Wideacre

19

The news Dr Pearce took back to the village only confirmed their fears and when we drove to church, in summer silks and satins, the faces were no more surly than usual. Celia and I led the way, our trains hissing up the aisle to the family pew, followed by Harry and John, and then the two nurses with the children. Julia toddling slowly, and with many an unpredictable swerve, and Richard carried in Mrs Austin’s arms.

As I passed up the aisle, my grey silk rustling around me, my new bonnet of twilled satin tied with a silky fat bow framing my face, I could feel a stir of unease like a wind in the top of the pine trees on a still summer’s day. I slid my eyes to one side and then another and what I saw made me draw in my breath in horror.

On the pew sides, all the way down the church, I could see the callused hands of our workers. As they heard my heels tap on the stones of the aisle, they all clenched into a protective fist, with the index finger crossing the thumb. The sure defence against a witch. The one-handed secret sign of the cross. I walked, smoothly, stately, between the avenue of pagan fists. I looked neither to left nor right again. But their hatred and their fear of me followed me like a court train on a ball dress.

Once I was inside the pew, and the door safely closed behind us, all anyone could see of me was the grey silk bow on the top of my bonnet. I dropped my head on my hands then as if in prayer. But I had no prayers. I was just resting my burning forehead against my icy fingers and trying to blot out the sight of all those honest dirty hands making the sign of the cross against me. Trying vainly to ward off the evil they thought I carried with me.

Dr Pearce preached a good sermon. I listened, stony-faced. His theme was that wonderfully ambiguous instruction of rendering unto Caesar, and he made a persuasive case for resting content under the civil authorities — whatever they chose to do to their people. I doubt if any of his parishioners heard a word. There was a continual clatter of the dry coughs that indicate consumption, and a muffled choking from a child with pleurisy. A hungry baby cried unceasingly at the back of the church, a thin despondent wail. Even in the richly panelled, well-cushioned Wideacre pew there was no peace. Even when the Vicar told us, his uncertain eyes on Harry and me, that the word of the Lord said we might always do as we pleased.

After the final psalm I walked down the aisle again. Conscious, at every step, of the dull, resentful eyes on my face, and the rare warm glances directed at Celia, half a step before me. We no longer lingered in the churchyard to say good day to the tenants. That tradition had somehow vanished. But while we walked to the carriage I saw, from the corner of my eyes, the rotund figure of the miller, Bill Green, burst from the church porch and march determinedly towards the carriage.

‘Miss Beatrice!’ he called. ‘Good day, Squire, Lady Lacey, Dr MacAndrew,’ he said in an afterthought, recollecting his manners. Then his anxious eyes were on my face again as I settled myself in the carriage.

‘Miss Beatrice, I need to speak to you. May I come to the Hall today?’

‘On a Sunday?’ I asked, my eyebrows raised in genteel disapproval.

‘I have called on many a working day and you have been too busy to see anyone from Acre,’ said Miller Green, breathlessly. ‘But I must have speech with you, Miss Beatrice.’

The other parishioners were coming from the church door, staring curiously at the miller, whose usually happy face was now strained. One hand on my carriage door, begging for one moment of my time.

‘Very well,’ I said with my new dislike of the Acre poor when they were all together in a group staring at me. ‘Very well. Come to the Hall at three this afternoon.’

‘Thank you,’ he said. He stepped back with a little bow and I saw that his plump cheeks were sagged and that his bright skin colour had gone. He looked sallow and ill.

I did not need a visit from him to tell me what was wrong. I had seen this meeting coming from afar off, as soon as Harry and I agreed to send Wideacre corn out of the county.

‘This will ruin me, Miss Beatrice,’ Miller Green said desperately. ‘If Acre people have no corn they will not bring it to me for the grinding. If your tenant farmers sell all their corn in the grain they will not use my mill to make flour. If you send the whole crop out of the county, where am I to buy my grain to grind for flour to supply the bakers who buy from me?’

I nodded. I was sitting at my desk, the window to the rose garden open behind me. The two children were playing in the paddock and John and Celia were strolling behind them, watching Richard’s nurse steering him along the footpath towards the wood. Celia’s cream parasol was an echo of the daisies, cream roses, and rare white poppies. I had seated Miller Green at the rent table and ordered him a glass of small beer, but it stood beside him, untouched. He twisted and turned on the chair like a dog with fleas. He was a proud man, a rising man. But now he was a man in a panic. He could see his plans and his newly won prosperity sliding away from him as water slides over his millwheel.

‘Miss Beatrice, if you do not want the millwheel, which your grandfather built, to lie idle, if you want the poor to eat, if you want our lives here to go on at all, you must, you must, reserve some of the crop for sale locally,’ he said desperately. ‘Miss Beatrice, there’s me and my wife and our three lads, all three working on the parish gang now for poor parish rates. Little money coming in from them, and much shame for them. If we lose the mill, it will be the workhouse for us, for we will be penniless and homeless in one night.’

I nodded again, my eyes towards the garden. John and Celia had reached the gate to the wood. With tender patience they turned back towards the house so that the children should have the smooth grass of the paddock under their tottery feet. I saw Celia nod, her little bonnet tip in emphasis, and saw John throw his head back to laugh at her. I could not hear them. The window was open but there was still a wall of glass all around me. The glass made it possible for me to watch my son learning to walk holding another woman’s hands, with utter indifference; to tell this good man, this old friend, that he would indeed have to go to the workhouse and die in poverty and sorrow; to tell him that my will was as strong and unstoppable as the grinding stones of the mill. And that he and all the grasping, desperate, poor of Acre should be crushed and powdered so that a little boy, just learning this day to walk, should ride tall over the land.

‘Miss Beatrice, do you remember the harvest three summers ago?’ Bill Green said suddenly. ‘Do you remember how you rested in our yard while we got the harvest supper ready? How you sat in the sun for an hour, listening to the wheel turning and the Missus’s doves cooing?

‘D’you remember how the wagons came singing up the lane and how you let the harvest into the barn with the Squire so young and handsome riding high on the sheaves?’

I smiled in nostalgia. Unwillingly, I nodded.

‘Yes,’ I said tenderly. ‘Of course I remember. What a summer that was for us! What a harvest it was that year!’

‘You loved the land then, and all of Acre would have laid down their lives for one smile from you,’ Bill Green said. ‘That year, and the year before, you were a goddess in Acre, Miss Beatrice. Since then it has been like you were under a spell and everything has gone wrong. Wrong. All wrong.’

I nodded. I had the papers under my hand that showed it was all going wrong. Ruin was on the way. As surely and as steadily as the coming of the Culler. I could smell the hint of smoke in the summer air. The creditors were presenting their bills before the quarter day. They knew; I knew. Wideacre was overstretched. They could smell ruin like horses can smell a storm in the air. As I can smell smoke.

‘Set it right!’ Bill Green’s Sussex drawl was a longing whisper. ‘Set your hand to it, and make it right, Miss Beatrice! Come back to us, come back to the land, and set it right!’

I gazed at him blankly, dreaming of a return to the land, of a return to the old ways. But my face was as hard as one of his stones, and as cold as his millpond.

‘It is too late,’ I said, and my voice was dry. ‘The corn is already sold. I have already been paid. The agreement is made, and I can do nothing. This is the way farming is done these days, Miller Green. You may indeed face ruin. But if I do not farm as the other landowners farm, then I would be ruined too. I do not choose how the world should be run. I have only to find my way in it.’

He shook his head like a stunned prize fighter.

‘Miss Beatrice!’ he said. ‘This isn’t like you. It’s not your voice that could say these things. You were always for the old ways. The good ways when men and Master worked alongside and men were paid fair and had a little land, and a day off, and kept their pride.’

I nodded. ‘Yes, I was,’ I said. ‘But the world is changing, and I have to change too.’

‘That’s the Quality!’ he exclaimed with sudden bitterness. ‘Never say, “Aye, I did it. I want more money and I shall get it whatever the cost to the poor.” It’s always “the way of the world”. But the way of the world is the way you, and the Quality like you, decide it should be, Miss Beatrice! All of you — landowners, squires, and lords — make the world the way you want it and then say, “I can’t help it, it’s the way of the world.” As if it were not you who decides how the world should be.’

I nodded, for he was right.

‘Well then, Bill Green, have it your way,’ I said coldly. ‘I chose that Wideacre should be wealthy. That my son and Miss Julia shall inherit. And if it costs you your mill, if it costs every life in Acre, then so be it.’

‘So be it,’ he muttered, as if he could not understand. He fumbled for his hat, his Sunday hat, and put it on his head. His glass of beer was growing flat and stale.

‘Good day, Miss Beatrice,’ he said like a man in a dream, a dream of misery.

‘Good day, Miller Green,’ I said, honouring him with the title he would not keep long.

He walked from my office like a man half dead. Soundless, speechless, incredulous.

His dappled grey mare was hitched outside, and he heaved himself into the saddle, still in his dream. I saw him ride past the window and saw John call out to him as he and Celia came through the gate into the rose garden. Miller Green tipped his hat instinctively at the sound of a Quality accent, but I doubt he heard or saw anything. His horse ambled down the drive on a loose rein, the stocky rider slumped in the saddle. He had tragic news to take home. There would be tears in the pretty sunny parlour of the mill this afternoon, and dinner would be spoiled.

John and Celia dawdled at toddler pace through the rose garden and then walked to the terrace up to my office window, Celia pausing to see that Nurse had Julia’s hand over the sharp stones of gravel.

‘What did Miller Green want?’ asked John through the open window, as if it were his business.

‘Arrangements for the harvest dinner,’ I said blandly.

‘He came all this way, on a Sunday, to plan a dinner his wife has organized for years?’ asked John in his most sceptical voice.

‘Yes,’ I said, and added cruelly, ‘I said Celia would make all the arrangements.’

