The Favoured Child

8

The news we brought of Ralph Megson’s reaction made Uncle John look anxious at supper and sent him into the library to look at the provisional leases he had drawn up. The next day he ordered the carriage for Chichester to see the Wideacre lawyers to ask them what they thought about a contract which would bind both the workers and the squires.

He paused as he came down the steps. I was in the front garden, the very picture of a demure young lady in a high-waisted white gown and a sun-bonnet to shield my face. But my fingers were suspiciously muddy, and when Uncle John came down the path, I was not quick enough to tuck the little spade out of sight.

‘Gardening, Julia?’ Uncle John said. He sounded appropriately scandalized, but there was an undercurrent of laughter in his voice. ‘Julia! My niece Julia! What are we going to do with you! What does your mama say about you gardening?’

‘She tries not to know,’ I said, shamefaced. ‘Uncle John, I know it is not proper, but someone had to do it. And Stride is too old, and all Jem’s plants died. And there was no one else. And you know how Mama loves flowers,’ I said, striking the very note which would persuade him.

‘Mama and I agreed that I might do it providing that no one of the Quality sees me. And that is all right, Uncle John, because no one ever comes down the drive in a carriage in the morning. And I never do it in the afternoon.’

Uncle John tried to look severe, but he cracked into a laugh of irrepressible merriment. ‘Miss Julia! You are having a clandestine affair with Nature!’ he said. ‘But how do you know anything at all about gardening?’

‘I just know,’ I said vaguely. ‘I knew of Mama’s favourite flowers from Wideacre Hall, and when I was very little, I collected the seed pods to give her. I planted them in little pots in my bedroom and when they grew, I planted them here so Mama should have her favourite flowers around her, so she should not be homesick for the hall, and the gardens.’

Uncle John nodded, his face understanding. ‘That was well done indeed,’ he said. ‘But who told you where the plants should go? Whether they like light or shade?’

I shrugged. I could not have explained. ‘I suppose I looked where they were growing and doing well in the old garden,’ I said, trying to remember. ‘But also, when I have a little bulb or a handful of seeds in my hand, I can somehow feel where they want to go. Whether they like the soil moist or dry.’ I broke off. ‘It makes no sense when I speak of it,’ I said. ‘But I seem to have been born knowing how to grow things.’

Uncle John looked at me hard, and the laughter was gone from his eyes. ‘Do they always grow for you?’ he asked suddenly. ‘No diseased plants, no sudden disappointments? No seedlings all shrivelled when you thought they were doing well?’

‘No,’ I said, surprised. ‘But the earth is so good here, Uncle John. And the weather just right. And I am only planting things which are accustomed to Wideacre, which have already done well here.’ I took a few steps towards him and put out a rather grubby hand. ‘Why do you look like that?’ I asked shyly. ‘I can stop gardening now you are home. Now you are home, you can hire a gardener. I should miss it, but if you dislike it so much, I can stop doing it.’

Uncle John shook his head, as if to clear a whirl of thoughts. ‘No,’ he said. ‘It is I who am in the wrong. I was a little shocked to find you resembling your Aunt Beatrice in this skill with the land. That was a talent she had. By the time she was dead, they had made it into some fairytale black art in the village, but that need not concern you. All it ever was, which you have inherited, was a very valuable skill. And it strikes me that if you are a good gardener, you might make a good farmer. We will need all the skills we can to teach Acre how to make the land yield again. Would you work on the land, Julia? If your mama agreed?’

I gasped. ‘Uncle John, I should love to farm!’ I exclaimed. ‘You mean help getting the hayfields back to hay and planting wheat? Uncle John! I should love it!’

Uncle John smiled at my bright face and patted my cheek. ‘Lacey girls!’ he said with much love. ‘Land-crazed, all of them. But I shall do my best to make sure that this one does not go wrong. If your mama permits, I shall be glad to see you taking this talent of yours to the fields and getting them growing. And in return, you will remember that people matter more than crops; the village of Acre matters more than the wealth of Wideacre.’

I nodded, only partly understanding what he meant.

