Wideacre

5

That night my mind played a strange trick on me in my dreams. I dreamed of Ralph, not the Ralph of my nightmares but the old Ralph of our loving summer. I was drifting through the rose garden, my feet skimming over the gravel paths. The gate opened before me and I made the same ghostly progress down to the river. By the bank stood a figure. I knew it was my lover and we slid together. His body entered mine with piercing sweetness and I moaned with pleasure. The high note of pleasure and pain disturbed my sleep and I awoke, full of regret. The dream faded fast as I opened my eyes, but the face of my lover as he lifted his head from our deep kiss was Harry’s.

I suppose I should have been shocked, but instead I merely smiled and sat up in bed. To dream of Harry while the spring was stirring seemed natural and right. We were constantly in each other’s company and I gained more and more pleasure from our comradeship. It was pleasant to walk in the gardens with him. We were planning a shrubbery, and we would take a stake and map out the shape of the paths on the newly turned earth. Then, when the carter came loaded high with swaying trees and shrubs, we spent a glorious couple of days ordering their planting by the three gardeners, and even treading them in, tying and staking out the branches ourselves.

Sometimes we drove up to the downs together. Although I was still forbidden to ride outside the grounds, I had hunted out an old governess cart and broke my mare to driving so I could range all around the estate and drive as far as the foothills of the downs with Harry riding alongside. I thought sometimes how pleased Papa would have been to see us in such unity on the land he loved.

‘Are you not tired, Beatrice?’ Harry would ask solicitously.

And I would smile without replying and we would stroll together to the top of the downs to look down on the surrounding greening fields and woods; or turn our backs and look southwards to where the sea gleamed like a blue slab in the distance.

I started to lose my fear of Harry’s superior education, especially when I saw how little he still knew about the land. And I started to enjoy hearing about his books and the ideas that interested him. I could never see what actual difference it made whether one had an agreement called a Social Contract or not, but when Harry spoke of the struggle for the ownership of land, and whether land could be owned by an élite of a people, I found my interest suddenly sharpened.

He would laugh at me then and say, ‘Oh, Beatrice, you care for nothing at all unless it relates to Wideacre. What a little heathen you are! What a little peasant!’

And I would laugh back and accuse him of being so full of ideas that he could not recognize wild oats in a wheat crop — which was shockingly true.

If there had been more young people in the neighbourhood we would have spent far less time together. Or if Harry had known more about the land he would not have needed my company daily. If we had not been in heavy mourning, Harry would probably have spent the previous winter in London for the season, and even I might have been taken to town for a few days. But as things were, we were very much on our own. My returning spirits showed themselves in my better health and I became once more buoyantly fit, restrained only by Mama who tried to keep me eternally stitching embroidery by her side in the pale parlour. There was no Papa to come banging in from the stables and rescue me from the tyranny of conventional behaviour now, but I could generally rely on Harry to need my advice for some work on the land.

The land missed Papa. Harry was inexperienced and slow to learn how to control the tenants who poached and thieved outrageously. Nor could he organize the villagers’ sowing and weeding of our crops. But beside his ignorance my status grew, and it was very pleasant to be able to order this thing or that thing to be done without confirming an order with the Master. I kept thinking how good it would have been if I could have had the land wholly to myself, but it was only ever a passing thought. It was also good to drive down the lanes to the fields with Harry riding alongside, and to look up in the evening and find his eyes smiling upon me.

He was no longer the schoolboy home early. He was a man in the first broadening and strengthening of his youth. As for me, every day made me a shade more golden, my eyes brighter hazel, my hair a tinge redder from the sun. Every day as I bloomed in the warmth of that especially fine spring, I felt a greater longing for a lover. I pressed my lips together remembering Ralph’s rough biting kisses, and my body warmed and tingled under the black silk of my mourning dress when I remembered his intimate, shameless probing. Harry once caught my eye in one of these erotic daydreams as we sat alone beside the library fire one evening, supposedly doing accounts. I blushed at once to the roots of my hair.

Harry, oddly, said nothing, but he looked at me as if he were somehow bemused and blushed too.

We were so delightfully strange to each other. My pleasure with Ralph had been in confirming the person I was, the things that were important. With Ralph I hardly needed to speak. We both knew if the day would be fair or if it would rain. We both knew that the villagers would be planting the fields on the bottom slopes of the downs so we would have to hide in the woods that day. We both knew that passion and the land are the most important things in anyone’s life, and that any other interests are secondary and slight.

But Harry knew none of these things, and while I could not help despising his ignorance, I felt also a great curiosity about the things he did know, and the things he did care for. Harry was a great intriguing mystery to me, and as the warm spring days became reassuringly hot summer ones I found my interest in him growing and growing while the corn turned silver-green. The only distraction from this growing affection and intimacy was Mama, who would intermittently insist that I behave as a normal young lady and not as a farm manager. But even she could not ignore Harry’s real need for me on the land. One day when she insisted that I stay at home to receive a call from the ladies from Havering Hall, we lost something like fifty pounds on one day’s work! Harry could not control the reaping gang and their families following behind to glean robbed us of one stook in every three.

The ladies — Lady Havering and little mousey Celia — had chatted politely with Mama as I watched the sun stream through the window, and knew in impotent rage that Harry would not be watching the reapers. When he came in for afternoon tea my fears were confirmed. He reported with great pride that they had finished the Manor Farm fields already. Properly cut they should not have been finished until the following day. Harry sat beside Celia Havering and nibbled seed cake like a sun-kissed cupid without a care in the world, while I could hardly sit still for anxiety.

He chatted away like a caged songbird to Celia, who actually spoke back in a voice a fraction clearer than her habitual whisper. Half an hour he spent talking of the lovely weather and the latest novel, before a hard look from me reminded him that he had workers in the field who were, I knew, taking an equally lengthy break. He took himself off with much flowery bowing and kissing of hands and seemed almost sorry to leave. The mysterious tastes of my beautiful brother were not always a delight.

‘You seem very anxious about the harvest, Miss Lacey,’ said Celia softly. I looked sharply at her to see if she was being impertinent, but the soft brown eyes were guileless and her face pale and quite without a spark of malice.

‘It is the first harvest Harry has had to supervise,’ I replied absent-mindedly. ‘He had been away from home and does not know our country ways. I am afraid I am needed out in the fields.’

‘If you would like —’ she paused delicately. ‘If you would enjoy a drive —’ She broke off again. ‘We came in Mama’s carriage and you and I could … I am sure …’ Her flutter of words came to a total standstill but her meaning finally penetrated my ears. I had been watching some rain clouds on the horizon that would have ruined everything if they had come to anything, but they seemed to be breaking up.

‘A drive?’ I said. ‘I should love it!’

‘Mama’s carriage’ turned out to be a large old-fashioned open landau, and after much fussing with parasols to protect our delicate complexions, we drove towards the fields. Celia tilted her sunshade precisely at the sky to cast a shadow over her face. She was milk compared with honey sitting beside me. Her skin looked as if she had been reared in a cellar she was so beautifully pale, while I was a clear honey colour on face, hands and throat, and had even a disastrous dusting of freckles on my nose. Even in my dark mourning clothes I was bright beside Celia, with flushed cheeks from the warmth of my heavy dress in the sun. She was pale and cool, her shy brown eyes scarcely daring to look over the hedges as we drove. She had a little trembly face and a quivering rosebud mouth. She seemed so young beside me. Five years older but such a sweet baby.

She showed no signs of anxiety at the plight of being ill-loved and unmarried at twenty-one. Her pale prettiness had not taken in London during her one cut-price season. Lord Havering had opened Havering House for her coming-out ball and had stood her the price of a court gown. But all of Lady Havering’s fortune at marriage had been squandered on betting and gambling, and there was little to spare for her daughter. Celia’s own substantial fortune, secure from her step-papa by sensible settlements, had guaranteed her one or two proposals. But Celia had demurred, and Lady Havering had not insisted, and she had come home to her restricted and hard-working life at the Hall with little idea that life for a young girl could include pleasure, or liveliness or joy.

She had little enough joy in her life. When her mama accepted Lord Havering and moved into the Hall little Celia went too, more like an extra bandbox than a person whose wants might be consulted. Aged eleven, she had been put in charge of the jolly, noisy Havering children for day after long crowded day, while Lord Havering recouped his gambling debts by dismissing housekeeper, governess and nurse, leaving his new wife and stepdaughter to share the work of running house and nursery between them.

The nobly born, ill-bred Havering children cared not a rap for their quiet-voiced, subdued new sister, and Celia, in silent mourning for her papa and their quiet, invalid’s routine, lived a life of loneliness and solitude in the very heart of one of the biggest houses in the county.

