I went down to the haymaking and watched them scything the crop under a pale warm sky, and tossing the sweet-smelling green grass to dry in the summer wind. The girls with the rakes smiled and called, ‘Good day,’ to Will with a note of affection, but to me they nodded and said nothing.

I knew what was happening and I did not blame Will for blabbing about our breach. I did not think he was the tattling sort and I did not think he would take every village slut into his confidence. But they knew that I was staying with the Haverings to learn to become a young lady. They knew that I was riding with Will to learn all I could about my land to strengthen my hand against them when the time came for me to make changes. They knew that although I had come home I was not at ease on the land, I was still rootless, hopeless in my heart. And so they wasted neither love nor words on me. They knew I did not belong. They knew I did not want to belong. I wanted to own the land. I did not care about loving it.

Every day that I rode with Will he became more like a clerk, or a bailiff or some middling sort of servant. He stopped calling me Sarah and speaking directly to me. Then one day he called me Miss Lacey and I knew myself to be set at a distance indeed. I could have summoned him back. I could have recalled the affection which had been growing between us. But…but I was damned if I would. When I saw his stiff back and his proudly held head trotting away from me I could have sworn and slung a flint under his horse’s hooves for being a stubborn fool. But I was learning to be a lady; and ladies do not swear and throw things.

I thought he was foolish and proud and I decided to ignore him. So I made no effort either to challenge or reconcile with him. Instead I was as haughty and as ill-tempered as he through all the hot summer days when the birds called for their mates and the swallows dipped and dived in the lingering lonely twilights. When I was alone at the top of the Downs, with Sea cropping the grass around me, I knew that I was missing my friends – not just her, but James Fortescue whom I had sent away, Will whom I had put at a distance, and all the people of Acre who had welcomed me with smiles and bright curious faces, and who had then learned that I would not live at Wideacre Hall, that I would not stay with them, that I was hard set on changing things, on changing everything.

I knew myself then to be bereft, but I had been so lonely and so hungry for so long that I did not jump up on Sea and ride down to Acre to seek Will out and make things clear with him. Instead I hunched up my shoulders and hugged my knees and watched the sun set redly in the sky, and huddled my feelings of loneliness and sadness within me, as a familiar longing.

In Will’s absence I rode with Perry, and sometimes Lady Clara took me around her own fields, or ordered her bailiff to drive out with me in her pale-blue lined-landau. He was a sharp hard-faced man; I could not like him. But I could recognize his ability to price a crop while it showed just inches above the soil, or to adjust a rent in his mind during the walk from the gate to the back door.

Will was right about the hardship on the Havering land. I saw it on every drive. Havering village was more like a campsite than a village. The houses were ready to tumble down and half were down already with their tenants sheltering in the lee of a wall with a half-thatched roof over their heads. The slops were thrown out in the village street, the stink under the hot summer sun was enough to turn your stomach. The people worked from dawn to dusk for wages which were as low as Lady Clara and Mr Briggs could keep them. More and more work was being done by the wretches brought in by a jolting wagon daily from Midhurst poorhouse. ‘It’s a service to the community to save them from idleness,’ Mr Briggs explained to me, smiling.

They planned to clear the village of Havering altogether. Lady Clara was sick of the dirt of it and the continual complaints which not all of Mr Briggs’s smiling threats could keep from her ears. The villagers who lived in the dirt and the squalor believed that if she really knew of their poverty she would pity them, she would do something.

‘All I’m likely to do is to set the soldiers on them and burn them out,’ she said grimly. ‘It’s disgusting how they live! They must lack all sense of shame!’

I said nothing. Will’s angry denunciations of the Quality were echoing in my head: ‘You leave them ignorant and then you complain they know nothing,’ he had said. I kept my eyes blank and I said nothing when Lady Clara threatened to clear the village.

I had thought she was threatening idly something that would never take place. But one day I came down to the parlour in my riding habit pulling on my gloves and she looked at me very hard and bright, and said: ‘Don’t go to Havering village today, Sarah, it’s being cleared.’

‘Cleared?’ I asked.