Celia jumped as if she had been pricked with a pig-sticker and I could not conceal the gleam of my amusement. ‘Set it in hand will you Celia? You know so much about the village these days. It should be about three weeks on Saturday. That should be nearly the right time. A day or so here or there makes little odds as long as there is enough fresh food for eighty or a hundred people, and it keeps fresh.’ She looked utterly aghast, and I could not repress a short spiteful laugh.

‘Excuse me, I have work to do,’ I said to the two of them. And I leaned forward and banged the casement shut in their faces. John’s eyes met mine through the glass. But even he seemed so very far away.

I had been right when I predicted a good crop. But wrong when I thought it would be reaped in three weeks. Even with a hot, hot sun that made midday work a torment, and an extra reaping band from the Chichester parish, it was the second week in August before we were done.

My heart should have been singing. It was a wonderful harvest. We started on the newly enclosed common fields and the reapers marched in a great wide sweep, up and down, up and down, the three gentle slopes of the levelled field. Wave on wave of greeny-golden, sound, dry corn rippled down before them. In the mornings of the first days, now and then, a voice would start a song, forgetting, in the pleasure of the smell of the ripe corn, in the crackle of the dry stalks, in the rhythm of the line, that this wealth and beauty were not, this year, a promise of a safe hunger-free winter.

‘I love to hear them sing,’ said Harry, reining in beside me after he had been for a ride on the downs. I had been all day in the field. I trusted this crop, which could save Wideacre, to no other.

I smiled. ‘So do I,’ I said. ‘They keep time better and the work goes faster.’

‘I might take a sickle out myself,’ said Harry. ‘It’s years since I went reaping.’

‘Not today,’ I cautioned him. ‘Not on this field.’

‘As you wish,’ he said, dense as ever. ‘Shall we wait for you at dinnertime?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Tell them to leave something for me in my office. I may well stay over their dinner break to see they are back to work promptly after they have eaten.’

Harry nodded and wheeled away. As his horse passed the reapers who had reached the end of the field he pulled up to watch them straightening their backs, with a grimace from those who were crooked with rheumatism. They cleaned their sickles with weary sad faces, and fell into line again like pressed infantrymen. Harry cried a cheery ‘Good day! Good harvesting!’ to them. I doubt very much that he noticed no one replied.

They worked until noon and still the field was barely half cut. They were not going slow — I would have been on to that in a flash and they knew it. And they were too unused to the idea that this harvest would profit them not at all to cheat on the work. They still loved the great pale forest of wheat as I did, and they swung along in a steady easy river of movement expressing their joy in the great fertility of the land in every purposeful, painful swing. But still the field waved high. It was so huge! Only now, when I saw the gang reaping and reaping for half a day, did I realize what a massive acreage I had laid to wheat, and what a triumph this wheat harvest was.

The women and the children and the old folk followed the reapers, clasping great heaps of wheat to their bodies, banging the stalks against their knees and twisting a plait of wheat around to make a tight heavy-headed stook. The women had fewer illusions than the men about this explosion of fertility from the new field, and I watched them like a covetous hawk as they snapped off the odd head of wheat and stuffed it into their apron pockets. Poor beggars! Turning their backs to me that I should not see them pocket the traditional favours of the harvest. Gazing around with innocent-seeming, sly eyes and dropping a few stalks of wheat to the ground so that one of them, not even the culprit, might have some good gleaning later.

It was the tradition, always had been the tradition, that the gleaning at Wideacre was generous. The land grew so rich, the crops so tall, that no Squire had ever done more than smilingly grumble at the rituals of the informal robbery.

But now it was different.

It had to be different.

I waited until the little children had come down the lane with the pitchers of ale and the hunks of bread and cheese for their parents’ dinners. This year I saw the bread was greyer than it should be, made with as little flour as possible eked out with powdered pease or grated turnip. There was no cheese for anyone. And the pitchers held only water. These men and women were working under a burning July sun with only a hunk of grey bread to eat, and water to drink. No wonder they looked pale beneath the grime and the sweat. No wonder the dinner break was no longer a time for laughter and jokes and sharing of gossip and baccy. They were smoking hawthorn leaves in their pipes. And when they laid back to doze, the younger men put their hands behind their heads and stared silently at the sky as if they longed to see a future there that might free them from this unending round of poor drudgery.

After they had had thirty minutes, to the second, I called in my clear confident voice ‘All right! Back to work!’

The men and the women got to their feet as willingly as pigs coming out of mud to the killer. They glared at me, surly and cross, but no one did more than mutter. The sun was at its highest now. Mounted on my horse, unmoving, I could feel the heat of it baking on the coiled hair at the nape of my neck and the sweat making my silk gown damp. The men who had been hobbling, bent-backed, back and forth through the corn, swinging their sickles, looked like fever patients, so white and drenched in sweat. And the women look drained, mortally ill.

‘Gather round,’ I said peremptorily, and waited until they stood around me docile as cattle in a head-bowed half-circle. I noted, with a shiver of displeasure, that no one stepped on my shadow. When Tobermory shifted his weight so the shadow moved, the crowd swayed like a wheatfield with him, so my shadow touched no one.

‘Turn out your pockets,’ I said baldly. And my gaze drifted over every head bent with weariness and humiliation at this fresh shame.

‘Turn them out, I say.’

There was a dull silence. Then one of the young men, one of the Rogers lads, stepped forward.

‘Those are reaper’s rights,’ he said. His young voice clear as a mellow-toned bell.

‘Let’s see yours,’ I said instantly on the attack. ‘Turn them out.’

He clasped his hands over the pocket flaps of his leather breeches.

‘Those are reaper’s rights,’ he said. ‘You should not muzzle the ox that treads the corn. We’re not oxen in Acre, yet. We’re reapers, skilled reapers. And a handful of corn, morn and night, is the reaper’s due.’

‘Not any more,’ I said coldly. ‘Not on Wideacre. Turn out your pockets or turn out of your cottage, young Rogers. The choice is yours.’

He glared at me, baffled.

‘You’re good for us no longer, Miss Beatrice,’ he said in despair. ‘You held to the old ways once, and now you’re worse than a workhouse ganger.’

He pulled up the pocket flaps of the breeches and took a dozen heads of wheat out of one pocket, and a dozen from the other.

‘Throw them down,’ I ordered. He did so without another word. But he kept his eyes to the ground. I had a fleeting insight that he would not look at me so that I should not see that he, a youth earning a man’s wage, was weeping.

‘And now the rest of you,’ I said without emotion.

One by one they stepped forward like mummers in a play and threw down the heads of wheat until it made a tiny, insignificant pile in the deep rich field before me. A meagre theft. Enough to make little more than a couple of loaves. They would have used it for thickening soup, to stretch the bacon and water a little further. To make some gruel for the children, or some pap for the unweaned baby who cried and cried at a dry breast. Altogether it was little gain for the village, and a loss to the estate of a few pence.

‘This is thievery,’ I said.

‘Reaper’s rights!’ someone called from the back of the crowd.

‘I heard you, Harry Suggett,’ I said, raising neither my eyes nor my voice so there was a ripple of fear at my instant identification of the anonymous challenge.

‘This is thievery,’ I said again quietly. ‘You know what Dr Pearce says about thievery: that you will go to hell. You know what the law says about thievery: that you will go to gaol. Now hear what I say about thievery. Anyone I catch with one grain, just one grain, of wheat in their pocket will be handed over to a Justice of the Peace at once, and his or her family, every one of them, will be homeless that same night.’

There was a breath from the crowd, almost a groan, a great ‘ooohhh’, instantly stifled.

‘And there will be no gleaning for Acre until the Chichester workhouse gang have been through the fields gleaning for me first,’ I said firmly. ‘Only when the field is cleared as I wish may you come to see if there is anything left.’

Again there was the sigh of consternation. But they could say nothing. At the back of the crowd was a woman, a young girl, Sally Rose, a mother but no husband to provide for her and the babe. Her coarse apron was up over her head and she was weeping very quietly.

‘Now get to work,’ I said gently. ‘If there is no thieving, and no cheating, you will not find me unfair.’

At the softer note in my voice their eyes flashed to my face. But they were full of suspicion and unease, and all around the circle hands were clenched in the old sign against black magic.

I stayed out in the field all day, and we still had not cut it all. It was an unbelievable harvest, a miracle of a harvest. The untouched common land grew corn as if it had been longing all those innocent heather-filled years to burst into ripple upon ripple of pale yellow. No one filched wheat as far as I could see, and my eyes were sharp enough to see all around the field, although my mind was sluggish and cold and slow.

When the sun started sinking, late in the afternoon, and the sky was like warm mother-of-pearl with fleecy clouds of pink and the pearly greyness of twilight, I said, ‘All right. You can stop now.’

I waited while they cleaned their sickles and stacked them tidily on the wagon. Then they put on their jackets and the women threw shawls over their shoulders for the weary walk home. I watched them file out of the field, all silent, as if they were too tired and too sad for speech. A newly wed couple walked as a pair, with arms around each other, but she rested her head on his shoulder in a gesture that seemed more like sympathy than passion. The older couples walked side by side with a yawning gulf between them that comes from poverty miserably shared that has no ending. A lifetime filled with regrets. I checked that they had fastened the fence carefully behind them, and watched them down the track towards Acre. I kept my horse still until they were out of sight around the corner and I was alone in the glooming wood. Then I set Tobermory to ford the Fenny and cantered along the track towards the drive and my home.

My mind was calm. A good day’s work and a yield better than I had a right to expect. If my luck held and I could be the goddess of good weather just once more, just one more year, the gamble would have paid off.

If I could pay off the most pressing creditors entirely and make prompt repayments on other debts, I could restore faith in Wideacre among the money-men. Once they believed that I could service my debts they would plot against me no more. The spreading of a little gold and the harvest of my fertile fields would serve as good security. These men were foxes — they fed off dying animals; they killed only weak prey. They surrounded Wideacre when they thought it would fail. At the first sight of success I would be offered generous credit again.