‘But we will get nowhere unless I can get an agreement past my stiff-necked farm manager,’ Uncle John said dourly, and went towards the garden gate. ‘Anyone would think that he was employing me and giving me orders instead of vice versa. What he will not understand is that I am no more free than the workers of Acre. I have to find some way to convince the lawyers that I am not cheating you and Richard of your inheritance. And, indeed, I am cheating you! You would make more money if we simply got Acre working and sold it as a going concern.’

I opened the gate for him and stood by it as he went through towards the waiting carriage, with Jem standing by the steps. I heard the sense in Uncle John’s words and my own Quality-trained mind responded at once to the idea of high profits for the landlords. But the dream of Ralph had put me in tune with the land. Since yesterday morning in the summer-house I had seemed to feel the air on my cheek like a caress, the sun on my face more warm; the grass on the Dower House lawn was softer, greener than any summer grass before. The great lush forest that was Wideacre woods took my breath away, and the circles of downs beyond were ripe mountains.

Ralph’s words in the living-room of the cottage which was the best cottage in Acre and yet still a hovel compared with the Dower House had taught me, in a sudden bolt of shame, that we were rich because Acre was poor. And however kindly intentioned we were, or however we planned to make the division of profits more fair, none the less we belonged to the wider world, and we could live as we pleased. We were rich and free in a way that the villagers never would be. And we did not invite them to tea.

‘It is not just ownership of the land,’ I said tentatively to Uncle John. ‘It is power. We can make all the promises we like, and yet, if we wish, we can walk away from Acre tomorrow, and sell to the first comer. They know that.’

Uncle John grinned wryly. ‘You are as bad as Acre,’ he said. ‘They think that the gentry are incapable of sharing their rights. They will not believe a gift when they see it. And so they argue and want guarantees when you and I and Richard and your mama want nothing more than to make the land right again.’

He smiled at me, the swift grin of a man who knows his own mind, and I felt myself smile back. I liked Uncle John, and I knew why my mama loved him. He had no feeling for the land; he was an utter outsider on Wideacre. But he was a man of such honour that he would never leave a debt unpaid. He felt he owed a debt to Acre, and he would work until it was clear. He was a man without deceit, a man one could trust.

‘No one doubts you, Uncle John,’ I said. ‘They only doubt the world you live in.’ He smiled at that. ‘Have a pleasant day,’ I said, almost as a blessing, ‘and do not get too tired.’

Uncle John threw me a mock salute and climbed into the carriage. Jem folded up the steps, shut the door and climbed on to the driving box. He twirled his whip in a salute to me and set the bays going. They were fresh and happy to be out in the spring sunshine and they leaped forward; the carriage was gone in a swirl of white dust.

I glanced back at the house, but there was no one waving from the windows. Mama had some patterns for brocades for curtains, and the morning’s post had brought her details of houses for sale in Bath. She had taken them to the parlour to read, and she was not looking out of the window, not even to wave farewell to Uncle John. Richard had long since gone to his lessons with Dr Pearce.

No one was watching me.

I was alone.

I laid my basket of seedlings down in the shade of a flowering currant bush. An early bee buzzed hopefully around the scarlet buds, looking for pollen and nectar, and the sound reminded me of high summer. There was not a muscle in my body which was not pliable and soft. My skin felt like warm cream, melting in the sunlight. I wandered down to the garden gate without a thought in my head. I wanted to be in a place where I could lie down in the shade and daydream.

I went up the drive as I had done before. But this time I did not want to go to the hall. I half thought the dream might be waiting for me there, but there was no singing which called me onwards in that direction. I wanted to see the Fenny. I wanted to lie beside the river and hear it burble over the stones. I wanted to see it flow and watch the sunshine dance in dappled brilliance on the water. I wanted to lie in shifting sun and shadow and dream of the young man who had held me.

I turned down the little path which leads from the drive to our childhood fishing pool, secret and dark amid the tall trees of the wood. It was a tight fit now that the early summer growth was sprouting, and a bramble caught at my gown as I pushed through. But once I was inside the deep wood I could move easily.

