Nothing.

I started on the drawers next. In the top were his fine linen shirts. I lifted each one out, shook it out of the carefully pressed folds and waited in case the deeds fell free. I dropped each shirt behind me on a chair, one after another until the drawer was empty and there was a snowdrift of creased fine white linen on the chair and on the floor. I took the drawer out then and threw aside the little muslin purse of dried lavender seeds, lifted the sweet-smelling paper lining of the drawer, and rapped with my fingers on the drawer base, in case Perry had taken care with the title deeds to my land. In case he had prized them so well that he had wanted to keep them safe, concealed where no one could steal them.

I knew they had been stolen. And I knew the name of the thief. But still I searched each drawer of the wardrobe, and then I went to the washstand and cast out his shaving tackle and his sweet-smelling soaps. His toilet water and the soft muslin cloth which he used to sponge his face. Everything I cast on the floor so that I could pull out the drawer and see if the deeds were safely hidden there.

Nothing.

I went to his writing desk, in the corner by the window. It was packed with papers, writing of every kind. I carried one drawer after another and heaped them on the centre of the bed. Small pasteboard calling cards, snippets of paper torn from dinner menus, sheets from notebooks, hot-pressed letter paper, a little mountain of papers and every one of them a note of gambling debts, written in Perry’s careless drunken scrawl. A score of them, a hundred of them, a thousand of them.

I moved the candelabra to the bedside table and lit the two new candles so that I might see better, then I smoothed the paper into a pile and sat amongst them, at the head of the bed. I drew the candles closer and lifted the first piece of paper, smoothed it out, and lifted it close to my eyes so that I could read. I spelled out the word carefully, whispering under my breath: ‘Ten guineas George Caterham’. Then I laid it on a pile and reached for the next.

Minutes I sat there, taking one paper after another, smoothing it, struggling with the words, placing it with the others. All the time my brain was working, calculating, adding and adding until all the little pieces were in a pile and I knew Perry owed two and a half thousand pounds in gambling debts to his friends.

There was a bigger pile, of proper paper, not crumpled scraps. Now I started on this. They were receipts from moneylenders against security and charging usorious rates of interest. They took me a long time to struggle through, I did not understand the words they used, nor some of the terms. I pulled my wrap around me and settled back with my back against the chair in the wreckage of the room. The deeds might be among them. They might be hidden among them. The bed was piled with papers, the chair heaped with Perry’s shirts, the floor covered with his coats. It looked as if someone had wrecked his room in anger. But I was not angry. I had been looking for the deeds of Wideacre. I cared for nothing in the world but my land. And as the clocks struck two all over the house in sweet muted tones I sat again in silence and knew what I should have known all along. That I loved Wideacre, that it was my home. And the man who tried to take it from me was my enemy. That whatever I had lost in the past, whatever I might cling to in the future, Wideacre was my source and my roots. I needed it like I needed air on my face and water in my cup. I had loved my sister and lost her. Wideacre I would keep.

I sat very still and gazed into the fire as if I could see my future there. I thought, for the first time ever, about my mother, my real mother, and thought how she had planned for me to be found and brought to Wideacre to be raised there as a country child. I thought of what James Fortescue had told me, that she had loved the land and loved the people. I thought that one of her friends had been a Tyacke, kin to the first man I met when Sea took me to my home. And for the first time my hardened roughened heart reached out to her memory and forgave her for letting me go, for throwing me out into that dangerous world. I forgave her for failing me then, when I was new-born. And I gave her credit for trying to do the best for me by putting me in the care of the man who loved her, and bidding him teach me that the land belonged to no one.

I felt that now…I smiled at myself. The moment the deeds were held by someone else I felt that no one should hold them. But I thought it was not my simple quick selfishness which made me feel thus, I thought it was something more. A sense of rightness, of fairness.

You should not be able to buy and sell the land people walk on, the houses they call homes. You should not be able to gamble it away, or throw it away. The only people who can be trusted with the land are those who live on it, who need it. Land, and air, and sunshine and sweet water can belong to no single person. Everyone needs them, everyone should be able to claim them.