The balance between utter ruin and total triumph now rested on whether I could get the wheat in with a surly, rebellious, undernourished workforce, before the good weather broke and spoiled the standing crop. If I did, I should draw a bounty payment from Mr Gilby and Wideacre would be secure for at least a year. The wind seemed set fair, the sky a faithful promise of clear weather on the morrow. The chances were good.

My heart was not light, for my heart was a shard of heavy glass these days, and I despaired of ever again feeling it lift with joy at simply being alive. But my mind at least was calm. And my courage was as dauntless as ever.

So I clicked to Tobermory and he lengthened his fast stride while the shadows and the ghosts slid past us and we saw the lights of the house through the dark pillars of tree trunks of the wood.

‘Gracious, how late you are,’ said Celia, as I clattered into the stable yard. ‘Had you forgotten we were going to supper with Mama?’

‘Forgive me, Celia,’ I said, sliding from the saddle and tossing the reins to a stable lad. ‘I had forgotten altogether.’

‘I can make your excuses if you wish. But won’t you be dull all alone at home?’ she asked. The carriage stood waiting for them; Celia scanned my face in the twilight, exquisite in her evening gown, Harry and John immaculate behind her.

‘Not at all,’ I said, smiling at the three of them without affection. ‘How very grand you are! It would take me hours to achieve such a pinnacle of elegance. Leave me in my dirt, and tell me all about it tomorrow.’

‘We could send the carriage back for you,’ Celia suggested, as she mounted the steps and spread her grey silk dress carefully over the seat.

‘No, no,’ I said. ‘I do indeed assure you. I am tired and longing for my bed. And I must be up early to be in the field with the reapers tomorrow.’

Celia nodded, and Harry bent and kissed my cheek as he passed me.

‘Thank you, my dear,’ he said. ‘Squire of Wideacre!’

I smiled at the jest, but my eyes were wary when John took my hand. ‘I’ll bid you good day and goodnight too then,’ he said civilly. His sharp eyes scanned my face. ‘You look tired, Beatrice.’

‘I am bone-weary!’ I laughed. ‘But a hot bath will set me to rights. And a huge supper. I would eat Lady Havering out of house and home if I came.’

John’s smile reached his eyes no more than my mirthless performance warmed me.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It is indeed a hungry harvest this year.’

He dropped my hand and got into the carriage with Harry and Celia, and the odd little threesome rolled off. I saw nothing more of them that night. After I had scalded the aches out of me with one of my boiling baths, I ate a supper big enough for two, and rolled into my bed like a hedgehog ready for winter. Before I slept the thought of the hidden tears in young Rogers’s eyes gave me a strange sharp pain, somewhere beneath my ribs. But then it passed. Nothing touched me much these hot, sad days.

I saw little of Harry, Celia or John the next day, or the next. The August social round was starting, and that meant picnics and fêtes and fairs in Chichester, and midsummer revels and late balls. For me it meant the wheat harvest, and that alone. Indeed the only time I noticed the gay life Celia was leading was when she wanted the coach horses when I had ordered them to be harnessed to an extra wagon. I refused to allow her the horses and Celia, the sweetest summer merrymaker that ever was, renounced the picnic without a frown, and made a summer ball for the children instead. She laughed and danced in the little summerhouse in the rose garden while John strummed a guitar, as if she cared not whether she was at a ball or alone with the children. I could hear her laughter, and her light step on the wooden floorboards while I made up the accounts and readied the wages at my desk. Through the glass I could see my son, and Julia, and Celia, hand-clasped, ringing-a-roses all afternoon.

I felt no regret at being behind the window while they were out in the sunshine and little Richard’s knees grew browner and his face bloomed with speckles of freckles like a lapwing’s egg. I did not mind seeing them through glass. My work this summer would mean I need never worry again when I opened the drawer that held the bills. Under one heavy glass paperweight were the terrifying quarterly demands from the money-lenders, the mortgage-holders, and the creditors. But under another was a sheet of paper with a list of yields from the wheatfields. And every sun-filled long day, while the workers sweated and swung the sickles, and I sat motionless on Tobermory in the shadow of a hedge if I could find one, Wideacre was growing and ripening its way into breaking even. If the weather held, if the uncut fields yielded equally well, we might even make a tiny profit.

This summer I might be living the life of a despised bailiff, but next summer I should be as blithe and as beloved as Celia. For one season, for one season only, I had to be either indoors counting the gains, or out on the fields watching for treachery. Next summer I would be the prettiest girl in the county again. Next year I should teach Richard to dance with me, not with Celia. Next year I should not feel this sluggish coldness. I should feel joy again, I would be as happy, as easy, as uncomplicated as Celia.

There was a tap on the door and it was Harry, dressed to cut the corn. Instead of his dark silken breeches and waistcoat he had trews of homespun. But he had kept his fine linen shirt, and his polished leather riding boots. He looked like a painter’s idea of a farm labourer. He was a cruel travesty of the young golden god who had brought in the harvest only three years ago. His face then had been round and golden, now it was plump and flushed with the heat. His features then were as clear as a Greek statue and now even his profile was blurred, with fleshy cheeks and a double chin. And Harry’s lithe young god-like body was now that of an ordinary man, a little older-looking than his years: over-indulged, overweight, under-exercised.

He had lost his early promise of intelligence, too. The Harry who had gone to school had been a scholar with a keen love of books and learning for its own sake. He came home with the sharp wits knocked out of him by the school’s corruption and by the discovery of his own perverse taste for pleasure. All he read these days were books on farm machinery, the odd fashionable novel, and occasionally stories about punishment and pain, which he kept in a secret box in the room at the top of the stairs.

He was like our mama. He would always avoid an unpleasant scene or an unpalatable truth; he complained they gave him a pain in his chest. He was a great one for the convenient lie, or for accepting another’s untruths rather than braving reality.

But he was also like me. We were both obsessed children. But when I learned that the most important thing in my life was the land, this Wideacre, Harry learned that the most important thing in his life was his pleasure, his indulgences. So he grew fat on rich food and sweet pastries, and red-faced on too much port. And he grew lazy and slobbish about his body for he sought to be fit for punishment — not fit for clear, free, equal love.

Now he dressed like a pauper prince in the travelling theatre and planned to work alongside ill-paid hungry men. I thought of our lads in the fields with enough material for perhaps one decent shirt among them, and sighed at Harry’s bright foolish face.

‘I thought I’d ride down on the wagon and do some reaping,’ he said boyishly. ‘They’re working on Oak Tree Meadow, aren’t they?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘That was two days ago. They’re in Three Gate Meadow now. I’ll be down later. You can keep an eye open for gleaning if you’re there. I told you that I’ve warned them I’ll not stand for it.’

‘Very well,’ said Harry. ‘I shall probably stay till dinner. You might send one of the stable lads down with something for me to eat if I’m not back by three.’

It was in my mind to caution Harry again, but I let it pass. If he chose to play gentleman farmer then it could do little more harm. The bitterness between us and the village could hardly grow more sour. Besides, I reckoned I had taken all the blame for the changes on the land. If Harry stole their hearts and became once more the demigod of the harvest, he might make them less surly. A rather plump deity, this year, and less bronzed and muscled. But if they liked having him in the line, it might make them go a little faster.

Harry took himself off singing what he fondly thought was a country song with many a ‘Hey-nonny-no’, a sound I have never heard any countryman make, even in his cups. Then the wagon went creaking down the drive with Harry sitting up beside the wagoner and waving goodbye to Celia and the children.

He was back within the hour, his face grim as he drove the wagon past my window. I pushed the letter I was writing aside, and waited. The west-wing stable door banged and I felt the gust of hot wind as Harry came into my room without a knock.

‘They insulted me!’ he said. His lower lip was trembling with rage and distress. ‘They would not speak to me. They would not sing the reaping songs we used to sing. They did not give me a place on the line of reapers. They squeezed me up against the hedge. The girls didn’t smile at me. And when I said, “Come on, lads, let’s sing,” one said, “We’re not paid enough to breathe, Squire, let alone sing. You get that flint-eyed sister of yours to pay us the proper rate, the fair rate, and we’ll sing like bloody blackbirds to please you. But while we hunger, you can sing to yourself!” ‘

‘Who?’ I said swiftly. ‘I’ll have him off the estate at once.’

‘I don’t know!’ said Harry petulantly. ‘I don’t know all their names like you do, Beatrice. I can’t even tell them apart. They all look the same to me. They don’t seem to have proper features. It was one of the older men, but I don’t know who. The others would know.’

‘And it’s likely they’d tell me!’ I scoffed. ‘Well, what did you do?’

‘I came home!’ said Harry indignantly. ‘What else could I do? If I can’t harvest my own fields I might as well come home for dinner. You’d think they’d be glad to have a Squire to work alongside them. If it’s the old ways they want, what could be more traditional than that?’

‘Odd indeed,’ I said drily. ‘How far had they got?’

‘Oh, I hardly noticed, I was so upset,’ said Harry uselessly. ‘Really, Beatrice, it is too bad. I can tell you, I shan’t go into the fields again this season. You’ll have to do the supervision, and if it’s too much for you it must be John Brien. It really is quite wrong I should be exposed to such insult.’

‘Very well,’ I said wearily. ‘Now go and have some coffee and biscuits, Harry. You’ll feel better after that.’

‘But why should they speak to me so?’ he demanded, his face working with distress. ‘Don’t they realize that this is the way the world has to be now?’

‘They certainly don’t seem to.’

‘I get a pain in my chest when I am upset,’ Harry said, the sickly-child whine in his voice again. ‘I should not be exposed to a scene like that. It is time they realized we are doing our best. When I think of all the work we provide for them. And the charity too! There’s Celia spending pounds every week on soups and bread for the poor. And this harvest dinner too! A pretty penny that will cost. And no thanks for it, you know, Beatrice!’

