Wideacre

18

But I had to wake up. There was always work to do, and no one but me who could do it. I had to wake, and dress, and go down to breakfast and sit opposite John, with Celia at the foot of the table, and Harry smiling, at the head, and exchange inanities. Then I had to go to my office and pull out the drawer of bills and spread them out before me and puzzle and worry at them until my head ached.

They were a morass of demands to me. I could not see how we had got there; I could not see how to get free. The first simple debts with Mr Llewellyn I had understood well enough. But then the bad weather had come and the sheep had done so badly. Then the cows had some infection and many calves were stillborn. So I had borrowed from the bankers on some of the new wheatfields. But then that had not raised enough, so I had mortgaged some of the marginal lands — the fields on the borders with Havering. But the repayments on those loans were heavy too. I was borrowing and borrowing against the wheat harvest. Praying that the wheat harvest would be such a golden glut that I need never borrow again. That the barns would overflow with wheat in such a surplus that I could sell and sell and sell, and all my debts would vanish — as if they had never been. I spread the bills before me like some complicated patchwork before an inadequate needlewoman, and I sighed with anxiety.

I carried this burden alone. I dared not tell Harry how the scheme for the entail had committed us to one debt after another. I mentioned casually that we had obtained credit on the basis of one field or one small farm, but I dared not tell Harry that I was borrowing to repay loans. And then I was borrowing to service loans. And now I was borrowing just to pay wages, to buy seedcorn, to stem the tide of bankruptcy that was lapping at my feet. I dared not tell Harry, and I felt so much alone. The scheme Ralph had planned for Harry: the erosion of his profits and the seeping away of his wealth, I had played on myself. In my one great gamble for total ownership of the land — to have it myself and to see my child in the Squire’s chair — I had gambled everything on the Wideacre harvest.

And if that failed: I failed.

And if I failed Harry and Celia and John and the children would go down in one resounding crash of debt. We would disappear like all bankrupts did. If we could salvage anything we might buy a little farmhouse in Devon or Cornwall, or perhaps in John’s beastly Scotland. Anywhere where land was cheap and food prices low. And I would never wake to see the hills of Wideacre again.

No one would call me ‘Miss Beatrice’ with love in their voice. No one would call Harry ‘Squire’, as if it were his name. We would be newcomers. And no one would know our family went back to Norman times, and that we had farmed and guarded the same land for hundreds of years. We would be nobodies.

I shuddered, and pulled the bills towards me again. The ones from Chichester tradesmen I let run. Only the purveyors of the household did I pay regularly. I did not want Celia to learn from the cook or from a housemaid that the merchants were refusing to deliver until their bills were met. So that made a pile of bills that had to be paid at once. Beside them were a smaller pile of creditors’ notes that had to be met this month. Mr Llewellyn, the bank, a London money-lender, and our solicitor, who had advanced a few hundred pounds when I badly needed cash to buy some seedcorn. They had to be paid at once too. With them also was a note from the corn merchant, to whom we owed a few hundred guineas for oats, which we did not grow, for the horses, and a note from the hay merchant. Now we grew fewer meadows I was having to buy in hay, and it was costlier than I had believed possible. It would make sense to reduce the Wideacre stables, which were filled with underworked horses. But I knew that the first Wideacre horse on the market would be seen as a sign that I was selling up, and then the creditors would rush to be first with their notes. They would foreclose on me, in a panic not to be left with a dishonoured note-of-hand, and in their rush for little sums of money, Wideacre would bleed to death from a hundred minor stabs.

Each small, irresistible demand added to a total I could not meet. I had no money. I felt the creditors gather around me like a pack of nipping wolves and I knew that I must free myself of them, and free Wideacre of them, but I could not see how.

I shuffled the final pile of papers into a heap of debtors who could wait, who would wait. The wine merchants, who knew we had their bill’s worth of wine in the cellars, and who would be circumspect in their demands. The farrier, who had worked on the estate since coming out of his apprenticeship. The carters, who had been paid on the nail for years and years. The cobbler, the gate-mender, the harness-maker — the little men who could beg that their bills be paid but who could do nothing against me. It was a large heap of bills, but they were all for small sums. My failure to pay might ruin the little tradesmen, but they could not ruin me. They could wait. They would have to wait.

It made three tidy piles. It got me no further forward. I folded them up and stuffed them back into the drawer. I did not have to see them to remember that I was drowning in debt. I remembered it every waking moment, and my nights were full of dreams of strange men with town accents saying to me, ‘Sign here. Sign here,’ in a long dream of horror and fear of the loss of Wideacre. I slammed the desk drawer shut with sudden impatience. There was no one to help me, and I was alone with this burden. All I could hope for was the old magic winds of Wideacre blowing my way again and a warm wind blowing out of a hot harvest sun to make the land golden, and set me free.

I rang the bell and ordered that Richard be dressed for a drive and brought to me in the stable yard. I could not stay indoors. The land no longer loved me, I could not take Richard at a whirling trot down the drive and show him the trees with the confidence of my papa on the land he owned outright, but I could still go out. It was still my land. I might still escape the intractable, unanswerable sheets of bills by driving out under a clear blue sky with my son.

He came to me beaming, as he always did. Of all the children I have ever seen Richard was the most sweet-tempered. One of the naughtiest too, I admit. At the age when Julia used to hold her toes in her warm cradle and coo to the delight of her grandmama and Celia, Richard was heaving himself up with chubby arms, and trying to climb out. Julia would play with a moppet in her cot for hours, but Richard would hurl it out on to the floor and then bawl for it to be returned to him. If you were fool enough to go to him he would play the same trick again. And again. Only a paid servant would return the number of times Richard thought necessary, before his dark eyelashes would close on that smooth and perfect cheek. He was the bonniest baby. The naughtiest, the sweetest, child. And he adored me.

So I caught him from his nurse’s arms and hugged him hard and smiled when I heard his crow of delight at my sudden appearance. I passed him up to her when she was settled in the gig and made sure she held him tight. Then I put his rattle in his grabbing little hands and swung up beside them.

Sorrel trotted down the drive and Richard waved the rattle at the flying trees and at the flickering shadows and sunlight. On either side of the silver toy were little silver bells and they tinkled like sleighbells and made Sorrel throw up his head and step out faster. I drove at a spanking pace down the drive and then up to the London road. We were in time to see the mailcoach go by in a whirl of dust and Richard waved to the passengers on the roof and a man waved back. Then I turned the gig and we headed for home. A small enough outing, but when you love a child your world shrinks to a proper size of little delights and little islands of peace. Richard brought me that. If I loved him for nothing else, I would have loved him for that.

We were nearing the turn of the drive when he choked. A funny sound, unlike his usual open-mouthed barks of coughs. He gave an open-mouthed retching, a sort of gasping for air, a sound unlike anything I had ever heard before. I hauled on the reins and Sorrel skidded to a halt. My eyes met those of his nurse in mutual bewilderment and then she snatched the rattle from his hands. One of the tiny tinkly silver bells on the end was missing. He had swallowed it and he was gasping, reaching for his life’s breath around it.

The gig lurched as I grabbed him and laid him over my knees, face down. Without knowing why, I slapped him hard on the back and then grabbed his little feet and held him upside-down with some vague memory of his birth and the little choking noises he had made then.

He squawked some more, but no little silver bell fell on to the floor of the gig. I half flung him back at his nurse and cracked the whip at Sorrel, and shouted, ‘Where’s Dr MacAndrew?’

‘In the village, with Lady Lacey,’ she gasped, and clutched Richard to her shoulder.

The noises he was making were more painful now, more shocking to hear. He was retching and choking and his little gasps were less and less effective. He was getting no air. He was dying, in my gig, on Wideacre land, on a sunny morning.

I lashed Sorrel and he put his head down and went from his well-bred canter into a wild gallop. The gig bounced and bobbed like a boat on flood water but I held to the speed, not checking. The wind streamed into my face, I could scarcely see. But one glance at my son told me that none of this rush of air was finding its way into his little body. His gasps were quieter and he was hardly coughing at all. His lips were blue.

‘Where in the village?’ I yelled above the noise of Sorrel’s thundering hoofs and the creaks of the speeding gig.

‘At the vicarage, I think,’ shrieked Mrs Austin, her face as white as her collar, clinging to Richard in fear for him, and in terror at the headlong pace.

We whirled into the village and I saw nothing, but heard the slap of a hen, neck broken under the gig’s wheels. I pulled Sorrel up so hard he half reared as he skidded to a halt, and I flung the reins at Mrs Austin and snatched Richard from her. It was too late. Too late. He was fighting for his breath no more.

I ran up the garden path to the front door, his body limp in my arms, his eyelids as blue as his lips, his little chest so still. The door was opened as I ran, and Dr Pearce’s startled face was there.

‘Where’s John?’ I said.

‘In my study,’ said the Vicar. ‘What is wrong …?’

I slammed open the door and scarcely saw Celia, Mrs Merry and old Margery Thompson bent over the table. I saw only John.

‘John,’ I said, and held out the limp body of my son to him.

He had never touched him, though Richard was now nearly a year old. But now he snatched him from me, taking in the blue eyelids, the blue lips, in one fast raking glance.

He laid the child on the table. Richard was limp; his head banged on the wood as if he were already a corpse. John was patting his waistcoat pocket for a little silver penknife he carried.

‘What?’ he asked, monosyllabically.

‘The silver bell, off his rattle,’ I said.

‘Buttonhook,’ he said to Celia. She was beside him, her eyes on my son’s face. He took Richard’s chin in one hand and forced it brutally upwards until the delicate skin of his neck was tight. And then he cut his throat.

My knees buckled beneath me and I slumped in a chair. For one crazed moment I thought my husband had killed my son, but then I saw him jam the stem of one of Dr Pearce’s pipes in the little hole and I heard a rasping breath. He had slit a hole in Richard’s windpipe and Richard was breathing again.

I dipped my head in my hands, unable to look, then peeped through my fingers to see John staring down Richard’s mouth, with his right hand outstretched towards Celia, as imperious as any Edinburgh surgeon.