Enough in that situation to make any girl nervous. Celia was fortunate only in that her dowry, which was a handsome parcel of land adjoining ours, a good half-dozen farms tied up by her mother’s lawyers, was safe from her spendthrift stepfather as part of the marriage settlement. I knew her from childhood when our mamas would call on each other and I would be taken to the nursery to romp with the small Haverings and attend Celia’s solemn dolls’ tea parties. But when I grew old enough to ride with my father, I saw little of her. We sometimes took our hounds over to Havering Hall, and I would wave to her as I rode beside my father in my smart dark green or navy riding habit, and see her watching, a fragile flower in white satin, from an upstairs window. She never rode, of course; she never even came to greet us from the front door. I think the major expeditions in her week were the two church services on a Sunday, and the occasional social visit like this one. What can have prompted the idea of a drive, the Lord only knew. I would have driven with the devil himself to see the fields; what Celia hoped to gain I neither knew nor cared.

As soon as we came in sight of the field I saw that I had been right. A dozen men were cutting in the line with their wives and children coming behind to collect the corn and set it in stooks. By rights, when the corn had been cut, the women and children and the men could then glean, picking up the broken straw for bedding or fodder for their animals, and picking up the dropped heads of corn for themselves. Harry had been letting them cut so carelessly that whole patches of the crop would be left standing for the convenience of the gleaners, and they were trying the old cheat of slicing the corn so short it would not bind into a stook and would be dropped for the families to collect.

Instead of supervising this shambles, Harry was stripped down to shirtsleeves himself and playing around with a sickle at the end of the line. Even in my temper I could not ignore his dazzling looks. Wig off, his own hair shone like pure gold in the bright sunshine and his loose white shirt billowed around him. He was taller than the men around him and slim. His dark breeches were cut close to his strong legs and back. I swear a saint would have felt desire on seeing him. Celia’s eyes, like mine, were glued to him, and he glanced up and saw her and waved and came to the gate.

‘It’s to be hoped you don’t cut your feet off,’ I said acidly. I was hot and irritable draped in my heavy black mourning clothes. Celia beside me was the picture of cool perfection in white silk under a cherry parasol.

Harry laughed in delight. ‘I dare say I will!’ he said happily. ‘It’s splendid fun! When I think of all the harvests I’ve missed! Do you know this is my first-ever harvest at Wideacre?’

Celia widened her brown eyes sympathetically. She could not drag her gaze from him. His open shirt revealed the glint of a few hairs at the top of his chest, and his skin was as pale as creamy milk with a pink tinge where he was catching the sun.

‘They should be closer together,’ I said. ‘They’re missing more than a yard every time they move forward.’

Harry smiled at Celia. ‘I’m such a beginner,’ he said helplessly.

‘I know nothing of such things,’ Celia said in her soft voice. ‘But I do love to see the men working.’

‘Working!’ I said impatiently. ‘That lot are on holiday! Help me down, Harry.’ I left the two of them admiring the beauty of the scene and stalked across the stubble (or rather through it, because it was a good foot high) to sort the men out.

‘Watch out,’ said one, loud enough for me to hear. ‘Here comes the Master.’ The slow chuckle of country humour spread among them and I grinned too.

‘Enough of this,’ I said, loud enough for the whole reaper gang to hear. ‘You close up, all of you. John Simon, I don’t plan to keep your family in corn for free all winter! Move closer to William there. You, Thomas, you cut nearer to the hedge. Don’t think I don’t know what game you’re all playing! Any more of this nonsense I’ll have you all out at Michaelmas!’

Grumbling and chuckling, they closed the ranks and started the process again, scything their way in a line up the field, this time leaving no part of the swathe uncut. I smiled in pleasure at the sight of our corn rippling and falling in great pale golden heaps in our fields, and turned and made my way back to the landau.

Celia’s laugh trilled out, as happy as a mistle-thrush, and I saw my brother smiling warmly at her. I paid no attention at all.

‘D’you see now, Harry, how they’re closer together and there’s less waste?’ I asked.

‘Yes, I do,’ said Harry. ‘I did tell them but they just seemed to straggle apart again.’

‘They’re hoodwinking you,’ I said severely. ‘You must show them that you’re the Master.’

Harry grinned at Celia and I saw her smile shyly in reply.

‘I’m a worthless fellow,’ he said to Celia, begging for a contradiction.

‘You are indeed,’ I said before she could disagree. ‘Now get back to the men and don’t let them stop for more than ten minutes for tea, and they’re not to go home till sunset.’

He stuck to his job and the labourers did not trudge home to their cottages until long after sunset. Harry rode home whistling under a round golden harvest moon. I heard him as I dressed for dinner, and for some silly reason I felt my heart lift as his horse clattered up the drive and around to the stables. I paused in twisting my hair into a knot on the top of my head, and looked more carefully at myself in the glass. I wondered how I looked beside Celia. I was beautiful, there was no doubt, thank God, about that, but I wondered how my clear, bright looks compared to Celia’s sweet loveliness. And when I remembered the scene at the field it struck me, for the first time, that Harry might not relish being reprimanded by his sister in front of the men. Perhaps his heart did not lift at the sight of me, and certainly I knew he did not watch my body and my movements as I had watched his when he bent and stretched in the cornfield.

I slipped down to Mama’s room where she had a long pier glass so I could see my full-length reflection. The sight reassured me. Black suited me — better than the pale pinks and blues I had been forced to wear before. The gown was tight-waisted with black stomacher and square neck, showing me as slim as a whip. The shorter hair around my face twisted into natural curls (with a little help from the tongs) and my eyes in the candle-light were as inscrutable as a cat’s.

Behind the image of my dark figure the room was reflected in shades of shadow. The deep green curtains of the old four-poster bed were dark as pine needles in the light from my single candle and, as I moved, my shadow leaped, huge as a giant’s, on the dim wall behind me. Some trick of light, some nervous fancy, made me suddenly certain I was not alone in the room. I did not turn to look quickly behind me as normally I would have done. I stayed facing the mirror with my unprotected back to the room, my eyes trying to pierce the shadowy corners of the dark room reflected in the darker glass to see who was there.

It was Ralph.

He lay, where he had longed to be, on the master bed. His face was warmed with that familiar, that beloved smile that always lighted him when he turned to me. A look part confident, part male pride, part tenderness, and the anticipation of rough as well as gentle pleasure.

I froze. I could not see his legs.

I neither moved nor breathed.

I could not see his legs.

If they were whole, then the last months had been a nightmare and this was sweet reality. If they were gone, then the nightmare was with me and I was in its grip, but a million times worse than I had dreamed in my bed. The curtains of the bed cast deep slabs of shadow across the counterpane. I could not see his legs.

I knew I must turn and face him.

My face in the glass was the only bright thing in the dark room and it glowed like a ghost. I bit the inside of my cheeks for courage, and like a doomed man turned slowly, slowly, around.

There was nothing there.

The bed was empty.

I croaked, ‘Ralph?’ out of my tightening throat and only the candle flame moved. I took three stiff steps and held the candle high to see every inch of the bed. There was no one there. The pillows and the embroidered silk counterpane were smooth and undented. I put a shaking hand out to touch the pillows and they were cool.

No one had been there.

I staggered to Mama’s dressing table, set the candlestick carefully down, and crumpled on to the stool, my head in my hands.

‘Oh, God,’ I said miserably. ‘Don’t let me go mad. Don’t send me mad now. Oh, don’t let it end in madness when I am so nearly at peace at last.’

Long minutes passed in utter silence except for the steady ticking of the grandfather clock in the corridor. I took a deep breath and took my hands from my face. My face was as serene and lovely as ever and I gazed at it in the glass as if it belonged to someone else, a stranger’s beauty. Even I could not penetrate its calm looks or imagine what terrors were hidden behind that green cat-like gaze.

Then a floorboard outside the door creaked and the door opened. I jumped with a scream in my throat, but only Mama stood there. For a second she did not move and I read her concern for me, and some hint of a darker thought in her expression.

‘It’s not like you to be preening in front of a mirror, Beatrice,’ she said gently. ‘Did I startle you? What were you thinking of, I wonder, that you should be so pale?’

I smiled a strained smile and turned away from the glass. She said nothing but crossed the room and opened her top drawer and took out a handkerchief. The silence lengthened and I felt a familiar drumming of blood in my head as I became anxious, wondering what would come next.

‘You must have missed your pretty dresses when you saw Miss Havering this afternoon,’ my mother said, wrong as usual. ‘How lovely she looked, didn’t she? I thought Harry was most struck.’

‘Harry?’ I said mechanically.

‘There could scarcely be a better match,’ my mother said, spraying eau-de-cologne on the lace handkerchief. ‘Her dowry lands lie so convenient for our own — your papa always had his eye on them — and she is such a dear, charming girl. I understand she is accustomed to very difficult circumstances at home, and the poor thing is well used to adapting herself. Lady Havering assured me that, should there be a match of it, you and I would stay here as long as we wished. Celia would expect no alteration. I do not think that one could plan better.’