‘Harvest dinner?’ I said sharply. ‘There is to be no harvest dinner this year.’

Harry looked blankly at me. ‘Celia is organizing one,’ he said. ‘You asked her to make the arrangements, she said. It’s to be at the mill, once the last field is cut, and they bring the last wagon in, as usual.’

‘No!’ I said aghast. ‘Harry, it cannot be! Bill Green himself faces ruin and he will hardly welcome merrymakers at the mill. It will be the Christmas party over again. We cannot tell what will happen! Besides, it is hardly bringing the harvest home when we are merely storing it, and threshing it at the mill and Mr Gilby’s wagons will come and take every grain of it out of the county!’

‘Well, it’s all arranged, Beatrice,’ said Harry awkwardly. ‘And I told all the people about it today, before they would not let me reap. I suppose it would only make everything worse if we said now that it would not take place.’

I scowled dreadfully. ‘I never meant Celia to take me seriously,’ I said. ‘It will have to be cancelled.’

‘As you wish,’ said Harry uncertainly. ‘But everything is prepared, and everyone seems to be planning to come. It might be easier to go through with it than to cancel outright.’

I nibbled the tip of my finger, lost in thought.

‘Oh, very well,’ I said. ‘If it is all planned, and Miller Green has not refused, I suppose it should go ahead. But it is odd, midway between the old ways and the new like this.’

‘Perhaps when they have brought the corn in they will all cheer up and have a good party,’ Harry said witlessly. ‘Perhaps it will be like that first wonderful summer.’

‘I doubt it,’ I said. ‘One never gets the same summer twice. And Wideacre is all different these days. And you are different. And I would not know myself.’ I paused, my voice had sounded so sad. ‘Anyway,’ I said briskly, ‘if it is all planned it will have to go ahead. And we can leave early if there is any unpleasantness.’

Harry went off to change and take coffee, a little soothed, and was able to pour out the tale of his wrongs to Celia’s sympathetic ear. But when she, prompted by a hard look from John, suggested that the men would not have been so rude if they had not been in despair, Harry was quickly up on his high ropes.

‘Now, Celia,’ he said, wagging a plump finger at her. ‘You must let Beatrice and me run the land as we see fit. If they have to tighten their belts in Acre for a few days that will do no great harm. It will give them an appetite for your harvest supper! Beatrice and I know best on this.’

Celia opened her mouth to reply, but then thought better of it. She shot a swift glance at John from under her eyelids. They needed nothing more. They understood each other so well. John now took up the debate, knowing, without being told, that Celia could not challenge Harry further than she had done.

‘Celia is right, you know, Harry,’ said John. He was hiding his distaste of Harry in his anxiety to get Harry to see reason about the land.

‘Celia and I have spent much time in Acre recently,’ said John. He spoke with his old incisive authority. ‘We have set in hand a system so the food we give is distributed first to the families with ill children, then to the old people, and then to the other families in need. But it is evident to me that we can do nothing effective while there is no long-term solution to the problem of poverty on Wideacre.’

‘No one denies that!’ said Harry. ‘It is a hard time for all of us who are dependent on the land.’ He took another cake and bit into it with resolution.

‘It’s not just “hard” in Acre,’ John said patiently. ‘There will soon be many deaths through starvation if nothing is done. The supply of food we have provided can keep some families going, but there are more of them in need than we can satisfy.’

‘That is because they insist on having large families,’ I said coldly. ‘They bear children with no idea how to support them. All you two have been doing is encouraging them to live in a fool’s paradise. While you give them free food they will never understand the way of the real world.’

John shot me a hard look. ‘This real world of yours, Beatrice,’ he said in a tone of detached interest, ‘this is the world where you can employ every man in Acre for hundreds of years, and then suddenly refuse to keep any, save two skilled workers, on the wage books?’

I said nothing.

‘This real world is one where there is no way of preventing the conception of children and yet the bastards of Quality wear silk and can look forward to inheritances? Yet the legitimate children of the poor go hungry?’

I knew he was thinking of two bastards, two incestuous bastards, in this house. I said nothing again, but I shot a murderous glance at Harry who was licking his fingers and looking at John.

‘No wonder they do not understand the real world,’ said John, ‘for this real world of yours baffles me. I have never been anywhere like Wideacre and I have travelled all around England and Scotland. In less than a year this estate has gone from being one of the most profitable, happiest places in the county. Now it is in the hands of the creditors, and the poor are starving. Which picture is real? The reality you inherited, or this horror you have made?’

‘Now, now,’ said Harry, blustering after catching my look. ‘It is no use blaming Beatrice simply because we now farm in the way of everyone else. Of course we farm for maximum profit. Beatrice has simply employed the obvious methods.’

‘It seems to me that there is a choice,’ said John. He was still infuriatingly cool, as if he were conducting a debate at his university chambers. I walked to the fireplace, leaned one arm along the cool mantelpiece and watched him.

‘There is the choice between saying the important thing in life is to make as much money as possible and saying the important thing is trying to live without abusing other people. Perhaps even to try to make their lives a little better. You and Beatrice — forgive me, Harry — seem to be committed to profit at any price. I find I don’t admire that.’

John’s look at Harry and me was like a lance on a gangrenous wound. He made me feel filthy. I gave an affected sigh.

‘Really, John, for a nabob’s son your moral obligations to profit sit rather oddly! You can enjoy the luxury of a conscience because someone else did the dirty work of earning the wealth for you. You were born and bred to a massive fortune. It is easy enough for you to despise wealth.’

‘I had so much,’ he corrected me, a gleam in his eyes. ‘You had better pray I do despise wealth, Beatrice. For I have my wealth no longer.’

Celia leaped to her feet, then checked herself. She had been about to run from the room but she hesitated and turned to Harry.

‘We all seem to be talking about different things and even quarrelling,’ she said sadly. ‘But while we talk things get worse and worse in Acre. Harry, I do implore you to stop this headlong dash for profit and at least give the poor the chance to buy Wideacre wheat at a proper price.

‘We all know that forestalling the market is wrong. Your papa never did it. You promised that you would never do it. Please, please, sell the wheat to the village.’

‘Now, Celia!’ said Harry, falling back on the reliable weapon of a loud-voiced bluster. ‘Are you accusing me of breaking my word? Are you challenging my honour?’

‘Oh, no!’ she said. ‘But …’

‘That’s enough!’ said Harry, with a bully’s abruptness. ‘Beatrice is running the land as we see fit. And I shall go harvesting another year, when Acre has come out of this fit of the sullens. This conversation is closed.’

Celia dropped her eyes to the coffee jug and I saw a single tear fall like a raindrop on to the silver tray. But she said nothing. And John, after one compassionate glance at her downcast face, said nothing more. I waited until I was sure they were completely silenced and then I went back to my office. I had work to do.

At last the prospects seemed to be brightening. The fields were being cut faster than ever before and I was out every day in a fever of impatience to get the job done.

Not only could I see the chance of a great bounty on the way for Wideacre, and a chance to be free, utterly free, of the creditors but I also felt a storm in the air. It prickled on the horizon. I felt it on my skin. The skies were clear, I could not wish for clearer. But I could feel the clouds massing against me, somewhere over the horizon.

The days were hot, too hot. They had lost their honest summertime heat and were sultry, threatening. Tobermory’s neck was streaked with sweat even while he stood in the shade and the flies buzzed ominously low about his head. The men in the field suffered as it became hotter and damper. One day a reaper fainted — Joe Smith, old Giles’s son. He fell on his sickle like a fool and the line broke as they ran around him. I rode over. It was a nasty wound, open nearly to the bone.

‘I’ll send for the Chichester surgeon,’ I said generously. ‘Margery Thompson can bind it up for now, and I will send for the doctor to stitch it for you.’

Joe looked up at me, white with shock, his dark eyes hazy.

‘I’d rather have Dr MacAndrew if I may, Miss Beatrice,’ he said humbly.

‘Get in the wagon then,’ I said with sudden temper. ‘It’s going up to the Hall. I think your beloved Dr MacAndrew is in. If he’s out doing good deeds in Acre you can sit in the stable yard and wait for him. I hope you don’t bleed to death while you are waiting.’

And I wheeled Tobermory and trotted back to my patch of shade by the hedge, and watched them help Joe into the wagon. He was in luck, John was in the garden and saw him as soon as the wagon drew up in the stable yard. He treated him for free and with such skill that Joe was out gleaning two days later. Another proof of John’s skill. Another reason for them to love him. Another enemy of mine.

I was surrounded by them. I worked all day in a field full of men who hated me and women who feared me. I slept at night with only a door between me and a man who wished for my death. And I woke every dawn to know that somewhere, out on the downs, was another enemy who was planning my death, who was readying himself to come for me.

The weather seemed to hate me. The heat held but there was no wind. The wheat barely rustled before it was cut down. In the hot humid days there was utter silence. The men did not talk in the fields; the women did not sing. Even the little children, twisting the stalks for tying the stooks, played and spoke in whispers. And if I rode Tobermory over towards them, they backed away with silent mouths agape, black stubs of teeth showing, and melted, like diseased fox cubs, into the hedgerow.

Not even the birds sang in the heat. You would think they shared Wideacre’s baking despair and were silent for sorrow. Only in the cool ominous dawns and in the uneasy twilight would they start up and their voices sounded eerie, like the whine of a whipped dog.

The light seemed wrong to me, as well. I was coming half to believe that it was my eyes and senses that were deceiving me, tricking me into fearing a storm when I so desperately needed a settled calm. But if I had mistrusted the prickle down my sweaty spine, and the wet smell of the heavy air, I could not be wrong over the brightness of the day. It stung my eyes. It was not the brightest honest yellow heat of a Wideacre midsummer, but something with a sickly dark core. A bluish light, a purple light hung over us. A sun like a red wound in a yellowing sky. When I opened my eyes in the morning I shuddered instinctively as if I had a fever. I dressed in my hot full-skirted habit with no joy. The sky was like an oven above me, and the ground as hard as iron beneath my feet, all the moisture baked from it. The Fenny was shrunk so small I could not hear its ripple from my bedroom window, and when it flowed through Acre it stank with the slops thrown into it, and the cattle fouling it. I too felt desiccated: as dry as an old leaf, or an empty seashell when the smooth little wet animal that lived inside it is dead.

