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Bernard’s obsessed mind, grounds for suspicion that she was on the pill, that she was milking the arrangement, taking all she could from him before she had to start giving him babies. So almost anything she had done or said had constituted an excuse for yet another short, sharp reminder that she was supposed to be giving him a son. She had learned from experience not to fight back, not to utter aloud the names she called him under her breath, not to leave before she was dismissed, because that prolonged the proceedings. He’d hammered obedience into his lass, and he’d hammer it into her, he would tell her as the vicious little punches landed, and to some extent, he had. Because she hadn’t left him, unwilling to give up on her fortune. She might he married to a raving lunatic, but he was going to be an incredibly rich raving lunatic, and she was on a percentage.
    And as summer had approached, she had finally missed a period, but she hadn’t told Bernard, by that time unsure of what she intended doing. Bernard had been expecting a visitor, and she had been sent up to the bedroom as she always was when business was to be discussed; she had been giving long, hard consideration to her future, had decided that she would have to leave, when she had heard the voices.
    At first they had baffled her, scared her, apparently coming out of thin air. Then she had realized, from the monosyllabic responses, that one of them was Bernard’s, and she knew where they were coming from, and why she had never heard them before. It had been the first day since she had moved in that there had been no fires lit in the non-centrally heated farmhouse. And it had been eavesdropping on that one-sided conversation, floating up through the chimney breast from the empty hearth in the office into the empty hearth in the bedroom, that had determined Rachel’s course of action.
    It was someone called McQueen who had come to see him; Bernard had told him to get out, but he had stood his ground. Men could; Bernard wasn’t so brave with men. And McQueen had said that he knew why Bernard had let most of the crops go and had concentrated on animals; which had, as things had turned out, been a wrong move, with the beef ban.
    She had already known that Bernard was having a difficult time of it with the export ban produced by the beef health-scare; half his profits had gone at a stroke, and the cows weren’t being auctioned at anything like their proper price at home. He had had to slaughter some of the cattle, and was still waiting for compensation; he had been told he might have to slaughter a whole lot more. Nothing had been settled about that, and he was having to feed and water them until it was. Couldn’t sell them, couldn’t do anything with them.
    What she hadn’t known, what she had found out, was that Bernard had risked almost all his capital in some financial venture; not long after his first wife died, it had failed, and he had lost it all. That when the beef ban had come along, he had had nothing to fall back on, and had borrowed money, then more money, then more, until now one missed payment on the loan meant repossession of the farm. That he was paying it back with money he didn’t have, living on credit that he couldn’t repay. That despite the impression he gave of solid wealth, the truth was that he was broke, and the farm couldn’t carry on for more than a few months longer.
    But McQueen wanted Bernard’s land, and the amount he was prepared to pay for it had made Rachel’s eyes widen. Bernard had turned him down, of course, because he had very much greater expectations. But Rachel had already decided that she wasn’t going to tell him about the baby she was carrying; once she had heard McQueen’s offer, she knew she had to get rid of it altogether. If there was no baby, he would have no incentive to keep on juggling his money around; he would have to sell, and she would still be able to salvage something from her dreadful