Wideacre

16

I liked Mr Llewellyn on sight. He was a fifty-year-old Welshman who had made a fortune on the little hill ponies of his home mountains. He had bred a string of them and, cunningly, gave them as presents to the cream of the London nobility. Months of relentless training paid off and the ponies carried the heirs of the wealthiest estates in the land with rocksteady safety — and set a new fashion. The craze for the Llewellyn Welsh mountain ponies swept the fashionable world and was not exhausted until every butcher’s daughter had one of her own. By the time the fashion had moved on Mr Llewellyn had a fine town house of his own and need never again set foot in Wales, never again go out in the freezing fog of a Welsh winter to break the water on the drinking troughs.

But he had lost none of his sharp peasant cleverness in the huge town mansion. His blue eyes twinkled at the frosty fields of Wideacre and ranged over the view from my office window as if he was pricing every tree in the park.

‘A neat estate,’ he said approvingly.

‘We have made many improvements,’ said Harry, sipping coffee with relish. He gestured to the map where the fields we had enclosed were outlined in yellow: the colour of the wheat we would plant this spring. Harry and I had spent long anxious evenings outlining in a dotted orange line all the areas where wheat could grow if the land was cleared. Each time Harry’s pudgy finger swept over a wood or a lush meadow I felt dread, and a foreboding of loss.

‘We can’t possibly enclose Norman Meadow,’ I had said. ‘It’s an old battlefield and the ploughshare will turn up skulls and bones. We’ll never get a boy to take a plough in there. The whole of Acre believes it is haunted.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ said Harry, interested. ‘What battle would that have been?’

‘The one that gained us the land, I think,’ I had said ruefully. ‘The tradition is that it was there that the Le Says, our ancestors, brought their handful of Norman soldiers and beat the Saxon peasants in a fight that went on for three days until every man in the village was dead. That’s the story, anyway.’

‘Well, it would make jolly good fertilizer!’ said Harry jovially. ‘And see, Beatrice! If we turn Oak Tree Meadow over to corn, and Three Gate Meadow over to corn, we cannot be left with a meadow growing hay stuck in the middle. It doesn’t make sense.’

None of it made sense to me. To change the shape of a high-profit high-yielding farm where the people who owned the land and the people who lived on it had hammered out some sort of harmony. Where the memory that the landowners came in and laid waste to the village was no more than the name of a field. Wideacre as it stood was a little island of security in a changing countryside. All around us landowners were changing the way they ran their farms. Charging higher rents for shorter leases, withdrawing traditional rights so the poorest of the poor were forced off the land altogether. Using the parish workhouse labour rather than keeping their own people in lifelong security. And building higher and sharper-topped park walls to shut out the sight of the angry faces pinched and thin with hunger and the eyes that burned with rage.

But then I remembered the entail and my son, and my heart hardened. When Richard was Squire of Wideacre with Julia his partner he could make reparation to the people I had been forced to injure in my search for ready money to pay his way to the Master’s chair. When Richard ruled the land he could restore the fields for the villagers’ vegetables. He could bring back the meadows; he could reopen the footpaths. He could let them snare rabbits, and fish again in the Fenny. When Richard was Squire he could leave the fresh new cornfields to revert to common land. And in a few years (very well, I concede, in many, many years), Wideacre would be again as it was before I conspired with Harry to despoil it. Richard could put right what I was forced to make wrong. Once Richard was in the Master’s chair he could make Wideacre good again. And the only way I knew to put him there was to make it bad first.

‘It will look so different,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ said Harry. ‘It will start to look like a properly planned estate, like one of the plans in my book, rather than a picturesque muddle.’

‘Yes,’ I said sadly.

The map I had ordered so proudly so that I could resolve the silly squabbles about the use of the land and the precise route of paths or borders was now Harry’s delight. He led Mr Llewellyn over to it with an insistent hand on his arm.

‘You’re planning a lot of changes,’ Mr Llewellyn said, scanning the growth of orange-dotted fields, which were spreading like a fungus.

‘Yes,’ said Harry with pride in his voice.

‘You believe in corn then?’ said the London merchant, smiling.

‘Of course,’ said Harry. ‘That’s where the profits are these days.’

Mr Llewellyn, peasant stock from a hard region, nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But you’re making a lot of changes very quickly, aren’t you?’

Harry nodded, and leaned towards Mr Llewellyn confidentially.

‘We have a project in mind that we need capital to finance,’ he said.

‘And we plan to raise that capital with your mortgage,’ I interrupted Harry smoothly. ‘We will repay the loan with the profits from the extra wheatfields so the turnover of money from the estate remains at its present high level, despite the loan.’

Mr Llewellyn nodded at me, his shrewd blue eyes crinkling in a smile. He had seen that I had silenced Harry.

‘You’ll miss your hay crop,’ he said. ‘How much will it cost you to buy in the extra hay you will need for winter feed?’

I pulled a sheet of paper towards me, for I had done the calculations, not Harry.

‘Between eight hundred and a thousand pounds, depending on the going rate,’ I said. ‘But we will be feeding the sheep on root crops, and on this new silage made from clover. Both the roots and the clover grow in the cornfields when they are being rested for a season.’

‘And hay for the horses?’ Mr Llewellyn asked Harry. But again I answered.

‘The horses will continue to eat their heads off,’ I said. ‘But we will keep enough hayfields to feed them.’

Mr Llewellyn nodded and scanned the figures I handed to him.

‘Let’s see the lie of the land,’ he said, putting his coffee cup down.

‘My brother Harry will show you around,’ I said, gesturing to my black silk gown. ‘I am still in mourning and I can only drive.’

‘Drive me then!’ he said genially, and I found myself smiling back at him.

‘I should be happy to,’ I said politely. ‘But I must tell the stables, then go and change. Excuse me for one minute.’

I slipped from the room and called from the west-wing door to a stable lad to harness Sorrel to the new gig. I took only minutes to change into my black velvet riding habit, and then I threw a thick black broadcloth cape on top, for this December weather was bitter.

‘You would rather drive than ride?’ I asked Mr Llewellyn as he tucked a rug across our knees and we bowled down the drive, Sorrel’s hoofs noisy on the frozen gravel and the iron-hard mud.

‘I would rather see the land with the farmer,’ said Mr Llewellyn with a sly sideways twinkle at me. ‘I think it is your footprint on the fields, Mrs MacAndrew.’

I smiled my assent, but stayed silent.

‘These are handsome woods,’ he said, looking around at the beech trees silvered on the east side with last night’s snow.

‘They are,’ I said. ‘But we would never mortgage these. The woods I would like you to consider are higher up, mostly firs and pines, on the north slopes of the downs.’

We took the bridle-track opposite the drive, and Sorrel leaned forward against the collar and blew clouds of steam with the weight of the gig.

The strips of the common plots where the villagers had planted their own crops for the past seven hundred years were white with frost. The little boundary walls and fences were already pulled down, and in the spring we would be ploughing up the vegetable rows that had been tended with so much care for so long.

We gained about twenty acres taking the land back from the villagers. Their land, where they could grow vegetables for the pot, and seed for the fowls: a shield against a poor season, no work, and the spectre of hunger. Their right to their little strip of land was nowhere stated in writing; they had no contract. It was just the tradition that these few acres should always be for the villagers’ use. And when I drove into the village and told half-a-dozen of the oldest men that we were ploughing up the land for corn next spring there was nothing they could do to stop me.

I had not discussed the matter; I had not even got down from the gig. I had met them under the chestnut tree on the green and, as I had told them, it started to snow. They had to have their grumble beside their own fireplaces, not at me. And, in any case, the potatoes had already been lifted, the green vegetables cut. They would not feel the loss of the common strips until next winter.

Even then, Acre villagers might count themselves lucky, for almost every cottage had a little garden. The gardens were filled with flowers, often the pride and joy of the house. They would have to go, and the little grass patches where children played would be dug over for vegetables, and planted in straight rows. All this, so that the Wideacre estate might be increased by twenty acres. But all this so that my son Richard would be a week closer to the Master’s chair with the extra small profit.

I pulled Sorrel up, and tied her to a fence post and then led the way on a little path along the brow of the downs until we reached the new plantation with the sheep-proof withy fence protecting the young trees.

‘How old is it?’ asked Mr Llewellyn, the smile gone from his eyes and a hard shrewd look ranging over the tall trees, now standing twenty, thirty feet.

‘I planted it with my papa,’ I said, smiling at the memory. ‘I was five. These woods are fourteen years old. He promised I should have a stool from these trees when I was an old lady.’ I shrugged away my sadness.

‘Times change,’ said Mr Llewellyn, his quick mind following my grief. ‘No one can predict the way things change these days. All we can do is to try to follow our consciences — and to chase profit with a care to others!’ He gave me a rueful smile and turned back to the trees.

‘Growing well,’ he commented approvingly. ‘How many trees?’

‘About five hundred,’ I said. I opened the little gate in the fence for him, and he strode down the straight rows looking carefully at the needles for signs of disease, pulling at the branches to see their healthy spring back into place. Then he walked in a carefully paced square, his lips moving as he counted how many trees to a ten yard square.

‘Good,’ he said finally. ‘I’ll certainly lend money on this plantation. I have a contract you may look at in my chaise. Was there some common land as well?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But it’s in the opposite direction. We’ll drive there.’

We walked back to the gig and with clever courtesy he did not offer to help me as I took Sorrel’s reins at the bit and backed him up the narrow path to turn the gig. Only when I had Sorrel facing downhill with the brake on, did he swing into the gig and smile at me.

We drove downhill and then along the lane towards Acre. Before we reached the village we turned left into the park woodland again, along the little track that leads to the new mill. Mrs Green was feeding hens from her front door and I waved at her as we went past and saw her eyes scanning Mr Llewellyn, wondering who he was. She would know soon enough. There are no secrets on Wideacre. I never expect to keep my business quiet.

The track wound through the woods, thickly silent under the grip of the frost, and then broke out into clearer ground as we neared the common. Softly on the air I heard the creaky sound of strong wings and above our heads was a V of geese flying westwards, looking for melted water and feed.