She had rummaged in her reticule and come out with a slender pearl-handled buttonhook and a little crochet hook. She put the buttonhook flat in his palm and stood beside him. Without a second’s hesitation she took Richard’s pale face in her own two hands and straightened him so that the pipe stem was not obstructed. His lips were turning pink again. John bent low, and probed down the tiny throat with the buttonhook. Behind me in the doorway Dr Pearce’s boots suddenly creaked as he shifted his weight in the silent horror of the room.

‘Too big,’ said John, straightening up. ‘What else?’

Without a word Celia took one hand from steadying Richard’s head and offered John the crochet hook. He smiled, without looking away from my son.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Perfect.’

Everyone in the room held their breath. Mrs Merry, who had sneered at the clever young Edinburgh-trained man, Margery Thompson, the village gossip, Dr Pearce and me. John poked down Richard’s tiny throat with the slender silver hook and only he and Celia seemed unaware of the agony of tension in the sunlit study.

There was a thin, incongruous tinkle. The little bell knocked against Richard’s milk teeth as John drew it out. And then, there it was, suspended on the silver hook.

‘Done it,’ John said, and he pulled his silk handkerchief from his pocket, pulled out the pipe stem from my baby’s throat, tied the handkerchief in a bandage around his neck and turned him on his front on the hard table. Richard retched and coughed, a wheezy hacking cough, and began, hoarsely, to cry.

Celia said, ‘May I?’ to John and, at his nod, scooped my son into her arms and laid his head on her shoulder. She patted him on his back and whispered loving words while he wept for the confusion and the pain in his throat. Beside his curly head her face was alight with pride and love, and she met John’s look with her heart written in her eyes.

‘You were good,’ he said, sharing the credit. ‘The buttonhook was too big. We would have lost him if you had not thought of the other.’

‘You were good,’ she said. Her eyes met his in frank love. ‘Your hand was steady as a rock. You saved his life.’

‘D’you have some laudanum?’ John asked Dr Pearce, not taking his eyes from Celia’s bright face.

‘No, only a little brandy,’ said the Vicar, watching the two of them as intently as the rest of us.

John grimaced. ‘Very well then,’ he said. ‘He needs something. He’s had a nasty shock.’

He took Richard from Celia’s arms as gently as a father and held the glass for Richard to sip. When the child squirmed he held his face still and tipped down the little measure with one practised gesture. Richard was soothed at once, and when Celia took him back into her arms, his head nodded on her shoulder and he dozed.

Celia and John looked at each other for a brief, magical moment, then John turned to me, and the spell was broken.

‘You have had a shock too, Beatrice,’ he said coolly. ‘Would you like a glass of ratafia? Or port?’

‘No,’ I said dully. ‘I need nothing.’

‘Did you think you had lost him?’ asked Mrs Merry. ‘He looked so blue!’

‘Yes,’ I said desolately. ‘I thought I had lost him, the next Squire. Then all this, all this, would have been for nothing!’

There was a silence. They all turned shocked faces to me. Every one. Every one of them looked at me as if I was an exhibit in some show of freaks.

‘You thought of him as the Squire?’ asked John, incredulous. ‘Your baby was dying in your arms, and you thought that your work would go for nothing?’

‘Yes,’ I said. I stared at the empty fireplace. Not caring what they thought of me. Not caring for anything, anymore.

‘If he had died, what would have become of Wideacre? The entail specifies them both. I have put everything on the two of them. And then I thought he was dead.’

I dropped my face into my hands and I shuddered with deep soundless sobs. No one put a hand out to comfort me. No one said one kind word.

‘You are shocked,’ said Celia at last, but her voice was cold. ‘I came in the carriage. You can go home in it. John can drive me in your gig. Go home now, Beatrice, and you can put Richard to bed when you get home. Then you can rest yourself. You cannot know what you are saying. This has been a shock for you.’

I let her walk me to the carriage and help Mrs Austin with Richard. Then I saw her step back from the window and Coachman Ben drove me home with my son’s warm sleepy body in my arms.

As the trees of the drive flickered past the window, green in the April sunshine, I remembered the look that had passed between Celia and John when he had praised her quickness in thinking of the crochet hook, and she had praised his skill. And I thought also that when she said, ‘Your hand was steady as a rock,’ she had spoken not for his ears alone. She had praised him, and restored him as a first-class doctor. She had told that quiet room, and thus the village, and the wider world outside the village borders, that Dr MacAndrew was indeed the best doctor that the county had ever seen. She had restored John to society. The trick that I knew he could never have done alone, that I had sworn I would never do for him, Celia had done with one easy sentence.

Wideacre might think that his fatigue and drunkenness had killed my mama, but that tale would be swiftly replaced with the story of how, when my child was in danger, I had driven like a devil to reach him. How I had run up the drive with my son in my arms. How I had asked for ‘Doctor’ MacAndrew, not ‘Mister’. And how John’s quick, nerveless skill had saved the life of my son.

The carriage stopped at the front steps of the Hall and Stride opened the door and checked as he saw me inside and not Celia.

‘Lady Lacey is coming later in my gig,’ I said. But it was an effort to speak at all. ‘There has been an accident. Please send coffee to my room. I do not wish to be disturbed.’

Stride nodded, as impassive as ever, and handed me down into the hall. I went wearily through the door to the west wing, not even waiting to see Richard’s nurse inside. She would know to put him into his cradle at once. She would know to watch over him while he slept. He did not need my care. And now there was a barrier between him and me. I had known and I had said aloud, that my son, my lovely son, was most important to me as the heir to Wideacre.

I might love the shadow of his eyelashes on his cheeks, or his curly hair, or the sweet, sweet smell of him. But when I thought he was dying it was Wideacre I had thought of first.

Wideacre. There were times when I thought the land had driven me quite mad. I shut my bedroom door and leaned my back against it, and sighed. I was too tired to stop and think. Too tired to consider what I was doing. Too tired even to wonder what had become of me if I cared for Wideacre first and foremost, even before the life of my darling son.

John had left a bottle of laudanum by my bed. I looked at it dull-eyed. I felt neither threat nor fear. I measured out two drops into a glass of water and I drank them slowly, savouring them like a sweet liqueur. Then I lay back on my bed and slept. I did not fear dreams. The reality of my life seemed worse than anything I might meet in sleep. I would rather dream than wake.

In the morning I wished I had not woken. There was a grey mist over everything. I could not see the hills from my window; I could not see the woods; I could not even see the start of the rose garden. The whole world seemed muffled and hushed. Lucy bringing my cup of chocolate found the door locked and called out, ‘Miss Beatrice? Are you all right?’ and I had to get out of bed on to a cold wooden floor and shiver across to open the door for her.

Her eyes were bright with curiosity but there was no sympathy in them as she watched me jump back into bed and huddle the covers up to my chin.

‘Send for the kitchenmaid to light my fire,’ I said snappishly. ‘I forgot when I locked the door that she would not be able to get in this morning. It’s freezing in here.’

‘She’s not here,’ said Lucy without apology. ‘She’s away down to Acre. There’s no one to light your fire. There’s only the upper servants left in the house. Everyone else has gone to Acre.’

The mist seemed to have penetrated my very room, it was so damp and cold. I reached out for the hot chocolate and drank it greedily, but it made me no warmer.

‘Gone?’ I asked. ‘Gone to Acre? What on earth for?’

‘It’s the funeral,’ said Lucy. She went to the tall wardrobe and took out my black silk dress for morning wear, and a sheaf of clean fresh-pressed linen.

‘Whose funeral?’ I asked. ‘You are talking in riddles, Lucy. Put those things down and tell me at once what is going on. Why have the servants taken a morning off without leave? Why did no one ask me?’

‘They’d hardly be likely to ask you,’ she said. She put my gown on the foot of the bed and spread the linen on the clothes-horse before the cold grate.

‘What on earth do you mean?’ I said. ‘Why not?’

‘Because it’s Beatrice Fosdyke’s funeral,’ said Lucy. Her hands were free and she put them on her hips. Arms akimbo she looked challengingly at me. Not at all respectful. I sat in my bed more like a cold child than the Mistress of a great estate.

‘Bea Fosdyke isn’t dead,’ I contradicted her. ‘She ran off to Portsmouth.’

‘Nay,’ Lucy said with a gleam of superior knowledge in her eyes. ‘She ran off to Portsmouth all right. But she ran off to shame. She thought she’d get a job as a milliner or a shop girl. But she had no references and no training and she could not get work. She lived off the money she had been saving for her dowry for the first week. But her lodgings were expensive and she had no friends to give her a meal. Soon all that was gone. Then she gathered pure for a week or two.’

‘What’s “pure”?’ I asked. I was listening to this tale as a fairy story. But some coldness, the mist, just the mist, seemed to be drifting down my spine. I drew the blankets a little more closely, but I felt a finger of dread, like a draught down my neck.

‘Don’t you know that?’ Lucy’s look at me was almost a sneer. ‘Pure is the filth of dogs and the human filth that they throw out in the streets and into the gutters. The pure collectors pick it up and sell it.’

I put my cup down. I could feel the rise of nausea at the thought. I made a pout of disgust at Lucy. ‘Really, Lucy! What a thing to talk about at this time in the morning,’ I said. ‘What on earth is it bought for?’

‘For cleaning booksellers’ leather,’ Lucy said sweetly. She stroked the calf-bound volume I had by my bedside. ‘Didn’t you know, Miss Beatrice, that they make the leather smooth and soft so you love to touch it, by rubbing it and scrubbing it with human and dog filth?’

I looked at the book with distaste and back at Lucy.

‘So Beatrice Fosdyke became a pure collector,’ I said. ‘She was a fool not to come home. There’s little enough work here but the parish money would be better than that. She was a fool not to come home.’

‘She didn’t keep that work,’ said Lucy. ‘While she was walking the streets with her little bag, a gentleman saw her and offered her a shilling to go with him.’

I nodded, my eyes a little wider. But I said nothing. I was still cold. The room was somehow damp too. The fog outside made ghostly shapes. It loomed up against the window.

‘She went with him,’ said Lucy simply. ‘And the next gentleman, and the next. Then her father went down to Portsmouth seeking her. He found her waiting down by the stagecoach inn, waiting for men to sell herself to. He smashed her face, in the open street, and he got back on to the coach and came straight home.’