I felt a growing chill inside me. Mama could not be talking about a match for Harry. Harry was my friend, my companion. We farmed Wideacre together. We belonged together, alone on Wideacre.

‘A match for Harry?’ I asked incredulously.

‘Of course,’ Mama said, not meeting my eyes. ‘Naturally. Did you think he would stay a bachelor all his life? Did you think Harry would forget his duty to his name and die childless?’

I gaped at her. I had never thought of the matter at all. I never thought beyond this easy summer of my growing intimacy with Harry. Of the happiness I felt when he was so sweet to me. Of the warmth of his smile. Of the tenderness in his voice when he spoke to me.

‘I never thought of the future at all,’ I said, speaking truly of my youthful, feckless half-planning.

‘I have,’ said Mama, and I realized that she was watching me intently and that my face was unguarded before her. I had thought of her for so long as an unimportant pawn on the great chessboard of our fields that it came as a shock to recall that she had been watching me for all my life, watching me closely even now. She knew me as no other person could. She had given birth to me and watched me walk away from her, watched my growing passion for the land and my growing pleasure in running it. If she knew …! But I could take that thought no further. It was impossible to consider what she might think if she had dared to go beyond the barriers I had placed on my own mind.

But she had been uneasy about me for years. Her little plaintive, nagging contradictions added up to a great suspicion that I was not a child of proper feelings. While my father had insisted that a Lacey of Wideacre could do no wrong, she had been forced to acquiesce and had assumed, as he had insisted, that her complaints about me stemmed merely from her town-bred conventionality. But now no rowdy, careless Papa was there to overbear her judgement and she could see me ever more clearly. She did not merely object that I did not behave in a conventional way — that would have been easily mended. She objected, she suspected, that I did not feel in my private heart as a young girl should do.

‘Mama …’ I said, and it was a half-conscious appeal to her to protect me, as a parent should, from my fear. Even though what I most feared were the thoughts behind her suddenly sharp eyes.

She ceased her fiddly tidying of her chest of drawers and turned towards me, leaning back against the chest, her blue eyes scanning my face with anxiety.

‘What is it, Beatrice?’ she said. ‘I cannot guess what is in your mind. You are my own child, and yet sometimes I cannot even approach a guess at what you are thinking.’

I stammered. I had no words to hand. My heart was still hammering from my foolish vision of Ralph. It was too much to have to deal with Mama, to have to face her only minutes later.

‘There is something wrong,’ she said with certainty. ‘I have been treated as a fool in this house, but I am not a fool. I know when there is something wrong, and there is something wrong now.’

I put my hands out, half to stretch towards her, half to ward off the words and the thoughts I feared she had in her mind. She did not take my hands. She made no move towards me. She was not grateful for a caress; she stayed cold and questioning, and her eyes drained me of courage.

‘You loved your papa not as an ordinary child loves its father,’ she said definitely. ‘I have watched you all your life. You loved him because he was the Squire and because he owned Wideacre. I know that. No one cared what I knew, nor what I thought. But I knew that your sort of love is, somehow … dangerous.’

My breath hissed in a gasp as she searched and then found that dreadful, illuminating word.

My hands were back in my lap loosely clasped to hide their trembling. My face upturned to my mama felt as white as a sheet. If I had been a murderer on trial in the dock I could not have seemed more aghast, more guilty.

‘Mama …’ I half whispered. It was a plea to her to stop this remorseless progress of ideas which could lead her all the way into the deep secret maze of the truth.

She moved from the chest of drawers and came towards me. I nearly shrank away, but something, some pride, some strength, kept me rock-still. I looked into her face with my brave, lying eyes, and matched her gaze.

‘Beatrice, I am preparing for Harry’s marriage to Celia,’ she said, and I saw her eyes glisten with a hint of tears. ‘No woman welcomes the arrival of another into her home. No woman looks forward to seeing her son turn away from her to his bride. But I am doing this for Harry.’ She paused. ‘I am doing this for you,’ she said deliberately. ‘You must, you shall be freed from your fascination with this land and with its master,’ she said urgently. ‘With another girl a little older than you in the house, you will go out more. You can visit the Haverings, perhaps go to London with them. And Harry will be absorbed in Celia and he will have less time for you.’

‘You wish to come between Harry and me?’ I said in impulsive resentment.

‘Yes,’ said my mother baldly. ‘There is something in this house. What it is I cannot say, but I can feel it. Some hint of danger. I feel as if I can smell it in every room where you and Harry are working together. You are both my children. I love you both. I should guard you both. I will save you both from whatever danger it is that threatens us all.’

I found, in the deepest reserves of my courage, a confident smile, and I held it on my face.

‘Mama, you are sad and still grieving for Papa. We are all of us still mourning. There is no danger, no threat. There is only a brother and sister trying to get the work done that only their papa knew and understood. It is just work, Mama. And Celia will help us and soon Wideacre will be straight again.’

She sighed at that and her shoulders trembled in a nervous shudder, and then straightened.

‘I wish I could be sure,’ she said. ‘I sometimes think I must be mad to think of danger, danger everywhere. I suppose you are right, Beatrice. It is only grief letting in foolish thoughts. Forgive me, my dear, if I alarmed you with my silliness. And yet, remember what I said. Now your papa has gone you are in my charge and you will have to lead a more normal life. While Harry needs your help you may indeed aid him, but when he has a wife you will be less important on Wideacre, Beatrice. And I expect you to accept that change with good grace.’

I bowed my head, my eyes smiling under the lowered eyelids. ‘Yes, indeed, Mama,’ I said submissively. And at the same time I thought, ‘You won’t keep me stitching in the drawing room when the sun is hot and the reapers need watching in the fields.’ And I knew she could not.

But the betrothal exposed once more my vulnerability. I had no plan. Ralph had been the planner and Ralph had paid for his upstart wickedness. I had only let the sunshiny days slip by me, resting like a child in the pleasure of the day. I was not even the principal person on the land that summer. I still knew more than Harry could ever learn. I still knew the needs of the lands, the needs of our people and the additional, slightly special Wideacre ways. But that summer Harry’s star was in the ascendant and while I might give orders, the sun came out when he came into a cornfield.

He could never control a reaper gang as I could. He was both too friendly — with his eccentric insistence on using a scythe very badly himself — and too distant — leaving them at dinner break to come back to the Hall. They preferred to have me overseeing, knowing that I would do my job well — watching the line, checking the yield and planning the work — and leave them to do theirs. Then when the girls came through the stubble with great flasks of cider and home-brewed beer and huge crusty loaves of yellow bread, they knew I would sit in the prickly field beside them and eat as hungrily as any of them.

But that year they were not my people. They were Harry’s.

I could not hate Harry for it. I hated with every fibre in my spiteful, resentful body the old men, the male lawyers, the male Parliament, the male judiciary and the male landowners who had constructed a system of laws expressly designed to ensure that their mothers, their wives and even their own little daughters should forever be excluded from everything that makes life worth living: the ownership of land. But I could not hate Harry. No one could. His ready smile, his sweetness of temper, his quick humour and his dazzling good looks earned him favour wherever he went. The men of the reaper gang might prefer working in the field where I was watching, but their women blushed as red as cherries if Harry so much as rode down the lane. He was the harvest deity that summer. All I could be was priestess at the shrine.

No one was immune to the high summer appeal of the new young Master of Wideacre. I think I was the only person on Wideacre who remembered the previous Master with continual regret. For everyone else, Harry was the rising sun; and his good looks — enhanced by hard work and radiant health — and his joyous energy clearly identified him as the summertime prince of Wideacre. Only I, dark in my black mourning, sour in my temper, worked in that golden summer with relentess efficiency but with little joy.

The cream of the year at Wideacre is the harvest supper when the last of the wheat is in. No one on the estate escapes the drudgery of the final days of the harvest when every man, woman and child is racing against the weather and the coming of the autumn rain to get the golden corn under cover before the dark clouds build up and demolish the year’s profit in one wicked night.

You work half consciously to that end from the first winter ploughing and spring sowing of seed. All the long year you watch the earth and the sky. Not too cold for the new seeds at the end of spring. Not too dry for the little shoots. Plenty of sun to ripen the grain but enough rain to make it green and lush. Then no rain — oh, you pray — no rain when the corn is standing proud and high but so vulnerable to storm and disease. Then the sense of triumph when the reaper gang go swish, swish, into the first field, which is as ripply as a vast, golden inland sea. Then the race starts between people and the wanton and unpredictable gods of the weather. And this year, the year of the harvest god Harry, the weather held and held and held until the people said they had never known such a summer, and everyone forgot the hot summer Ralph and I had made last year, a lifetime ago.

