‘I dun’t want him to think I can’t cope. I don’t know what he intends – now Matthew’s not coming back. He might only need the slightest excuse to take the tenancy off me.’

Will was silent, scratching his head in defeat.

‘And,’ she added bitterly, ‘I dun’t want him to know why none of the others are helping me this year.’

‘I ’spect he knows,’ Will muttered under his breath, but Esther’s hearing was sharp.

‘I suppose you’re right. I can’t understand them,’ she said angrily. ‘They all came last year, when Jonathan was actually here. They liked him – everyone did. So why are they punishing me now?’

‘They didn’t blame him, Esther lass,’ Will told her gently, unknowingly echoing Ma Harris’s words. ‘At first he was a hero in their eyes. A soldier wounded in the war and going to go back. But then you kept him here. To their way of thinking it was you turned him into a deserter. They blame you for everything.’

Esther closed her eyes and swayed slightly as her loss swept over her again. Tiredness made her vulnerable. Whilst for the most part the hard work blotted out her memories, when those same memories did intrude, she had no resistance to the hurt. She groaned and sank down into a kitchen chair and leant her head on her arms on the table.

‘Why was it so very wrong of me to fall in love with him?’

‘Because you were married – are still, for all we really know – and to one of their own. More than anything else, they can’t forgive you for that, Esther.’

‘It’s different for men, isn’t it?’ Her voice was muffled, but there was no mistaking her resentment. ‘They get away with it. They can have affairs, even bring – bring bastards into the world and are just thought “a bit of a lad”. Even envied by other fellers. But a woman! Oh, no, she’s a trollop and a whore . . .’ She stopped, appalled that she was talking to Will in this way, that she was thrusting the knife of her years of resentment into him of all people.

Will Benson sighed but said nothing. What was there that he could say to her accusation?

‘Me husband’s dead,’ Esther went on. ‘Am I supposed to live the rest of me life alone, just because . . . ?’

‘No, of course not, Esther. You jumped the gun, that’s what’s caused the resentment. You hadn’t even had word that he was missing before you took up with Jonathan Godfrey.’

It was a fact that she could not deny and it was that fact the people of Fleethaven Point could not forgive.