I nodded again. The mist was like a grey animal rubbing against the window. Its cold breath was icy in the room. I could not get warm. I did not want to hear about this other Beatrice.

‘She went back to her lodging house and borrowed a penny off the woman to buy a pennyworth of rope, to tie up her box, she said. She said her pa had come to rescue her. That she was going home. That she would never leave her home again.’

Bright in my mind against the grey window was the picture of Giles, his corpse bent like a bow, because he would not go on the parish.

‘She hanged herself?’ I asked, to get the story over and to break the spell of Lucy’s malicious sing-song voice.

‘She hanged herself,’ Lucy repeated. ‘They cut her down and they’ve brought her body home. But she cannot lie in the churchyard. She will have to be buried outside. Next to Giles.’

‘She was a fool,’ I repeated stoutly. ‘She could have come home. No one gathers filth on Wideacre. No one sells themselves for a shilling to strangers. She should have come home.’

‘Ah, but she would not,’ Lucy said. I felt again that prickle of dread at the rising inflexion of Lucy’s voice. ‘She would not come home to Wideacre because she would not tread the same earth which you tread, Miss Beatrice. She said she would not breathe the same air as you. She said she would rather die than live on your land.’

I gaped at Lucy. Bea Fosdyke, this girl, of my own age, bearing my name, christened in compliment to my parents, had loathed me so?

‘Why on earth?’ I asked incredulously.

‘She was Ned Hunter’s girl!’ said Lucy in triumph. ‘No one knew, but they were betrothed. They had exchanged rings, and carved their names in the oak tree you felled on the common. When he died of the gaol fever she said she would not sleep another night on Wideacre land. But now she will sleep here for ever.’

I lay back on the pillow, trembling with the cold of that freezing room. The chocolate had not warmed me, and no one would light my fire. Even my very servants were against me and had gone to honour the shameful grave of a prostitute who had hated me.

‘You may go, Lucy,’ I said, and there was hatred in my voice.

She bobbed a curtsy and went to the door. But she turned with her hand on the knob. ‘The patch of ground outside the church wall has two heaps of stone there now,’ she said. ‘Old Giles … and Beatrice Fosdyke. We have a graveyard for suicides now. They are calling the suicides’ graveyard “Miss Beatrice’s Corner”.’

The mist was coming down the chimney like a swirling cloud of poison. It was stinging in my eyes. It was behind my throat making me want to retch. It was clammy on my forehead and my face. I slumped back on the white lace pillows and pulled the fleecy blankets right up over my head. In the friendly dark under the covers I gave a great wail of pain and horror. And buried my face in the sheet, and waited for a sleep as deep and as dark as death.

The fog lasted until May Day, a whole long grey week. I told Harry and Celia that it gave me a headache, and that was why I was so pale. But John looked at me with his hard clever eyes and nodded, as if he had heard something he had known all along. On May Day morning it lifted, but there was no joy in the air. Acre village usually had a maypole, and a queen o’ the may, a party, and a football fight. The Acre team would take a ball, an inflated bladder, up to the parish bounds, and they and the Havering men would struggle and kick it back and forth over the parish boundaries until one team triumphed and carried it home as a prize. But this year Acre was all wrong.

The cold grey mist hung over everything and people coughed in the coldness and hugged damp clothes to them. Last year’s queen o’ the may had been Beatrice Fosdyke, and there was some nonsense about it being unlucky to be the prettiest girl in the village and to follow in her shoes. The Acre team could not muster enough sound men. Those who were on the parish dared not be away from their cottages in case John Brien was making up a labour gang and they missed the chance to earn a few pence. And many of the others had coughs and colds because of a long wet spring and poor food. Acre had nearly always won the ball because the team was led by the three tearaways: Ned Hunter, Sam Frosterly, and John Tyacke. Now Ned was dead, Sam on his way to Australia, to his death, and John had gone missing with broken honour, broken loyalty, and a broken heart. So Acre felt indisposed either to dance or wrestle, to court or to make merry.

I dreaded the coming of my birthday in this dismal weather. I always thought of my birthday as the start of spring and yet it was like November when I awoke. I walked slowly downstairs knowing that I would find presents from Harry and Celia beside my plate. But the doorstep would not be heaped with little gifts from the village children. And baskets of spring flowers and posies would not arrive all through the day. And everyone would see what everyone knew: that I had lost the heart of Wideacre. That I was an outcast on my own land.

But, incredibly, it all looked the same. Three brightly wrapped presents sat beside my breakfast plate, from Harry, Celia and John. And on the table at the side, as ever, was a heap of small presents. My eyes took them in with a leap of gladness and a sigh, almost a gasp, escaped me. I felt a sudden prickling under my eyelids and could have wept aloud. Spring was coming then. The new season would make amends. And Acre had forgiven me. Somehow they had understood what I had never dared tell them outright. That the plough breaks the earth, cuts the toad, in order to plant the seed. That the scythe slices the hare while it is cutting hay. That the losses and deaths and grief and pain that had soured Acre all this freezing miserable winter and spring were like the pains of birth, and that the future, my son’s future, and Acre’s future were safe. But they had understood. They might have turned against me in bitterness and hatred for a while. But somehow they had understood.

I smiled and my heart was light for the first time since John had looked at me as he would look at a dying patient. I opened the presents by my plate first. I had a pretty brooch from Harry: a gold horse with a diamond inset as a star on its head. An ell of silk from Celia in a delicate lovely pewter grey. ‘For when we are in half-mourning, dearest,’ she said, kissing me. And a tiny package from John. I opened it with caution and then stuffed it back in the wrapping before Harry and Celia could see it. It was a phial of laudanum. On it he had written: ‘Four drops, four-hourly’. I dropped my head over my plate to hide my white face and shocked eyes.

He knew that I sought to escape the world in sleep. And he knew also that my sleeping and sleeping through these foggy weeks was a longing for Death. And he knew that I believed him when he had told me that Death was coming for me, and that I was ready. He was now giving to my hand the way to hurry towards it. And the corner outside the graveyard for suicides would be ‘Miss Beatrice’s Corner’ indeed.

When I gathered my courage and looked up, his eyes on me were bright, scornful. I had shown him the way. When he was struggling against drink he had found everywhere, at every hand, a dewy bottle with an unbroken seal. Now I knew that by my bedside every night would be a liberal supply of laudanum. And that the young doctor, who had loved me and warned me against the drug, would now supply me with as much as I wanted, until I slept and never woke again.

I shuddered. But my eyes slid to the little table heaped with presents.

‘And all these from Acre!’ said Celia marvelling. ‘I am so glad, so very glad.’

I nodded. ‘I am glad too,’ I said, my voice low. ‘It has been a hard winter for all of us. I am glad it is over.’

I walked to the table and unwrapped the first little parcel. Each one was no bigger than a cork from a wine bottle, all surprisingly uniform. All wrapped in gay paper.

‘What can it be?’ Celia exclaimed. She soon had her answer. From the pretty wrapping rolled a flint stone. It was white, and the grey shards on it showed where the white had chipped away. It was a flint from the common where the villagers could no longer go.

I dropped it in my lap and reached for another parcel. It was another flint. Harry exclaimed and strode over to the table. He opened half-a-dozen, ripping at the papers and scattering the wrapping on the floor. They were all flint stones. My lap was soon full of them. I counted them mechanically. There was one for every cottage, or house, or shanty, on our land. The whole village and every poor tenant had sent me a flint for my birthday. They did not dare stone me. Only one pebble had ever been shied at my gig. But they sent me, wrapped in pretty paper, a lapful of flints. I stood abruptly and showered them to the breakfast parlour floor. They clattered on the wood like monstrous hailstones in a storm of ice. Celia’s face was aghast. John was looking at me with overt curiosity. Harry was champing on his words, speechless with rage.

‘By God!’ he spluttered. ‘I’ll have the troops into the village for this. It’s an insult, a deliberate calculated insult. By God, I’ll not let it pass!’

Celia’s brown eyes suddenly filled with tears.

‘Oh, don’t let’s talk like that!’ she cried out in sudden passion. ‘It is we who have brought this on Beatrice. It is our fault. I have seen the village getting hungrier and more despairing and angrier. And all I have done is to try and ensure the very poorest families survived the winter. I never challenged what you and Beatrice were doing, Harry. But now I see the result of it. We have been all wrong, Harry. All wrong.’

I looked at her, my face blank. Everywhere I went I seemed to hear echoes of the message that Wideacre had gone wrong, had gone badly wrong. Whereas I believed, I had to believe, that it was all coming right. With fifty flints on the floor around my feet I stared at Celia, reproaching herself for the sorrow and hardness that had come to the land, and at Harry, speechless with anger. And at John, staring at me.

‘There’s one you missed,’ he said quietly. ‘Not a stone, a little basket.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Celia hopefully. ‘A pretty little basket like the children make with reeds from the river.’

I looked at it dully. It was Ralph’s basket, of course. I had been waiting for it all day. Now it sat on the table and I noted with dark eyes that he had lost none of the skill with his ringers, even if he would never walk or run or jump again. It was exquisitely made. He had taken time and trouble to make his threat to me delightfully pretty, inviting.

‘You open it, Celia,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to.’

‘Are you sure?’ she asked. ‘It cannot be anything bad. Look at the work that has gone into this lid, and the exquisite little catch.’ She slid back the little splinter of wood that served as a bolt and lifted the latch. She raised the lid with gentle ringers and parted the straw packed inside.

‘How odd,’ she said in surprise.

I had expected a china owl, like the last present. Or some horrid trick like a model of a mantrap or a china black horse. But it was worse than that.

I had braced myself for months, knowing that my birthday was coming, sensing Ralph somewhere near my land. I had expected some warning from him. Some coded threat. I had imagined all the forms that it could take. But it was worse.

‘A tinderbox?’ asked John. ‘A little tinderbox? Why would anyone send you a tinderbox, Beatrice?’

I drew a deep shuddering breath and my eyes turned to Harry, the plump pompous fool who was my only help and support in this hating world that I had made all around me.

