Martha’s tirade continued. ‘My Thomas’s family was related to old Sam’s way back. All that should have been ours, by rights, not left to a scheming hussy like you!’ Martha was in full flow now, enjoying having Esther at her mercy. ‘To say nothing of how you tricked young Matthew into marrying you. Telled him you was pregnant by him, I don’t doubt. ’Tis the oldest trick in the book, that one.’

‘That’s not true,’ Esther shrieked, ‘and you know damn well it ain’t. My Kate was born nearly a year after we was wed.’

Martha cackled. ‘Huh, ya dun’t have to be pregnant to catch ’em. Only tell ’em you are.’

Esther’s eyes narrowed. ‘Oh,’ she said, her tone heavy with sarcasm, ‘is that how you caught poor old Tom Willoughby, then?’ It was a particularly cruel remark considering that the Willoughbys had no family.

Martha’s fat cheeks, already marked with tiny red veins, grew purple. ‘Why, you, you—’

At that moment behind them the great steam engine spluttered into noisy life and drowned Martha’s abuse.

Esther turned on her heel and marched away from Martha and off their farmland. She returned to Brumbys’ Farm. It was her farm, and everything in it, no matter what Martha said.

Esther wished now she had never gone up to Rookery Farm, particularly as Jonathan had hardly seemed to notice her. His indifference had hurt her far more than Martha’s scathing attack.

So, Esther thought furiously, if he prefers a smelly old engine puthering steam and smoke to me, then he’s welcome.

Nevertheless, she found it impossible to sustain her anger for long, for when he came back to the farm, his face was grubby with oil and smuts and his eyes were shining like a little boy’s on Christmas morning.

‘It was good to get me hand in again, Esther,’ he told her as he sluiced away the grime under the pump in the yard. ‘Eh, but I’ve missed it – my work. I hadn’t realized just how much until . . .’ He spread his hands out before him and looked down at them and laughed. ‘Until I got them all mucky with oil and grease again.’

She watched his lean body rippling in the sunlight and longing burned inside her. Again she saw the bandage covering the wound on his shoulder; that jagged, purple scar that was a constant reminder of what he had seen and suffered.

It was a reminder to her too that he was still a soldier and that the war was not yet over. Not for either of them.