She nodded grimly. ‘I’ve had enough of them,’ she said. ‘Their complaints, their needs, their dirt and their diseases. There’s a case of the typhus fever been reported down there as well. I won’t have sickly people on my land.’

‘What will they do?’ I asked.

She shrugged. She was wearing a peach silk morning gown and that elegant movement of her shoulders made the pattern of the gown shimmer.

‘They’ll go to the Midhurst poorhouse I suppose,’ she said. ‘Any of them who can claim rights in other parishes will go to where they can, if they have money for the fare. I don’t care, it’s none of my concern. I won’t have them on my land any more.’

I hesitated. This blank ruthlessness was not new to me. I had been sold from a stepfather who despised me, to a master who loved me only when I earned him money. I saw no reason why I should worry over the fate of a dozen dirty villagers who were not even my tenants. And yet, in some part of my mind, I did worry. I did not feel comfortable to be sitting here in the sunny parlour looking at the sheen of Lady Clara’s peach silk while three miles away there were people arguing with bailiffs and begging them not to evict. I knew what it was to have nothing. I knew what it was to be homeless. I wondered what the people would do, those with young children who would be separated from them in the poorhouse. Those young women with husbands who would lose their homes and have to sleep apart.

‘I’ll ride the other way,’ I said uncertainly. ‘Towards Wideacre.’

She put both hands up and carefully smoothed her cheeks as if she would stroke away the faint fretwork of lines from under her eyes.

‘Certainly my dear,’ she said pleasantly. ‘If you see any of the evicted tenants don’t go too near. They may be carrying the fever and they will certainly be ill natured. They did have fair warning of my intentions, you know. Mr Briggs told them a day ago.’

I nodded, thinking that a day’s warning was perhaps not enough if you had been born and bred in a cottage and lived all your life there.

‘Perry can ride with you,’ she said. ‘Pull the bell.’

I did. At Havering we all did what Lady Clara wished. Within the hour Perry and I were obediently riding together up towards the Common at the back of the Havering estate.

The path wound through a little coppice of silver birches, their heart-shaped leaves shivering in the summer air. It was another hot day, the scent of the thick bracken heavy and sweet. When the path came out on a little hill Perry drew rein and we looked back.

There was little trouble in the village. We could see from where we watched a couple of soldiers standing with Mr Briggs at the end of the village street while half a dozen men went workmanlike down one side, pulling off rotting doors and knocking axes through old dusty thatch. Drawn up in the street, ahead of the wreckers, was a large cart with a handsome shire horse between the shafts. The Havering people were loading their few goods on to the cart, a man standing on the cart helping them. I screwed my eyes against the glare of the sunlight but I hardly needed to see him to know it was Will Tyacke.

‘Who’s that?’ Perry asked me.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. I lied before I had even considered the lie. ‘Perhaps someone from the poorhouse.’

‘Oh,’ Perry said innocently, and we stood for a little while, watching in silence.

The wreckers reached another house and there was a moment’s hesitation. We were too far to hear or see anything clearly but I guessed that someone inside had refused to leave. I shrugged. It was not my land and anyway Lady Clara was probably in the right. Since she was not going to spend money on making the cottages habitable they were better pulled down. The tenants would have to make lives for themselves elsewhere. There was no reason why Lady Clara should be responsible for each and every one of them.

‘What d’you think is happening?’ Perry asked. ‘The sun is so bright I can hardly see.’

I shaded my eyes with my hand. Sea stirred restlessly as he felt my weight move on the saddle.

‘Someone, I think a woman,’ I said. I could just make out a little figure standing in the dark doorway of one of the hovels. As I watched, the wreckers made a rush for her and she grabbed the post which propped the thatched porch. In a ludicrous pose, like a comical print, one of the men got hold of her legs while she clung to the post of her house.

I sniggered, and Perry laughed beside me. ‘She’ll pull it down herself if she doesn’t watch out,’ he observed.

We watched together smiling, but there was no sport. Will Tyacke went quickly to her and made the man put her on her feet. He bent over her and I saw she was quite a small woman. He put his arm around her and he led her to the cart. Out of the cottage behind her came three little children, the smallest a baby, lugged by the others.