The wood-pigeons in the trees above my head cooed of love and mating and the thrushes in the lower branches warbled a long lovely liquid song which went on and on, like someone playing on a flute without a tune or pattern. The brown leaf-mould soft under my feet was starred with wood anemones in a carpet of white, and at the base of each broad grey tree-trunk there was a mass of spiky green leaves, promising a rich crop of bluebells later in the month. The land, supposedly wrecked and derelict, was thick with life. The woods, which had not been clipped or pruned or cropped in fourteen years, were rich with growth. I touched a beech tree and felt the bark warm under my palm. Then I followed the little path to the pool, to Richard’s pool, to my pool, where no one else ever came.

Ralph was there.

Of course he was there.

Without my knowing it, my feet had brought me here to be with him. Without an idea in my head, I had been seeking him ever since I had left the garden. Ralph was here.

He was seated on the ground, leaning back against a great fir tree which stretched even higher than the others, like a great tall pillar up to the blue sky, beyond the thick criss-crossing branches which were the roof of the wood, the ceiling of this private shadowy world. He was wearing a felt hat, pulled down to shade his eyes, like a common man. I stood silently, watching him, thinking that he might be asleep. He had laid aside his wooden legs and his body looked oddly short, stopping thus at the knees, as if in some jest he had buried himself in the leaves.

I realized, with a shock, that he was no younger than Uncle John, whom I had sent on his way with an anxious reminder not to get too tired. But John was worn with longing and duty, and Ralph – for all the pain he had suffered and the danger he had run – had never gone against his own inclination once in his life.

He tipped back his hat and his eyes were open. ‘Miss Julia,’ he said sleepily. ‘I give you good day.’

‘Mr Megson,’ I said, equally formal, but my voice shook and gave me away.

He looked up at me with a smile, his eyes warm. ‘Do sit down,’ he said, as courteous as he would have been in a drawing-room. ‘The ground is not damp.’

I gathered my pale skirts under me and sat beside him, within reach, but not too close. I had a feeling that he measured the distance I had chosen with eyes of some experience.

‘I am here poaching,’ Ralph said. ‘Would you like to watch me tickle for trout? Was there anyone to teach you when you and Richard were little?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘No one. There was only Mama, and the servants, of course.’

‘There was a whole village of poachers down the lane who could have shown you,’ Ralph said, ‘But, of course, they would not count.’

‘We hardly ever went there when we were small,’ I said, half apologetic. ‘It was only when I made friends with Clary that I started to know the people in Acre at all. It is still unusual for Mama to go to the village, except for church on Sunday.’

‘Because of the fire?’ Ralph asked as if it were an historical event of no great interest.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘She was afraid of the village after that.’

He nodded, his face non-committal. ‘No need,’ he said. ‘Everyone in Acre respected your mama. They knew what she tried to do for them. The firing of the hall was to break the power of the Laceys – Beatrice and Harry – no attack upon your mama or your Uncle John.’

‘Perhaps it was a little hard for her to make the distinction,’ I said waspishly. ‘That night left her a widow with a bankrupt estate and two children to rear alone. If Acre did not mean to harm her, then it botched the job pretty thoroughly.’

Ralph beamed down at me, not at all put out by my suddenly sharp tone. ‘Oh, the gentry!’ he said, amused. ‘The Quality voice!’

Then he swung around and shuffled to the side of the pool. I was ready to retract everything I had said, but Ralph had forgotten it already.

‘The way to do it is to make the trout think that your hand is part of the water,’ he said as he leaned over the lip of the pool. ‘They have very sensitive skins, and I think they can smell the water too. So one of the first tricks is to make your hands clean and cold. Before you even start to feel for him, you leave your hand in the water for a while.’

Ralph stripped off his jacket and spread it out for me to lie on. Then he rolled up his sleeves and washed his hands carefully in the water of the pool, and rubbed a little mud from the side into his palms. I pushed my lacy cuffs up above my elbows and copied him exactly, and then we lay, faces staring into the pool, hands in the water, for silent minutes.

