‘Ten guineas!’ Dandy exclaimed. ‘Merry, what will you do with so much money?’

‘I shall save it,’ I said sagely, dipping my bread into the rich gravy around the chicken. ‘I don’t know what money we will need in the future, Dandy. I’m going to start saving for a house of our own.’

They both gaped at me for that ambition, and I laughed aloud though my bruised ribs made me gasp and say: ‘Oh! Don’t make me laugh! Please don’t make me laugh! I hurts so when I laugh!’

Then I asked them to tell me what they had been doing all the day; but they both complained that it was the same as the day before, and looked like being the same for ever. They had both swung up high on the trapeze in the roof of the barn, but most of their work had been on the practice trapeze at ground level, and pulling themselves up and down on the bar.

‘I’m aching all over,’ Dandy complained. ‘And that dratted David just makes us work and work and work.’

Jack nodded in discontented agreement.

‘I’m starving too,’ he said. ‘Merry, we’ll go over and get our dinners and come back to you after. Is there anything you need?’

‘No,’ I said smiling in gratitude. ‘I’ll lie here and watch the firelight. Thank you for making the fire, Jack.’

He leaned towards me and ruffled my hair so my curls stood on end.

‘It was nothing, my little gambler,’ he said. ‘We’ll see you in a little while.’

The two of them clattered down the stairs to the stable, I heard Dandy groan as she had to pull the trapdoor at the head of the stairs shut with her aching arms, and then their voices as they crossed the yard and went through the little gateway to the house. Then I heard the kitchen door open and close and there was silence.

Silence except for the flickering noise of the fire and the occasional rustle from Sea, safe in the stable beneath my room. I watched the shadows bob and fall on the wall beside me. I had never seen a fire light up a bedroom before, I had never lain in darkness and felt the warm glow of it on my face, and seen the bright warmth of it behind my closed eyelids. I felt enormously comfortable and at peace and safe. For once in my life I felt that I need not fear the next day, nor plan our survival in an unreliable and dangerous world. Robert Gower had said that he wished he had a dozen of me. He had said that he was better pleased with me than he had been with any living soul. I had let him hold my hand, and I had not felt that uneasy anxious prickle of distaste at his touch. I had let Jack rumple my head and I had liked the careless caress. I watched the flames of the fire which Jack had lit for me, in the room which Robert had made ready for me, and for once I felt that someone cared for me. I fell asleep then, still smiling. And when Jack and Dandy came to see how I did, they found me asleep with my arm outflung and my hand open, as if I were reaching out, unafraid. They put an extra log on the fire and crept away.

I did not dream in the night, and I slept late into the morning. Robert had ordered Dandy not to wake me, and I did not stir until breakfast time. I went to the kitchen then and confessed to Mrs Greaves that I had lost her bonnet in the course of winning the master a fortune. She already knew the story and smiled and said that it did not matter.

The dress and the apron were a more serious matter. The apron was permanently stained with blood and grass stains, the grey dress marked as well. I looked cheerfully at them both as Mrs Greaves hauled them out of the copper and tutted into the steam.

‘I’ll have to wear breeches all the time then,’ I said.

Mrs Greaves turned to me with a little smile. ‘If you knew how bonny you looked in them you’d not wear them,’ she said. ‘You think to dress like a lad and no man will notice you. That may have been true when you were a little lass, or even this summer; but now you’d turn heads even if you were wearing a sack tied around your middle. And in those little breeches and your white shirt you look a picture.’

I flushed scarlet, suddenly uncomfortable. Then I looked up at her. She was still smiling. ‘Nothing to be afraid of, Meridon,’ she said gently. ‘You’ll have seen some bad doings when you were a girl, but when a man loves a woman it can sometimes be very sweet. Very sweet indeed.’

She gave a little sigh and dumped the heap of wet cloth back into the copper and set it back on to boil.

‘It’s not all sluts in hedgerows and dancing for pennies,’ she said, turning her back to me as she laid the table for breakfast. ‘If a man truly loves you he can surround you with love so that you feel as if you are the most precious woman in the world. It’s like forever sitting in front of a warm fire, well fed and safe.’

I said nothing. I thought of Robert Gower keeping my hand warm under his arm as he drove home. I thought of my head dropping on his shoulder as I slept. For the first time in a cold and hungry life I thought that I could understand longing for the touch of a man.