‘This is the land,’ I said, nodding at the common. ‘I showed you the area on the map. It is all as you see here. A little hilly, mainly bracken and heather, a few trees which will have to be felled and two little streams.’

I kept my voice even, but my love for the common, gold and brass under this cold winter light, crept into my tone despite myself. One of the streams was near by and we could hear the trickle of its clear waters as it dripped off icicle waterfalls on its way to the Fenny.

The bracken still glowed bronze under a silvering of white frost. The few trees I would have to fell were my beloved silver birches, their trunks paper-white and their twigs a deep purple-brown in a shape as graceful as a Sèvres vase. The heather still held pale grey flowers under the coating of hoar frost, so every plant masqueraded as lucky white heather. The ground beneath the wheels of the gig was hard as a rock where the wet peat had frozen, but in the little valleys the white sand was as crunchy as sugar and looked as pale and as sweet.

‘You can enclose this?’ Mr Llewellyn looked at me, his face quizzical.

‘There are no legal problems,’ I said. ‘The land belongs outright to the Wideacre estate. It has always been used as common land and there is only a tradition of access and use. Our people have always taken the lesser game here; they have always grazed animals here; they have always collected firewood or kindling here. But there is nothing in writing. In the old days it used to be agreed annually by the Squire and the village, but there are no records. There is no written agreement to stop us.’

I smiled but my eyes were cold.

‘And even if there were records,’ I said ironically. ‘They are kept in my office, and there are few of our people who can read. There is certainly no reason why we should not enclose this.’

‘You misunderstand me.’ Mr Llewellyn spoke softly, but his eyes no longer twinkled. ‘I meant to ask whether you felt you could bear to rip up this land with a plough, level the valleys, fill in the stream beds and plant acres of corn here.’

‘That is my intention,’ I said, my face as grave as his.

‘Well, well,’ he said, and he said no more.

‘You are interested in a mortgage on this land?’ I asked neutrally, and I turned the trap back the way we had come.

‘Indeed, yes,’ he said coolly. ‘It promises to be a most profitable venture for the estate. Would you wish to have the money paid directly to you, or to your London bankers?’

‘To our London lawyers, if you please,’ I said. ‘You have their address.’

We sat in silence then, and the trap rattled home in the yellow winter sunshine, which brightened but could not warm the icy day.

‘A pleasure to do business with you, Mrs MacAndrew,’ he said formally, as we drove into the stable yard. ‘I’ll not come in again. I’ll be off now as soon as my horses are put to.’

He went to his chaise and brought the two contracts out to me. I took them, standing beside Sorrel’s head, her soft lips gently nipping at my fingers, cold inside the leather gloves. I tapped her russet nose and held my hand out to him in farewell.

‘Thank you for calling,’ I said politely. ‘Good day, and safe journey.’

He got into his chaise and the footman folded up the steps, slammed the door and swung himself up into his seat behind. A cold ride he would have of it, I thought, all the way to London in his livery. I raised a hand in farewell as the carriage moved off.

The day was cold, but I was chilled inside at the change in Mr Llewellyn’s manner towards me. A total stranger, he despised me for my attitude to the common land, for reneging on the informal contract between me and the poorest of the poor, for my willingness to destroy the easy fertile beauty of Wideacre. I shivered. Then the carriage was no longer between me and the Hall, and I could see the door to the west wing. Celia was standing there, watching me. She was dressed in the usual black, and she looked thin, and slight, and scared.

‘Who was that gentleman?’ she asked. ‘Why did you not invite him in?’

‘Just a merchant,’ I said easily, handing the reins of Sorrel to one of the stable lads. I swept Celia in with an arm around her waist. ‘It’s freezing again,’ I said briskly. ‘Let’s go and warm up beside your parlour fire.’

‘What did he want?’ she persisted as I stripped off my gloves and cape and rang for hot coffee.

‘To buy the timber from the new plantation,’ I said with a convincing half-truth. ‘I had to drive him up there and it was terribly cold.’

‘Selling the timber already?’ said Celia surprised. ‘But the plantation isn’t ready for cutting yet, surely?’

‘No, not yet, Celia,’ I said. ‘He’s a timber specialist. He offers you a guaranteed price long before the cutting. Actually it is growing well and will be ready for felling soon. You haven’t been up there for years, Celia. You don’t know what it is like.’

‘No,’ she admitted, accepting the rebuke. ‘I do not get out on the land like you, Beatrice. I do not understand it like you.’

‘No reason why you should,’ I said briskly, and smiled at Stride as he brought in the coffee. I gestured to him to pour and took my cup to the fireplace to drink it before the blaze. ‘Your control over the kitchen is flawless. What’s for dinner?’

‘Game soup and venison, and some other dishes,’ said Celia vaguely. ‘Beatrice, when will John come home?’

The suddenness of her question took me by surprise and I jerked my head up to look at her. She was sitting in the window seat with neither darning nor embroidery in her hands, but her eyes were not idle — she was scanning my face — and her brain was not idle. I could feel her trying to think her way out of the incomprehensible situation that seemed to be before her.

‘When he is completely well,’ I said firmly. ‘I could not bear to have to go through that scene again.’

She paled as I had thought she would.

‘God forbid,’ she said, and her eyes dropped to the floor where John had lain screaming for her to rescue him. ‘If I had known they would have treated him like that I should never have supported your idea of sending for them,’ she said.

‘Certainly not,’ I said, matching her fervent tone. ‘But once they had him and he was sleeping peacefully it was obvious that the only thing to do was to let them go on with the treatment. After all, it was John’s own wish to go.’

Celia nodded. I could see a host of reservations behind her eyes, and I wanted to hear none of them.

‘I shall go and change for dinner,’ I said, tossing my tricorn hat into the chair. ‘It is too cold to go out this afternoon. Let us take the children into the gallery and play shuttlecock with them.’

Celia’s face lightened with her quick affection for the children. But her eyes stayed shadowed.

‘Yes, lovely!’ she said, but there was no joy in her voice.

So at the cheap price of an afternoon of unmitigated tedium playing at shuttlecock with Celia, two doting nurses and with children too small to understand the game, and too little to play it if they did, I won freedom from any questions about Mr Llewellyn, and entails, and my sudden need for capital. And freedom from questions about John, and John’s proposed return.

Celia assumed John would come home for Christmas. But Christmas came and went and John was not well enough to return. We could not have a great Wideacre Christmas party for we were still in mourning. But Dr Pearce suggested a smaller party for the village children at the vicarage, which Harry and Celia and I could attend.

I thought we could do better than that; I thought we had better supply it too. Miss Green — the Vicar’s housekeeper, the miller’s sister — had a spinster’s notion of what Acre children should eat, and the sort of amounts that were suitable. So on Christmas Day I drove to church with a bootful of meat and bread and jellies and sweetmeats and lemonade. The party was to be immediately after the church service and Harry and Celia and I walked from the church, saying ‘Good morning’ and ‘Happy Christmas’ to the wealthier tenants who had stopped in the churchyard to greet us.

The poorer tenants, and the Acre villagers, and even the cottager children were in the vicarage garden, dourly supervised by Miss Green and by the two curates.

‘Happy Christmas, good morning,’ I said generally as we entered the garden gate and was surprised at the response. There were no smiles. The men bared their heads or pulled a forelock as Harry and Celia and I walked up the path and the women dipped a curtsy. But the warmth of a Wideacre welcome was missing. I looked around, surprised, but nobody met my eyes, and there were no loving voices calling ‘Good day’ to me, or muttering with satisfaction how pretty Miss Beatrice was looking today.

I was so accustomed to being the darling of Wideacre that I could not understand the feeling of coldness in that pretty garden. The children were seated on long benches along a trestle table, their parents standing behind them. In a few moments the Wideacre servants would help Miss Green serve them a hearty dinner. It was the Christmas party — one of the jolliest and noisiest events of the year. Yet it was silent, and no face smiled at me. I spotted the midwife Mrs Merry and beckoned her to me with a crook of my finger.

‘What is the matter with everyone?’ I asked. ‘They’re all very quiet.’

‘It’s the death of Giles that has upset everyone,’ she said to me, her voice low. ‘Had you not heard, Miss Beatrice?’

Giles — my mind went back to the old man who had stooped over his spade to listen to my papa all those years ago when I was a child and thought I owned every inch of Wideacre. Giles, who had seemed so old and frail, had outlived my strong, young papa and had been working right up to the day when I stopped casual labour for the village and called in the parish labour gang instead. Now the old man had died — but that was no good reason to spoil a children’s party.

‘Why are they so upset?’ I asked. ‘He was an old man, bound to die some day.’

Mrs Merry’s eyes were sharp on my face. ‘He did not die from age, Miss Beatrice. He poisoned himself and he will have to be buried outside the churchyard without a service.’

I gasped. ‘Poisoned himself!’ I exclaimed. My shock made my voice too loud and a couple of our tenants glanced curiously at me as if they guessed that Mrs Merry was telling me the dreadful news.

‘There must have been some mistake,’ I said certainly. ‘Why on earth should anyone think he would do such a thing?’

‘Because he said he would,’ said Mrs Merry baldly. ‘When you stopped the casual work, digging ditches and hedging, he had no money. He lived off his savings for two weeks and borrowed from his neighbours for a week. But then he knew he would have to go on the parish. And he always swore he would kill himself first. This morning they found him dead. He had taken the strychnine he borrowed from the mill, saying he had rats in the cottage. It’s a painful death that, Miss Beatrice. His body was bent backwards like a bow and his face black. They were trying to get the body in the coffin as you drove by on your way to church. Didn’t you see them, Miss Beatrice?’

‘No,’ I murmured. I could say no more. Somewhere in the very depths of me there was a sad little cry at the end of something. Deep in my heart I was mourning for some good thing about Wideacre that seemed to have broken, that seemed to have died. That had been poisoned as surely and painfully as dead Giles. And with as little a dose.

‘What’s the matter with everyone?’ cried Harry, reliably oafish at the worst possible moment. ‘I’ve never seen so many solemn faces. Come along now, it’s Christmas morning! Christmas morning!’