I sat there in silence, in silence and weariness. And I wondered where in all of the gambling dens and hells of London Perry had gone with the deeds to Wideacre in his pocket and the desire to gamble making him mad in his head. I had known at once what Perry was staking tonight. He had gone out gambling with our marriage deeds and the deeds of Wideacre in his pocket. The imp of mischief which had made him slip them into his jacket had been born in the parlour when I stopped him drinking, had grown strong at dinner when his mama and I pulled him and worried at him like a pair of hungry curs over a strip of cowskin. Perry would never stand up to her. Perry would never stand up to me. He was a coward. He would lie and steal and betray us all as he sought to prove himself to us, in his hundreds of little vengeances.

And I knew where he was playing, too. I knew that his new-found friends, Redfern and Thomas, were bilkers. I had seen all the signs – Perry’s amazing luck which started when he met them, just as he came into his fortune. They called him ‘Lucky Havering’ he had told me and I had not thought quick enough with my clever cheating mind. They were gulling him and tonight, when he was drunk and peevish, they would spring the trap.

I gnawed on my knuckle and pulled one of Perry’s expensive coats around me in the darkness. I was racking my brains to think of a way to find him, to trace him before it was too late.

There was a sudden rattle against the glass. A tapping like hailstones. It was someone in the street outside, throwing stones up at the bedroom windows. My heart leaped for a moment, perhaps it was Perry locked out and afraid to wake the house by knocking. Another shower of stones came, and I jumped out of bed and crossed to the window, afraid for the glass.

The windows had been sealed shut, thick with white paint. I could not open them. I pressed my face up to the glass and squinted down into the street below. Whoever was throwing stones was hidden by the angle of the house, but then a figure stepped back into the road to look up at my window and I recognized him at once.

It was Will Tyacke, standing in the dark street like an assassin come to murder me.

I ran to the bedroom door and wrenched it open. I flew down the hall, my bare feet making no noise on the thick carpet, and pattered down the icy stairs. The front door was bolted and chained, but I had often let myself out for my morning rides, and I pushed the bolts back and unchained the door and threw it open.

I tumbled out on the stone step, wearing only my nightdress, my arms outstretched. ‘Will!’ I said. ‘I need you!’

He fended me off roughly, pushed me away from him, and with a sudden shock I saw his face was dark with anger. I fell back.

‘I’ve no time for that now!’ I said suddenly. ‘You may be angry with me, but there is something that matters more. It’s Wideacre. You have to help me save it!’

Will’s face was as hard as chalk. ‘I have come to ask you one question,’ his voice was thick with rage. ‘One question only and then I will go.’

I shivered. It was freezing, the pavements glistened with hoar frost. I stood barefoot on the stone step.

‘Do you know what stake your husband is using to gamble with tonight?’ he asked.

‘What…?’ I stammered.

‘Do you know what stake your husband is using, for his gambling tonight?’ Will repeated. His voice was very harsh, the whisper was charged with anger.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He came home to get the deeds. I have just found them missing.’ I put my hand behind me and gripped the knocker of the big black door so hard that it hurt. ‘D’you know where he is?’ I asked.

Will nodded. ‘I wanted to see you,’ he said. ‘I went to that woman’s party, where you were this evening. They said you’d gone home to bed. I thought I’d see his lordship instead, if I could find him.’ He paused. ‘I found him,’ he said. ‘He was in a new gambling club, in a mews behind Curzon Street, he was dead drunk, trying to play piquet. The gossip in the club was that he had won all evening but was starting to lose. The stake on the table were the deeds to Wideacre. Whoever wins them, wins Wideacre.’

We neither of us spoke. The wind blew icy down the street and I shivered but I did not step back into the hall.

‘It was not lost when you left?’ I asked.

‘No.’

‘Did you see him?’ I demanded. ‘Did they let you in?’

Will’s hard mouth twisted in a smile. ‘It’s not a gentleman’s club,’ he said with the precise discrimination of a radical. ‘They let in anyone who is rich enough or fool enough. It’s a mews turned into a club with a porter down at the bottom of the stairs, and where the grooms would sleep is where they play. It’s only been open a few weeks.’