On Friday morning Alinor left a sleepy Alys in the warm bed, and went out in the dawn light to pick samphire on the shingle seashore while it was still fresh, damp and salty with the sea fret. The tide was on the ebb. She could see the little waves breaking on the sandbar, far out to sea, and the horizon was a glorious line of gold with low-lying banks of cloud catching the light of the sunrise. The little birds ran back and forth in the shallow water, sometimes wheeling away in a flock, to settle a few yards farther down the beach. At six o’clock by the stable clock she tapped on the kitchen door of the Priory and when Stuart opened it, his hands dirty with wood ash from the fire, she walked in and put down her basket on the dresser.

“Aye, there you are,” said Mrs. Wheatley, flushed from the heat of the bread oven where she was shoveling in rolls with a long-handled wooden peel. She closed the door with a thick woolen cloth over her hand and came over to look at the basket, pulling away the fresh green leaves from the top to make sure that the crop underneath was as good.

“Tuppence?” she offered.

“Certainly,” Alinor said pleasantly, though it was cheap.

“You’ll be hoping to see your boy,” the cook guessed. “You can come up to the chapel with me for morning prayers. You’ll see him then.”

Alinor shook her wet shawl out of the door and put it on a hook, then pulled her cap lower over her fair hair. “If I may,” she said.

“I knew you’d be desperate to see him,” the cook said shrewdly. “But he’s well. He’s not pining. At any rate, he eats well enough, he’s not off his feed.”

Stuart gave a short laugh. “He’s not that!”

“Did I ask you?” the cook demanded, and Stuart ducked his head and went out to stock the wood basket, as a bell in the hall sounded three times.

“We can go now,” Mrs. Wheatley said, rinsing her hands under the pump at the kitchen sink and drying them on the cloth at her waist. She laid aside her stained apron, revealing a clean one underneath, and led the way out of the kitchen.

The two women went down the stone-flagged corridor towards the entrance hall. Three dairymaids were waiting outside the carved wooden door to the Peacheys’ private chapel, lined up before the wall in silence. Alinor and Mrs. Wheatley joined them. His lordship’s valet, Stuart, another footman, a couple of grooms, and two gardeners took the opposite wall.

Alinor heard the Peachey family descending the great wooden stairs. First, his lordship, magnificent in dark red velvet with a rich lace ruff, tall hat on his head, cane in his hand, gloriously overdressed for a country morning, for attendance at his own private chapel. His eyes flicked incuriously over his household and stable staff; he did not even notice Alinor. Behind him came his son, dressed more plainly in a brown suit of knee breeches, and a jacket over a linen shirt with a short white collar. He was bareheaded with his light brown hair brushed smoothly, falling to his shoulders. He recognized Alinor, who had nursed him in two illnesses, and he smiled at her and turned to speak to the boy who followed him down the stairs. It was Rob. Alinor would have known him in a heartbeat for her boy, her beloved boy, but he was transformed. He was wearing an old dark green suit of Walter’s with a clean white linen collar edged with a little lace, white woolen stockings to his knees, and black shoes with buckles. Everything was a little too small for his long legs and growing frame, the jacket sleeves showed his bony wrists, the breeches were pulled too high; but he looked nothing like the boy who had emerged unwashed from the cottage by the mire to play barefoot in the churchyard before school.