The closed resentful looks were turned on him and then the people, my people, looked down at the ground and shuffled their boots in the frozen gravel. Before Harry could make the situation any worse the door of the vicarage opened and the servants came out with the children’s dinner.

‘Giles is dead,’ I said quietly to Harry. ‘It seems he killed himself when his savings ran out rather than go on the parish. He was found this morning. You can see that everyone blames us. I think we should wait till they have drunk our healths and then go home.’

Harry’s red cheeks went pale. ‘My word, that’s very bad, Beatrice,’ he said. ‘Giles had no cause to do a thing like that. He should have known we would never have let him starve.’

‘Perhaps he didn’t,’ I said harshly. ‘What he wanted was work, not charity. But anyway he’s dead. Let’s finish here and get away before some gossip blabs it to Celia. There is no need for her to be upset.’

‘Indeed not,’ said Harry, glancing quickly around for her. She was holding one of the newborn Acre babies in her arms and smiling at it. The child’s mother stood beside, watching the two of them and her eyes on Celia were warm, not cold as the looks I had met.

‘We will not stay long,’ Harry called in his clear tenor. ‘We just came to wish you the compliments of the season, and to hope you enjoy the party we and Dr Pearce have given you.’

Then he turned and touched Celia’s arm. Together they walked back to the chaise and I followed a step behind. I could feel the eyes scanning my back and I had the odd fleeting fear that if the Culler or one like him were on my borders now I could not be sure of being safe. But I reassured myself swiftly. It was mid-winter miseries — everyone who works on the land gets tired of the cold weather and the dark days. It was the shock of Giles’s death — everyone who is poor is in dread of going on the parish, and even worse, of being forced into the poorhouse. Once spring came life would be easier. And Giles would be forgotten.

In the carriage I leaned forward to look out of the window to reassure myself that nothing had really changed. That the Christmas party was the same as ever. That Giles’s death had upset his family and friends but that the rest of the village would soon forget. That once the children had eaten their fill there would be games and dancing and joy at Wideacre as there were at every Christmas time. That nothing on Wideacre could ever change so badly or so fast.

The pretty garden was a shambles. Our move to the carriage had been the signal for a free-for-all. The children were crawling all over the tables grabbing food and stuffing it into their mouths, and their parents were squeezing between them to snatch at food and stuff it into their pockets. It was a small-scale riot; no party. From the doorway Miss Green and the servants watched in horror. At his study window I caught a glimpse of Dr Pearce’s white face as his parishioners thumped and pushed and jostled to pull hunks of bread to pieces and to hack and claw at legs of ham. The little sweetmeats I had brought from the Hall fell to the ground unnoticed by anyone except the smallest children who crawled between adult kicking legs to get them. Above their heads on the table their mothers and fathers made desperate lunges for the food as if they were starving.

‘Drive on!’ I said sharply, with an edge of terror in my voice, and pulled the cord for the coachman. He had been still with amazement at the sight of such a frenzy in the very heart of Wideacre, but jumped at my signal, and the horses leaped in the harness to sweep us away from the scene.

‘What is happening?’ asked Celia. She could see almost nothing on the far side of the carriage with Harry’s bulk between her and my window. I leaned forward to block the view completely.

‘Rough party games,’ I said quickly, trying to keep the tremor out of my voice. ‘And some grabbing by the children.’ I glanced at Harry. His cheeks were white, but at my hard look he nodded in support.

‘Good heavens, what a noise they make,’ he said, trying to sound casual.

Then, mercifully, we were out of earshot and I could sit back in my seat and breathe steadily and quietly to try to control my trembling.

I had not realized, had not thought, that the loss of casual labouring jobs would have hit Acre village so hard so soon. For it was not just our winter chores on Wideacre; we set the pattern for the rest of the neighbours. When Wideacre Hall employed the low-paid gangs of parish workers, recruited by the roundsman from the poorest families who had to live on parish charity, then that practice was sanctioned for the hundred square miles of our influence. Havering Hall had long been paying the lowest possible rates to the parish roundsman’s labouring gang and using them for a handful of days a month. Now with Wideacre going over to the parish labourers the last reliable employer in this part of Sussex had been lost.

Giles’s shameful death was, of course, the sign of a crazy old man’s inability to adapt to a new world. But his belief — that if there was no work to be had on Wideacre, then there was nothing for him but the workhouse — was probably right. The roundsman would take only the fittest of the destitute workers — Giles could never have been employed in the gang. For him it would have been the workhouse — worse than Chichester prison — and the sure road to death. He was a mad old man to take his own life, of course. His death was not a sensible reaction to our attempts to farm Wideacre rationally and profitably. The last thing I needed was a pang of conscience about such an old fool. And I would be mad myself if I even considered that his death should be laid at my door, that I had made his world — Wideacre — unbearable.

So I told myself during the drive home, and when we were inside the Hall with the front door bolted I was ready for Harry’s urgent need for reassurance. We stood by the parlour fire while Celia went upstairs to take her hat and coat off, and fetch the children for their Christmas dinner.

‘My God, Beatrice, that was terrible,’ said Harry. He crossed to the decanter of sherry in two swift strides and poured himself a glass and tossed it off before handing me one. ‘They were like animals! Savages!’

I shrugged, deliberately careless. ‘Oh come, Harry,’ I said. ‘You are too nice. There is always a little pushing and shoving at the Christmas party. It is just that we usually do not see it. They generally wait for us to leave first!’

‘I have never seen anything like it before!’ Harry said firmly. ‘And neither, I am sure, have you, Beatrice. They were near rioting. I cannot understand it!’

I wager you cannot, you fool, I thought to myself and sipped at my sherry.

‘They are anxious,’ I said evenly. ‘They are anxious because many of them have lost their winter wages. And Giles’s death upset them all too. They think at the moment that they are near starvation, but when spring comes they will realize that there has been little real change.’

‘But they behaved as if they had not seen food for a sennight!’ Harry objected. ‘Beatrice, you saw them! You cannot tell me that those were families who find themselves a little short of cash. They looked as if they were starving.’

‘Well, what if they are?’ I demanded, suddenly hard; weary of shielding Harry from the consequences of our joint choice. ‘You wanted to use the roundsman labour gangs. We both agreed there would be no more casual labour for the villagers of Acre. We both agreed we would keep no hedgers and ditchers and helpers with the sheep on the wage books to be paid in good and bad weather and to be paid if they work or no. We agreed to that. Did you think they worked for the love of it? Of course they are hungry. They are receiving no pay; they are trying to last out on their savings until spring. They think that we will go back to the old ways and that every man in the village will be able to do a day’s ploughing, and every lad will be able to earn a penny sowing seed. When spring comes they will find that it is not so. That we shall still use the gang labourers. And if they want work they will have to go to the parish and join the gang and accept the pittance they are offered.

‘Are you saying now that you don’t want to continue with our plans?’ I asked tightly. ‘We are saving hundreds of pounds a month, and we are fanning as you have always wanted to. Did you think no one paid for your fancy farming ideas, Harry? The poor pay. The poor always pay. But they can do nothing against us. And if you don’t like the look of what you are doing then turn your head away and look out of the other window like Celia.’

I spun on my heel and turned my back to him to stare into the fire and regain my temper. I was panting with anger and close to tears. Harry’s wilful ignorance about what we were doing to the land enraged me. But also I was boiling with rage at the trap I was in. For the decision to farm for profit and consider only profit had led us to this point and might yet take us farther. The poorer people would have to leave Acre; the estate could not support so many, farming in this new way. And many, many of them would be stubborn and not leave. Then, I supposed, the old people, and perhaps the frailer children, might die. And Giles would be only the first death on the road to make Richard the heir. With the picture of Richard as Master in my mind I would not retract, I would not relent. But I could see, and no one but I would see, the long, slow, painful path the poor of Wideacre would tread barefoot so that my son could be called Squire.

Harry’s hand fell on my shoulder and I tensed, but controlled myself not to shake it off. ‘This is a bitter time for us both,’ said Harry sadly, forgetting the hungry faces and thinking only of himself. ‘Of course I agree we should go on. Every landowner has precisely these problems. It is a time of change. Nothing we can do could stop that process of change. The people will just have to adapt, that is all. They will just have to learn to live the way things are. It would be folly for you and me to try to farm in the old ways, Beatrice.’

I nodded. Harry had found a way to still his own conscience, and I had my way to silence mine. I could comfort myself with the thought that all that I now did brought my lovely son closer and closer to owning Wideacre. And Harry could tell himself the convenient lie that he was equally trapped by the changes as the people he had dismissed from their work. Harry had Pontius Pilate’s answer that it was really nothing to do with him. He saw himself as part of a process of historical change and he could neither be blamed nor held responsible for what would happen.

‘There is just no alternative,’ he said quietly. And he even sounded sad that there was nothing he could do.

So when Celia came downstairs with the two nurses and the two children dressed in their best and hungry for roast goose we could all exchange smiles and go into the dining room to eat at a table heaped with main courses and side dishes, as if, five miles away, there were no hungry children picking crumbs from the frozen grass of the vicar’s garden.

It was a hard winter in Acre that year. I went less to the village than I had ever done, for it was no pleasure to me to be greeted with surly faces. Once or twice a woman had burst from a cottage with tears in her eyes and put her hand on the side of my gig and said, ‘Miss Beatrice, do take my William to do some hedging for you. You know there’s no one like him for hedging in the whole county. I can’t keep the children on the wages we get from the parish. They’re hungry, Miss Beatrice. Do give my man work.’

Then I would have to hold the picture of my own child, my Richard, and his future very clear before my eyes. I would stare hard at the horse’s ears and not look the woman in the face and say in an even tone, ‘I am sorry, Bessy, but there’s nothing I can do. We only use the roundsman on Wideacre now. If your man wants other work he had best go and seek it.’

Then I would click to the horse and drive off before she shamed herself and her man by weeping before me in the village lane. And my face was set and cold, for I knew no other way to do it.