The ripples from our touching the water cleared and steadied, and I found I was gazing at the reflection of us, side by side. The dark water was kind to Ralph, and he did not look old enough to be my father. It hid the dark lines drawn by pain on either side of his mouth and the deep parallel furrows between his eyebrows. In the shifting sunlight which filtered through the budding leaves over our heads he looked not old and not young, but timeless; as ageless as one of the trees around us, as the earth they were rooted in.

I thought of the legend about the Culler in the village, that he was one of the dark gods of the earth who had taken Beatrice away to the heart of the land, and I gave a little shudder and felt suddenly icy down my spine as I realized I was alone in the darkest part of the Wideacre woods with a killer.

Ralph turned his head at the almost imperceptible movement and gave me a long unsmiling stare. ‘Look at yourself,’ he said in a whisper, as if he knew what I had been thinking.

I turned my gaze back to the waters and saw my own face. I knew at once why John had turned pale to see me and why Ralph had stared at me that day in the village.

I had never seen Beatrice’s picture, nor heard a description of her, other than that her hair was chestnut red and her eyes hazel, almost green. But I had seen her face in the mirror of the dream and I had seen her smile in my mirror. Robbed of colour by the darkness of the pool, so my light hair and grey eyes were all one shadowy tone, I knew I was as like to her as a daughter. My eyes were not set at such a slant as Beatrice’s and my chin was not as determined as the one of the woman who had ruled this land. But seeing my reflection in that pool, alongside the reflection of her lover, no one could have said whether it was her or me.

‘You have no call to fear me,’ Ralph said, speaking to my reflection in the water, his face gentle. ‘I am not likely to forget that she is dead. I am not likely to forget that you are quite another lovely girl – however much you resemble her. And I am not a man to be haunted by ghosts.’

We were silent for a few minutes.

‘Hands cold?’ he asked. I nodded. ‘Now, without making a ripple, without disturbing the water, you move your hands under the bank. Make your hand straight, like the fish itself.’ Ralph drew his hands in towards the bank and spread out his arms, questing with blind fingertips under the water. ‘I have one,’ he said with quiet satisfaction. ‘Do you stay still now.’

I froze obediently and saw Ralph’s face darken with concentration.

‘You stroke his belly,’ he said, the words hardly louder than a breath. ‘You softly, softly run a finger down his belly. He likes that, it makes him all sleepy, all dreamy, all unawares. Then, when you feel him growing heavier and come into your hand, you snatch him with two ringers under his gills and flick him out!’

As he spoke, Ralph suddenly twitched and flung on to the bank between us a silver, slithering, gasping fish. I flinched back in instinctive fright and Ralph laughed aloud at my face. He took a stone from the bank and knocked the trout on the head, impartially, accurately, and then the thing was still except for a little twitch along the spine.

‘It’s still alive,’ I said uneasily.

‘Nay,’ Ralph said gently. ‘It is twitching from habit. It’s dead right enough.’

I regarded the smooth speckled scales with awe.

‘Next time you will do it,’ Ralph promised. ‘I should have let you try your luck with this one. But it is so long since I last poached that I could not resist the temptation when I felt him hiding under the bank like that.’

I smiled and nodded; but I understood not at all.

‘Would you like to try your luck again?’ Ralph invited. ‘Or should you be home?’

‘I have to be home at three for dinner,’ I said.

Ralph rolled on his back and squinted up at the sun through the criss-crossing branches. ‘You’ve half an hour,’ he said with certainty.

‘Uncle John will be late anyway,’ I said idly. ‘He went to Chichester to see the lawyers again. He really does want to turn over the farmland to Acre, you know.’

‘Aye,’ said Ralph. ‘I know he does. It’s what the future holds that worries me.’

‘I thought you would be pleased,’ I said shyly. ‘I thought you would see this as a great chance for Acre. Not just to get free of the poverty, but to be free of the power of the squires for ever.’