On the last day of harvesting, I watched the work in the morning and Harry rode out to the last field in the afternoon. When I judged they would be nearly finished, I rode down to the great granary and barn behind the new mill to watch the carts come in. Only the miller — Bill Green — and his wife were at home. Their two labourers and three sons had all gone off to bring the harvest home. Mrs Green herself was in a flurry of preparation for the evening harvest supper and her kitchen was crowded with the staff from the Hall, unpacking great hampers and flagons from our kitchens.

I sat alone in the courtyard, listening to the tumble of the water into the millpond and the rhythmic slap, slap, of the millwheel, and watching the flock of doves leaving and returning to the dovecote built into the point of the roof.

A solitary cat stretched out in the sun, too hot and too lazy to wash her crackling, dusty fur. When I moved, her eyes, as green and inscrutable as my own, snapped open and gave me gaze for gaze. By the river, the tallest beech trees rustled in the breeze but the lower branches never stirred. The wood birds were silent in the heat; only the doves cooed in a continual purr of courtship. Courtyard, cat, doves and I were all motionless in the heat of the afternoon, baked into silence by the August sun.

Unbidden, into my dozy, daydreaming mind, came thoughts of my brother. Not Harry my brother the schoolboy, nor Harry the incompetent farmer. But Harry the harvest demigod at whose bidding and on whose land the corn stood tall. At the Harry that Celia saw when she found the courage to order out her mama’s landau to drive down the lanes under the pretext of obliging me, but really to see him stripped down to shirtsleeves and riding breeches. Of the Harry that I saw growing in authority and power. Of the Harry who was daily becoming a true Master of Wideacre, whom I could never shift.

And then I thought, with dawning clarity, that I did not want to shift Harry. That I liked seeing him learning about the land, that I liked seeing the earth growing to his bidding. That I liked seeing him at the head of the table smiling down the length of it to me. That every second of this hot summer I had spent with Harry had been delight and pleasure. And the long periods of dull time without him had been spent in thinking of him, and remembering his smile, his special tone of laughter, or just hearing again in my mind snatches of our conversation.

In the distance I heard the rumble of the carts and the sound of people singing. I hardly knew what to do, I had been so enwrapped in this revelation of the tightness of Harry at Wideacre. I crossed the yard and entered the barn as Mr and Mrs Green exploded from the house and ran to open the yard gate. I could clearly hear the harvest songs as they rounded the track to the mill — even distinguish different voices and Harry’s clear tenor ringing out.

The beam across the great curved barn door was heavy and I had to go to the furthest end to lever it up. Then it jerked and tilted away from me and I could drag it from its mountings. As the cans rumbled into the yard in a great triumphant procession of proven fertility, I swung the great double doors open and faced the Wideacre harvest.

The first cart was a swaying wall of golden stooks with Harry perched high up to the sky on top of them all. The heavy shire-horses halted before me at the door and the load rocked as the wheels stilled. Harry leaped to his feet and stood framed against the hot, blue sky looking down at me. My head tipped back to see him; I gazed up at him on his mountain of wheat. He was in his gentry clothes stripped for work, an outfit both impractical and indecent. A fine linen shirt, already torn on one shoulder and opened wide at the throat, showed the brown column of his neck and a glimpse of hard smooth collarbone. His riding breeches fitted snugly to his body and emphasized the muscles of his thighs. His knee-high leather riding boots were scratched beyond repair by his walking through the stubble. He looked exactly what he was: Quality playing peasant, the worst sort of landlord one could have. And I looked at him with naked delight on my face.

His spring down to the carter’s seat and to the ground was stopped short by the look on my face. He paused and his eyes suddenly darted to mine. The careless, hedonistic, laughing look vanished and he looked deeply shocked as if someone had suddenly slapped his smiling face. His eyes never left mine, as if he were about to ask me some question of enormous importance — but had never guessed before that I would know the answer. I stared back at him, my lips half open as if to answer, but able only to take shallow fast breaths. Harry’s gaze slowly ranged from the top of my glinting chestnut hair to the black hem of my skirt and returned again to my face. All he said, very low, was, ‘Beatrice’, as if he had never known my name before.

The carter waited for me to step to one side, then clicked to the team who ambled past me into the barn. Other carts drew into line behind and the men sprang up beside Harry to help throw the stooks down, while others below caught and stacked them in a great spreading and growing mountain of Wideacre wealth. I don’t think Harry even saw them. He stood in the middle of the flying stooks, his eyes on mine, and his look had the intensity and the disbelief of a man drowning.

We exchanged not one word all the rest of that long hardworking day, though we worked near each other until every stook of corn was piled in the barn and every scrap of straw either in the barn or lashed under covered stacks. When the great trestle tables were laid in the yard in the twilight, Harry took the head and I the foot and we smiled when they drank our healths and cheered us. We even danced a little jig, first with each other in a breathless, dreamlike circle, and then with the handful of the wealthiest tenants who had turned out to work on the harvest that day.

As it grew darker and the moon rose, the respectable villagers said their goodnights and rode the carts homeward. The young men and girls stayed behind to dance and to court, and the wilder, single men and bad husbands started to circulate little flasks of the powerful gin they buy from the London carters. Harry fetched my mare from the mill stables and his own hunter, and we rode home under a harvest moon as round and as golden as a guinea. I was so weak with desire that I could scarcely hold the reins or keep straight in the saddle. The merest glance from Harry set me trembling, and when our horses brushed together and our shoulders touched, I jumped as if I had been scorched.

In the stable yard luck favoured me for there was no groom to lift me from the saddle. I kept my seat until Harry came towards me and then I put out both hands on his shoulders. He lifted me down and I swear he held me close to him. I shuddered as I slid down every inch of his hot, weary body, and smelled the open-air smell and the warm maleness of him. As his gripping hands gently set me on my feet I swayed slightly towards him and lifted my face. In the magical moonlight his clear hard-boned face was an invitation to swift, gentle kisses all over his eyes, forehead and scratchy cheeks. His eyes were hazy as he looked down at my face.

‘Goodnight, Beatrice,’ he said with an undertone of huskiness in his voice. His face came down to mine in a gentle, dry, chaste kiss on my cheek. I hardly stirred. I let him kiss me as he would and I let him release me. I let him step back and take his hands from my waist. Then I slid away, consciously graceful, towards the stable door and up the back stairs to my bedroom. The golden moon lit my way like a promise of paradise.

It was a painful paradise, that autumn and winter. Harry’s courtship of Celia and his growing maturity meant he was away from home often, dining or drinking with new friends, or visiting Celia at Havering Hall. While my power on the land grew in his absence, my power over myself diminished, and I longed for him every second of every dull day that he was away.

I watched him secretly at breakfast, watched him read the paper and comment with assured knowledge on political developments and the news of London society. I watched his quick stride out of the room and listened for the bang of the front door as he went out. At dinner I was by the window to see him ride home, his head full of ideas about his agricultural books. I sat at his right hand and made him laugh with gossip about Mama’s afternoon callers. At tea in the evening I poured his cup and my hand trembled as I gave it to him. I was hopelessly, desperately in love, and I rejoiced in every painful, delightful moment of it.

When he spoke of Celia I cared not at all. Her pretty manners, the fresh flowers of her parlour, her marvellous needlework and her tasteful sketches meant nothing to me. My brother’s genteel courtship of the angelic Celia was not what I wanted. The little songs and pretty presents, the odd bouquet and the weekly visit — she could keep them. I wanted my brother to feel for me the passion I felt for him, which Ralph and I had shared. Instead of shying away from the memory of Harry burying his face against Ralph’s foot and his groans of pleasure at the feel of Ralph using the riding whip on his back, I recalled it with hope. He could feel abject desire; he could be fascinated and overwhelmed. I had seen him with Ralph; I had seen him infatuated and helpless with love. I longed for him to be infatuated again — this time with me.

I knew also — a woman always knows though she may conceal her knowledge even from herself — that Harry desired me in return. When he knew I was in the room his face was schooled and his voice neutral, but if he came upon me unexpectedly, or if I walked into the library when he had thought I was out, his eyes would light up and his hands would tremble. The long discussions we shared over the planting of next year’s crops and Harry’s new theories on crop rotation were spiced and lightened by this unspoken exchange of excitement, and when my hair brushed his cheek as we both leaned over a column of figures, I felt him stiffen. Disappointingly, he did not move forward, but nor did he draw away.

All the long autumn and winter I hardly noticed the chill and the dreary rain, I burned so inside. In the early months, when the chrysanthemums and the thick Michaelmas daisies bloomed, I carried them in to fill the house with their peppery smell and shuddered at the flaring colours. The hunting season came and I had to trail around in my heavy black dress on mornings when the sun rose like a red ball over the hoar-frosted fields and I could hear the hysterical yelp of hounds rushing like mad things in the first runs of the year. By some erratic social ruling, Harry was allowed to attend the meet, dressed in dark colours, and follow the hounds over the first few fields, but was not allowed to be in at the kill. The same inflexible social code ruled that I could not ride in company, and was thus banned from hunting for the whole of the frosty bright season. Only my secret rides about the estate were allowed, as long as none of the gentry saw me.