Harry would do nothing at all. When he met someone in the lane and heard the tale of the bad wages the roundsman gave the gang, of the meanness of the parish and of the fear of the workhouse, he would shrug at the man and say, ‘What can I do? I am no freer to choose how the world is than you, my good fellow.’ And he would put a hand in his pocket for a shilling as if that would help a man with four children and a sickly wife at home, and a long cold winter to get through.

They thought I had turned against them. But that was only partly true. I had to think of other things, of the claim of Richard, and of my desperate need to establish the entail and Richard’s and Julia’s partnership in the breathing space I had won by John’s absence using John’s fortune. Even so, I did not enclose the common until spring, so they had a winter’s supply of firewood, which they gathered for free, and peat, which they cut for nothing, before I had the fences made that would straddle the footpaths, and ban the whole village from the land they had thought was their own to use.

All winter the fences stood at the back of the stables and I delayed ordering them set in place.

‘We really should get on with enclosing the common,’ Harry would say to me, leaning over the map. ‘Mr Llewellyn’s loans are costing us a good deal. We shall be planting wheat this spring, and there will be much work to do to make the ground ready.’

‘I know,’ I said, glancing up from writing letters at my desk. ‘I have it in mind, Harry. I have the fences ready and I have told the roundsman that I shall need at least twenty men for the work. But I wish to wait until the snow is gone. The people are used to getting their firewood for free, and also snaring rabbits there. There may be trouble when the fences first go up. It is bound to be easier for us if we do it when the weather is milder.’

‘Very well, Beatrice,’ Harry said. ‘You know best how it should be done. But really, the people should understand that they have been living in the old ways for too long. I don’t know another estate in the county that held to the traditional ways as long as we did. Free firewood, free snaring, free grazing, free gleaning; we have been robbing ourselves for all these years, Beatrice. You would think they would be grateful.’

‘Odd, isn’t it?’ I said drily. ‘But they are not.’

Indeed they were not. As the winter went on I heard no more appeals from the village women. When I trotted my gig through the village there were no smiling faces or deep curtsys. There was no open rudeness; I would have dismissed anyone from the land if I had seen so much as a flicker of overt insolence. But I was not loved as I had been. And I missed it. The men would doff their caps or pull a forelock and the women make their little bob, but they did not call out ‘Good day’ to me, and the children were not held up to see pretty Miss Beatrice and her fine horse. It was just another price that had to be paid.

They disliked Harry too, of course. But in the fickle way of ignorant people they did not blame him as they blamed me. They knew he had always been crazy for change, but they had trusted me to hold out against him. Now I was farming for profit they blamed me far worse than they did Harry. They even blamed me for influencing Harry, although if they had consulted their own conveniently short memories they would have known that Harry had always been a fool on the land and I was not responsible for that.

The weather matched the angry desolate mood of Wideacre and the winter dragged on with snowstorms and wet freezing fogs, then high winds and storms of rain all through lambing. We lost more lambs that year than we had done for seasons. Partly it was the weather but also I think it was because the men would not stay out all hours to earn a smile from me and a slap on their shoulders at the end of a long cold evening. While I was there watching over them they did their job helping the sheep in difficulties, checking the nibbled-off cord, ensuring the lambs were accepted by their mothers. But when I was not there I knew that they were away down the hill to Acre with a spit on the ground at the mention of the flock.

So we stood to make less of a profit on the sheep that year than I had calculated. And the prospect of losing that money made me firmer to hold to the plans I had, whatever it cost me in smiles and goodwill.

We had to keep more beasts indoors and there was not enough hay or winter feed. Faced with the choice of killing good stock or buying in feed, I chose to buy. But the hay prices were outrageous and there was no way I could get the money back. We would be lucky to break even on the beasts this year.

I spent one cold dark afternoon after another at my desk. And when Stride brought in the candles in the early twilight my head was aching. We did not seem to be making enough money. And Mr Llewellyn’s loans were costing more than I had thought they would. The interest rates were high but the profits were rock-bottom and I was actually paying out more than came in. At this rate I would not be able to buy top quality seedcorn. I would have to borrow to buy seed.

I rested my head in my hands and I knew real fear. Not fear like when you jump too high a gate, hunting, nor even my steady, constant fear of violence, of men coming for me. But business fear. The black figures on white were so uncompromising. And even the feel of the heavy cashbox under the desk did not comfort me. It looked like a lot of money. But I needed more. Wideacre needed more. And I was afraid of the clever London business men. I was afraid to borrow again. But I would have to do so.

Harry was shielded by me from the worry of business. I did not want to frighten him off the plan to change the entail. And I was too proud to admit I was afraid. But Harry could not escape the hatred of the village that grew and grew all the cold winter.

Of the three of us only Celia, the newcomer, seemed to keep their respect. In their prejudiced ignorant way they did not blame her for the empty soup pots and the thin gruel. Like fools they managed not to see Celia’s fine woollen cloaks and fashionable bonnets, and saw only that her face underneath the silk trimming was pale and anxious, and that her purse was always open to tide a family over especial difficulties, or to buy a child a blanket for the cold nights. As the weather worsened in January and the ground froze hard, Celia had the carriage out every day to send steaming bowls of stew from the Wideacre kitchens down to families in the village who otherwise would have eaten no meat that week. And I noted, sourly, that they blessed her for it.

She came to know Acre village, my village, and she started to know the people, my people. She started to learn the detail of the kinship and friendship ties. Who was married to whose sister. Which man drank, which father was too rough with his children. Which women were pregnant. And she was the first to know when Daisy Sower’s baby died.

‘Beatrice, we must do something,’ Celia said, walking without so much as a knock into my office. She had come into the house straight from the stables, by the west-wing door, still wearing her driving cape and dress and as she moved to the fire she stripped off her black leather gloves. I was suddenly struck how much she had changed since Mama’s death. Her pace was faster, her voice clearer, her whole bearing more purposeful. Now she stood with her back to my fire, warming herself at my hearth and preparing herself to lecture me about my people.

‘Do what?’ I said sharply.

‘Something about the hardship in Acre,’ she said passionately. ‘It cannot be right, Beatrice. There are families there in want. Now poor Daisy Sower’s little baby has died and I am sure that it was because she never had enough milk for it. There was so little food in the house I am certain that she was feeding her husband and the other children first and only then eating. Her baby just got thinner and thinner and now it has died, Beatrice. It is such a wicked waste. It was such a lovely baby!’ Celia’s voice quavered on a sob, and she turned to the fireplace and brushed her hand across her eyes.

‘Surely we can employ more people on the estate?’ she said. ‘Or at the very least we could give some of the grain to the village. Wideacre seems so wealthy, I do not see how there could be hardship in Acre.’

‘Would you like to see the figures?’ I said, my voice hard. ‘Wideacre seems wealthy to you because up until now you have spent your life indoors where no expense has been spared. The housekeeping is partly your responsibility, Celia, and you know I have never challenged a bill from the kitchen.’

She nodded. The first sign of my anger was enough to unbalance Celia. She remembered too well her horror of Lord Havering when he used to bellow at her in one of his drunken rages. She could not tolerate a raised voice, or even a sharp tone. I used both.

‘It is all very well for you queening it in the village with your bowls of soup and blankets, but we have mortgages to meet and debts to be paid. It is no Garden of Eden. This year we have lost dozens of lambs, and the calving is going badly too. If we have a wet spring we will have problems with the corn. It is no good asking me to take on half of the men in Acre village. The estate cannot afford it. In any case I have signed a contract with the parish roundsman and we get our labourers from him. They are generally the very men from Acre anyway, so they are working here, but at proper rates.’

Celia nodded. ‘They tell me the parish rates of pay are not sufficient to keep a family,’ she said softly.

‘That may be so,’ I said impatiently. ‘It is hardly my fault if the women cannot make the money stretch. It is hardly my job to encourage improvidence. The rates are set by the Justices of the Peace, or the churchwardens. I am not able to pay higher, and I would be foolish indeed to do so.’

Celia looked dashed. But Daisy Sower’s baby was still on her conscience and in her barren mind. ‘It was just that poor baby …” she said.

‘How many children has Daisy Sower?’ I interrupted harshly. ‘Five? Six? Of course there is not enough money to go round. She should stop having children and then she would see she could manage perfectly well. You do the poor a great disservice to encourage them as you do, Celia!’

Celia flushed scarlet and then pale at the tone in my voice. ‘I am sorry to have disturbed you,’ she said, gathering her scraps of dignity and turning to leave.

I stopped her at the door.

‘Celia!’ I called, and my tone was kind. She turned at once, and I smiled at her. ‘It is I who should apologize to you,’ I said tenderly. ‘I am a miserable cross sister to you and I beg your pardon.’

She came from the door slowly, and there was distrust in her face.

‘You need not say that, Beatrice,’ she said. ‘I know how much you have to worry you. The sheep and the cows and the worry there always is, I know, in your mind about John. I apologize for troubling you further.’

‘Ah, don’t!’ I said, reaching out a hand to her. ‘It is just that I have been worried about money matters, my dear, and it does make me short-tempered.’

Celia’s knowledge of money matters extended so far as generally knowing within a pound or so how much she had in her purse, but she nodded as if she understood perfectly.

‘Oh, yes,’ she said earnestly. ‘And your worry about John. Have you had a report from Dr Rose this month?’

‘Yes,’ I said, making my voice sad. ‘He says that John is still far from well but is struggling bravely against the temptation.’

‘No word from John himself?’ asked Celia tentatively.

‘No,’ I said, and managed a brave smile. ‘I write and write. But Dr Rose said that John is not ready to reply yet, not to any letters. So I am not concerned not to have heard from him personally.’

‘Should you like to go for a visit, Beatrice?’ Celia asked. ‘The roads will surely clear soon and then you could see for yourself how he is.’

I shook my head sadly and leaned my cheek in my hand.

‘No,’ I said. ‘It would do no good. Dr Rose told me quite specifically that John was not ready to receive visitors and that a surprise visit would almost certainly cause a relapse. We will just have to be patient.’

‘Oh yes,’ Celia said earnestly. ‘Poor John, and poor you too, Beatrice.’ She put her arm around my shoulders and gave me a hug. ‘Now I will leave you for I know you are busy,’ she said softly. ‘But don’t work too hard, and stop soon and change for dinner.’