So I hurried the reapers. I was there first in the field every morning, and last to leave every night. I rode them as I would a sluggish horse and they would have kicked out if they had dared. But they could not. Whenever they halted the line to wipe their heads or to rub the stinging sweat from their eyes they would hear me call, ‘Reapers, keep moving!’ And they would groan and grasp the handle of the sickle — slick with sweat and turning painfully even in their callused hands. They did not murmur against me. They had not even breath enough to curse me. They worked as if they just longed for the whole miserable job to be done, the harvest in, and winter to bring cold starvation and quick death to end it all.

And I sat high on the sweating horse, my face white and strained beneath the cap that cast no shade on my eyes, and knew that longing for myself. I was bone-weary. Tired with days and days of watching and worrying and driving them, and driving myself. And tired with a deep inner sickness that said to me as slowly and as firmly as a funeral bell, ‘All for nothing. All for nothing,’ as if the words made any sense at all.

But we were nearly done. The stocks were piled in the centre of the field awaiting the wagons, and the men had collapsed, gasping in the airless shade of the hedge. The women and the old people stacking the stooks were nearly finished, and the men watched their bent-backed wives and parents with lack-lustre beaten eyes, without the strength to help them.

Margery Thompson, who had been at the vicarage when John saved Richard’s life, had ceased her work already. I watched her under my eyelashes, my attention suddenly sharpened with unease. She had seated herself on the bank by the hedge and was twisting stalks of corn on her lap. It is the tradition on Wideacre that the last stook, the last one of the whole harvest, is a corn-baby, a corn-dolly. Woven by the cleverest old woman, the doll represents the leader of the harvest. Season after season I had loaned my ribbons to make the circle of magic between the harvest and me complete. I had seen a little corn-dolly Beatrice triumphant at the top of the pile of stooks. In the year Harry brought in the harvest the corn-dolly was bawdy, with a scrap of linen for its shirt and a head of wheat between the stalk legs, grotesquely erect, and everyone had roared. Harry had taken that one home, grinning, and hid it from Mama. The corn-dollies they had made for me were pinned on the wall of my office. Proof, if ever I was near forgetting, that the world of papers and debts and business was the pretend life, and the real world was the corn and the goddesses of the fertile earth.

The corn-dolly tradition had slipped from my worried, money-mad mind, but as I watched the old woman’s nimble fingers moving so cleverly and so quickly among the stalks I knew a twinge of dread warning me of some fresh disaster, that some magic against me was brewing.

The clouds had come out from hiding at last and were piling up on the horizon like great walls, blocking out the eerie sunlight and making a premature dusk. It had held off long enough to save me. As long as the wagons came safely through, and took Wideacre’s corn to the richest market in the world, the rain could pour down and wash Acre and all Wideacre into the Fenny for all I cared. I had done what I set out to do, and I cared little if the storm drowned me.

Tobermory shivered in the breeze, not because it was cold, for it carried no freshness, but it blew like the breath of a threat. It was as hot as if it blew from India with the black magic of distant dangerous places. Margery Thompson had the corn-dolly on her lap and was muttering to it as if she were nursing a baby, and chuckling to herself. The others had finished piling the stooks and were looking at her curiously. The stooks were heaped in an unstable pyramid in the middle of the field, wanting only the corn-dolly to top it off and to mark the end of the harvest.

‘There. ‘Tis done,’ she said, and tossed it high in the air. She threw it accurately and it balanced on the top of the pile. The reapers moved forward, drawn by the old tradition as if they hardly knew what they were doing, their sickles sharp in their hands.

The game was that they stood some distance from the heap and shied their sickles at it. The sickle that stuck in the dolly belonged to Bill Forrester and he walked wearily towards the stooks to claim his prize and bring it to me. But when it was in his hand he flushed scarlet to the roots of his hair and chucked it, like a football, to the man next to him. They tossed the dolly down the line and then one skilful hand, I don’t know whose, sent it whirling into the air towards me. Tobermory threw up his head in fright and I tightened one hand on the rein and caught the dolly — faster than thought, which would have warned me to let it fall.

It was not one corn-dolly but two. It was two figures coupled. It was the two-backed beast Mama had seen before the fire. A piece of grey ribbon filched from me was round the neck of one of the dollies, and a scrap of linen to indicate Harry was twisted around the other. The head of wheat that had been such a good bawdy joke four seasons ago was now obscene. The phallic sheath of corn was stuck between the other dolly’s straw legs. She was meant to be me; he was meant to be Harry. The secret was out.

Not out as gossip, I thought, shaken to stillness by this horror made from good Wideacre wheat, that seemed to stink in my hand. But out of something sensed. Something as threatening and permeating as woodsmoke. Something as indescribable yet as certain as the feel of thunder on the way. Margery Thompson, the clever old woman, had listened with her inner ear, and made a joke that hit the mark. The truth had come to her despite herself. She had not spoken it of her own free will. She had just smelled the stink of lust and incest that lingered around my skirts, that Celia feared and Mama had sensed. And she had fashioned a horror from good Wideacre wheat to show that everything was wrong.

I tore at the delicate bodies and dropped them to the ground beneath Tobermory’s hoofs.

‘You disgust me,’ I said to the thickening air over their heads. ‘You are scum. You deserve to be treated like pigs for you think like swine. The treatment you have had from me has been the best I could do. But now I shall feel nothing, nothing for you. If we are at war then well and good. I shall enclose all the common. Indeed I shall enclose and flatten Acre village itself. I shall clear my land of you altogether. And the good clean land will grow pure without your stinking cottages, and your fearful children, and your dirty minds.’

The men had hunkered down again, and only the women sighed like fir trees when the first breath of a storm moves the feathery tops. But they did not weep or call out. The baking air was draining us all, sucking the strength from us in unpredictable eddies of little hot whirlwinds.

‘Now go,’ I said. My voice was full of hate but cracked with weariness and the dryness of my tense throat. ‘Go. And when I come to the harvest dinner this afternoon remember that the man there who does not doff his cap to me and the woman who fails to curtsy is penniless, homeless, and jobless, from that moment.’

They sighed again like a forest when a woodland fire is taking hold, licking like a lover up the young saplings while the tops of the trees flutter as if to call for help.

I wheeled Tobermory round and left them in the stubble. The wagons were lumbering over the fields towards the pile of stooks and I could see John Brien in the leading cart.

‘I’m away to change,’ I said. ‘I will come down to the mill later.’

‘There may be trouble at the harvest dinner,’ he said warningly, his strange town face forever fearful on the land, sharp in this early gloaming. His face was greenish yellow from the uneasy storm light. I heard a crackle, sharp as fire, in dry bracken behind me, and his face was suddenly blazing like a white angel as the sheet lightning dropped like a shard of glass on the upper horizon of the downs.

‘There is always trouble,’ I said wearily. ‘We can always arrest some young lads. We can always hang another old man. They can start trouble but we always finish it. I have men from Chichester to guard the corn tonight and till it is threshed. And Mr Gilby will send guards with his wagons. I do not fear Acre’s spite. And tomorrow I shall speak with you about expelling them all from Acre and firing the village. I want it no more. I need it no more.’

His weasel eyes glinted at the prospect of violence to the people he despised.

‘I shall see you at the mill,’ I said. ‘Make haste to get this load into the barn. I think the rain will hold off, but when it comes it will be a great storm.’

He nodded and cracked his whip at the horses but he need not have hurried. I was right about the rain. It held off for all of my wearisome ride home when I could scarcely breathe the hot air. I felt as if someone was holding a damp muffler over my mouth and if I could have breathed I would have screamed for help.

Even inside the Hall the light made everything strange. Celia’s parlour was an undersea green, and her face was white coral, a drowned virgin. Her eyes were like brown hollows in her head and when she poured my tea her hands were shaking.

‘What’s the matter, Celia?’ I asked.

‘I scarcely know,’ said Celia. She tried to laugh but the lilt in her voice had a hard edge. John was alert, his eyes on her strained face.

‘Are you unwell?’ he asked precisely.

‘No,’ said Celia. ‘I suppose it is just this horrid weather. This endless threat of storm that never comes weighs and weighs on me. I feel hot and then shivery. I have been down in Acre today and it feels all wrong there too. Some of the women seemed to be avoiding me. I feel certain that there will be trouble over the grain wagons, Beatrice. The air is full of threat. I feel almost fearful. I feel that something most dreadful is going to happen.’

‘It’s going to rain, that’s what’s going to happen,’ I said drily, to shake Celia out of her fancies. ‘It’s going to pour. We had better take the carriage to the harvest dinner and not the landau.’

She nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I ordered the coach. One does not have to be as weather-wise as you, Beatrice, to feel this storm coming. I feel like a cat with my fur rubbed all the wrong way. I have felt thus for days. But I fear more than a storm. I fear the mood of Acre.’

‘Well, I shall soothe my nerves with a bath and a fresh dress,’ I said with pretended indifference. But I knew I had John’s eyes on my face, and I knew my eyes were dark with fear at Celia’s forebodings. ‘And then, I suppose, we will have to go. When did you plan we should be there, Celia? The carts will be unloaded within an hour.’

‘As soon as you wish,’ she said absently. As she spoke there was a rumble of thunder along the heads of the downs. Another flash, so bright it stabbed our eyes, lit the room with a blaze of blue and then vanished, leaving us blinking in total blackness. Celia laughed at her jump, but her voice had a high note of hysteria.