So there were no wild gallops for me to burn off the energy I felt. There was little work to do on the land, so I was much indoors. As the damp and the rain lifted, and the frost took hold, I longed for Harry with sharper and sharper need. My desire grew so strong that the pleasure curdled into pain on some days. Once, waiting for his return in the stable yard, I broke the ice on the drinking trough and crushed the splinters in my hand to still my impatience. But then, when he came riding in like a warrior high on a steed, and his face lit up to see me, every icy bit of pain melted into joy.

Christmas and New Year passed quietly for we were in second mourning. When a sudden frost made the roads usable, Harry took the coach to town for a week to transact some business. He came home full of the new fashions and plays of the season.

His absence gave me an opportunity to note, with ironic self-knowledge, that although I missed him, I relished the absolute power over the land that was mine when he was away. Our tenants, our labourers and the Acre craftsmen knew well enough who was the master, and would always consult me first before taking a plan or request to Harry. But merchants or dealers who did not know the county well sometimes made the mistake, that first year, of asking to see the Squire. I was always piqued when they entertained me with social gossip but then paused, waiting for me to leave the room before they started business talk. And Harry, with one half of my knowledge and experience, would always be flattered and would sometimes say, with a smile to me, ‘Don’t let us detain you, Beatrice, if you have something to do elsewhere. I am sure I can manage this alone and I will discuss it with you later.’ At which I was supposed to take my leave. Sometimes I went. But sometimes I committed the social solecism of smiling back and saying, ‘I have no business elsewhere, Harry. I would rather stay.’

Then the merchant and Harry would exchange the rueful grin of two men with a recalcitrant female, and discuss the deal for wool or wheat or meat. Wideacre always had the best of it when I was there, but I was unfailingly offended at the assumption that my business could be elsewhere when wealth was on the table.

While Harry was away, however, the merchants, the traders, the lawyers and the bankers had perforce to recognize my ability to give and honour my word. The law, the eternal male law, did not recognize my signature, any more than if I were a bankrupt, a criminal, or a lunatic. But a business man generally needed only one hard look from me before he realized that if he wanted a contract with Wideacre he had better not suggest awaiting Harry’s return. In Harry’s absence my power on the land shed its concealment and everyone, from the poorest tinker or shanty dweller to the leaders of county society, could see that I ruled the land.

We had a week of cold, clammy fogs after Christmas but in mid-January the hills shed their grey and became clear and frosty and bright. Every morning I awoke from a night of confused hot dreams and got up from my bed to throw my window open and breathe in the sharp freezing air. A few hard gasps would send me shivering back into the room to wash and dress before my log fire.

The weather took its toll in Acre. Bill Green, the miller, slipped on some ice in his mill yard and broke a leg and I had to send for the Chichester surgeon to come and set it for him. Mrs Hodgett, the lodge-keeper’s mother, took to her bed when the snow started falling and complained of pains in her chest. They could not root her out. After a week of this nonsense, Hodgett held the gate for me one morning and confessed that he was sure she was in bed only out of pure spite, and that his wife, Sarah, was exhausted with the extra cooking and washing and tired by two walks a day to Acre village to take the old crone her meals.

I nodded and gave him a smile and the next day took my roan hunter down to Acre village and tied him to old Mrs Hodgett’s wooden gate. I could see no face at the window of the little cottage but I knew the old witch would have been peeping. By the time I had swept up her snowy garden and burst into her house, stamping the snow off my boots and pulling my gauntlets off, she had skipped back into her sick bed, covers up to her chin, her bright healthy eyes shifty with deceit.

‘Good day, Mrs Hodgett,’ I sang out. ‘I am sorry to see you abed.’

‘Good day, Miss Beatrice,’ she quavered. ‘It is kind of you to visit a poor old lady.’

‘I can do better than a visit,’ I said encouragingly. ‘I have come to tell you that I am sending for the new Scottish physician, Dr MacAndrew, to come and see you. I hear he is wonderful with chest complaints.’

Her eyes were bright with eagerness.

‘That would be grand,’ she said. ‘I’ve heard tell on him. They speak well of him indeed.’

‘But have you heard of his special treatment?’ I asked. ‘He has a wonderful reducing diet which they say never fails.’

‘No. What is that?’ she asked, walking unsuspecting into the trap.

‘He calls it starving out the infection,’ I said, lying through my teeth with a candid gaze. ‘The first day you take nothing but hot water, and the second day you have hot water with one spoonful, no more, of gruel. The third day you have plain hot water again and the fourth you have a spoonful of gruel. That goes on until you are cured. They say it never fails.’

I smiled encouragingly at her and inwardly apologized to the young doctor whose reputation I was traducing so wilfully. I had not yet met him, but I heard he was excellent. His practice was mainly with the Quality families, of course, but he had a growing name for caring for the poor, and in some very hard cases he was giving his services for free. He would survive this faradiddle. No one but a very foolish old lady would believe such nonsense. But Mrs Hodgett was aghast. She stared incredulously at my face and plucked at the bedding with her plump fingers.

‘I don’t know, Miss Beatrice, I’m sure,’ she said hesitantly. ‘It can’t be right to eat so little when you’re poorly.’

‘Oh, yes,’ I said blithely, and turned as the door opened. It was Sarah Hodgett, who had walked from the gatehouse with an earthenware bowl of stew in her hands and a crusty new-baked loaf of bread wrapped in a spotless towel balancing on the lid. The smell of rich rabbit stew filled the frowsy little room and I saw the old lady’s eyes gleam.

‘Miss Beatrice!’ said Sarah with a courteous half-bob and a warm smile for me, her favourite. ‘It’s good of you to call on Mother while she’s poorly.’

‘She’ll be better soon,’ I said with certainty. ‘She’s going on Dr MacAndrew’s special reducing diet. You might as well start now, had you not, Mrs Hodgett? So you can take your rabbit stew home again, Sarah. I dare say that it won’t go to waste there!’

‘I could start the treatment tomorrow!’ Mrs Hodgett intervened despairingly, fearing the disappearance of Sarah’s hot dinner.

‘No, today is best,’ I said firmly. ‘Unless you are already feeling better?’

She seized on the way out with an audible gasp of relief.

‘I am a bit stouter,’ she said. ‘I think I might well be on the mend.’

‘Exercise then,’ I said, firmly putting out an imperious hand and hauling the old lady out of her bed. ‘Sarah can pop home and lay an extra place, and you can walk up to the lodge for your dinner today.’

‘Out in the snow?’ she squawked, as if its touch would poison her. I glanced to the door and saw the pair of stout leather boots and the warm shawl and bonnet hanging on a peg.

‘Yes,’ I said inexorably. ‘It’s either exercise or the special diet for you, Mrs Hodgett. You are too important to us all for us to take any chances with your health.’

She smiled at the compliment but scowled at the options and then, grudgingly, complied. I left Sarah bundling up the old devil in layers of flannel for her outing and went to untie Sorrel, well satisfied. I had done the Hodgetts a favour that they would not forget, and I had given the village a joke that would last them until spring. My swinging stride into the cottage and my starvation diet would be mimicked and laughed over in every taproom in a hundred miles’ radius. And the toast, when the long country guffaws had died down, would be the joking tribute: ‘The Master of Wideacre — Miss Beatrice!’

I called to one of the Tyacke boys, who was making snowballs in the lane, to come and hold Sorrel while I climbed awkwardly on the wall to reach the saddle, and then tossed him a penny for his help, and then another one because I liked his gap-toothed smile of hero worship as he looked up at me.

‘Gaffer Cooper is poorly, too,’ he volunteered, turning the coins in his hand and planning a feast of buns and toffee.

‘Bad?’ I asked, and the lad nodded. I could call on my way home. He was one of the cottagers who patched together a living on the fringe of the village where it merges with the common. In summer he had the odd day’s work harvesting or reaping in the Wideacre gang, in winter he would help someone kill a pig and be paid with a good measure of bacon. He had a couple of scrawny hens that sometimes laid an egg or two. He had a thin old cow that gave him a little milk. His cottage was built from wood scrounged and stolen from our woods, and from branches legitimately cut on common land. His roof was made of branches and sods of turf. His wood fire burned turves and wood from the common and filled the little room with smoke. He sat on a three-legged stool carved years ago, and he ate from a wooden bowl with a tin spoon. He cooked in a three-legged pot set in the embers of his fire, which burned on a stone in the middle of the room and smoked the room as well as the bacon hung from the rafters.