I nodded with another of my courageous smiles, and Celia took herself off. I waited until the door closed behind her and I heard her footsteps echo down the corridor to the main part of the Hall, then I opened one of the secret drawers of the desk and took out Dr Rose’s reports, and a bundle of letters. They were addressed to my husband. They were from Celia.

Dr Rose had faithfully forwarded every one to me unopened with his monthly reports. These were clear and had done much to increase my tension. If the lawyers did not hurry, if John continued to improve, I should have him back at Wideacre before I had given his fortune away to my cousin in return for the entail. Dr Rose’s first report had been gloomy. John had completed the journey in a drugged state but when he woke to find himself in a room with a barred window he had gone crazy with fear. He had sworn that he was imprisoned by a witch, by the Wideacre witch, who had her whole family under some spell and would keep him imprisoned until he was dead.

All this sounded sufficiently lunatic to keep him inside and safely away from Wideacre for years. But Dr Rose’s later reports were more doubtful. John was making progress. He still had a craving for drink, but for the rest of his time he was lucid and calm. He was using laudanum in controlled amounts and was taking no alcohol. ‘I think we may begin to hope,’ Dr Rose wrote in his last report.

I was not beginning to hope. I was beginning to fear. Events were taking place outside the estate where my word was law, beyond my influence. I could not make the lawyers go faster; I could not speed the negotiations with my cousin. I could not set back John’s recovery. All I could do was to write letter after letter to the lawyers pressing them to move on with their slow processes, and the occasional sad reply to Dr Rose, assuring him that I would rather my husband stayed with him for a year than prejudice his health by bringing him home too early. I had also a hard task to keep John’s father safely away in Edinburgh. As soon as John was committed and power of attorney vested in me I wrote to him to tell him of his son’s illness and to assure him that John was receiving the best of care. Using Dr Rose’s authority I explained that no one was allowed to visit John, but as soon as he was well enough I would contact old Mr MacAndrew at once so that he could visit his once best talented son. The old man, in a storm of grief and concern, never thought to ask how John’s fortune was managed while he was inside the asylum, and I never offered information. If he had asked me I would have said that Harry held the MacAndrew shares in trust for John. But I had been holding to the hope that by the time John was released and ready to reclaim his fortune, it would all be gone. Spent to put the bastard who bore his name into the Squire’s chair in the house he hated.

All had to happen at the right time. If only the lawyers would hurry. If only my cousin would sign the contract, surrendering his inheritance. And all I could do was wait. And Celia could only write letters. Eleven letters I had in my drawer in the desk, one for each week that John had been away. Every Monday Celia wrote on one side of one sheet of notepaper, judging perhaps that a long letter might disturb him. Uncertain yet, whether he forgave her for what he had called her betrayal of him. Tender letters they were. They were full of a love so sweet and innocent, the love that two children might share. She started each letter, ‘My dearest brother’, and she ended each one with the words, ‘You are daily in my thoughts and nightly in my prayers’, and signed herself, ‘Your loving sister, Celia’.

And all the body of the letter was news of the children, a word about the weather, and always the assurance that I was well. ‘Beatrice is well and grows lovelier every day,’ she wrote in one. ‘You will be glad to know that Beatrice is well and, as usual, most beautiful,’ she wrote in another. ‘Beatrice is well but I know she misses you,’ wrote Celia. I smiled a bitter smile when I read them. Then I tied them together and stuffed them at the back of the secret drawer, locked it, hid the key behind a book in the bookcase and went to change for dinner with a light step and my eyes shining. I held to my private pledge not to enclose the common before the worst of the bad weather was over, and I waited until March before two days of settled clear cloudless days tipped my impatience to have done.

I told the parish roundsman that I would be enclosing two hundred acres of common on the following day and that he should have twenty men waiting for me in the morning. He scratched his head and looked doubtful. He was a plain man, in brown fustian, with the good boots of the labouring man who is making a better living than most, on the backs of the rest. John Brien his name; he had married one of the Tyacke girls and moved into the village. A little freer of village loyalties, with book-learning from his Chichester day school, he had obtained the job of parish roundsman and could now congratulate himself that he was the best-paid and most hated working man in Acre. He had no great love for me. He disliked the tone in my voice when I spoke to him. He thought himself a cut above the rest of the Acre villagers because he could read and write and because he did a job most of them would be shamed to do. Somewhere in my heart I still held to the old ways, and if the villagers despised and disliked a man then so did I. But I had to do business with him, and so I held Sorrel on a short rein when I stopped the gig and explained to him civilly where I wanted the men to meet.

‘They’ll not like it, Mrs MacAndrew,’ he said, his voice expressing contempt for such people who would refuse to work when and where the Quality and their dogs like him bade them.

‘I don’t expect them to like it,’ I said indifferently. ‘I merely expect them to do it. Can you get enough men together for tomorrow, or should we wait a day?’

‘I have the men to do the work.’ His hand gestured towards the shuttered cottages where idle men were sitting, heads in hands beside empty tables. ‘Every man in the village wants work. I can pick and choose. But they will not like the job of fencing in the common, fencing themselves out. There may be trouble.’

‘These are my people,’ I said with the indifference of a local for a stranger’s advice. ‘There will be no trouble that I cannot manage. You get the men there. There is no need for you to tell them what job they are to do. And I will meet you there. And any trouble I shall deal with.’

He nodded and I held Sorrel in, my hard eyes on him until he turned the nod into the full bow that I expect from my people in my village. Then I gave him a tight smile and said abruptly, ‘Good day, Brien, I shall see you at the beech coppice tomorrow, with twenty men.’

But when next day I trotted my gig down the lane and turned the corner to the start of the common land I saw there were not twenty men, there were more like one hundred. Wives too, and children, and the old people too aged for work. And a handful of the poorer Wideacre tenants, and about a dozen of the cottagers. The whole of the poor community of Wideacre was out to greet me. I halted Sorrel and took my time in tying his reins to a bush. I needed time to think; I had not expected this. When my head came up from fumbling with the reins my face was Clear and serene, my smile as lovely as the bright morning.

‘Good day to you all,’ I said. My voice was as bright and as untroubled as the robin in the beech tree over my head who started a clear and lovely warble at the pale blue sky.

The older men were in a little cluster, conferring among themselves. They jostled each other like boys caught in an orchard and then George Tyacke stepped forward, the oldest man in the village, still hanging on to life and his cottage, though he was stooped and bent with rheumatism and his hands shook with palsy.

‘Good day, Miss Beatrice,’ he said with the gentle courtesy of a patient man who has spent his life at other men’s bidding, and yet never lost temper or dignity.

‘We have all come out today to speak to you about your plans for the common,’ he said. His voice had the soft accent of the Sussex downland. He had been born and bred here, spent all his life within this circle of green hills. His family had never lived anywhere else. It was probably his ancestors whose bones lay in Norman Meadow. It was probably his land before my ancestors stole it.

‘Good day, Gaffer Tyacke,’ I said, and my voice was gentle. Today might see a hard act, a harsh act, against the poor of Wideacre, but I could never keep a smile from my eyes when I heard the slow drawl of my home. ‘I am always pleased to see you,’ I said with courtesy. ‘But I am surprised to see so many from Acre village, and others, too.’ My eyes flicked towards the tenants: my tenants, whose roofs depended on my goodwill, and they shuffled their feet at my scrutiny. ‘I am surprised that so many of you should think you have anything to say about what is done by me on my own land.’

Gaffer Tyacke nodded at the reproof, and the tenants looked as if they wished they were elsewhere. They knew that in that one swift glance I had noted every one, and they had an uneasy fear that they would pay for it. As indeed they would.

‘We are just worried, Miss Beatrice,’ Gaffer said gently. ‘We did not want to come up to the Hall and when we first heard of your plans we did not believe that you would do it. So we have left it so long to speak to you.’

I set my hands on my hips and looked around at them. In the winter sunshine my driving dress glowed a deep black. Under my neat black riding hat my hair gleamed as ruddy as an autumn beech tree. They had formed a circle around me but it was the circle of a court, not that of a mob. I was in utter control of this scene and they all knew it. And even old George Tyacke with his dignity and wisdom could not keep the servility from his voice.

‘Well,’ I said, and my tone was clear and loud so even the most distant of my shrinking tenants could hear me. ‘I’m damned if I can see it’s anyone’s business but my own, but since you’ve all made a day’s holiday to be here, you’d best tell me what it’s all about.’

It was as if a flood had broken through a dam.

‘It’s the rabbits! I can’t buy meat, they’re the only meat we eat!’ said one woman.

‘Where am I to get kindling from if I can’t come here?’ said another.

‘I’ve a cow and two pigs and they’ve always grazed here,’ said one of the villagers.

‘I set my beehives out on the common for the heather honey,’ said one of the tenants.

‘I cut peat for my stove on the common!’

‘I gather my brushwood here!’

‘My sheep graze here in autumn!’

And above the babble of voices Gaffer Tyacke’s old-man trembly tenor carried to my ears.

‘Look behind you, Miss Beatrice,’ he said. I turned. I had been standing in front of a great oak tree, one of the oldest in the woods. It was a pretty tradition of the village that lovers plighting their troth should seal their engagement by carving their names in its bark. From as high as a tall arm could reach, down to the roots, were love knots and names entwined and hearts carved, sometimes exquisitely carved, in the bark.

‘There’s my name, and my wife Lizzie,’ said George and pointed behind my head. Carefully I stared at the knots and whorls of the tree trunk and made out, as lichened as an old headstone, the heart shape and ‘George’ and ‘Lizzie’ carved inside.

‘And above them is my pa and ma,’ said George. ‘And above that is their pa and ma, and the names of my family go back as far as anyone remembers until you cannot read the names but see only a chip in the old bark where a name was.’

‘So?’ I said coldly.

‘Where are my grandchildren going to carve their names when they are courting?’ Gaffer said simply. ‘If you fell this tree, Miss Beatrice, it will not be like courting at all for the Acre bairns.’

