Her face fell. She said, “I had no idea…”

“That he has common rights?”

“I don’t even know what the expression means, to tell you the truth.”

Rob explained briefly, how some of the land within the Perambulation had certain rights attached to it-the right of pasture, the right of mast, the right of estovers or marl or turbary-and this particular property had the right of common pasture. It meant that Gordon and Jemima had been allowed ponies which could graze freely upon the New Forest but the proviso was that land near the house had to be kept free for the ponies should they need to be removed from the forest for any reason. “Gordon didn’t tell you this?” he said. “Odd that he’d be thinking of putting a garden in the paddock when he knows he can’t.”

She fingered the edge of the map. “I haven’t actually told him about the garden. He knows I’d like to bring my girls out here. So they can see the horses, walk on the forest or in the inclosures, picnic by one pond or another…But I hadn’t really gone further than that. I thought I’d make a plan of it first. You know…sketch it out?”

Robbie nodded. “It’s not a bad idea. Are these city girls, then? From Winchester or Southampton or the like?”

“No, no. They’d be from Brockenhurst. I mean they’d go to school in Brockenhurst-the college or the comprehensive?-but they could be from anywhere in the New Forest, I expect.”

“Hmmm. Except they’d be from properties just like this, some of them,” he noted. “So it wouldn’t be that much of a diversion for them, would it?”

She frowned. “I hadn’t thought of that.” She walked to the kitchen window. It overlooked the driveway into the property and the west paddock beyond the driveway. She said with a sigh, “All this land…It seemed such a shame not to put it to good use.”

“Depends on how you define ‘good use,’” Robbie said. As he spoke he looked round the kitchen. It was bare of those items that had belonged to Jemima: her set of cookbooks, her colourful wall hangings, and on a shelf above the table, her model horses-some of that collection which she’d kept at her family home, his own home-were gone. In their place were propped a dozen antique postcards of the sort that predated greeting cards: one for Easter, one for Valentine’s Day, two for Christmas, etc. They were not Jemima’s.

Seeing these, it came to Robbie that Meredith Powell was correct in her surmise. Gordon Jossie had wiped Robbie’s sister completely from his life. That wasn’t unreasonable. But having her car and her clothing was. Jossie wanted talking to. There was no doubt of that.

GORDON LAY IN BED THE NEXT MORNING WITH THE SWEATS come upon him, and their source had nothing to do with the summer heat, as it was early-shortly after six-and the day was not yet baking. He’d suffered through another nightmare.

He always woke with a start, a gasp for air, a weight on his chest like a test for witchery, and then the sweats. These regularly drenched him, the pyjamas he wore in winter, and the bedsheets. And when he was drenched, he began to shiver, which woke Gina up as it had once awakened Jemima.

Their reactions were completely different, though. Jemima always wanted answers to the whys. Why do you have nightmares? Why are you not talking to someone about them? Why haven’t you seen a doctor about the sweats? There could be something wrong, she told him. A sleep disorder, a lung disorder, a weakness of the heart…God only knew. But whatever the reason, he needed to take an action because this kind of thing could kill him.

Which was how Jemima always thought: people dying. It was her greatest fear and no one needed to explain to him the reason for this. His own fears were different but no less real to him than hers were to her, and that was what life was like. People had fears. They learned to cope. He’d learned to cope with his and he didn’t like to talk about them.

Gina didn’t require talking about them. With Gina, when he woke with the sweats in the morning after a night she’d spent with him-which was most nights, actually, and there was really no point to her keeping her place in Lyndhurst any longer, was there?-she rose from the bed and went to the bathroom for a flannel, which she dampened and then returned to use it upon his body. She brought a bowl of cool water with her, and when the flannel grew too hot from his skin, she dipped it in the water and then used it against him again. He wore nothing in summer when he went to bed, so there were no clammy pyjamas to remove. She smoothed the flannel against his limbs and his face and his chest and when he became aroused by this, she smiled and she mounted him or she did other things equally pleasurable and when she did this, every nightmare he’d had sleeping or waking was forgotten and very nearly every thought he harboured was gone from his mind.

Except one. Jemima.

Gina asked nothing of him. She merely wanted to love and be with him. Jemima, on the other hand, had asked the world. She had ultimately asked the impossible. And when he’d explained why he could not give her what she asked for, that had ended everything.

Before Jemima, he’d kept clear of women. But when he’d met her, he’d seen the light hearted girl that she presented to the world, the fun-loving spirit with a childlike gap between her front teeth. He’d thought, I need someone like this in my life, but he’d been wrong. It hadn’t yet been time and it probably never would be, but here he was now with another woman, as unlike Jemima as was humanly possible.

He couldn’t say he loved Gina. He knew he ought to love her, as she was certainly worthy of any man’s love. When they’d first gone into the hotel in Sway for a drink on the afternoon he’d seen her up in the woods, more than one bloke had looked her over and looked at him and he knew what each of them was thinking because one thought such things about Gina Dickens, one couldn’t help it and still be a human male. Gina didn’t seem to mind. She looked at him frankly, in a way that said, It’s yours if you want it, when you’re ready. And when he’d decided that by God he was ready because he couldn’t live as he’d been living with Jemima gone, he’d accepted her offer and now here she was and he didn’t regret his decision in the least.

She bathed him now. And all the rest. And if he took her forcefully instead of allowing himself to be taken by her, that was fine with Gina. She gave a breathless laugh as he moved her roughly onto her back and her legs spread and then went round him. He found her mouth and it opened to him like the rest of her and he wondered how he’d got lucky just this once and what he would have to pay for his good fortune.

Afterwards, they both were soaking. They separated and laughed at the sucking sound that came from damp skin disengaging from other damp skin. They showered together and she washed his hair and when he became aroused again, she said, “Good lord, Gordon,” with a breathless laugh and she dealt with it-with him-again. He said, “Enough,” but she said, “Not enough,” and she proved it to him. His knees went weak.

He said, “Where’d you learn this, woman?” and she said, “Did Jemima not like sex?”

He said, “Not like this,” and by that he meant wanton. For Jemima it had been reassurance. Love me, don’t leave me. But she had done the leaving.

It was nearly eight when they went down to the kitchen for breakfast. Gina talked to him about her desire for a garden. He didn’t want a garden with all the unnecessary disruption it would bring to his life, not to mention the laying of walks, the arranging of borders, the digging, the planting, the building of sheds or greenhouses or conservatories or whatever. He didn’t want any of it. He hadn’t told her as much because he liked the look of her as she went on about what a garden would mean to her, to them, and to “her girls” as she called them. But then she also brought up Rob Hastings and what he had told her about the land.