‘Breakfast,’ Mrs Greaves said, suddenly practical. ‘Run and call the others, Merry.’

They were practising in the barn. David, Jack and Dandy; and Robert was watching them, his unlit pipe gripped between his teeth. Dandy was swinging from the practice trapeze and I could see that even in the day that I had been away she had learned to time herself to the rhythm of the swing. David was calling the beat for her but more and more often she was bringing her legs down at exactly the right moment and the swing was rising, gaining height, rather than trailing to a standstill as it had done on our first day.

They were glad enough to come back to the house for breakfast. David exclaimed over my black eye but it had opened enough for me to see clearly and I had taken enough knocks in my girlhood to rid me of vanity about a few bruises.

‘When we were chavvies I don’t think I ever saw Merry without a black eye,’ Dandy said, spreading Mrs Greaves’ home-made butter on a hunk of fresh-baked bread. ‘If she didn’t come off one of the horses then our da would clip her round the ear and miss. We didn’t know her eyes were green-coloured until she was twelve!’

David looked at me as if he did not know whether to laugh or be sorry for me.

‘It didn’t matter,’ I said. They were hurts from long ago, I would not let the aches and pains of my childhood cast a shadow over my life now. Not when I could feel myself opening, like a sticky bud on a chestnut tree in April.

‘Will you be too sore to train today?’ David asked me.

‘I’ll try,’ I said. ‘Nothing was broken, I was just bruised. I reckon I’ll be all right to work.’

Robert pushed his clean plate away from him. ‘If your face starts throbbing or your head aches, you stop,’ he said. Dandy and Jack looked at him in surprise. Mrs Greaves, at the stove, stayed very still, her head turned away. ‘I’ve seen some nasty after-effects of head injuries,’ he said to David, who nodded. ‘If she seems sleepy or in pain you’re to send her in to Mrs Greaves.’

Mrs Greaves turned from the stove and wiped her hands on her working apron, her face inscrutable.

‘If Meridon comes in ill you take care of her, ma’am,’ he said to her. ‘Put her on the sofa in the parlour where you can keep an eye on her.’ She nodded. Dandy was frozen, a piece of bread half-way to her mouth.

‘Meridon to come into the parlour?’ Dandy demanded tactlessly.

A flicker of irritation crossed Robert’s face. ‘Why not?’ he said suddenly. ‘The only reason you two girls are housed in the stable yard is because I thought you would like your own little place, and it is easier for you to mind the horses. The two of you are welcome in the house, aye, and in the parlour too if you wish.’

I flushed scarlet at Dandy’s slip, and at Jack’s open-mouthed stare.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said flatly. ‘I’m well enough to work and I won’t need to rest. In any case, I’d not want to sit in the parlour.’

Robert pushed his chair back from the table and it scraped on the stone-flagged floor. ‘A lot of to-do about nothing,’ he said gruffly and went out of the kitchen. David got to his feet as well.

‘Half an hour’s rest,’ he said to the three of us. ‘I’d like to see this famous horse of yours, Meridon.’

I smiled at that and led all of them, Mrs Greaves as well, out to the stable yard to see my horse, my very own horse, in daylight.

He was lovely. In daylight, in a familiar stable yard, he was even lovelier than I had remembered him. His neck was arched high, as if there were Arab blood in him. His coat was a dark grey, shading to pewter on his hind legs. His mane and tail were the purest of white and silver, down his grey face there was a pale white blaze, just discernible. And four white socks on his long legs. He whickered when he heard my step and came out of the stable with just a halter on, as gently as if he had never thrown and rolled on a rider in his life. He threw up his head and sidled when he saw the others and I called:

‘Stand back, especially you Jack and David. He doesn’t like men!’

‘He’ll suit Meridon, then,’ said Dandy to Jack and he smiled and nodded.

Sea stood quiet enough then, and I held his head collar and smoothed his neck and whispered to him to be still, and not to be frightened, for no one would ever hurt him or shout at him again. I found I was whispering endearments, phrases of love, telling him how beautiful he was – quite the most beautiful horse in the world! And that he should be with me for ever and ever. That I had won him in Robert’s bet, but that in truth we had found each other and that we would never part again. Then I led him back down through the path at the side of the garden to the field and turned him out with the others to graze.