There was a murmur of support from the crowd. The main issues were those of food and fuel, but even the poor have their sentiments.

‘No,’ I said uncompromisingly. It had been on my lips to offer to leave the tree and to run the fence around it so that the couples of Acre could still walk the dark lane on summer nights and carve their names together, then stop in dark undergrowth to make love on the way home. But it was folly and sentiment. And it was nonsense to put a kink in a straight fence for the happiness of children as yet unborn.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I know you are set in certain ways at Acre and you all know that I have stood your friend in the past. But Wideacre is changing and the way we have to farm is changing. There are still acres of common left that will not be enclosed this season. You may go on grazing your beasts and snaring rabbits, and gathering firewood there. But this area is to be sown for wheat.’

‘It will be a bad day when there are wheatfields all around Acre and no one with the price of a loaf inside the village,’ called a voice from the back of the crowd, and there was a murmur like a groan of support.

‘I know you, Mabel Henty,’ I said certainly. ‘You owed me three months’ rent last quarter day and I let the tally run. Don’t you raise your voice against me now!’

There was a ripple of laughter from some of the other villagers and Mabel Henty flushed scarlet and was silenced. No one else took up the cry. I let my gaze roam around the circle of faces until all the eyes had dropped under my hard green glare. They were all looking at their boots. Only Gaffer’s head was still up; only Gaffer Tyacke’s eyes still met mine.

‘I am an old man, Miss Beatrice,’ he said. ‘And I have seen many changes in my life. I was a young man when your pa was a boy. I saw him wed and I saw him buried. I saw your brother married and I was at the church gate to see you go in a bride. I was at the back of the church when they buried your ma. I have seen as much here as anyone. But I have never seen a Squire at Wideacre who went against Acre village. Nor heard tell of one. If you go on with this when we have asked you, begged you, not to, then you are not the Master as your pa was, nor as his pa was. There’s been a Lacey at Wideacre for hundreds of years. But they’ve never given the poor cause to groan. If you go on with this plan, Miss Beatrice, you will break the heart of Wideacre.’

I nodded quickly to clear my head. A dark mist seemed to swell up from the ground and I could only dimly hear the murmurs of support from the crowd. To fail the land, to fail the people, seemed more than I could bear. In that second as I shook my head like a weary deer surrounded by hounds, I felt afraid. I felt afraid that I had, somehow, lost my way, had mislaid the whole thread and purpose of my life. That the steady constant heart of Wideacre would no longer beat when I listened. I put my hand to my head, the anxious faces around me had blurred into a circle.

John Brien’s face stood out. Bright, curious, uncaring.

‘You have your orders, Brien,’ I said, and my voice seemed to be someone else’s, a distant clear tone. ‘Put the fences up.’

I took half-a-dozen unsteady steps to the gig and clambered up into it. I could see little for my eyes were filled with hot tears and my hands were shaking. Someone, Brien, untied the reins and handed them to me. My hands, as automatically skilful as ever, backed Sorrel and turned the gig.

‘Don’t let him do it!’ called a desperate voice from the crowd. ‘Miss Beatrice, don’t do this to us!’

‘Oh, get on with your work!’ I said in sudden desperate impatience. ‘Enclosures are taking place up and down the country. Why should Wideacre be different? Get on with your work!’ And I flicked the reins on Sorrel’s back in one irritable gesture and he jumped forward and we swirled away down the lane, away from the circle of shocked faces, away from the old lovely wood, which would be felled, and away from the sweet rolling heather and bracken common, which would be burned and levelled and drained dry.

All the way home I had tears on my cheeks and when I brushed them away with the back of my gauntlet I found my face was wet again. But I could not have said what had made me weep. Indeed, there was nothing. The common would be enclosed as I had ordered, the half-spoken protest of Acre village would be the talk of the ale-houses for half a year and then forgotten. The new fence would soon blend in, greened with moss and greyed with lichen. And the new courting couples of Acre would find another tree for their carvings. And their children would never know that once, through the woods, there had been hundreds of acres of land where little children could hide, and play at war, and picnic and roam all day long. All they would know would be field after flat field of yellow wheat where they would not be allowed to play. And knowing no different, why should they grieve?

It was those of us who had known the common who would grieve. And the next day when I put on my black silk dress I felt I was in mourning indeed. For by now the fences would be up and the men would be cutting down the great lovely trees and hacking out the roots. I would not drive out and see the work done. I did not want to see it until it was so far advanced that no sudden softness of mine could halt the relentless progress of the mindless beast that Harry exultantly called ‘The Future’. Neither would I be driving to Acre village for a while. The voices in the crowd had been grieved, not angry, and no crowd led by Gaffer Tyacke would ever be other than courteous. But when they saw the fences going across the ancient footpaths they would be angry. And there was no reason why I should see that anger. I did not choose to.

But after a long breakfast, during which I planned my day, which seemed very empty if I was not to drive out on Wideacre, I went to my office and found John Brien waiting in the lobby by the stable door.

‘Why are you not at the common? Has something happened?’ I asked him sharply, opening the door and beckoning him in.

‘Nothing has happened,’ he said, ironically. I sat at my desk and let him stand.

‘What do you mean?’ I said. He heard the tone in my voice and he heard the warning note.

‘I mean nothing has happened because the men won’t work,’ he said. ‘After you left yesterday morning they went into a little huddle with old Tyacke …”

‘George Tyacke,’ I prompted.

‘Yes, Gaffer Tyacke,’ he repeated. ‘And then they said that they wanted to take an early dinner break. So they all trooped home and when I waited for them to come back an hour later no one came.’

‘And then?’ I said sharply.

‘Then I went to look for them,’ he said, his voice almost petulant. ‘But I could get no answer at any of the cottages. They must all have left the village for the day, or else locked their doors and kept silent. Acre was like a ghost town.’

I nodded. This was a petty rebellion; it could not last. The people of Acre were in a hard vice of needing work, and Wideacre was the only employer. They needed access to the land, and we owned all the land. They needed roofs over their heads, and they were all our tenants. No rebellion could last long under those circumstances. Because we had been good, even generous, landlords they had forgotten the total power the Squire of Wideacre has for the using. I would not want to use the power. But I would certainly do whatever was needed to get those fences up and that common land growing wheat.

‘And today?’ I asked.

‘The same today,’ John Brien said. ‘No men waiting to work, and no reply at the cottages. They just will not do it, Mrs MacAndrew.’

I flashed him a scornful look.

‘Would you ask them to get my gig ready with Sorrel harnessed,’ I said in a tone of icy politeness. ‘I see I shall have to come out again and get this settled.’

I changed into my driving dress and found John Brien waiting beside the gig in the yard. He was riding his own mare, a horse good enough for a gentleman born.

‘Follow me,’ I said in a tone I reserve for impertinent servants, and swung out of the yard.

I drove down the lane to Acre. This tale of silent cottages might do for John Brien but I knew that behind every cottage window there would be a pair of eyes watching me go past. I drove to the chestnut tree at the centre of the village green, as clear a signal for a parley as if I was carrying a stick with a handkerchief.

I tied Sorrel to one of the low branches, I climbed back into the gig and waited. I waited. I waited. Slowly, one by one, the doors of the cottages opened and the men came sheepishly out, pulling on their caps and shrugging on their sheepskin waistcoats, their wives and children following at their heels. I waited until I had a goodly crowd around the gig, and then I spoke clearly and my voice was cold.

‘We had a few words yesterday and you all explained to me why you wanted things at Wideacre left as they are,’ I said. ‘I told you then that it cannot be so.’ I paused and waited for any comment. None came. ‘John Brien here tells me that none of you stayed to work yesterday,’ I said. I let my gaze wander around the circle of faces. Not one eye met mine. ‘Nor today,’ I said.

I signalled to John Brien to untie Sorrel and pass me the reins. ‘The choice is yours,’ I said flatly. ‘If you refuse to work I shall send to Chichester for the labourers from the Chichester poorhouse and they can come and earn your wages and take home your pay while you sit in your houses and go hungry. Or, if there are problems with that, I can bring in Irish labourers and I can cancel your tenancies and give them your houses.’ There was a shudder of horror at that thought. I waited until the spontaneous moan had died, then gazed around the circle of faces again. They were all people I knew so well. I had worked side by side with all of them ever since I had been out on the land. Now I sat high above them and spoke to them as if they were dirt in my road.

‘The choice is yours,’ I said again. ‘You can either take the work that these changes provide. And take the wages that are fairly set by the parish. Or you can starve. But either way those fences are going up. The common will be enclosed.’

I nodded to Brien to stand aside from Sorrel’s head and loosened the reins to move off. No one said a word this time, and I had the feeling that they were silent even when I was out of earshot. They were stunned by the ruthlessness of a woman they had loved since she was a tiny girl on a fat pony. They had thought I was their pretty Miss Beatrice who would never fail them. And now I looked at them with a cold set face and offered them the choice between independent starvation and starvation wages.

They went back to work. Of course they did. They were not such fools as to try to stand against one who was landlord, employer and landowner all in one. Brien rode up to the Hall during their dinner break to tell me that the work had started and that the fences were going up quickly.

‘You did tell them!’ he said admiringly. ‘You should have seen their faces. That’s broken their spirits all right. I wish we had brought the Irish in. It would wake that village up for once! But they looked pretty sick when you trotted off, Mrs MacAndrew, I can tell you! You slapped them down pretty hard!’

I looked at him coldly. His spite against my people reminded me again of the oddness of the role I had to play. And the disgusting nature of the tools I had to use to do the jobs I had to do. I nodded.

‘Well, get back to work,’ I said brusquely. ‘I want that common ready for spring sowing.’