It was not a life I would choose to lead, but Gaffer Cooper had never had different and never settled to regular work and called no one master. In his dirty little shanty, sleeping on a bed of bracken, rolled up in rags, Gaffer Cooper called himself a free man; Papa, who had a sensitive eye for other men’s pride, always called him Gaffer Cooper and never John. And so did I.

Sorrel was tired of standing still, and chilled, so I gave him a brief canter down the snowy lane and back before turning right down the track that leads towards the cottages. The wood was silent, magical in the snow. The deep green pine trees and firs each held a thick line of snow along their branches and pointy fingers. Even the tiniest pine needles were capped with a sliver of ice. The silver birches looked grey instead of white against the icy brightness, and the beech trees’ grey trunks were pewter-coloured. As I rode I could hear the Fenny clattering louder around the ice-floes and I went closer to see the green water sliding secretly under little silver skins of ice to make silent pools under the white ceiling.

The snow in the woods was pockmarked with animal tracks. I saw the two round two long prints of a rabbit and the little dots of a weasel or stoat following close behind it. There were fox tracks, like a little dog’s, and even the scuffed trail of a badger whose low belly brushed the thicker drifts.

Looking up through the tracery of snow-laden branches, I could see from the sky that we would have more snow later in the day and I put Sorrel into a canter to get home before dinner. Someone had been down the track before me. A stout pair of boots and a pair of wooden clogs, so Gaffer must be ill indeed if he was being visited.

As we rounded the bend to his cottage I guessed I was too late. The door of his cottage stood wide open, something that happened generally only on the most scorching of summer days, and coming out was Mrs Merry, midwife and layer-out in Acre parish — and owner, as befitted her rank, of a good pair of boots.

‘Good day, Miss Beatrice. Gaffer’s gone.’ She greeted me matter-of-factly.

I drew rein beside the fence of hazel sticks.

‘Old age?’ I asked.

‘Aye,’ she said. ‘And the winter takes them.’

‘He had enough to eat, and enough clothes?’ I asked. Gaffer was not one of our people. He was neither tenant, labourer nor pensioner, but he had scraped his living on our land and I should feel to blame if he had died in want.

‘He ate one of his hens only last night,’ said Mrs Merry. ‘And he had survived many winters in those clothes and in that bed. You need have no fears, Miss Beatrice. Gaffer’s time was come and he went peacefully. Would you care to see him?’

I shook my head. There was no family in Acre who would be offended by my refusal. I could please myself.

‘Did he leave any savings?’ I asked. ‘Enough for a funeral?’

‘Nay,’ she said. ‘It’ll be a pauper’s grave for him. We have found nothing.’

I nodded. ‘I’ll stand the coffin and the service,’ I said briefly. ‘Set it in hand, Mrs Merry. I won’t have Wideacre folk buried in shame.’

Mrs Merry measured me with her eyes and smiled.

‘Eh, but you’re so like your papa!’ she said, and I smiled in return at the compliment: the best that could be paid me.

‘I hope so,’ I said and nodded my farewell.

In a day or two the plain whitewood coffin would take Gaffer’s remains to the churchyard and he would be buried in the far corner where the water pump is and the tools are kept. I would pay for a plain wooden cross with his name on it. The service would be read by the curate to whoever was there, idling from work, for Gaffer had few friends. A couple of the other cottagers might attend to pay their respects to one of their own from the village within a village, but Acre itself would be little touched. I would pay the extra penny necessary to toll the funeral bell for him, and at the sound the men ploughing in the fields, or trimming the hedges and digging ditches, would stop their work and pull off their caps to be bare-headed for the passing of the old man who never earned such a mark of respect in his life.

Then the bell would cease and the caps would go back on to the quickly chilled heads. The men digging would spit on their cold hands, grasp the spades again and curse the life that forced them to stand knee-deep in icy water in mid-January with no break until dinner, and no chance of being warm and dry until dusk.

The freezing weather was hard enough on the labourers but this winter it was a nightmare for the shepherds. It was especially hard because the snow fell so thick and so early that the sheep had not been gathered off the downs in time for them to lamb on the lower, more accessible hills. Day after grey snowy day we toiled up that blocked track to the top of the downs to poke about with long sticks in the snow to try to find the firm white lump that meant a buried sheep, and then set to the miserable job of digging the thing out.

We lost remarkably few because I made sure the men were out from dawn to dusk and they cursed me with language that should have dropped me faint with horror from the saddle, but that instead made me laugh.

They learned a great, if grudging, respect for me that winter. Unlike the labourers and tenants who saw me almost daily, the shepherds worked alone. Only at a time of crisis like this one when most of the flock was buried under six-foot drifts did they work in a gang commanded by me. They noted the advantage the horse gave me and cursed me roundly when I trotted past them up the track, or when they slipped and fell into great deceiving hills of snow while I rode dry-shod. But they knew also that not even the oldest, wisest one of them could match me for sensing where a sheep was buried or guessing where a little flock would have huddled. Then, when they were digging, more often than not I would be side by side with them in the snow, probing for the buried animal, and feeling for its head.

And when it came to rounding up the chilled and silly things to move them downhill, the shepherds knew that although I was tired and cold I would ride behind the stragglers and bawl at the dogs until we had them all safe in a lower meadow.

Only then, when the gate was pulled shut and hay thrown on the snow, would our ways diverge. The men would go home to their little cottages to dig out potatoes, or swedes, or turnips for their dinner, or reluctantly go to work their tract on the common fields. Or they would go out to set a snare for a rabbit or mend a leaking roof. Working, even in the dark, working, working, working, until they fell into their beds and slept, sometimes still in their wet clothes.

But I would trot home and toss the reins to a stable lad, climb the stairs to my room and sink into a tub before the fire while Lucy poured ewer after ewer of hot water over me and said, ‘Miss Beatrice! You will scald! You are all pink!’

Only when my skin was stinging with the heat would I heave myself out and wrap up in a linen towel while Lucy brushed my hair and piled it up and powdered it ready for the evening.

I found I could chat to Mama at dinner, and she showed some interest in my day, although the weight of her disapproval curbed my tongue. She disliked what I was doing, but even she could see that when a fortune of wool and meat lay buried in the snow one could not leave it to paid labourers to dig out, when and how they fancied.

But once the covers were removed I became quiet, and by the time the tea tray came into the parlour I was weak with sleepiness.

‘Really, Beatrice, you are good for nothing these days,’ Mama said, looking pointedly at a spoiled piece of embroidery which had been in and out of the work basket every night for a sennight. ‘It is hardly like having a daughter at all,’ she said.

‘I am sorry, Mama,’ I said in sudden sympathy. ‘I know it seems odd. But we have had such bad luck with the sheep. Another couple of days and they will all be in, and then Harry will be home in time for lambing.’

‘In my girlhood I did not even know the word lambing,’ said Mama, her tone plaintive.

I smiled. I was simply too tired to try to restore her to good humour.

‘Well, as Papa used to say, I am a Lacey of Wideacre,’ I said lightly. ‘And while I am the only one, I have to be Squire and daughter, all at once.’

I tossed the stitchery back into the workbox and rose to my feet.

‘Forgive me, Mama. I know it is early and I am no company for you, but I am too tired to stay awake.’

I bent down for her goodnight kiss, a cool resentful one, and left her.

Every night was the same. As I climbed each stair my tiredness fell away and my thoughts turned to Harry. His smile, the sweetness and tenderness of his expression, his blue eyes and the set of his coat became more and more vivid with every step I took up to my room. By the time I was undressed and lying on my back in bed, I could almost feel his body on mine and his arms around me. With a moan I would roll on my side and try to put the insane, senseless picture from my mind. I was sure that I longed for the touch, for the pleasure of Ralph. But the thought of Ralph was a nightmare to me, so my mind had played this trick on me and made me dream of Harry. Once he was home, and we were working side by side again, I might enjoy his company and this strange, fevered dreaminess would be gone. I tossed and turned, and dozed and woke with a jump until midnight. Then I sank into sleep and dreamed only of golden curls and a sweet, honest smile… and acres and acres of snow hiding precious sheep.

Harry came home the second week of February, later than he had promised. His lateness meant I had the first week of lambing to manage alone. The shepherds and I spent each long dark evening, after every long cold morning, finding sheep in lamb, checking the lambs and moving the sickly ones indoors to barns where they could be watched. Some of the flock, the less hardy ones, were to lamb indoors anyway.

I loved going into the barn when it was full of sheep. They rippled like a woolly river away from me as I walked through them. Outside the wind howled and the beams of the barn creaked like a ship at sea; but inside it was snug and sweet-smelling. The oil lantern cast a yellow glow when I checked the newborn lambs early in the morning, or last thing at night, and the smell of the oil on their fleeces lingered on my greasy hands when I rode home.