‘I will be quick then,’ I said. But I could not move fast. The air was too thick for me. It quivered around me with meanings and resonances with a stink of horror I could not face. I swam through it to the door and tried to smile casually at them. My teeth were bared in an awkward grimace and my eyes were dead and cold. John moved to open the door for me, and his fingers brushed my hand.

‘You are icy cold, Beatrice,’ he said, his professional interest kindled, but malice in his voice. ‘Have you a fever? Or are you, too, afraid of this storm? Do you also feel the tension, the hatred all around us?’

‘No,’ I said wearily. ‘I have been bringing in the corn for what seems like all my life. I have been out in the fields every day. While you two sit in the parlour and plot against me, and drink the tea my labour has paid for, I am out there in the baking sunlight trying to save Wideacre. But I would not expect anyone to understand that.’

‘I say, steady on,’ said Harry, roused at last from the plate of cakes on the little table before him. ‘You know why I cannot help, Beatrice. They pay no mind to me, and I cannot bear insult.’

My lips curved in a disdainful smile. ‘No reason why you should, Harry,’ I said. ‘I go out and bear it for you. For all of you.’ In my mind I saw again the obscene dollies and the wheathead cock and the crafty skill of the making, as they seemed to roll over and over with their perverse passion, falling from the stook in the middle of their thrust.

‘I am tired,’ I said with finality. ‘Please excuse me, all of you. I should go and wash my ill-temper away.’

But I should have known better than to hope for decent service while there was a party starting at the mill. Every one of the kitchen staff had taken leave without one word of permission from me. The cook had taken a day off and gone to Chichester with Stride in the gig. Only Lucy was left to serve me and she complained bitterly about every hot water can she had to lug up the two flights of stairs and along three corridors.

‘That’s enough, Lucy,’ I said finally when I felt rested and brave again. ‘Now tell me again, who is in the house?’

‘Only the valets, Lady Lacey’s maid and me,’ said Lucy. ‘All the others have gone down to the mill. There’s a cold collation laid for your dinner.’

I nodded. In the old days the staff shared in every party and feast that the village could dream up. Sometimes they begged permission to borrow the paddock for Wideacre’s own sports events. But now the easy uncounting, uncalculating days were past.

‘I’ll dock them a day’s pay,’ I said while Lucy draped a towel around my shoulders, unpinned my hair and brushed it in long sweeps. She nodded. Her eyes meeting mine in the mirror were cold.

‘I knew you would,’ she said. ‘They knew you would. So they asked Lady Lacey, and she said they might go.’

I met her gaze with a long hard look that I held until her eyes dropped to her hands.

‘Warn them not to push me too far, Lucy,’ I said, my voice even. ‘I am tired of impertinence in the fields and house. If they push me too far they may be sorry they ever started. There are many servants looking for places, and I no longer have much attachment to people born and bred on Wideacre.’

She kept her eyes on the tumbled silk of my copper hair and brushed it in steady even sweeps. Then she deftly bunched it into one hand and twisted it into a smooth knot on the top of my head.

‘Beautiful,’ she said grudgingly. I looked at myself in the glass. I was lovely. The days in the field had bronzed me into my usual summer honey and now that the strained weary look had gone from my face I once more looked like a pretty twenty-year-old. The colour was back in my cheeks and there was a dusting of tiny freckles over my nose and upper cheekbones. Against the honey tea of my skin my hazel eyes gleamed greener than ever. My hair, burnished with the sun, was bronze as well as copper, and some of the curls around my face had even been sun-bleached to red-gold.

‘Yes,’ I said coldly, acknowledging like her the physical perfection of the oval face in the glass.

‘I’ll wear the green silk,’ I said, rising from the glass and dropping the damp towel on the floor for her to stoop and pick up. ‘I’m sick of greys and dark colours. And no gentry will be there.’

Lucy opened the wardrobe and shook out the deep green sack dress. A matching green stomacher tied tight at the front and a wide swaying panel shimmered loose at the back.

‘Good,’ I said, as she slid it over my head and tied the stomacher tight. ‘But I cannot breathe in here. Open the window, Lucy.’

She threw open the casement window but the heat and the damp air flowed in like a river of steam from a kettle to scorch the inside of my mouth and nose. Involuntarily I gave a little moan.

‘Oh, if only this weather would break,’ I said longingly. ‘I cannot breathe this air. I cannot move in this heat. Everything is so unbearably heavy all around me!’

Lucy looked at me without sympathy.

‘It’s affecting the children, too,’ she said. ‘Master Richard’s nurse asked if you would step into the nursery when you were changed. He is fretting and she thinks he may be cutting a tooth.’

I shrugged my shoulders. The fresh silk was already feeling too warm and sticky.

‘Ask Mr MacAndrew to go,’ I said. ‘I have to get ready to go to the mill. Mr MacAndrew will know what to do, and Richard minds him.’

Lucy’s eyes met mine and I read her instant condemnation of a woman who would not go to her own child when he was in pain and calling for her.

‘Oh, stop, Lucy!’ I said wearily. ‘Just tell him to go to the nursery at once, and then you come back and powder my hair.’

She went, obediently enough, and I moved to the window to try to breathe. The rose garden was drained of colour. I could not even remember how pretty it used to be before this nightmare light closed in. The green grass of the paddock was grey and ghostly looking. The scarlet roses in the garden looked green and sickly. The belly of the storm was leaning on the rooftop of the house and I looked up to a ceiling of purple clouds as billowing and claustrophobic as a tent. It stretched from the top of the downs to the top of the common without a break, without a chink to admit either light or air. The only light was the great dropping wall of sheet lightning that cracked as if the back of Wideacre had broken in two on the rack of my plans. The white light burned my eyes. I was still dazzled while Lucy powdered my hair and handed me my wrap.

‘I’ll take nothing. It’s too hot,’ I said. The merest touch of the pure wool on my fingers had me sweating and itchy.

‘You don’t look well,’ said Lucy coolly. She cared nothing for me now. I could be dying and she would not care.

‘I am perfectly well,’ I said coldly. ‘You may go, Lucy. I shall not want you any more tonight. Are you and the valets and Lady Lacey’s maid going down to the mill?’

‘If we may,’ she said with a hint of insolence in her voice.

‘You may,’ I said, too weary to challenge her again. I had worn out any affection for me. I had worn out all the love that everyone had felt for me. I was still only a young woman but I had already lived too long. I had enjoyed my best years, the years when I was surrounded with love and everyone adored pretty Miss Beatrice. Now I was old and tired and longing for sleep. I swept past her, my silk train hushing behind me and rippling like a flood of green poison all the way down the stairs. I had lost my quick easy stride; I felt less like a pretty girl than a snail with its sticky trail over everything it touches.

They were waiting for me in the hall and the carriage was at the door. Harry, portly and pompous in his grey silk with a black embroidered waistcoat and silver grey stockings. Celia, drained of colour in a navy silk dress, which made her strained face haggard in the yellowish storm light. John, handsome and meticulous as ever, and glowing with the knowledge that none of this could go on for much longer; that, like the storm, something was certain to break. Their faces turned to me as I came through the west-wing door and, in a sudden spurt of rebellion, I said to myself in horror, ‘My God! What have I done? I have planned my life and waded through blood; I have wilfully killed and accidentally killed and gone on and on with my heart growing harder and colder, so that this useless trio should live here in wealth and ease with clean consciences. So that I can see them every dreary day for the rest of my life. So that my long struggle should have as its goal seeing Harry, Celia and John every day until I die.’

I mastered my face with an effort and put my fingers to my forehead to smooth out the skin and the sudden expression of despair from my face.

‘I am sorry to have kept you waiting,’ I said. ‘Shall we go?’

Only Coachman Ben was there to drive us. The footmen were down at the mill released by dear Celia for a night out with the villagers. So John pulled in the steps and shut the door. The rocking of the carriage in the eerie light reminded me of my sickness at sea, and I pressed my lips together. Celia and John spoke in an undertone about the failure of their charity to make any real difference to Acre, and I heard again the rising note of panic in Celia’s voice when she said privately to John, ‘Whatever we do is simply not enough. However much we spend we seem only to delay a crisis. We solve nothing, and winter is coming.’

Her anxious voice set my teeth on edge and her words made me tense with foreboding. I bit my lips to keep my anger quiet.

The carriage rolled in the mill yard and a hundred pinched faces, greenish in the storm light, turned towards us. Celia alighted first, and there was a gentle murmur of called greetings for her. I came down the steps into a stony silence as cold as the millpond, but every woman dropped into a curtsy and every man doffed his cap or pulled his forelock. John was greeted with a few ‘Good days’, but Harry’s bluff shout, ‘Good day! Good harvesting!’ fell into an icy well of resentful silence.

‘Better get it over and done with,’ he said in a loud undertone to Celia, easing a finger under his tight stock.

‘Very well,’ she said. ‘Will you say grace?’

Harry looked abashed but strode over to the trestle table and waited until everyone was settled on a bench. Then he gabbled a string of Latin, which he may have understood once, and waved to Mrs Green at the kitchen door.

She marched out, her face set, carrying shoulder-high the great tray of sliced ham and chicken and beef, and crashed it on the table. Behind her came the Wideacre kitchenmaids all carrying great platters of cheeses and, behind them, the footmen with great loaves of our golden bread. There was no ripple of pleasure at the sight, no cheers as the enormous amounts were laid on the table. The heart was out of Wideacre. They were hungry; they were starving. And they had forgotten the taste of meat. There was no fighting. They were too exhausted to fight. Their good behaviour was partly a courtesy to Celia and John, but also because they had gone beyond fighting. They were resigned now to dying of hunger together, and there was no one sufficiently angry or sufficiently hopeful to grab his neighbour’s portion. The natural leaders of the village — old Tyacke and the three lads — were gone. All there was left were the miserable poor, enduring their hunger in silence. Expecting death this winter, and fearing it no more. They were so hungry — it gave me a shiver to see — they could not eat.