‘It is the Culler,’ I said in despair. ‘He sends me that, to tell me he means to fire the house. He will come soon.’ And I reached out to Harry as if I were being swept down the Fenny on a flood tide and the waters were closing over my head. But Harry was not there. The mist was in my head and before my eyes again, and this time the greyness was not damp and cold, but hot.

And it smelled like smoke.

I took to my bed like some London miss in a decline. I could think of nothing else to do. I feared and hated the village and did not want to go there. I could not hear the heartbeat of the land so the woods and the downs were no comfort to me. I knew that somewhere, in some secret hollow, Ralph was hiding, watching the house with his hot black eyes. Waiting for me. My office and my maps, my rent table and my accounts were just so much paper that would blaze up if someone set a tinderbox to them. There was nothing for me to challenge so I stayed in bed. I lay on my back and looked at the great carved canopy over my head, at the profusion of fruit and flowers and animals and I longed for a land like that. Where good things grew and one could eat and enjoy without starving another. And I knew, in my secret, despairing heart, that Wideacre had been a land like that before I had gone mad, and lost myself, and lost the heartbeat, and lost the love, and lost the land. All I had left to cling to was the future, was Richard and Julia and the world they might make if I could keep Wideacre long enough to hand over to them. But I was lost.

They treated me like an invalid. The cook dreamed up delicate little dishes to tempt me. But I had no appetite. How could I have? I had eaten hearty on days when I had roamed the land like a gypsy and come home dog-tired and starving. They brought Richard in to see me, but he would not sit still beside me, and the noise he made hurt my head. Celia sat by my bed by the hour, sewing in the window seat with the warm May sunshine lighting her brown hair, or reading a book in companionable silence. Harry came in, clumsily tiptoeing, twice a day. Sometimes with a sprig of hawthorn for me or bluebells. And John came in, night and morning, with a cool hard look at me on his entrance. A phial of laudanum if I asked for it, and an expression in his pale eyes that was sometimes akin to pity.

He was working against me. I knew it without having to steal his letters or check the postbag. He had been in touch with his father, and with his father’s sharp Scottish lawyers, to see if they stood a chance of reclaiming what was left of his fortune. To see if they could disinherit my son. But I knew I had tied that rock-solid. I trusted my lawyers to have forged a contract that could be broken only by the signatories. And while I held Harry in the palm of my hand, Wideacre was safe for my son. And John could do nothing against me. But he stopped hating me throughout May while I lay in my bed dozing the warm days away. He was too good a doctor. All he could do, all his disposition and training and habits forced him to do, was to watch me and note the paleness in my cheeks and the shadows under my eyes, and the way I stared sightlessly at the wooden ceiling of my bed.

Under my pillows in the great bed were two things hidden. One, hard and square, was the tinderbox. I had taken the flint from it, and the tinder, for I had a fear now of fire, and every night I would insist that Harry went around the fireplaces of the Hall to check that they were all safely doused. Inside it I kept a twist of curl-paper with a handful of Wideacre earth in it. It was the earth I had clenched in my hand all the trembling walk home; I had kept it in the bottom of my jewel box all these long years. Now I put it with the tinderbox the Culler had sent me. Ralph’s earth in the Culler’s box. If I had been the witch they called me, I would have made magic with them. And the magic I would choose would have made me a girl again and this pain and hunger and death would not have been.

I lay like a tranced princess in a daydream of death. But Celia, pitying, forgiving Celia, laid little plans for me and tempted me from my bed.

‘Harry said the wheat was looking very well,’ she said one morning towards the end of May as she sat in the window seat of my bedroom and gazed over the rose garden and paddock to the woods and the high, high downs behind.

‘Yes?’ I said languidly. I did not even turn my head. Above me was the carved roof of the bed showing corn standing tall, fat sheep, cows in calf and a tumble of fruit and sheaves of wheat from a great twirly shell. A carving to bless the master of the land with a constant reminder that the land was fertile and easy.

‘It is high and silvery-green,’ Celia said. Somewhere, among the mist in my mind, the shape and colour of the rippling fields came back to me.

‘Yes,’ I said with more interest.

‘He says that the Oak Tree Meadow and Norman Meadow are growing a crop the like of which has never been seen in the country. Great fat heads of wheat and straight tall stalks,’ said Celia, her eyes on my suddenly brightening face.

‘And the common field?’ I asked, raising myself a little in bed and turning to look at Celia.

‘That is doing very well,’ said Celia. ‘It is so sunny there, that Harry says it will ripen early.’

‘And the new fields we enclosed up to the slopes of the downs?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know,’ said Celia slyly. ‘Harry did not say. I do not think he has been up that far.’

‘Not been up that far!’ I exclaimed. ‘He should be up there every day. Give those damned idle shepherds one chance and they’ll let the sheep in to graze it down to the root to try and show us that the downs should be left for sheep! Let alone the rabbits and the deer. Harry should be checking the fences around the corn fields every day!’

‘That is bad,’ said Celia ingenuously. ‘If only you could go and see for yourself, Beatrice.’

‘I’ll go,’ I said without thinking, and tossed back the covers and slid from my bed. The three long weeks in bed had made me weak, and my head swam when I leaped up. But Celia was at my side, and when Lucy came into the room they had my pale grey riding habit laid out for me.

‘Shouldn’t I still be in black?’ I asked, pausing at the sight of the pretty dress in the lighter material.

‘It has been nearly a year,’ Celia said, temporizing. ‘One would not wish to be lacking in attention but it is far too hot for your black velvet riding habit, Beatrice. And you always looked so lovely in this one. Wear it today, you are not going off the estate, and you will feel so much better in it.’

I needed no persuasion but slid the silk skirts over my head and buttoned the smart jacket. Lucy brought the little velvet cap that matched the outfit and I piled my chestnut curls into it carelessly, and pinned it securely. Celia gave a half-sigh as I stood before the mirror.

‘Beatrice, you are so beautiful,’ she said earnestly. I turned and looked at myself in the mirror.

My eyes looked back at me, the mouth curved in my quizzical smile. As I grew older and harder I had lost the magical prettiness that had been mine when Ralph loved me, and my beauty was like a luminous sunbeam in a dark barn. But the new lines around my mouth and the little trace of lines above my nose on my forehead from scowling had not robbed me of the beauty that comes to women with clear, lovely bones under smooth, glowing skin. I would be a beauty from now until the day of my death. Nothing would ever rob me of this. But in many ways it was changing. In some ways it was soured. The new lines did not matter, but the expression did.

Ignoring Lucy and Celia, I stepped closer to the mirror so my reflected face and my real one were just inches apart. The bones, the hair, the skin were as perfect as ever. But the expression had changed. When Ralph had loved me, my face was as open as a poppy on a summer morning. When I had desired Harry my secrets did not shadow my eyes. Even when John followed me, and courted me, and held my wrap for me after dancing, the smile on my mouth showed warm in my eyes and turned his heart over when he saw me. But now my eyes were cold. Even when my mouth was smiling, or when I was laughing, the eyes were as cold and sharp as splinters. And my face was closed in on the secrets I had to carry. My mouth had new lines because the lips pressed together, even in repose. My forehead had new lines because I frowned so often. With surprise I realized that when I was old, my face would fall into the expression of a discontented woman. That I should not look as if I had enjoyed the best childhood anyone could have, and a womanhood of power and passion. I might think I had made a life to give me every sort of pleasure. But my face when I was forty would tell me that my life had been hard and my pleasures all paid for.

‘What is the matter?’ asked Celia gently. She had slipped from her window seat and come to stand beside me, her arm around my waist, her eyes on my face.

‘Look at us,’ I said, and she turned to look in the mirror as well. It reminded me of the day we were fitting for her wedding and my bridesmaid’s dress, so long ago at Havering. Then I had been a pattern for any man’s desire, and Celia had been a pale flower. Now as we stood side by side I saw she had worn the years better than I. Her happiness had put a bloom in her cheeks, a constant upturning of her mouth. She had lost the scared look she had worn at Havering Hall, and was ready to laugh and sing like a carefree bird. The battle she had fought and won, over John’s drinking, against her husband and Lord, Harry, and against her best friend, me, had put an aura of dignity around her. She still had her childlike prettiness, but she had cloaked that vulnerable girlishness with the dignity of knowing her mind when others did not. And being able to judge, and judge rightly, when those around her were ready to do wrong. She would be an old lady beloved for her charm, but also for her uncompromising moral wisdom.

It was not in Celia’s nature to be unforgiving, but she would never forget the selfishness I showed and Harry showed when John trembled at the sight of a bottle, and we drank before him and praised the wine. She no longer depended on me, and she would never trust me again. There was a little distance between us that not even Celia’s loving spirit would attempt to bridge. And as she watched my eyes in the glass I could no longer predict with certainty what she was thinking.

‘I think you could ride to see the wheat crop,’ she said temptingly. ‘I do think you could, if you wanted to, Beatrice.’

‘Yes,’ I said, smiling. ‘It has been nearly a year. I should love to ride up to the downs again. Tell the stables to get Tobermory ready for me.’

Celia nodded and took her dismissal from the room, pausing only to gather her sewing. Lucy handed me my grey kid gloves and my whip.

‘Better already,’ she said, and her voice was cool. ‘I have never known a lady who could recover like you, Miss Beatrice. Sometimes I think that nothing will stop you.’

My weeks in bed had rested me well. I took Lucy by the arm, just above the elbow in a hard, pinching grip, and I pulled her a little towards me.

‘I don’t like the tone of your voice, Lucy,’ I said confidentially. ‘I don’t like it at all. If you want to look for a new place without a reference, with a week’s wages in your purse, and far away from here, then you have only to say.’

She looked back at me with villager’s eyes. Hating and yet craven.

‘I beg your pardon, Miss Beatrice,’ she said and her eyes fell below my blazing green ones. ‘I meant no harm.’

I let her go with a little push and swung out of the door and pattered down the stairs to the stable door. John was just outside, watching the tumbler pigeons on the stable roof.

‘Beatrice!’ he said, and his cold eyes scanned my face. ‘You are better,’ he said definitely, ‘at last.’

‘I am!’ I said, and there was a gleam of triumph in my face that he could no longer look on me as a patient that he was nursing to a slow and painful end. ‘I am rested and well again, and I am going out riding,’ I said.