I was tired and chilled and smelling of lanolin one night riding home, when I noticed fresh hoof marks in the snow of the drive and, absurdly, my heart sprang up like a winter robin. ‘Perhaps Harry is home,’ I said to myself and spurred Sorrel on to a faster canter, sliding on the icy snow.

His horse was standing at the front door and Harry, gross in a caped cloak, was in the doorway, hugging Mama and answering her babble of questions with a laugh. The sound of Sorrel’s hoofs on the icy gravel made him turn and come back out to me, though I saw Mama’s detaining hand on his cape.

‘Beatrice!’ he said and his voice was full of joy.

‘Oh, Harry!’ I said and blushed as scarlet as a holly berry.

He reached his arms up to me and I slid from the saddle towards him. The capes of his riding cloak billowed round and half drowned me in the smell of wet wool, of cigar smoke and horse sweat. He held me in a hard hug before he released me and I sensed, with the sureness of my leaping heart, that his heart was pounding too, as he held my slim body in his arms.

‘Come along, you two,’ called Mama from the doorway. ‘You will both catch your deaths of cold out there in the snow.’

Then Harry’s arm was round my waist and he swept me indoors like some buffeting winter wind, so we arrived in the parlour breathless and laughing.

Harry was full of town gossip — the snippets of political news he had heard from old friends of Papa’s, the family news of our cousins and a bundle of little presents. He had the playbill of the theatre he had visited and the programme from a concert.

‘Wonderful music,’ he said enthusiastically.

He had visited the sights of London, too; Astley’s amphitheatre and the Tower of London. He had not been to Court but he had been to several private parties and met so many people he could not remember half their names.

‘But it’s fine to be home,’ he said. ‘My word, I thought I should never get here at all. The roads were shocking. I planned to come post but I left my baggage at Petworth and rode the rest of the way. If I had waited for the road to be cleared for carriages, I think I should have been there for Easter! What a winter it has been! You must have been busy with the sheep, Beatrice!’

‘Oh! Do not ask her!’ Mama threw her hands up with sudden vivacity at the return of her lovely boy. ‘Beatrice has become a full-time shepherdess and she smells of sheep, and talks sheep and thinks sheep until she can barely speak at all but only bleat.’

Harry roared. ‘I can see it’s high time I came home,’ he said. ‘You two would have been pulling caps in another week. Poor Beatrice, you will have had hard work to do in this weather! And poor Mama, with no company!’

Then I saw the clock and hurried to my room to change. My bath was even more scalding than usual that night and my scrubbing with the perfumed soap even more meticulous. I chose a deep blue gown of velvet with wide swaying loops of material over the paniers at the side. My maid powdered my hair with extra care and placed among the white curls deep blue bows that echoed the colour of the gown. Against the powder, my skin was clear, pale honey, my eyes hazel rather than green. I doubted if there were lovelier girls even in London, and after Lucy left me I stayed seated before my mirror gazing blankly at my reflection.

The gong roused me from my daze and I hurried downstairs in a rustle of silk petticoats and rich velvet.

‘Very nice, dear,’ Mama said approvingly, noting my unusually thorough powdering and the new gown.

Harry frankly gaped at me and I stared back at him.

In half-mourning, like Mama and me, he had to wear dark clothes, but his waistcoat was a deep, deep blue embroidered with intricate black thread. His long coat with the dandified wide cuffs and lapels was deep blue also — a sheeny satin that caught the light when he moved. His hair was tied back with a bow of matching blue material, and his satin evening breeches were blue also.

‘You match,’ Mama said unnecessarily. ‘How very fine you both look.’

Harry smiled, but his eyes had a confused, transfixed expression in them. With jesting ceremony he bowed to Mama and me, and offered us both an arm, but behind the smile and the ready courtesy I knew him to be keenly aware of my every move. I smiled back as if I was at ease, too, but the hand I put on his arm trembled, and when I sat in my chair the table swam before my eyes as if I was going to faint.

Harry and Mama exchanged family news over the dinner table and I concentrated on schooling my voice to make normal, laughing replies when one or other of them turned to me. After dinner Harry refused port and said he preferred to come at once with us to the parlour.

‘For I have brought home the family jewels from the bank, Mama,’ he said. ‘And I am longing to see them. Such a great weight! I had them tucked under my arm on the horse for I feared to leave them with the rest of my baggage. I was certain I should be robbed!’

‘There was no need to carry them,’ Mama said apologetically. ‘You could have left them with your valet. But you shall certainly see them.’

She went to her room for the key and then opened up the little chest and lifted out the three fitting trays.

‘Celia shall have these on her wedding day,’ she said, picking out the family heirloom, the Lacey diamonds: a set of gold and diamond rings, bracelets, a collar of diamonds, eardrops and a tiara.

‘I should think they would bring her to her knees,’ said Harry laughing. ‘They must weigh a ton. Have you ever worn them all, Mama?’

‘Good heavens, no!’ she said. ‘We only had one season in town after our marriage and I looked behind the times enough without being draped in old-fashioned jewels. These were given to me on my wedding day, as is the custom, and then stored at the bank. But Celia should at least see them in October.’

‘October?’ I said. The eternal piece of embroidery slipped in my hands and the needle jabbed into my thumb.

‘Oh, poor Beatrice!’ said Harry. ‘I must have this embroidered kerchief when it’s done. There are more blood spots on it than thread. What tortures you put her through, Mama!’

‘The torture is in trying to teach her,’ Mama said, laughing with her beloved son. ‘After a day out with your sheep she can barely see to put a stitch in its place. And she was always clumsy with a needle.’

She packed the jewels back into the box and took them up to her room. Harry took my hand in his and inspected the welling spot of blood on the ball of the left thumb.

‘Poor Beatrice!’ he said again and kissed the thumb. His lips opened and he sucked the little spot of blood. In my nervous, passionate state I trembled like a high-bred mare. The ball of my thumb was pressed against his teeth, and I could feel his tongue, wet and warm, sliding over the ridges of the thumbprint. His mouth was hot, and fascinatingly wet. I held my hand up to his face and scarcely breathed.

‘Poor Beatrice,’ he repeated. He raised his eyes and looked at me. I hardly dared move. There was such pleasure in having him touch me, such delight in a tiny gesture. I could not have taken my hand away had my life depended on it. But somewhere in the back of my mind was a growing awareness that he had kept hold of my hand for some time. The casual gesture was turning into a caress. There was silence.

He took the thumb from his mouth and inspected it with playful seriousness.

‘Do you think you will survive this wound?’ he asked.

‘I’m scarred from a thousand similar battles,’ I said, trying to keep my voice light, but I could not help it quivering. I noticed that he was breathing slightly faster and his eyes had that absorbed, incredulous look again.

‘Poor Beatrice,’ he said, as if he had forgotten any other words. He still held my hand and I rose from my seat to stand beside him. We were nearly the same height and if I had moved half a step closer my breasts would have rubbed his chest and our bellies brushed.

‘I hope you will always care for my wounds and sorrows so tenderly, Harry,’ I said.

‘My dear sister,’ he said sweetly. ‘I will always care for you. You must promise to tell me if ever you are unhappy or unwell. I am sorry I left you with so much work to do, and I was sorry to see you so pale.’

‘My heart flutters so, Harry,’ I whispered. It was hammering like a drum at the closeness of him. He put his hand against my ribs as if to feel for the pulse and I covered it with my own, pressing his palm against me. Scarcely knowing what I was doing, I slid it towards the curve of my breasts, very soft under the blue velvet.

Harry gave a gasp and his other hand came around my waist to draw me towards him. We stood like two statues scarce believing that our hearts were hammering hot blood round our bodies and that we were moving closer and closer together. I felt his leg press forward, then closed my eyes at the blissful moment of contact as our bodies touched down the quivering length. With my eyes still closed I blindly lifted my face and felt the warmth of his breath as his head bent down to me.

His lips touched mine as gently and as chastely as any brother’s could. Instinctively I opened my mouth in pleasure and felt his whole body flinch in surprise. He would have pulled away but my hand was behind his neck and held his face to me. Then my tongue slid into his virginal mouth and I licked him in a thoughtless fit of passion.

He jerked back, and I came to my senses and let him go.

‘That was a brotherly kiss,’ he said gently. ‘I am so glad to be home and to see you again that I wanted to give you a hug and a brotherly kiss.’ Then with cruel suddenness he turned on his heel and left me. Left me with a sweet smile and a sweet unconvincing lie.

He had lied to spare us both the knowledge of our mutual desire. He had lied because he knew nothing of passion between a man and a woman. He lied because he had two irreconcilable pictures of me in his mind. One his dear pretty sister, and the other the irresistible beauty who greeted the wheat carts with her head tipped back and the glory of a goddess of the harvest in her eyes.

