He cleared his throat. ‘Actually it was he who showed them to me. He brought me out here and asked me to keep an eye on them, to make sure they were protected from poachers. You can imagine the racket we’d have if word got out. The eggs would go for a king’s ransom.’

‘But he hasn’t told his father? Even though they’re on their own estate?’

The gamekeeper shrugged. ‘He asked me to keep it between just the two of us. That was what he said.’

She looked back at him. So it wasn’t quite true, then, what he had said about Sholto’s family – having to possess for mere display? The son did not necessarily share the sins of the father. Sholto understood the birds’ rarity meant they needed protection, not possession.

‘I shouldn’t have broken my word to him by taking you here but I knew you’d understand how special they are.’

‘I do. I really do.’ She looked back at the birds that told her so much about the nature of the man – men – protecting them.

He placed a hand upon her own and she almost jumped at his touch. ‘I’m trusting you to keep the secret, Effie.’

Effie? It was the first time he’d called her by her given name, another step towards an intimacy she had known was coming. Nothing had been explicitly said, but she saw it in his and her father’s eyes when she came home to them in the evenings; an expectation was growing.

‘We’re alike, you and me. Birds of a feather, if you will. We understand one another.’

It was true, she couldn’t deny it. She’d known him before he’d ever said a word. He was her stock, the kind of man she’d been bred to marry: no airs, no graces, just plain-speaking and inured to the prospect of a life of toil. A future with him stretched out long and clear with no bends in the road. She already knew, just from the way he greeted him, that her father approved the match. Sholto had seen it too, the seemingly inevitable divergence of their two paths. He was destined for a socialite, she a gamekeeper. Or at least, she would have been, were it not for Frank Mathieson.

But it was too late for her now, and as he gripped her hand, it didn’t matter that her heart fluttered against her ribs like a caged bird. Felton was a good man, he deserved better.

She looked back to the ospreys, seeing how they were getting ready to fly, preparing to escape here for somewhere safer, far, far away. If she had wings and no ties too, she knew she’d be doing exactly the same.