One of the lads led Tobermory from the stable door. In the hot sunshine his coat gleamed exactly the colour of my own chestnut hair. He whickered when he saw me and I stroked his nose. I gestured to John and there was nothing for him to do but to cup his hands for me to put my booted foot in then, and to toss me up into the saddle. I had a thrill of pure joy when I felt his white hands, doctor’s hands, under my boot, and I beamed down on him from Tobermory’s high back, as if I loved him.

‘Do you see Death in my face today, John?’ I said teasingly. ‘You were in rather a hurry to think that I would die to please you, weren’t you?’

John’s face was serious and his eyes were as cold as flints.

‘You’re healthy as ever,’ he said. ‘But I still see Death coming for you. You know it, and so do I. You feel well now because the sun is shining and you are out on horseback again. But things are not the same for you, Beatrice. And you are not such a fool you do not know when everything around you has been destroyed, and that the only thing left to die is you.’

I bent down and patted Tobermory so that John should not see that my face had blenched when he spoke to me in that prophet’s voice.

‘And what shall you do?’ I said, my voice hard and under control. ‘When you have talked me into an early grave or into madness with boredom at this theme of yours? What do you do then?’

‘I will care for the children,’ he answered easily. ‘You hardly see Richard these days, Beatrice. You have either been plotting the downfall of Julia and Richard and Wideacre, or you have been ill in bed.’

‘And you care for Celia,’ I said, finding the point at which I could wound him in return. ‘That is why you did not tell her the whole package of crazy ideas you have about me and my life. When she came to you all in grief and all in terror you did not tell her she should be grieved, she should be terrified. Even though you yourself were grieved and terrified, did you? You soothed her and petted her and told her it could all be made right. And then you brought her home to be reconciled with her husband as if nothing were wrong.’

‘As if there were no monster in the maze,’ John said softly. ‘Yes. There are some sights and some thoughts that a woman — a good woman, Beatrice — should never have to think, should never need to know. I am glad to protect Celia from the poison that is in her house. It is possible to do because I know that this time of endurance will not go on for ever. The maze will collapse. The monster will die. And in the rubble I want Celia and the children safe.’

‘Fustian!’ I said impatiently. ‘It sounds like a scene from one of Celia’s romances. What do you think causes this collapse? How are Celia and the children safe? What nonsense you talk, John. I shall have to get you committed again!’

His eyes went hard at the jest, but his face stayed serene.

‘The collapse will come about through you,’ he said certainly. ‘You have overreached yourself, Beatrice. It was a good plan and a clever one. But the price was too high. I do not think you can service the loans and then Mr Llewellyn will foreclose. And he will not only foreclose on the loans you made with Harry’s consent, he will foreclose on the others: that only you and he, and now I, know about. And he will refuse to accept the land. He will insist on money. And you will have to sell. And you will have to sell cheap, because you will be in a hurry. And all your promissory notes will fall due at once. And you will not be able to pay without selling land and more land. Then Wideacre will be stripped of its land and its wealth. And you will be lucky if you hold on to the house, but all the rest of this’ — he gestured to the garden, the green paddock, the shimmering pigeon-cooing wood, and the high pale hills, streaked with the white path — ‘all this will belong to someone else.’

‘Stop it, John,’ I said, my voice hard. ‘Stop it. Stop the way you curse me. Any pain, any threats from you and it will be I who smash the maze. I shall tell Celia that you are in love with her and that is why you drank. And that is why you came home with her. And I shall tell Harry that you and she are lovers. And Wideacre will be destroyed for you and her. She will indeed be in the rubble. And you will have brought the wreckage on her when she is divorced and parted from her child, and thrown off the estate, and shamed. If you threaten and curse me, if you meddle in my financial affairs, if you contact Mr Llewellyn and threaten my ownership of the land, I will ruin Celia. And that would break your heart. So do not threaten me, and do not curse me as you do.’

John’s eyes were bleak and distant. ‘It is not I who lay the curse, Beatrice,’ he said. ‘You are your own curse. For every road you tread has a snake coiled in the path. If Death comes for you, if ruin comes for you, it will be because death and ruin are all that you know, all that you plan for, everything around you. Even when you think you are planning for the future, for Richard, for life, all you can produce is death in the village and desolation on the land.’

I jabbed suddenly at Tobermory’s mouth in a spurt of rage and I whipped him. He reared up in the old trick I had taught him and his front hoof caught John a glancing blow on the shoulder. It sent him spinning against the door but did him no great harm, and then I set my heels in Tobermory’s side and we thundered down the drive as fast as if I was riding a race again, but this time against John’s words and his keen sharp insight. Not against John, the man who once rode to win because he loved me so.

Tobermory was in high fettle and as glad to be out of his stable as I was glad to be on his back and not in the gig. The sunshine was as golden as champagne on my face and I flushed warm as he cantered past the new corn meadow up to the slopes of the downs. The birds were singing with summer madness and somewhere up in the hills a pair of cuckoos were calling in their two-toned notes like a pipe played by a child. The larks were singing their way up into the summer sky and the earth was breathing, a warm lush smell of grass growing and flowers blooming and hay readying. Wideacre was eternal. Wideacre was the same.

But I was not. I rode like a city girl. I looked around me and saw all I needed to see, all I had come to see, all there was to see. But it did not speak to me. It did not chime in my heart like a clear-toned bell. It did not call to me like one loving cuckoo to another. It did not sing to me in a lark’s voice. It was eternal, eternally lovely, eternally desirable. But it no longer needed me. I rode on the land as a stranger. I rode on Tobermory like someone who has just learned to ride. I did not breathe with him. When I whispered his name his ears did not flick back to listen to me. The saddle felt stiff and awkward under me and the reins too big for my thin hands. Tobermory and I did not move as one, an unthinking half-human half-horse animal. And his hoofs did not cut into the land like the Fenny cuts out its riverbed. We were not part of the land. We were merely on it.

So I looked at the corn with conscious care, with extra care, because I knew I could no longer know by instinct whether the crop was healthy. I rode along the line of the fences and when I saw a gap where a sheep could push in and ruin the crop, I hitched Tobermory to a tree and slid from the saddle. I heaved a branch over the gap and stared at it with my experienced dry eyes. It would keep a sheep out. The job had been done. But the branch had seemed very heavy, and I felt weary through and through.

I trotted along the top of the downs and dropped down by the Acre track into the village. In my numb cold mood I had forgotten that I had not been in the village for nearly a month. Not since the base threat of my birthday presents. They would know that the breakfast parlour floor had been scattered with flints, for the servants coming home to Acre on their day’s holidays would have spread that rich piece of gossip. And they would know that Miss Beatrice had gone to bed stumbling like an old woman and had not got up for weeks. I had not planned to come home this way; Tobermory’s head had turned to Acre out of habit and I had been in a daze and not stopped him. Now I rode down to the village on a slack rein and let who dared threaten me. I could face down Lucy when she challenged me and I was fresh from my bed, but to be on Wideacre land and not to feel at home drained my strength from me like life-blood into the earth. My shoulders drooped, but my back was straight as ever, as my papa had taught me to ride. My head was up, but my fingers holding the reins were numb. Tobermory felt the change in me and he picked his way carefully, his ears flickering uneasily.

The track drops down into Acre past the churchyard, around the corner they call ‘Miss Beatrice’s Corner’ with the graves of the two, the only two, suicides in the long history of Wideacre. Someone had put fresh flowers on both of the little mounds. But there was neither headstone nor cross. Not even a wooden one. Dr Pearce would not have permitted it. Once they grew careless and forgot the flowers, the graves would hardly show. And then they might forget. And then they might cease calling those two little heaps by my name.

We turned left, past the church, and rode down the lane. I half expected, half feared some sign of the villagers and I faced that thought not with courage but with dull numbness. What more could they do? They had ceased to love me; they had learned to hate me. They dared do nothing against me other than hidden threats and childish cruelty. I might ride down Acre street every day of my life. If they did one thing to displease me I had the power to raze the whole village. I could burn the roofs over their heads. And they knew it.

As Tobermory walked down the street a woman in one of the gardens looked up from the pitifully short row of vegetables she was weeding. She took in the handsome hunter and my smart grey habit in one swift glance, and then she gathered up her child and swept indoors. Her cottage door banged, like a shout. And I could hear the sound of the bolt being shot. As if to distract me from her rudeness — although I knew her name, Betty Miles — a barrage of bangs followed me down the village street. They had seen me from the little windows of their unlit cottages. They had heard Tobermory’s hoofs as they sat beside their empty fireplaces with little in the stew pot and no wage coming in, and then they had gone to their front doors and banged-them sharply two, three times. Acre was shut against me, as the land was closed to me.

I rode Tobermory home, and stopped only briefly to look at the great wheatfield where the common land had once been. As if by some spell you could see the old landmarks under the blanket of the pale green wheat crop. The two valleys showed as indistinct lines. Even the great hollow, where the oak tree’s roots had spread, showed as a dip. And the two footpaths that led from where I sat on my horse showed as two little trenches leading from the oak tree’s gap up to the hills where the heather was budding and the ferns showed green. In my clear tired mind I knew that the infilling had been done badly because I had not been on the land to check it; that another year’s ploughing would wipe out all traces that the land had been open and loved and free to all the village.

But sitting on my high hunter with my pretty cap perched on my head, it seemed to me that I might plough and plant this field every season for a thousand years and you would still be able to see where the village children had driven the geese, and where the oak tree had stood for courting couples to carve, announcing their betrothal.

I turned Tobermory with heavy hands and headed for home at a jolting trot. It was a warm scented humming summer afternoon. The silk of my dress was rippling in the breeze of the trot that lengthened into a canter as I dropped my hands and Tobermory lengthened his stride. I moved in the saddle like a lump of wood, and under my ribs felt like a frozen stone.

Only Harry welcomed me back with blind good humour. They were taking tea in the parlour when I came in, unpinning my cap for it seemed suddenly too tight.

‘Good to see you out on the land again!’ he exclaimed, his voice muffled around some fruit bread.