So he left me with a lie and I stood, one hand on the mantelpiece of my mama’s parlour and my feet on the hearthstone of my home, and shuddered with longing for him. And looked that longing, at last, in the face.

Nothing could stop us or divert us from the road down which we were travelling, Harry and I. No word of mine or act of will could have kept us from each other. We were both like driftwood on the Fenny’s springtime floods, and our passion and our love grew as remorselessly as the buds on the trees and the spring flowers in the hedgerows.

If I had wanted to escape this destiny I do not know where I could have gone. I was as driven to Harry as the birds were driven to build nests and lay eggs; my heart and my body called to him as wilfully as the cuckoos called in the greening woods. He was the Master of Wideacre; of course I wanted him for my own.

The first days of the warm spring weather passed for me in a haze of sensual daydreaming. The lambs were fit and we transferred the flock back to the spring grass on the downs and I was suddenly at leisure. I rode around the woods; I even made myself a little line and spent one morning fishing in the high fast river. I took myself up to the downs and lay on damp grass gazing up into the blue sky where a few early larks were climbing. The spring sun warmed my cheeks, my closed eyelids, but inside I was scorching. And there was nothing I could do to stop it.

My nonchalant dismissal of the courtship Celia enjoyed was now past history. When Harry and Mama spoke of the October wedding, I felt nauseous with envy. Harry’s every other sentence was of Celia and her likes and dislikes and I could scarcely school my face to remain smiling and serene when I heard her name. She was no longer something off Wideacre, as distant and unimportant as the London-scene; she was a threat to me that was coming ever closer. She held my brother’s heart in her little hands. She would be coming into my home; she would sit at the foot of the great Wideacre table and Harry would smile down the length of it to her. Worse, most nightmarish picture of all, every night of our lives she and Harry would climb the stairs together and shut the bedroom door, and he would hold her and possess her while I lay in my single bed and trembled with longing.

I did not dream now; I started to think. In the back of my mind a plan was forming to give me the land, and to give me Harry. To forge out of these demented, unlikely elements some stability, some basis for my future. But I could not be certain that it could be done. It depended so much on Celia, and I knew her only slightly. Next time she was due for a visit my eyes were sharp upon her.

Harry met the Havering landau at the steps of the Hall with Mama at his side and me in polite and reticent attendance a few steps behind. I had a perfect view of Celia’s face as Harry greeted them, and I saw with amazement that she was nervous with him. Her pale pink parasol trembled over her little head as Harry brushed the footman aside to open the carriage door. He handed Lady Havering out, then turned to Celia. He bowed low and took her gloved hand. The colour flowed from her face and then rushed back as he kissed her hand, but I knew — with the keen insight of a woman in love — that it was not the nervous heat of passion I felt for Harry. What was the silly thing blushing for? Why was she trembling?

I had to understand what went on behind those soft brown eyes, so this time it was I who suggested a drive while our mamas gossiped over the teacups.

We went through the lanes to see Harry’s new turnip field. Harry rode politely behind, at a distance to avoid the white chalky dust of the high lanes. So I had her to myself. It was a warm spring day, almost as hot as last summer when we had gone to see the harvest, when I had cared nothing for either of them. Now I knew they could either wreck or make my life.

‘Celia,’ I said sweetly, ‘I am so glad that we shall be sisters. I have been so lonely with just Mama and Harry and I always wanted you as a friend.’

The colour mounted to her face in one of her easy blushes. ‘Oh, Beatrice,’ she said, ‘I should be so glad if you and I were to become special friends. There is so much that will be new to me and strange. And I feel so awkward coming into your mama’s house.’

I smiled and pressed her little hand.

‘You always seem so grown up and confident,’ she said shyly. ‘I used to watch you and your papa setting off hunting, and wished so much that I could know you better. And the great horses you rode! When I think now of living in Wideacre Hall, I feel’ — she gave a little gasp — ‘quite frightened.’

I smiled gently at her. Although she had lived all of her adult life in Havering Hall, as the unwanted stepdaughter and stepsister, she had seen little of country society, and had played no great part in the life of the Hall. She was nervous, of course, and it occurred to me that she might want Harry merely as the lesser of two evils.

‘Harry will be beside you,’ I said comfortingly.

‘Oh, yes,’ she agreed. ‘But gentlemen can be so …’ She paused. ‘Marriage is so …’ and she stopped again.

‘It’s a big step for a girl,’ I said helpfully.

‘Oh, yes!’ she said with such emphasis in her soft voice that I racked my brains to think what was behind all this flutter.

‘There is the new position — as the Lady of Wideacre,’ I said, biting my tongue on the pain that the title would go to this baby.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That is rather frightening, but …’ There was something more, something else.

‘Harry seldom drinks to excess,’ I said at random thinking of her stepfather.

‘Oh, no!’ she said quickly, and I had drawn a blank there, too.

‘I am sure he loves you very, very much,’ I said. Envy made me faint as if I had an illness. But it was true. I was sure he did, damn her.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That’s the trouble really.’

I recovered rapidly. The trouble? What trouble? ‘The trouble?’ I repeated.

Her head with the pretty little bonnet bowed low. I saw a tear drop on her figured satin and one gloved finger covered the spot.

‘He’s so …’ She couldn’t find the word and Lord help me I couldn’t think what could be wrong.

‘He’s so …’ She tried again, and I was dumb.

‘He’s so … unrestrained …’ she got out. ‘I suppose it is because he is interested in farming … but really …’

I nearly gasped aloud at this revelation. While I had been aching and longing for Harry and trembling at his touch, this little ice maiden had been refusing his kisses and shrinking from an arm around her waist. Envy made me physically queasy, but my face must not show it.

‘I expect men always are,’ I said, imitating her awed whisper. ‘Is he always like that?’

‘Oh, no!’ she said. The deep brown eyes flickered to my face. ‘The last two Sundays, he changed. He tried to kiss me …’ — her voice dropped even lower — ‘on the mouth! Oh, it was horrid.’ She broke off again. ‘Something else, too.’

I remembered with every cell of my sensuous body the warmth of Harry’s body against mine, my lips opening beneath his and my tongue seeking his mouth. His hand tightening and pressing my breast. That had caused the change.

‘He forgot himself,’ said Celia with some little determination. ‘He forgot who I am. Young ladies do not…’ She paused. ‘And certainly they do not let gentlemen touch them — in that way.’

I caught my breath in a hissing sigh. It had to have been the evening in Mama’s parlour that had made the difference. I had pressed his hand to my breast. I had opened my mouth to him. He had gone from me to Celia hot with desire and tingling with the touch of his first woman — and cold, unloving little Celia had rebuffed him.

‘Did you tell him so?’ I asked.

‘Of course,’ she said. The brown eyes opened wider and she stole another glance at me. ‘He seemed angry,’ she said. Her lower lip trembled. ‘It made me rather afraid … for later.’

‘Don’t you want him to kiss you?’ I burst out.

‘Not like that! I don’t like kisses like that! I don’t think I ever will! I don’t see how I can learn to bear them. Mama and Step-Papa don’t behave like that; they … they have an arrangement.’

The whole world knew that Lord Havering’s arrangement was a ballet dancer in one of the London theatres when Lady Havering put her foot down after two children and four miscarriages.

‘You would like that with Harry?’ I asked. I couldn’t believe my ears.

‘Oh, no,’ she said miserably. ‘I know one cannot, until there is an heir. I know there is nothing to be done. I shall just have to … I shall just have to …’ She gave a piteous little sob. ‘I shall just have to endure it, I suppose.’

I took her hand in my firm clasp.

‘Celia, listen to me,’ I said. ‘I will be a sister to you in October, and I will be a friend to you now. Harry and I are very, very close — you know how we run the estate together — he will always listen to me because he knows I have his interests at heart. I will be a friend to you, too. I shall help you with Harry. I can talk to Harry and no one but you and I need ever know what you have told me. I can make it all right between the two of you.’

Celia raised her eyes to my face.

‘Oh, if you would!’ she said. ‘But won’t Harry mind?’

‘Leave it to me,’ I said. ‘I make only one condition.’ I paused and the cherries on her little bonnet trembled. I realized that to escape Harry’s embraces she would promise me anything.

‘The condition is that you always tell me everything about you and Harry, everything.’

The cherries bobbed as she nodded vigorously.

‘Should you change in your feelings to him, or should he change to you, you will tell me at once.’

The cherries bobbed again and she held out her hand.

‘Oh, yes, Beatrice. Let’s shake hands on the bargain. I promise you shall always be my best and closest of friends. I will always confide in you and you shall have thousands of favours from me. Anything you want that I can give shall be yours.’

I smiled and kissed her cheek to seal the agreement. She had only one thing that I wanted — that I would ever want — and she was far along the road to giving it me, my heart’s desire, my brother Harry.