At the Christmas party they had scrambled for food, clawing like savages, as wild as hungry animals. But now at the harvest dinner the sharp new hunger had gone from them. They could eat little or nothing. They had forgotten how to relish food; the tasty cheese and the sweet-cured ham had lost their savour. And their poor shrunk bellies could manage proper amounts of food no more. They were used to famine. And they could eat only little.

Instead they shamelessly folded great doorstep slices of bread and meat and cheese and stuffed wedges of food in every pocket and handy corner of their clothes. They took food like squirrels preparing for a hard winter — in enormous amounts. But even then they did not grab. They helped each other now, and the frailest older people were given their share by young men whose own cheeks were pinched and white. Saddest of all was the way that these old people in their turn pressed extra pieces of meat on the mothers with small children. One girl, with a look of blank despair on her face, was pregnant, and with tender courtesy her neighbours on either side of the bench ensured she had wrapped up meat and cheese in her kerchief to take with her. They no longer grabbed food from each other’s mouths. They had learned the discipline of hunger, and they had been shocked by wintertime deaths. Now they shared, even when their own bellies rumbled and pained them.

The ominous dark sky billowed overhead but here on the lower ground we could not even feel the slight breeze that had blown at the Hall. We could see its passing in the way the treetops swayed and the pine trees moaned as it grew stronger. Then there was a crash like a thousand trees falling and the scene was suddenly frozen in a snowy glare and the thunder roared at us. Celia beside me suddenly swayed, and grabbed my arm.

‘I can’t stand this,’ she gasped. John instantly had an arm around her waist supporting her.

‘Get her away!’ he said abruptly to Harry, and supported Celia the few steps to the carriage. Coachman Ben, a hearty eater at the Hall kitchen, had not joined his hungry family at the table but came out of the purple shadows when he saw we were ready to leave.

‘We will be off then!’ said Harry, his voice like a foghorn above the rising wind. ‘We will say goodnight, and thank you for your labours.’

I stepped into the carriage and sat beside Celia. Her hands were as cold as ice and she kept twisting them in her lap as if she were trying to pull invisible rings off her fingers. She shuddered every now and then, and gasped. I thought then that we might have got away with it, but I had forgotten Harry’s infallible instinct for doing the wrong thing.

He climbed into the carriage and then turned to call from the open door.

‘So Wideacre is not so bad, hey?’ he shouted. ‘There’s not many estates left where they still bring the harvest in with a free dinner, you know!’

The rising wind moaned and the muffled voices moaned with it. The hollow hungry despairing eyes lifted from the table and fixed themselves on Harry at the steps of the carriage, and me at the window as if they could burn us up with the hatred of their gaze.

‘What about the corn?’ yelled one voice, and the rabble’s chorus of hate swelled beneath it.

‘Wideacre grown should be Wideacre sold, Wideacre milled, Wideacre fed!’ they rumbled. At the kitchen door of the mill I saw Miller Green appear and his eyes met mine in a message of cold hatred.

Harry hesitated, as if to shout down the rising hum of voices, but I tweaked his jacket and said quickly, ‘Harry come!’ and he pulled in the steps and slammed the door. The carriage tipped as he slumped back in his seat opposite me. Celia was gasping like a beached salmon and her face was ashen in the darkness of the coach.

‘I cannot stand it,’ she said again.

‘What’s the matter?’ I asked, my voice arid.

‘I cannot stand living like this any longer,’ she said. Her eyes were burning. She grabbed my hand and held it so hard she hurt me.

‘I will not live like this,’ she said. ‘These people are dying of hunger. The children are starving and their arms and legs are like sticks. I cannot eat in the Hall while there is starvation in the village.’

The coach was wheeling around; we would soon be away. There was another flash of lightning and every detail of the death’s-head feast was as bright as white noon. They were still seated at the trestle and every great platter of food had been cleared; there was not even a crumb left behind. In one corner of the yard a hungry child was retching desperately, choked on his first decent meal in half a year. His mother was holding the little heaving body, tears pouring down her face. The young girls in stained and ragged linen were not flirting with the lads. They had laid their dirty weary heads on the table, or were staring dully into space as if they had no interest in courtship and love, with their hunger and the fear of hunger a hollow under their ribs.

It had taken less than a year to turn the thriving, jolly, noisy, courting, wedding, bedding village of Acre into a graveyard for the walking dead with hollow eyes and sad faces. They looked ready for the workhouse. They looked like labourers fit for the new workhouses where they like quick fingers, no strength, but a dogged determination to get through the day, to collect the penny to buy a crust of loaf and some gin to get through another despairing night.

These were the walking dead from Harry’s great vision of the future. I had known it would be like this. I had killed them.

The carriage rolled forward, and another flash of lightning cracked over our heads and made the horses shy. The villagers saw my white face staring from the window, and Harry’s fat head near mine. They saw the horror but no pity in my eyes. From the back of the yard I saw an arm swing and I jerked back from the window in an instinctive reaction. The stone smashed into the glass and splinters and shards shattered into the coach like ice. Celia’s fine silk and mine were sprinkled with splinters of glass and John and Harry’s boots crunched on the shards on the floor of the coach.

A scratch on the back of my hand welled red, and I dabbed at it with a ribbon, feeling a sliver of glass dig deep into the cut, but feeling no pain.

Neither pain nor resentment, while the coachman whipped up the frightened animals and Harry exploded with rage. Celia hid her face in her hands and wept like a comfortless child. The carriage swayed, the horses near bolting in their fright at the thunder and the wind lashing the trees. Over the noise of the rumble of wheels was the louder rumble of thunder as it rolled around the top of the downs, but still it did not rain. Through the jagged hole of the window hot air blew in my face making me gasp with the stifling heat of it.

‘If only it would rain,’ I said absently.

‘Rain!’ Celia cried out, and her gentle voice was harsh. ‘I wish it would rain a flood and sweep the whole of this cruel country away and Wideacre with it!’

‘I say!’ said Harry feebly. ‘You’re upset, Celia, and no wonder! Villains they are! I’ll have the whole village cleared! I’ll not have them on my land!’

Celia turned on him, her eyes blazing. ‘It is we who are the villains, not they!’ she said, half stammering in her rage. ‘How could you, how could you, have let such a life come about? On your own land, Harry! We treat the poor worse than a northern coal baron! We feed the horses in our stables with more care than those little children are fed! We should be the ones who are chased by soldiers in the wood and hanged. It should be us who go hungry, for it is the four of us who let this plague of unhap-piness loose on Wideacre. John and I are to blame as well as you, for we stood by and tried to help in foolish little ways. But it is you and Beatrice who are most at fault, Harry, for you should never have farmed in this way that kills people. You are ploughing lives into Wideacre, not seaweed. You are sowing our downfall, not seeds. And I will not have it!’

The carriage stopped outside the Hall and Celia pushed past me, swung open the door and jumped down in a shower of glass. I would have grasped Harry’s hand for a few urgent words but John swept him in after Celia and there was no time to prompt him.

‘We farm Wideacre in the only way there is to produce a good yield,’ said Harry defensively, standing before the empty grate of the parlour. The thunder rumbled outside in a nightmare contradiction, half drowning his words.

‘Then we must content ourselves with less yield,’ said Celia sharply. She was riding the storm of her anger. Her moral force was based on her certainty of being right. Celia never spoke as a stratagem; she only ever spoke out when her stern, unswerving conscience told her she must.

‘Yields are hardly a matter for you, my dear,’ said Harry, with a warning note in his voice.

‘They are when the carriage is stoned with me inside!’ Celia retorted, her colour blazing in her cheeks. ‘They certainly are when I cannot pray in my parish church because behind me there are hungry people, dying people, facing starvation.’

‘Now!’ said Harry, raising his voice. ‘Now, I won’t have this, Celia.’

I nodded at John. ‘Come,’ I said, and turned towards the door.

‘Oh, no,’ said John not moving. ‘This is not a private affair between Harry and Celia that they should settle in privacy. This is an issue that concerns us all. Like Celia I cannot live here while this starvation goes on. Another winter is coming, and the last one took famine within a hair’s breadth of that village. I won’t leave this room until we have decided to restore the common plots for vegetables and you have agreed to open up the common land again.’

‘What do you know about farming?’ I demanded rudely. ‘Either of you! All you have seen, John, have been the Edinburgh drying greens; and all you know, Celia, is the inside of your parlour. If we do not farm in this way we will lose Wideacre!’ I stopped on a shaky half-laugh as a great crack of lightning lit up the room and showed me Harry’s aghast face.

‘I am not exaggerating,’ I said. ‘We are desperately overstretched and we have to keep on this course or we will lose all. No Wideacre for us, no Wideacre for Julia. The poor carry the brunt of it, of course they do. The poor always do. But once the profits of this season come in we will be able to ease the burden a little. And then yearly it will get better.’

‘No,’ said Celia. She was standing by the window, the sky livid behind her, the black clouds underlined with the garish orange light of the setting sun.

‘This is not a time for gradual improvements,’ she said. ‘We must change completely. It is not right that we should eat well at table while people starve on our land so that we can grow rich. It is not Christian, it is not right, that there should be such a great gulf between rich and poor. I will not accept that this is the way it has to be. You are a tyrant on Wideacre, Beatrice; you can decide absolutely how things are to be. But you may not decide that the poor starve — I will not allow it!’

‘I manage Wideacre in the only way there is to increase yields …’ I started but Celia’s voice broke in over mine, clear and sharp with her anger.

‘You do not manage Wideacre, Beatrice,’ she said, and her voice was full of scorn and disdain. ‘You ruin it. You ruin everything you love. You are a wrecker. I have loved you and trusted you and I was mistaken in you. You adored Wideacre but you have destroyed every good thing about it. You loved the meadows and they are gone. You loved the woods and they are sold or uprooted. You loved the downs and your ploughs are going higher and higher. You are a wrecker and you destroy the very things you work for.’ Her eyes flickered from me to John and I knew she was also thinking of how I had tried to wreck him too, the man I loved.