Celia’s eyes were on my face, worried at my pallor. I saw her glance at John and he scanned me with his measuring, professional, unloving stare.

‘Have a cup of tea,’ Celia said, gesturing to John to pull the bell pull. ‘You look tired. I’ll order another cup.’

‘I am perfectly well,’ I said with some impatience. ‘But you were quite right, Celia, it does look like being an excellent crop. With a good summer we should clear many of the outstanding debts of the estate.’

I shot a look from under my eyelashes at John as I said this. He looked scornful, and I was certain, as I had guessed, that the MacAndrew fortune had bought even lawyers’ and merchants’ secrets, and that John alone of the three of them knew that one season would not clear our debts. Four or five good ones would be needed. And whoever had good weather when your survival depended on it? I was running on the spot with Wideacre, like one of those dreadful dreams when you cannot flee from a threat coming for you.

‘Excellent!’ said Harry heartily. ‘I am especially glad that you are up and about, Beatrice, because I wanted you to take the London corn merchant to the fields next week.’

I frowned at Harry, but the damage was done.

‘A London corn merchant?’ asked John quickly. ‘What can he want here? I thought you never sold direct to the merchants?’

‘We don’t,’ I said promptly. ‘We never have done. But this man, a Mr Gilby, wrote to say that he was in the area and would like to look at our fields to give him some idea of the standard of Sussex wheat.’

Harry opened his mouth at the lie, but at a look from me closed it again. But that single betraying gesture was enough for John, who looked hard at Celia in an unspoken message that as good as called me a liar to my face.

‘Perhaps it would be better if you did not see him, Harry,’ Celia said, her soft voice tentative. ‘If he were to offer a very good price you could not help but be tempted, and you know you have always said that local corn should be locally sold and locally ground.’

‘I know,’ said Harry impatiently. ‘But one has to move with the times, my dear. Wideacre is farming in the way that all sensible land is now run. And the old idea of little markets and a pennyworth of corn for the poor is really not good business sense.’

‘And hardly a conversation for the parlour,’ I suggested smoothly. ‘Celia, could I have another cup? This warm weather makes me so thirsty. And do you have some sugar biscuits there?’

Celia bustled behind the urn, but I could tell by her face she had not finished. John stood still by the fireplace, his eyes on Harry, and then looking in turn at me. He looked at us both with a detached curiosity as if we were some specimens in his university medical training that were interesting, but rather unpleasant, examples of some lower animal life.

‘So you will not sell to him,’ he said flatly. He knew very well we had to. I had to sell to the top bidder to start to clear the backlog of debts.

‘No,’ I said firmly. ‘Or at the very most we will sell only a small part of the crop. The wheat off the new fields, which would not have been in the market last year anyway. There can be no objection to that. It would be madness to flood the Midhurst market with corn and bring the price down, after all.’

‘Indeed?’ said John, with affected interest. ‘I should have thought that after the winter the poor have endured you would be glad that they should have cheap bread this summer and autumn.’

‘Oh, yes!’ said Celia with emphasis. ‘Do say that it will be a good harvest and the benefits will be passed on to the poor, Harry! Beatrice! It has been a terrible winter for them, as John says. But one good summer and I am sure all of Acre would be happy and well fed again.’

I sipped my fresh cup of tea and said nothing. She was Harry’s wife and he had sworn he would have no ill-informed sentimental meddling with our land. He shuffled his feet and looked back at me to give him a lead. Like a cat’s green unwinking stare, my eyes were on his face, challenging him to make a stand against Celia’s mistimed Christian spirit.

‘I won’t discuss it,’ Harry said at length. ‘Celia, you and John are very right to care for the poor; I care for them myself. No one wants anyone to go hungry. But if they are so improvident as to marry and have huge families without knowing how they are to support themselves they can hardly expect cheap wheat. Of course there will be no starvation in Acre. But I cannot support a whole village as well as run the estate as it should be run.’

‘Should be run?’ John queried.

‘Oh! Let’s change the subject!’ I said with abrupt playfulness. ‘Harry the Squire has spoken! And indeed there is little hardship in Acre now the good weather is coming. Let us talk instead about some visitors or amusements now summer is here. I long to take Richard down to see the sea; shall we make a party of it?’

Celia looked still uncertain but she could not face an open clash with Harry, and the topic was safely closed. I saw John’s hard eyes on me and knew I had not turned him from his dogged pursuit of the truth of my plans, of the trail of my deceptions. But without Celia’s gentle support he did nothing. He merely sat in silence and watched my face. Only when his eyes were on Celia did they soften.

After that, I took good care that Celia and John should be off the estate on the day I expected Mr Gilby. I reminded Celia of the urgent need for new shoes for both children and the toughness of the village cobbler’s leather — good enough for Harry and me when we were small, but quite inadequate for the little princess. Celia decided to take both children to Chichester for a day’s shopping and we all agreed to go. At the last moment I feigned a headache and cried off, and had the satisfaction of seeing the three of them, and the two children, bowling off down the drive a clear hour before I expected Mr Gilby.

He was punctual, which I like. But that was the only thing I liked about him. He was a slight man, a townsman with natty, almost dandified, well-cut clothes, snowy linen, and boot-tops so bright you could see his weaselly little face upside-down, looking up at you when he bowed low. He bowed often. He knew, and I knew, that Wideacre wheat had never before been sold while it grew in the fields. That Wideacre wheat had always been offered first to the people whose labour had made it tall and proud and golden. He knew that every prickly, self-important Squire of Wideacre had suspected and disliked London merchants, the clever money-men who might bluff or cheat an honest man out of his profits. And he knew also, as I feared half the City knew, that the estate was overcommitted, that our notes and mortgages were in the hands of Mr Llewellyn, the bankers, and two other London merchants. That we had to deal with the people we had despised because we were locked into a trap of debts and loan repayments. He knew all this as well as I. But no shadow of it appeared on his smooth pale face as he handed me into the gig and I drove him down the drive.

He glanced around the woods mentally pricing them, and he looked left through the hedge and the line of trees to the old meadows, which were now featureless, flowerless, with green tall corn.

‘All this?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ I replied shortly and, taking one hand from the reins, swept a gloved finger over the wide acreage shown on the map on the seat between us.

He nodded and asked me to stop the gig. I waited on the driver’s seat while he strolled among the fields like a lord on his own land, and plucked a handful of green ears of wheat, and peeled back the silvery-green sheath, and popped the raw unripe kernels into his mouth and chewed them like a thoughtful locust that I had been fool enough to invite on to my land. The only way to keep the distaste off my face and out of my voice was to be as cold and as bloodless as he. And that was easy. The pain of driving a merchant around the land, where my papa had sworn no business man would ever tread, was turning me to ice; even though the afternoon sun was blazing down on my head and I was hot and stuffy in my long-skirted driving gown and jacket.

‘Good,’ he said, as he swung back into the gig. ‘Excellent crop. Promising. But it’s an uncertain business, buying the crop before it’s cut. You have to make allowances for the risks, Mrs MacAndrew.’

‘Indeed I do,’ I said civilly. ‘Would you like to see the down-land fields now?’

He nodded his assent, and I drove him down the drive and up the bridle-way to the slopes of the downs. The plantation on our left was thriving, but I could scarcely glance at it without a sinking feeling of guilt in the pit of my stomach. Wideacre water and earth were feeding these sweet dark springy trees. But the trees no longer belonged to Wideacre. They were Mr Llewellyn’s, and the wide, lovely crescent of the plantation my papa had ordered with such pride was not a source of wealth for the future, with limitless wood for building and burning. It was gone. Sold as it stood. Before it even reached its mature height. Now I was selling the corn while it was still green. Nothing seemed to belong on Wideacre any more. Not the trees. Not the corn. Not even me.

Mr Gilby climbed down again and walked among the wheat. On these north-facing slopes the crop was later, and the little kernels he put in his mouth were as small as rice grains, still pale green with an unripe pod.

‘Good,’ he said again. ‘But a risky business. A very risky business.’

The quality of Wideacre wheat against the chances of its being spoiled were his themes all the long afternoon while I sweated inside my stays and shivered from the dread I felt.

He strolled in my fields, and looked at my sky as if he might buy it as well, in a job lot. No doubt the blue sky and the hot white clouds were ‘good, but risky’ too.

He wanted to see the common land fields and we had to drive through Acre. I would have preferred to take the track through the woods but the bridge by the mill was up, and there was no easy way around for the gig. No doors were slammed at the sound of my horse’s hoofs this time, but Acre village was as silent as if it had been itself enclosed and the people gone on the tramp.

‘Quiet place,’ said Mr Gilby as the unearthly hush penetrated even his money-box brain.

‘Aye,’ I said drily. ‘But not empty, you can be sure.’

‘Having trouble with the poor?’ He cocked a knowledgeable black eyebrow at me. ‘They won’t adapt, will they? They just won’t learn to change.’

‘No,’ I said shortly.

‘Bad business,’ he murmured. ‘Don’t have any rick-burning round here, do you? No crops spoiled in the fields? No attacks on barns?’

‘We never have,’ I said firmly. ‘They complain but they would dare nothing more.’

‘Good,’ he said. ‘But risky,’ he said after a pause.

‘Risky?’ I said, clicking Sorrel into a trot once we were clear of that ominous deserted village street.

‘Risky,’ he said. ‘I can’t tell you how much trouble I have getting my grain wagons through the countryside on the way to London. I have had mothers lying down in the road before them with their babies in their arms. I have had fathers surrounding the wagons and cursing the carriers — as though anyone was to blame! I’ve even been caught by the mob myself once or twice. One time I actually had to sell half a wagon to them at the market price before they would let me through!’

‘We don’t have any of that here,’ I said firmly, a superstitious shiver down my spine.

‘Aye,’ he said. ‘Sussex is quiet at the moment. They’ll come to heel.’

We pulled up in the stable yard and I took him in by the west-wing door into my office.

‘Handsome room,’ he said, looking round as if he were pricing the furniture.

‘Thank you,’ I said shortly, and rang for tea.

