Really, she thought to herself, I’m almost eighteen and yet I still can’t hardly move without her wanting to know what I’m doing.

She hung over the farmyard gate and Danny’s shadowy shape loomed up in the dusk. “Ave ya still got ya job then?’ she called merrily, confident that the worst Danny would receive from the kindly Squire was a telling off.

‘It’s all right for you to joke!’ Danny muttered morosely. He was walking towards her, but his hands were thrust deep into the pockets of his trousers. Suddenly, he kicked viciously at some loose stones on the road side, sending them pattering on to the grass verge.

A sudden fear clutched at her. ‘He didn’t – oh, he wouldn’t – sack you. Did he?’

‘He did! The old bugger bloody well sacked me!’

Kate gasped. Danny rarely resorted to bad language; that he was doing so now, and being so disrespectful to the Squire, shocked her.

And what made it worse – it was all her fault.

Very early the following morning, before going to work, Kate cycled to the Grange. Standing in front of the Squire’s huge polished desk, she felt the familiar fluttering just below her ribs that she got when she was nervous.

‘What’s so urgent, young lady, that I have to be dragged away from my breakfast?’

He was sitting on the opposite side of his desk now, glowering at her. When she had been shown into the book-lined study, he had been sitting in a wing-chair near the long window overlooking the smooth expanse of front lawn, his right foot propped up on a footstool, and a plate of bacon and eggs on a small table to one side. Leaving his meal, he had levered himself up from his chair and hobbled across the room, wincing with every step.

Kate had always liked the Squire, with his bristly white whiskers and red face. As a child, she had thought of him as a jolly Father Christmas and in her sudden concern for him, her nervousness was forgotten for a moment.

‘Have you hurt your foot, Squire?’

‘Gout,’ he said testily. ‘That’s why I wanted a driver till that silly young fool put my new car in the ditch!’

Her stomach lurched afresh. ‘That’s what I’ve come to see you about – Danny Eland.’

The old man grunted and glared up at her. ‘Well? What about him?’

Kate took a deep breath. She was taking a big gamble and she knew it. He couldn’t hurt Danny any more – he’d already dismissed him. But the Squire was her mother’s landlord. He owned the home they all lived in. If she, Kate, angered him even more . . .

‘Well, get on with it.’