I did not spare myself the pain of seeing the common this time but drove down to it in the early spring dusk, which came at about four o’clock. In the gloaming I could see little of the common, but the smell of it, the frosty bracken and the hint of icy pine needles, pulled at my heart strings as I sat on the gig at the end of the lane and Sorrel chafed at the bit. Before us loomed the new fences that marked out the limits of this year’s wheat-fields. Next year we would enclose and drain more and more until the only fields left to grow hay and the sweet meadow flowers would be the ones that were too high or too steep for any plough. All of the common that rolled in such easy soft valleys would be gone in a few years’ time, and this fence, which was causing Acre village so much worry and grief, was only the first of many lessons that would teach them that the land belonged only to us, and that in years to come they would not be allowed so much as to set foot on it without permission. But behind the dark outline of the new fence I could see the soft rolling profiles of the little hills and valleys of the common where it drops down to our woods. And my heart ached for it.

I drove home in a hurry for I wanted to be in time to bathe Richard and to put him into his fleecy little nightshirt. I wanted to tickle his bare sweet-smelling warm tummy, and to tease him by poking my chilled fingers in the soft little pits under his arms. I wanted to brush his hair into black little kiss-curls, and to bury my face in his warm neck and sniff at the sweet pure smell of baby. But most of all I wanted to see him to reassure myself that I did indeed have a son who would be Squire if I could only hold to this one true course, that I was not crazy to tear the heart out of the land I loved.

Next morning John Brien was calling even before breakfast. He was waiting in the lobby before my office and my maid, Lucy, told me he was there as I was dressing. I raised an eyebrow at her as our eyes met in my mirror.

‘Don’t you like John Brien, Lucy?’ I asked quizzically.

‘Nothing to like or dislike,’ she said abruptly. ‘I hardly know him. I only know what his job is, and that he earns twice the wage of anyone in Acre and yet never has a penny to lend his wife’s own kin. I only know that he picks out the men who can work and left young Harry Jameson off the gang all through the winter when the lad was desperate for a wage. I don’t like him very much. But then, most of them hate him like poison.’

I grinned at Lucy. She was no longer a village woman, for her life was bound up with my life at the Hall and her plate would be always full at the kitchen table. But she had kin in Acre and a good nose for what went on there.

‘I’ve no love for him either,’ I said, as she piled my hair on the top of my head, and let a few curls hang down around my face. ‘But he should be out working this morning. Have done, Lucy. There’s like to be some trouble.’

Obediently, she made two deft touches and stood back.

‘Bound to be trouble if you fence off land that’s always belonged to the village,’ she said dourly.

I gave her a long hard look in the mirror until her eyes dropped.

‘The land belongs to Wideacre,’ I said firmly.

I gave her one more look, and thought that here was another person I had faced down in so few days. Wideacre might be wealthier at the end of this, and my son might be the Squire, but I would have lost a great deal of love.

I shrugged off the thought and went down to John Brien.

‘Yes?’ I said coldly. He was twisting his cap in his hands and his eyes were wide with excitement at the bad news he was bringing to me.

‘Mrs MacAndrew, ‘tis your fences,’ he gasped, forgetting his town-bred accent in his haste. ‘They’ve pulled your fences down and hacked some of them. Nearly all the work we did yesterday has been undone. Your fences are down and the footpaths are open again.’

My head jerked up to stare at him as if he was an angel of death.

‘Is this the Culler’s work?’ I said sharply. The fear in my voice made him hesitate and look strangely at me.

‘What’s the Culler?’ he asked.

‘An outlaw, a rogue,’ I said, stammering in haste. ‘He fired Mr Briggs’s plantation back in the autumn. Could this be his work? Or is it the village?’

‘It’s the village,’ said John Brien positively. ‘There’s been no time for anyone else to have heard of the trouble we are having here. Anyway I swear I know who has done it.’

‘Who?’ I said. My face, which had been white and wet with cold sweat, was regaining its colour and my breath was coming normally again. If it was not the Culler on my land then I could face any danger. For one moment it was as if the ground had opened beneath my feet and the Culler sitting so oddly on his black horse with his two black dogs was coming for me out of the darkness of hell. But then I recognized the sense of what Brien said. It was too soon for anyone outside the village to have got wind of the troubles here. If the Culler was coming, if he was coming for me, and that was a fear I would have to face, then I prayed only to be spared that fear while my mind was so busy, so frantic with so much else.

‘Who from the village then?’ I said, my voice steady again.

‘Gaffer Tyacke’s youngest son John. Sam Frosterly, and Ned Hunter,’ said Brien certainly. ‘They worked slowly and were surly all day. They’re known troublemakers. They were last to leave last night and they were in a huddle together all the way home. And they were first there this morning to see my face when I saw the damage. I saw them smile at each other then. I’d lay a week’s wages it was them.’

‘That’s a serious charge, a hanging offence,’ I said. ‘Have you any evidence?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘But you know they’re the wildest lads in the village, Mrs MacAndrew. Of course they had a hand in it.’

‘Yes,’ I said thoughtfully. I turned to the window and looked out over the garden and the paddock and the high, high hills of the downs. Brien cleared his throat and shuffled his feet impatiently. But I let him wait.

‘We do nothing,’ I said eventually, when I had taken my time and thought the thing through. ‘We do nothing, and you say nothing. I’ll not come driving down to Acre every time something happens. Set the fences back in their places and repair the broken ones as best you can. Say nothing to those three: young Tyacke, Sam Frosterly and Ned Hunter. Just leave it. It may be that it was high spirits and bad temper and they’ll forget all about it. I’m prepared to overlook it.’

I knew also that if Brien had no evidence we could not move against the three. The village had closed its doors and its face to me. If I arrested three of the happiest, naughtiest, best-looking lads in the whole of Acre I would be more than disliked: I would be hated.

The three had been an irrepressible gang ever since they had been expelled in a giggling heap from the village school. They had stolen apples from our orchards; they had poached game from our preserves. They had taken salmon from the Fenny. But one of them was always the first to claim my hand at a Wideacre dance and, while the other two would hoot and catcall, he would spin me around, his red face smiling. They were bad lads — in the village judgement. But there was not an ounce of vice or spite among the three of them. And any girl in the village would have given her bottom drawer to be courted by any one of them. But they were just twenty and in the uproarious stage of bachelordom when young men prefer each other’s company and a pint pot to the prettiest girls in the world. So although they would give and take a hearty kiss under the mistletoe in winter, or behind the hay ricks in summer — they were not the marrying kind.

If I knew them — and I thought I did — then the breaking of our fences would have been done as a dare. If they had no response either from me or from John Brien, the joke would lose its savour. And it would not be repeated, for that would smack of spite. And I believed that they loved me, and would not break my fences, once the thing was beyond a joke.

‘Leave it,’ I said again. ‘And don’t let them know that you think it was them.’

John Brien nodded, but the gleam in his eyes told me that he thought I was being weak. I did not care. His opinion mattered nothing to me. If I read this attack as a jest, then I was more likely to be right than he — with his prickly pride about property and his anxiety at being made mock by three wild lads.

But he was right. And I was wrong.

Somewhere I had lost my sense of what was happening in Acre village and on the land. I had been certain that the one attack was one jest, that it would stand alone as Acre’s reply to Miss Beatrice’s haughtiness. That if I said nothing and did nothing but merely continued to enclose the common, then honour would be satisfied on both sides and the work would go smoothly ahead.

But the second night the fences were thrown down. And the third night they were thrown down and burned.

It was a tidy fire, built with a countryman’s care in a clearing, away from the dry tinder in the wood and clear of any overhanging branches. They had piled up the fences, fired them, and got themselves home to Acre before anyone noticed the flames.

‘And then they all tell me that there was nothing they could do!’ said John Brien in irritation. ‘They say that by the time they got water from the Fenny to put out the flames the fences had been destroyed!’

‘They could have made a chain to the common stream,’ I objected. ‘It’s only a few yards away.’

‘It’s inside the area that’s to be enclosed,’ John Brien said. ‘They said you’d told them to keep off that land, so they did.’

I gave a hard smile. ‘It makes sense,’ I said.

But I turned to look out of the window and my smile died. ‘I won’t have this,’ I said coldly. ‘I gave them a chance, but they seem determined to defy me. If they want to threaten me, with a fire in my woods, then they will have to learn who is Master on this land.

‘I shall have to go to Chichester to get new fences. I shall call in at the barracks and get a couple of soldiers to guard the fences until they are up. And if those lads come near them they can have a beating to teach them better manners. I have allowed them their jest. But now there is work to do and the games are over.’

Brien nodded. His eyes bright at the hardness in my voice. ‘You could arrest them if we caught them red-handed,’ he said. ‘They could hang for this.’

‘Not Wideacre lads,’ I said dismissively. ‘They deserve a fright, but nothing more. I’ll go to Chichester at once.’

I paused only to find Harry, who was playing with Julia in the nursery, before I ordered the carriage.

‘This is very bad, y’know, Beatrice,’ said Harry, as he accompanied me to the stable yard.

‘I agree,’ I said briskly, pulling on my gloves.

‘Typical of the poor,’ said Harry. ‘They simply can’t see that this is the way things have to be.’

‘They seem to be doing rather well at ensuring that events do not follow this apparently inevitable course,’ I said ironically, and stepped into the carriage. ‘For a natural process your progress seems to be rather difficult to bring about.’

‘You are jesting, Beatrice,’ Harry said pedantically. ‘But everyone knows this is the way things have to be. A couple of crazy villagers cannot stop it.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘I shall check the law with Lord de Courcey while I am in town. If it goes on we will have to catch them and turn them over to the courts.’

‘Absolute severity,’ said Harry, inspecting the shine on his top boots. ‘No leniency.’

I nodded and waved him farewell from the window. Harry’s tone might strike me as pompous and silly but everyone I spoke to in Chichester seemed to share it. Lord de Courcey treated the fence breaking and the mischievous bonfire as if it were an armed insurrection and took me at once to the barracks. I resisted, without too much difficulty, the suggestion that I should have an entire troop of horse quartered on the Home Farm to protect Wideacre Hall from three young lads. But I was glad to accept the offer of half-a-dozen soldiers with a sergeant.

I could have used the Wideacre footmen. But ours is a small community and I knew only too well that while the love and sympathy of the Hall servants might be wholly mine, they would not seize and hold their cousins or even their brothers in a free-for-all over my fences.