While Stride brought the tray and set up the urn Mr Gilby wandered along my bookshelves, inspecting the red leather bindings with approval. He put a flat hand on the rent table and turned it experimentally to feel the smooth movement as it spun. He fingered the backs of the chairs and shuffled his boots in the plain deep-pile carpet. Even while he sat and drank his tea his eyes flickered around, looking out of the window where the birds sang and the bees hummed in the rose garden, at the door with its polished walnut wood, at my desk and the great cash box beside it. At the comfort and elegance of a room furnished with goods hundreds of years old.

‘Here’s my offer,’ he said, scrawling on a piece of paper. ‘I won’t haggle with you, Mrs MacAndrew, you’re far too good a farmer. You know the value of your crop. It’s good, but it’s risky. I like the crop but I don’t like the look of the road that leads from Acre to the London road. There are too many places there for trouble from men who think they know more about farming than their masters. I like your crop, but I don’t like the look of your village. So I think it’s good, but risky, Mrs MacAndrew. And my price represents that.’

I nodded, and looked at his paper. It was less than I had hoped, rather a lot less. But it was treble what we would get in the Midhurst market, and double what we would get at Chichester. More to the point he would pay me now, not in six weeks’ time when the grain was ripe; then a bumper crop could bring a bonus. The money chest beside my desk was nearly empty, and the loans would fall due again in July. I could not refuse him, even if I had wanted to. But his talk of shady lanes, and a silent village, had me shivering again.

We had never sold the crop away from our people before; but if he thought our people might turn against me, might threaten me to my face, then I would not hesitate to save the land for me and my son, the only way I knew. I did not wish them to starve; I did not mean them to suffer. But they had to play their part in winning Wideacre for Richard. And when Richard was Squire everyone would agree that it would have been worth the price, even this cruel price of fear for me and hunger for them.

But, in truth, when he spoke to me of shady lanes and angry men I felt such blind fear, and unreasoning fear, that I would have starved the whole of Acre. Somewhere, near or far, from Wideacre land, was the Culler. He had threatened me last year. This year he had sent me that terrible little tinderbox. He was telling me as clearly as he could that there was fire coming for me. That the cull of the gentry would start with me. And so I cared nothing for anyone who might help the Culler, or succour him, or point him to the Hall and say, ‘Take her, she is our beloved Miss Beatrice no longer.’ And while he was near my land, or while his mind was on me, even if he were far away, I would rather have money in the chest than corn in the fields or grain in the barns. He could not burn gold. He could not attack me safe in this room.

‘I agree,’ I said neutrally.

‘Good,’ said Mr Gilby. ‘You’ll have a draft on my bank within two days. You’ll reap it yourself?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But you had better send your own wagons down. We don’t have the carts or the beasts to take it all to London.’

‘Good,’ he said again, and gave me his soft hand to shake on the deal. ‘A handsome place you have here, Mrs MacAndrew,’ he said, gathering his hat and gloves.

I smiled and nodded.

‘I am looking for a place like this myself,’ he said. I raised my eyebrows and said nothing. It was the way of the counties around London, but I had not thought Sussex would suffer so soon from these city-bred merchants setting themselves up as Squires. They brought their city airs and graces into the country. They understood neither the land nor the people. They muddled along with farming and they wrecked the land by forgetting to rest it. They spoiled whole villages by taking servants up to London and then sending them home again. They lived on the land but they had no heart for it. They bought and sold it as if it were a length of cloth. They belonged nowhere, and bought anywhere.

‘If you were considering parting with Wideacre …’ Mr Gilby started engagingly.

My head jerked up. ‘Wideacre!’ I said outraged. ‘Wideacre will never be for sale!’

He nodded, an apologetic smile on his face.

‘I am so sorry,’ he said. ‘I must have misunderstood. I thought you were selling the crops and the woods preparatory to selling the estate. If you had been I would have paid a very fair price, very good indeed. You’d not get a better one, I assure you. I had the impression that the estate was rather overcommitted and I thought …’

‘The estate is managing wonderfully,’ I said with a tremor of rage in my voice. ‘And I would be bankrupt before I parted with it. This is the inheritance of the Laceys, Mr Gilby. I have a son and a niece who are to come after me. I would not sell their home. I would not sell my own home.’

‘No, of course, of course,’ he said pacifically. ‘But if you should change your mind. If Mr Llewellyn were to foreclose, for example …’

‘He will not,’ I said with an assurance I did not feel. What talk was there about Wideacre in the money-men’s clubs? Would they form a ring against us and foreclose on the estate to win for themselves one of the biggest prizes in Sussex? Had my borrowings not been discreetly spread around London at all, but had played straight into the hands of a ring of cronies who even now calculated the months before I should be ruined? And what did Mr Gilby, a corn merchant, know of Mr Llewellyn, a dealer in land and wood from the other side of the City?

‘Even if he did, I have sufficient funds. I am a MacAndrew,’ I said.

‘Of course,’ said Mr Gilby, his black eyes betraying his secret knowledge that the MacAndrew money was closed to me. He might even know that the MacAndrew fortune was working against me.

‘I’ll bid you good day then,’ he said, and he took himself off without another word.

He left me still. He left me silent. He left me cold with dread. It was bad enough to know that the Culler and all the lawless men of his rank might be planning against me, waiting to come to me. But if my own people — those who slept between linen sheets and ate off silver plate — were plotting against me, then I was lost indeed. If the hard-faced money-men knew of me, knew of the mounting pile of debts and the empty cash box, then Wideacre and I were both in jeopardy. I had not thought that they might all know each other. I had forgotten that men like to make little clubs, like to be in packs, like to bully as a gang. Alone and isolated from the outside world I had not realized that there might be eyes watching me, ears listening for the first note of hesitation, and smiles exchanged as they heard of one heavy debt after another, and no sign of my getting clear.

I could fight them with the easy productive wealth of Wideacre at my back, and a village full of people who loved me and would work for free rather than I should lose a battle against strangers. Or I could fight an angry village, a bitter workforce. But I could not fight the lower orders and the people of my own rank at once, and hope to win. And while I was undermining and attacking the poor, the wealthy were undermining and attacking me. With a sullen, silent village on one hand and a secretive ring of creditors on the other I was surrounded by peril. And in the middle of it all — like a bone between two dogs — was Wideacre. And I could no longer feel for Wideacre.

I gave a little moan of sorrow and exhaustion and laid my face on my hands on my hard desk and stayed still until the summer evening grew grey outside my tall windows and bats criss-crossed the evening sky. Somewhere, from the wood, a nightingale started singing. I longed only for rest.

I had not reckoned with Celia. I began to think I had never properly reckoned with Celia. She came into my office as soon as the carriage returned. She came in, taking off her bonnet, and never even glanced at the mirror over the mantelpiece to see if her fair hair was smooth.

‘We passed a post-chaise on the drive with a gentleman in it,’ she said. ‘Who was he, Beatrice?’

I glanced at the papers on my desk and looked at her with raised eyebrows as if to imply that I found her curiosity impertinent. She met my eyes look for look. And her pretty mouth was not smiling.

‘Who was he?’ she asked again.

‘It was someone come to see a horse,’ I said blandly. ‘Tobermory’s foal out of Bella. It seems that the fame of the Wideacre hunters is spreading.’

‘No, it wasn’t,’ Celia contradicted me, her voice even. ‘It was a Mr Gilby, the London corn merchant. I stopped the carriage and spoke to him.’

I flushed with irritation but I kept my voice steady. ‘Oh, him!’ I said. ‘I thought you meant another gentleman. I have had two visitors this afternoon. Mr Gilby was the last.’

‘He told me he had bought the wheat as it stands in the fields,’ said Celia, ignoring my lie. ‘He told me you are indeed going to forestall the market.’

I rose from my desk and smiled at her. I knew there was no warmth in my eyes, and her face was like stone.

‘Really, Celia, this is hardly the business you were brought up to,’ I said. ‘The business of managing Wideacre is a complex task and one in which you have previously shown little interest. It is too late now to start meddling with the way I run the estate.’

‘You are right to reproach me for knowing little,’ she said. Her breath was fast and as she spoke one of her easy blushes coloured her face and neck. ‘I think it is a great fault that ladies are taught to know nothing of the lives of the poor. I have lived all my life in the country and you are right when you say I am ignorant.’

I tried to interrupt her, but she talked over me.

‘I have lived in a fool’s paradise,’ she said. ‘I have spent money without ever thinking from whence it came or who had earned it.’

She paused. I moved to the bell push as if to order tea.

‘I was brought up to think like a child,’ she said, speaking half to herself. ‘I was brought up like a baby who eats food but does not realize someone has had to cook it, and mash it, and serve it in a bowl. I have spent and spent Wideacre money without ever realizing that the money came from the labour of the poor.’

‘Not entirely,’ I contradicted her. ‘You should speak with Harry on the theories of political economy, but we are farmers, remember, not merchants or manufacturers. Our wealth comes from the land, from the natural fertility, from nature.’

Celia waved away the argument with an impatient gesture and put her palm flat down on my rent table.

‘You know that is not true, Beatrice,’ she said. ‘You take the money here every month. People pay us because we own the land. Left to itself the land would grow weeds and meadow flowers. We invest in it as surely as a merchant, and we pay people to work it for us as surely as a mine owner pays miners.’

I stood silent. Celia had changed so much from the shy girl who had watched the reapers and blushed when Harry looked at her. I said nothing, but I felt a growing unease.

‘The mine owner pays them a fraction of what they earn,’ she said slowly as if she was working out her ideas aloud. ‘Then he sells what they have dug, at a profit. He keeps all of that profit. That is why he is rich and they are poor.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘You do not understand business. He has to buy equipment and he has to pay back loans. Also, he has to have a return on his investment. If it did not profit him to mine, then he would invest his money elsewhere, and his workforce would have no wage at all.’

Celia’s honest gaze was on my face and, surprisingly, she smiled as if I was jesting with her.

‘Oh, Beatrice, that is such nonsense!’ she said with a ripple of laughter. ‘That is what Harry says! That is what Harry’s books say! I would have thought you of all people would have known what nonsense that is! All the people who write about the need for a man to have profit are rich people. All they wish to prove is that their profits are justified. That is why there are hundreds of men writing thousands of books trying to explain why some people go hungry and others get richer and richer. They have to write all those books because they will not accept the answer which is there before their eyes: that there is no justification.’