Ralph gave me a quick little smile. ‘But it doesn’t work like that, does it?’ he said gently. ‘Acre is not an island. Acre men and women have to leave the village to earn wages, and have to come home again. I can’t see anyone persuading them that their wages should be paid into a common fund! So the brightest and the best of the young people will try to leave the village and work outside where they earn good rates and keep all their money. Then there’s the gentry…’ He paused.

‘They’re not all bad,’ I said.

He smiled at me again. ‘Nay,’ he said. ‘Even the worst of them can be likeable enough rogues. But they have the power. If Acre was successful, they’d use that power against the village, I’ve no doubt of that. They’d find a statute on the books which said it was illegal. Or if they had no law, they’d pass one in a hurry. You cannot defeat the whole country by making one little place right.’

‘It could be a start,’ I said earnestly. I rolled around and lay on my front, hands under my chin so that our heads were close. ‘If it worked here, perhaps people would try it elsewhere.’

‘Aye,’ Ralph said. ‘And even if it worked for a short time, it would be good to say we tried it, and good to know why it failed. If the gentry came against it, that would be a lesson worth showing to the people who come after us with their own hopes and their ideas.’ He sighed heavily. ‘I’m torn,’ he said frankly. ‘I know in my heart it won’t work. It depends for its success on the whim of the squire. Unless the land was bought outright by the village and owned in law by them, then it depends on the will of the squire to keep going. So the power of the Laceys over Acre is unbroken. And I could trust no single person with that much power. It is as natural to abuse power as it is to breathe. That is true for every man and every woman. And if you are reared to having power, and in a class which is used to it, and in a country which permits you – nay! encourages you – to abuse the power you have, you’re corrupt! You cannot help it.’

‘Do you think I am corrupted?’ I asked in a small voice.

Ralph had been staring up at the branches above us, and he turned his head to look at me with a smile. Of course,’ he said gently, stating an obvious fact. ‘I’m not abusing you. But you come from the Quality and you are used to controlling everyone who is poorer than yourself. Put you in the hall, with a child to think of, and perhaps a couple of bad harvests and money getting tight, and I think you would do what anyone would do – you’d look to how you could make more money. And then you’d see Acre, and the people taking a share of the profits that you consider your own from the land you have claimed as your own for generations. I don’t think you’re evil, but I don’t think you’re a saint either. John has high ideas about what people can and cannot do. But I’d not trust even him if he lost his fortune and was poor and anxious.’

‘Will you not do it, then?’ I asked.

I was so sorry – sorry for Uncle John who had such high hopes of what we could do in Acre, and sorry for Acre that it should not be a place where the tradition of cruelty to the poor could be pushed back, even if it was in just this one little place. And very anxious for myself, for if Ralph Megson would not manage Wideacre, then I thought that John and Mama would insist that it must be sold.

Ralph sat up and gave a little laugh with no humour in it. ‘I’ll do it,’ he said. ‘I destroyed the power of the Laceys over the land and I have a duty to try and make something better. I always knew that it was easier to pull down than to build, and this is going to teach me that lesson in the hardest way.

‘I’ll do it if I can. And if I fail, if we fail, then I shall have the great pleasure of being able to say that I was right!’

I sat up and threw an arm around his shoulders and hugged him in my delight. Oh, yes!’ I said. ‘But it will not fail. You think all the squires are bad, but Richard would keep to a bargain with Acre, and John will be there, and you know I would! And you will be here to make it work, and it will be good!’

Ralph smiled at my enthusiasm and slid an arm around my waist to hold me to him, but his face was still set. ‘Nothing else I can do,’ he said, ‘but I’m just leading them out into the dark again.’

A kingfisher, like a spark of blue, arrowed up the little rill which goes to the Fenny from this pool and dived into a hole in the bank. We were still and it did not notice us for a moment, but sat on the edge of the hole, looking at us with dark bright eyes. Then it dipped its head and launched off down the little stream again, so close to the water that you could see the reflection, turquoise on the surface of the stream.