I took a deep breath that sounded like a harsh groan as she held up this hard mirror to my life. And I knew she was right.

‘I will not live with you while you persist in this destruction,’ she said as cool as a judge with a hanging sentence in mind. ‘I will not permit you to destroy the morality of our life by forcing us to be party to this horror. I will not attack the people who look to us to shield them. I will not starve people who have no defence.’

She stopped and in the silence Harry’s eyes went from her flushed face to my white one. But he said nothing. I bit the inside of my cheeks to steady my breathing and then I drew breath to defeat her. I had words, I had power. I could beat her down.

But John’s sharp eyes had been on me all the time, and he spoke first.

‘You are wrong, Celia,’ he said, and I quickly glanced at him, an unexpected ally. ‘You are wrong,’ he said. His eyes were bright, and very sharp on my face. ‘They do have a defender,’ he said slowly, watching me. His emphasis surprised Celia and she was looking at me too. Even Harry was alerted.

‘They do have a defender,’ said John again. ‘The Culler is on Wideacre.’

‘No!’ I said, and I crossed the room with two quick strides and took John’s lapels in a hard grip, scanning his face, wide-eyed.

‘It is not true,’ I said. ‘You are trying to torture me, as I tormented you. It is a lie.’

John’s look at me was empty of any compassion. ‘No, Beatrice,’ he said. ‘The Culler is on Wideacre. I heard them say so tonight. Who is he? And why is he such a terror to you?’

I half closed my eyes and near swooned. John put two ungentle hands under my elbows to support me and scanned my white face with his hard, questioning gaze. I opened my eyes to look past him, to the familiar safe landscape of my home.

And then I saw them.

Two black dogs in the rose garden. They were still, as still as well-trained keeper’s dogs when he has ordered them to stay and has an eye on them from some dark shadow. The spaniel was sitting, ears cocked, eyes bright on the house, black as mourning velvet. The black lurcher was lying, head up like some heraldic monster, watching the house, watching me.

‘He is here,’ I said, and took one staggering step to the chair by the fire before my legs gave way and I sank into it. A hard hand on my shoulder twisted me around and I raised my dazed eyes to see Celia bending over me. But her touch was hard, and her eyes were cold.

‘Who is he?’ she said. I could hear a little insistent echo of the question over and over again, which said ‘Who is he?’ ‘Who is he?’ ‘Who is he?’ in my frightened whirling head.

‘Is he coming for Julia?’ she asked. Her hard little hand on my shoulder tightened and she half shook me in her own fear. ‘Is he coming for Julia?’

I gazed blankly at her. I could scarcely remember who Julia was. In the grip of my own terror all I could see were the two dogs with their eyes fixed on the parlour window, waiting for their master to send them in like a hunting pack.

‘Is he Julia’s father? Is he coming for her?’ Celia’s voice, sharp, with an edge of hysteria, still could not get through to me.

‘Yes,’ I said, neither knowing nor caring what I was saying. ‘Yes, yes.’

Celia gasped as if I had slapped her, and stretched a hand to John.

‘What?’ said Harry, utterly bemused. His secure world was shattering too fast. His life was being undermined from too many sources at once. ‘What are you all talking about? I am Julia’s father.’

‘No,’ said Celia dully, one hand held by John, tears pouring down her cheeks. ‘This is just more of your sister’s wreckage, Harry. Beatrice cheated you, and she cheated me. I am not Julia’s mother. She is Beatrice’s child. And now her father is coming for her.’

Harry’s frightened eyes turned on me.

‘Beatrice?’ he said, as if he meant to call for his mother. ‘Beatrice, tell me, this is none of it true?’

‘It is true,’ I said. I was in my own private hell and I cared not who else plunged into their own nightmares. ‘Julia is my child and the Culler is her father.’

‘And who is the Culler?’ asked John, following the thread through the tortuous maze of lies. ‘Who is this Culler?’

I met Harry’s eyes.

‘The gamekeeper’s lad,’ I said. Celia and John looked to Harry for it meant nothing to them. There was a second while Harry’s face was blank and then his pitiful confusion was replaced with a look of pure terror.

‘He is coming for us?’ he said. ‘He is coming for you? He is coming to get Julia?’ The tone of terror in his voice tipped Celia over the border from fear to panic.

‘I am going,’ she said. ‘I am leaving here and taking the children at once.’

I slumped back in the chair. It was all wrecked, as Celia had said it was. The maze was falling in, and the Culler’s dogs waited in my garden.

‘I’ll harness the horses,’ said John and he left the room without another glance at me. Questions were still burning in his mind, but one look at Celia’s aghast face had sent him running to save her from the horror that I knew, and that Harry confirmed.

John had been waiting for this moment, when the maze would be wrecked and he would pull Celia and the children she loved out into safety. He thought I lied about Julia’s father. He thought I lied when I confirmed Celia’s long secret fear that one day the mysterious father would come to snatch Julia from her. But he knew the sound of terror in my voice, and he knew the world of Wideacre was crumbling around us. And all he cared for was that the innocent should be out of the wreckage when the world caved in.

Harry had turned his head into the stone mantelpiece and was weeping in silence. He was like a child left alone among a ruin.

Celia left the room without another word. I heard her run up the stairs to Julia’s nursery, and then come down slowly, carefully, carrying the sleeping child. Then I heard the door of the west wing bang as she went for Richard. I went into the hall like a sleepwalker.

Harry shambled after me, still weeping.

John came in from the stables; he took Richard from Celia and she turned to pick up Julia from the sofa. My son had not even stirred. He slept wrapped in a blanket, his dark lashes on his pink cheeks, one thumb firmly embedded in his sweet pursed mouth. Now and then he sucked noisily and settled into sleep again. I put my nose to his sweet-smelling forehead and felt the soft tickle of the baby hair. But I felt nothing, nothing, nothing, in my icy private well of fear.

John’s eyes on my face were curious.

‘No,’ he said, as if agreeing with something I had said. ‘There is nothing left for you, is there, Beatrice? It is all gone.’

I straightened and looked coldly at him. Nothing could touch me now. I was lost.

Celia walked past me without a word, without even a backward glance, and Harry followed her like a good foal his dam. He was blind and deaf and dumb with shock, all he could do was follow in Celia’s small determined footsteps until his own haze of horror lifted. Then my husband walked past me without a word. The door to the west wing clicked; I heard them go down the corridor to the stable door. Then the stable door banged in the keening wind. I was alone.

The hall was almost as black as nighttime in the gloom from the storm, but I feared no shadows. The terror I had hidden in my mind for year after year after year was here. It no longer threatened me as some horror for the future. It was here and I could face it. Half blind, half dazed with shock, I at least was free of a fear of ghosts, of shadows that moved, of dreams that could terrorize me. My worst fears, my utter terror, were all coming for me. I need fear the unknown no more.

And the house, my lovely Wideacre, was at last mine. Mine alone. Never before had I been utterly alone in the house like an insect in the heart of a deep sweet-smelling rose. Never before had there been silence from the kitchen quarters, silence from the bedrooms, silence from the parlour. Not a sound. Nothing. No one was here but me. I was the only person in the Hall, the only person on the land. And my ownership was undisputed.

I walked around the Hall like a woman in a trance. I touched the carved newel post of the staircase, fingered the intricate carvings, which showed corn, a bag of fleeces, a cow in calf, all the great easy fertile wealth of Wideacre. I crossed to smooth the polished top of a straddle-legged table with the flat of my hand. The wood was warm and gentle, good to stroke. A silver bowl of flowers stood on the table, the drooped heads of the roses gazing at their own pale reflection in the polished top. I touched them gently with one fingertip and the soft petals showered off the flower heads leaving the cluster of dusty stamens. I thought of what Celia had said: ‘You are a wrecker, Beatrice.’ And I smiled without humour, and turned away.

The parlour doorknob was a little miracle of round warmth under my cupped palm. The panels smooth and cool to my forehead. I ran my fingers along the stone mantelpiece and felt the sweet rough texture of Wideacre sandstone. I touched the delicate pretty china Celia had brought back from France, and the rose-pink pebble I had once found in the Fenny that I had insisted should be displayed on the mantelpiece. Some conscientious parlourmaid had put the little china owl on the mantelpiece with the other porcelain. I touched it now without fear. He was coming for me. He would be here soon. I need fear no more secret messages.

I rubbed the back of my hand along the smooth brocade of the winged chair, the one I like to sit in to watch the fire. And I tinkled the keys of the piano — a ghostly sound in the silent house. Then I left the parlour and went through the hall, trailing my fingers in the bowl of pot-pourri and catching up a handful of dried flower petals as I passed. I went to my office. To my own special safe room. The fire was laid but not lit and the room was dark. I walked in, as if it were an ordinary day, with a steady heart and a light step. I was just moving a little more slowly than normal. I was thinking a little more slowly. And I could see nothing clearly. There was a mist around the periphery of my vision that meant I could see nothing except what was immediately before me. I was in a long, long tunnel. And I did not know where it was taking me.

Before I lit the candles I went to the window. The storm had rolled along the head of the downs and was no longer close to the house. A fitful light showed through the breaks in the storm-clouds; the rose garden was empty. The Culler’s dogs had gone. He had been here to see the house, perhaps to see who was there and who had fled. He would know I was here alone. He would know I was awaiting him. He would know that I was aware of his nearness, as he was of mine. I sighed, as if that knowledge made me content, then I turned from the window and lit the candles and set a spill to the fire, for the room felt damp. I pulled down a cushion from one of the chairs and sat myself before it and watched the logs burning. I was in no hurry. My life no longer required planning. Tonight would go according to his plan, and I need, at long last, do nothing.