I moved restlessly, but she was looking out of the window past me.

‘Why should the man who invests his money have his profit guaranteed, while the man who invests his labour, even his life, has no guaranteed wage?’ she said. ‘And why should the man who has money to invest earn so very much more with his capital than a man could earn working at the very top of his strength, all day? If they were both to be rewarded equally then after the debts had been paid and the new equipment bought, miners would live in houses and eat the food of the mine owners. And they clearly do not. They live like animals in dirt and squalor and they starve while the mine owners live like princes in houses far away from the ugly mines.’

I nodded emphatically. ‘The conditions are dreadful I am told. And the moral danger!’

Celia’s brown eyes gleamed at my shift of ground.

‘It is as bad here,’ she said baldly. ‘The labourers work all day and earn less than a shilling. I do not work at all and yet I have an allowance of two hundred pounds a quarter. I have taken no risks with capital. I replace no machinery. I am paid simply because I am a member of the Quality and we are all wealthy. There is no justice in that, Beatrice. There is no logic. It is not even a very pleasant way to live.’

I plumped down in my chair, the Squire’s chair, and I drew my papers towards me. I had forgotten that I had ever thought the world should change. I had forgotten that a landless man had ever persuaded me that the people who know and love the land are those who should make the decisions about it.

‘It is a wicked world, Celia,’ I said, smiling. ‘We are agreed on that. But it would do little good if you were paid a labourer’s wage. It would make no difference if we were a Leveller’s commonwealth. The Commonwealth of Wideacre would still have to pay its way in the outside world.’ I tapped the drawer, which held the sheaf of bills due for settling this month. The wood no longer sounded hollow: it was packed tight. ‘It is the outside world that is massing against Wideacre,’ I said. ‘It is the outside world that sets the pace of change.’

‘Sell land,’ said Celia abruptly.

I gazed at her, open-mouthed.

‘What?’ I said.

‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘Harry tells me that you two have borrowed so heavily to buy the entail and pay the lawyers’ fees that you have no choice but to profiteer and farm in this new way. Clear the debts by selling land, and then you need farm no longer in a way that starves Acre, and has wrecked the life of Wideacre.’

‘You do not understand, Celia!’ I burst out. ‘We will never, never sell Wideacre land while I manage the estate! No landowner ever parts with land unless he has to. And I, of all people, would never sell a Wideacre field.’

Celia rose from the table and went to stand behind the bureau, looking down on me. She leaned her arms along the top.

‘Wideacre has two great strengths,’ she said fiercely. ‘The land, which is fertile, and the people, who will work their hearts out for the Laceys. One of these assets will have to be wrung dry to pay for this mad scheme to which you are committed. Let it be the land. Sell some land — however much is needed, and then you will be free once again to treat the people in the old ways. Not with justice, but at least with tenderness.’

‘Celia,’ I said again, ‘you simply do not understand. This year we are desperate to make a profit. But even if we were not, we would be starting to farm in the new ways. The less we pay the labourers the more profit we make. Every landowner wants to make as much profit as possible. Every landowner, every merchant, every business man, tries to pay as little as possible to his workers.’

She nodded then slowly, as she finally understood. But the colour had gone from her face. She turned and went with a slow step towards the door.

‘What of your allowance?’ I said, taunting her. ‘And your dowry lands? Shall I pay your allowance to the parish poor rates, and do you wish your couple of fields to be declared a commonwealth?’

She turned back to me, and I saw with surprise that there were tears in her eyes. ‘I spend all my allowance on food and clothes for the village,’ she said sadly. ‘John matches it with what his father sends him, and Dr Pearce pays in the same amount. We have been buying food to give the women, and clothes for the children, and fuel for the old people. I have spent every penny you pay me, and John and Dr Pearce have matched it.’ Her shoulders drooped. ‘We might as well not bother,’ she said dully. ‘It is like the dam of Harry’s that broke when the spring floods came. It is all very well giving a little charity when the men are in work and the village is prosperous, but when the landlords are against the tenants, as you are, Beatrice, and when the employers have decided to pay the least they can, charity has no chance. All we are doing is prolonging the pain of people who are dying of want. At best we are rearing children for the next Master of Wideacre to work and to pay as little as he can. Their mothers tell me they cannot see why their children are born. And neither can I. It is an ugly world you and your political economists defend, Beatrice. We all know it should be different and yet you will not do it. You and all the rich people. It is an ugly world you are building.’

She waited to see if I had an answer to that sad-voiced condemnation and then she went out to her room. I pursed my lips as if I had a sour taste in my mouth. And then I opened that bursting drawer and took out the bills to look at them again.

The news of the forestalled corn went fast around Wideacre and Celia’s was merely the first of three visits I had to endure. She was in some ways the hardest to answer because she feared me now not at all, and her honest brown eyes had a certain knack of looking at me as if she could not believe what she saw.

My second visitor was easier to manage. It was Dr Pearce, the Acre Vicar, who entered with apologies for disturbing me, but would I make allowances for a worried man?

He knew who paid his tithes and he was anxious not to offend me. But he was driven, like Celia, by the poverty that met his eyes every day in Acre. He could not, like Harry and me, simply avoid the village. He lived there, and his high-walled garden was no refuge when children cried for hunger in the lane that ran before his house.

‘I hope you do not think I am exceeding my position,’ he said nervously. ‘I hold no brief for improvidence. No one who knows me or my connections could ever doubt for a moment my proper feeling on the treatment and discipline of the poor. But I must speak to you about this wheat crop, Mrs MacAndrew.’

I smiled then, conscious of my power.

‘Speak then, Vicar,’ I said. ‘And I will do what I can.’

‘They are saying in the village that the crop is sold already,’ he said, his eyes on my nod of assent. ‘They are saying in the village that the whole of the crop, every wagonload, will be sent away to London.’ I nodded again. ‘They are saying in the village that they do not know where they will buy their corn to grind for flour to make bread.’

‘At Midhurst market, I assume,’ I answered coolly.

‘Mrs MacAndrew, there will be a riot!’ exclaimed the Vicar. ‘Of the three major suppliers of corn, two of you — Wideacre and the Havering estate — are sending grain out of the county. Only the little Tithering estate is selling locally. There will be hundreds of families needing corn and only one farm selling at Midhurst. The corn will simply run out.’

I shrugged, and made a little grimace. ‘Then they will have to go to Petworth, or Chichester,’ I said.

‘Can you not stop this?’ Dr Pearce’s tone was suddenly ragged with fear, his urbane smiling face suddenly naked with concern. ‘The whole village has changed almost overnight, it seems. The fences went up and the heart went out of it. Can you not take the fences down and restore the land? When I first arrived here, I heard from everyone that no one knew the land like you. No one loved the land like you. That you were the heart of Wideacre. Now all I hear is that you have forgotten your skills, forgotten that these people are your people. Can’t all this be restored?’

I looked coldly at him through the wall of glass that now separated me from everyone.

‘No,’ I said. ‘It is too late. They will have to pay dear for corn this year or do without. You may tell them that next year it will be better, but this year Wideacre has to sell to the London market. If Wideacre does not prosper, no one prospers. They know that. I am ensuring their ultimate prosperity. The way of the world is that the poor survive only if the rich prosper. If the poor want to eat, the rich have to be enriched. That is the way the world is. And Wideacre is not nearly wealthy enough to be safe.’

Dr Pearce nodded. The opulent dinners at Oxford, his landed friends and family, the shooting parties, the dances, the balls, had been his world. He was one of those who do indeed believe the world is a better place for the rich becoming wealthier. And he had read a hundred clever books written solely to prove that point. He himself longed to increase his tithes on the back of our bumper crop. He belonged, like me, to the rich. And his eyes glistened, despite his concern, at my picture of an inevitable process whereby we gained and gained and gained, and no one could blame us or gainsay us.

‘It is the children,’ he said weakly.

‘I know,’ I said. I reached into a drawer in my desk and found a guinea. ‘Here,’ I said. ‘Buy the children some toys, or sweetmeats, or food.’

‘The coffins are so very tiny,’ he said, more to himself than to me. ‘The father generally carries it in his arms. It is so light, you see. They do not need pallbearers. For the children who are dying are so small, and when they die of hunger they are as light as babies by the time they die — little arms and legs like dry sticks. When they lower it into the grave it is such a little hole.’

I tapped the bundle of papers on my desk with a sharp click to recall him to his surroundings. He was gazing out of the window, but not seeing the budding tea-roses and the fat boughs of white sweet lilac.

‘Was there anything else?’ I asked abruptly. He jumped, and reached for his hat.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I apologize for troubling you.’ Then he kissed my hand without a shadow of reproach, and he was gone.

So that was the champion of the Acre poor! I watched his glossy bay cob amble down the drive, its plump haunches rolling. Small wonder they dreamed of revenge, of a man to ride like a devil before them to lead them against the people with plump faces who lived on dainties and drank only the very best of wines. While the comfort-loving, biddable, Vicar of Acre stood between them and me, they had scant protection indeed. They must think, indeed by now they should know, that the whole of the world was against them. That for me, and for people like me — the ones who ate four times a day — the poor were there to work. And if there were no work? Then there was no need for them to live.

There was a knock at the door, and Richard’s nurse came into the room. ‘Do you wish to see Master Richard before dinner?’ she asked.

‘No,’ I said wearily. ‘Take him out for a walk in the garden. I can see him through the windows.’

She nodded, and a few minutes later I saw her stooping over my son, helping him to toddle from one bright rose bush to another, and patiently, repeatedly, putting a petal in his hand and then, reprovingly, taking it out of his mouth.

The thick glass of my office window muffled the sound. I could scarcely hear my son’s clear lisping voice. I could not make out at all the words he was struggling to say to express his joy at the gravel beneath his feet and the petal in his hand, and the sunshine on his face. Through the thick glass of the window all the colour seemed drained from the landscape. And the little flaws in the glass made him and his nurse seem a long way away. The window pane was like the lens of a telescope held the wrong way. As I watched him he seemed to recede even further. Further and further away from me. A little boy in the sunshine, too far for me to recognize as my own. And I could not hear his voice.