish of tea. Oliver accepted, not because he was thirsty, but because he knew it would annoy Clem.

‘Your husband not joining us, Alice?’ Oliver asked casually, a bit too casually and Alice went pink.

‘He’s rescuing my washing from the billy goat, he’ll be in drekkly.’

‘I see,’ Oliver replied, amused. Was Clem really doing such an unmasculine thing as bringing in the washing, or was Alice making an excuse for more bad manners on Clem’s part?

An unreadable look passed between Alice and Sir Oliver, and Rosie was at a loss as to what it meant. She did not know that her sister-in-law and the baronet shared a friendship, of sorts. It went back to the days before Alice married Clem; Oliver had come across her and Clem quarrelling in the manor grounds when, not knowing that he had made Alice pregnant, Clem had finished his dalliance with her. Alice had been left sick and distraught and Oliver had taken her home to the manor on his big black horse. At the time Oliver’s marriage to Kerensa had been strained and she was away at the Beswetherick’s. In their loneliness Oliver and Alice had talked throughout the night and a lasting closeness formed between them.

Oliver looked down at the scrap of paper. ‘Serenade would be appropriate at the end of the next line, Kenver,’ he said, returning the poetry. He was impressed with what he had read.

Jessica Trenchard was as fair as her father but had inherited Alice’s bouncy curls giving her a cherubic appearance. She stood before Oliver and stared at him in the disconcerting way of the child. He returned her stare with paternal amusement. Jessica was approaching her fourth birthday, four years younger than his own daughter. Pretty and small for her age, she was dressed in a frock he recognised as an old one of Olivia’s and too large for her.

‘You’re a big man,’ Jessica said, resting her tiny sharp elbows on his knees.

‘Jessica, come away and don’t bother Sir Oliver,’ Alice chided her.

‘It’s all right, Alice,’ Oliver said, and he lifted Jessica up to stand on his knees.

Jessica giggled, her face lighting up like the sun coming out. ‘What’s your name?’ she asked, twisting her thin red lips to the side.