I came home in triumph, followed at a lumberingly slow pace by a wagonful of new fences, and at a distance by the sergeant and the troopers. They were to put up at the Bush and it was given out that they were a recruiting party. But they were to be ready for my word to set the trap.

I sent word the very next night. All day John Brien and the grinning villagers had set the new fences and dug them securely into the ground. As darkness fell and the men went home, John Brien, Harry and I met the troopers on the far side of the river. Making no noise, we waded the horses through the water and the soldiers tied their mounts and surrounded the clearing, leaving only the lane to Acre empty. It was dark, the moon was not yet up, and the only light was starlight, and that often hidden with cloud.

I had stayed on horseback and I could see Tobermory’s ears flickering nervously at this late vigil. It was cold, a damp bitter cold of a late winter evening. Harry beside me shifted in his saddle and blew into his gloves to warm his fingers.

‘How long do we wait?’ he asked. He was as excited as a boy and I remembered, with some anxiety, his enthusiastic accounts of the fights at his school led by his hero Staveley. It was all a game to Harry. To John Brien, whose horse was on my other side, it was more serious. Despite his Acre wife he hated the village and thought himself above it. Like any foolish town-bred man he prized his quick wits above the slow wisdom of the country. And like any man climbing up the small and difficult ladder of snobbery he hated the rank of people he was trying to leave.

‘We’ll give them an hour,’ I said softly. I was anxious and tense with the excitement of the ambush, but somewhere in the back of my mind there was a voice saying, ‘These are your people, these are your people, and yet you are in hiding with soldiers and with two men whose judgement you despise to ambush them and do them harm.’

I could not believe that I had lost so much of my relationship with Wideacre, with the land, with the people, that I should be out in the dark like some spy to attack them. If it had not benefited Richard! But Richard’s rightful place at Wideacre had created a long chain of events that meant that even now my husband was eating his dinner behind bars, and that the face of Wideacre, that beloved smiling land, seemed to be changing as I looked at it. If it had not been for Richard! But…

‘There they are,’ said John Brien softly.

Straining my eyes into the darkness I could see, as he had seen, three figures coming silently down the track that leads to Acre. They were walking at the side in single file and their shadowy shapes sometimes blended with the dark bushes. I saw John Tyacke’s blond curls bright in the starlight, and thought I recognized the broad shoulders of Sam Frosterly. I heard John Tyacke say something under his breath and heard Ned Hunter laugh softly. They were quiet because it was night and they were country born and bred. They were not hushed for fear of a trap. They would never have dreamed that there could be a trap laid for Acre lads on Wideacre land.

They moved to the first fence that straddled the land and readied themselves to push it down. One of them had a spade over his shoulder and he dug out the foundations and then all three rushed at it in a giggling dash and tumbled over when it gave way beneath the charge.

‘Now?’ said Brien softly to me.

‘Now,’ I said, my lips so cold I could hardly speak.

‘Now!’ shouted Harry, and spurred his horse forward as the troopers rose up out of the dark bushes and raced towards the three lads. There were six troopers, a mounted sergeant, Harry, John Brien and I. The lads tumbled to their feet and stared as if they could not believe their eyes, then in a flash they were running like startled deer back towards Acre, heading for home, in the old trust that home was safe for them.

Ned and Sam leaped the broken fence and raced up the track with the troopers behind them and Harry riding them down. But I saw a glint of fair hair and realized that John Tyacke was running in the opposite direction, down towards the Fenny where he could be sure of a hundred hiding places and a dark secret creep home. He did not know I was there, watching him as he ran straight towards me. His ears and his attention were on the noise of Harry throwing himself from his horse on to the two other lads. He was expecting to be chased from behind. He was upon me almost before he knew it and he skidded to a halt in the darkness at Tobermory’s side.

‘Miss Beatrice!’ he said.

‘John Tyacke,’ I replied. Then he ducked away from me and fled down the little path towards the river.

‘Did you see him go, ma’am?’ called the sergeant, turning his men from the fight in the lane where Ned and Sam were standing sulkily between John and Harry.

‘No,’ I said in a quick thoughtless response. He was Tyacke’s grandson and I liked Tyacke. He was one of our people and the sergeant was a stranger. He was not to be ridden down like a dog.

‘No, we’ve lost him,’ I said.

The troopers took Sam and Ned away to Chichester that very night. I had not thought of that. They were committed to trial at the quarter sessions before Judge Browning. I had not thought of that. By the time Acre woke up the next day there was nothing anyone could do. Two of the best-loved lads of the village had been taken away. And their greatest friend, young John Tyacke, could only sit by his mother’s small fire with his head in his hands and mutter that he did not know what he should do.

The whole of Acre knew that if Ned and Sam had been up to some devilry then John would have been with them. But they also knew that the devilry must have gone badly wrong indeed for the three to have been split up. For John was not the sort of lad to leave his friends to face trouble alone. He sat and brooded all day about what he should do, while the fence was repaired and the felling of the trees inside the enclosed land could at last start. Then he went to his grandfather, Gaffer Tyacke, and told him what had happened.

Then Gaffer Tyacke came to me.

I had half expected him, for I had yet to learn that I was no longer the villagers’ first call when they faced trouble. Gaffer came in to my office while Harry was there, and if I had been quicker to send Harry out of the room then I might have stopped the downward spiral from error to tragedy. But Stride had served coffee for Harry and me while we worked on some plans, and Harry was intent on some petits fours and would have been troublesome to move. So I let him munch at the table while Gaffer Tyacke stood in front of my desk with his cap in his hands.

‘I’ve come to give myself up, Miss Beatrice,’ he said.

‘What?’ I demanded incredulously.

‘I’ve come to give myself up,’ he replied steadily. ‘I took the two lads into the woods last night and I ordered them to pull down the fences. I ordered them to help me on that one night. The nights before was me alone.’

I stared at him as if one of us was crazy, and then slowly it dawned on me what he was doing.

‘Gaffer Tyacke, no one could believe that,’ I said gently. ‘You are an old man, you could not possibly have done it. I know what you are trying to do, but it cannot be done.’

There was no responsive gleam in his eye. He had known me and loved me since as far back as I could remember. He saw me christened in the parish church, and on my first rides with Papa. But now he looked through me as if I were a smeary window, and said, ‘I’ve come to give myself up, Miss Beatrice, and I ask that you will have me arrested and send me to Chichester.’

‘What’s this?’ said Harry, coming out of his dream of chocolate cakes with a start. ‘What’s this I hear? Was it you breaking the fences, Tyacke?’

‘Yes,’ said the old man steadily.

‘No!’ I said, breathless with irritation and a rising sense of fear. ‘How could it be, Harry? Don’t be so foolish. You saw the man run last night. It could not have been Gaffer Tyacke.’

‘It was me, begging your pardon,’ said George Tyacke steadily. ‘And I have come to give myself up.’

‘Well, you’ll have to stand trial and it’s a most serious offence,’ said Harry warningly.

‘I know that, Squire,’ said Tyacke evenly. He knew it better than any of us. It was only because he really understood what was happening that he was here. I put out a hand to him.

‘Gaffer Tyacke, I know what you’re doing,’ I said. ‘I did not mean it to go this far. But I can probably stop it. There’s no need to try and save them this way.’

He turned his face towards me and his dark eyes were as black as a prophet. ‘Miss Beatrice, if you did not mean it to go this far you should never have started it. You told us yourself this is the way of the world outside Wideacre. You have brought that world to Wideacre and now it will mean death. You have brought death to Wideacre, Miss Beatrice. And it had better be mine rather than anyone else’s.’

I gasped and fell back in my chair, and Harry stepped forward with bullying authority.

‘Now see here, that’s enough!’ he said. ‘You’ve upset Miss Beatrice. Hold your tongue!’

George Tyacke nodded his head, his eyes still upon me burning with reproach while Harry crossed to the bell and ordered the carriage for Chichester.

‘Harry,’ I said urgently. ‘This is nonsense and it must stop now.’

He hesitated at my tone and looked from me to George Tyacke.

‘I’ve come to give myself up to you,’ said George. ‘But I can go to Lord Havering. I’m prepared to take the punishment.’

‘It’s too serious to let pass, Beatrice,’ said Harry, his tone reasonable but his babyish face alive with excitement at the drama of these petty, deadly events. ‘I’ll take Tyacke here to Chichester at once and make my deposition. You come along, now,’ he said rudely to Tyacke and took him from the room.

I saw the carriage go past the window and I could think of no way to stop it. I could think of no way to stop anything. I sat with my head in my hands by my desk for a long, long hour. Then I went up to my nursery to find my son, the future Squire.

They hanged him.

Poor, old, brave, foolish, Gaffer Tyacke.

The two lads would not agree that it was all his doing but the court was happy to have a man who confessed to breaking fences, trespassing on property and burning wood. So they hanged him. And Gaffer Tyacke went with steady steps to the scaffold and his old shoulders straight with pride.

The two lads, Hunter and Frosterly, they transported. Ned Hunter caught gaol fever and died while he was awaiting transportation. They said that Sam was with him all the time and he died in Sam’s arms, his lips black with the fever, longing for a sight of his home and the touch of his mother’s hand. Sam Frosterly sailed on the next ship out, and his family had a letter from him, just once. He was in Australia, a hard life and a bitter life for a lad reared in the gentle heart of Sussex. He must have longed and longed for the green hills of home. And they said it was the homesickness, not the heat or the flies or the dreadful bloody brawls, that killed him. He died within the year. If you are Wideacre born and Wideacre bred you cannot be happy elsewhere.

I heard of the deaths — Gaffer’s through the trapdoor, and Hunter’s on the convict ship — with a thin mouth, a white face, and dry eyes. After Hunter’s death, John Tyacke, the young lovely grandson and the pet of the village, disappeared. Some said he had run off to sea, some said he had hanged himself in the Wideacre woods and would be found when the autumn winds came and swept the leaves away from shielding him. He was gone, anyway. And the three of them would roister arm in arm down Acre lane no more. And when they brought the harvest in, John Tyacke would not swirl me round in a leaping jig while the others twisted their caps in their hands and giggled and nudged each other. The three of them were gone.