Ralph’s eyes were on it and he stayed still so as not to disturb it. I was frozen too, but not for the benefit of a river bird. Ralph’s hand was warm on the thin muslin at my waist. My arm was still around his shoulders. Our sides were touching. I had embraced him in a moment of quick thoughtless delight, but now I found myself close to him, held by him. And with the dream, and the pleasure of the dream in my mind, I could not bring myself to move away, though I knew I must.

Ralph dropped his hand, shook himself and glanced up at the sky. ‘You’d best go,’ he said. ‘You don’t want them to start wondering about you. Would you like the trout?’

‘You caught it,’ I said fairly, ‘you keep it.’

‘I caught it in a Lacey pool, on Lacey land, under a Lacey sky,’ Ralph said, ‘but I’m glad to have poached my dinner. Thank you.’

He wrapped it carefully in a couple of dock leaves and stuffed it in his jacket pocket as I rose to my feet. My knees were shaking, but I did not want him to know that. My face burned again. He was a man old enough to be my father, and a working man. And I had thrown my arm around him, and then not had the sense to immediately withdraw.

I stood to one side as he swung himself over to his wooden legs. He pulled down the breeches and smoothed them carefully over the angry skin of the stumps of his legs, and then he eased them into the wooden peg-legs. He grimaced, and there were small drops of sweat on his forehead by the time he had them on.

‘Are they very painful?’ I asked. From the glimpse I had, it looked as if they had been cauterized with boiling tar. Old wounds, but still red with the daily chafing of the wooden legs.

‘They’re the devil,’ Ralph said coolly. ‘But I am lucky to have survived at all.’

I wanted to ask him how the accident had happened, but some prickle down my spine warned me to keep silent. And I simply stood and watched as he put his back to a tree-trunk and pushed against it until he was upright. It was not easy, and the lines in his face deepened when he had done.

‘You can bring me my horse,’ he said, and it was a concession to me rather than a request for help.

I untied the mare he had hired from the Midhurst stables, and brought her over to him and then stood, awkward, at her head. I could not see how he would get into the saddle. She was not high – even I could have vaulted up – but I had sound legs, and ankles and knees to spring from. I held her head and waited.

Ralph grasped the pommel and the crupper of the saddle and hauled himself up the horse until he was level with the saddle and half-way across it. He reared up, taking his weight on his hands, and swung one leg over. Then he smiled sweetly down at me as I stood at his horse’s head.

‘You’re easy with horses,’ he said, noting the casual way I stood beside her. ‘They tell me in the village you ride like Beatrice.’

I shrugged, my face rueful at another similarity between me and the Wideacre witch.

‘I’m surprised you have no horse of your own,’ he said.

‘Uncle John went to buy us horses,’ I said. ‘One for Richard and a horse of my own for me.’ I could not hide the longing in my voice. ‘But there was nothing suitable at the Chichester fair, and so now it is all put off.’

Ralph made a funny face, like you might make at a crying baby. TU see what I can do,’ he said; and that half-promise from Ralph was worth more than a contract written in blood from another man. ‘Thank you for my trout, Miss Lacey,’ he said, teasing me with my name.

I went closer to the horse’s shoulder, pretending I wanted to pat her neck. In truth I wanted to be near him. He caught my hand as it stroked her shoulder and bent low. He kissed it, with a kiss as gentle as the brush of a little bird’s wing. ‘Good day,’ he said and his voice was warm, almost tender. ‘Good day.’

He turned his horse’s head and was gone. The dappled shadow of the woods hid him at once. I could hear the chink of the bridle, but he was swiftly hidden, following the old path I thought was known only to Richard and me. I stood, dazed, by the pool, watching the flicker of light and shade on the brown surface; and then I brushed down my dress with meticulous care, retied my bonnet and headed for home.

But I was not happy. Ralph might be at peace, with his hands cold from the river and a fresh trout in his pocket. But Ralph was a simple man, blessedly simple. He was content to have been Beatrice’s lover, and her murderer, and to have my eyes upon him; he could smile at my measured closeness. When I was with him, I could feel only delight. But when he rode away and left me alone I was uneasy.

The old anxiety of the dream was coming back to me. The sweet humming of Wideacre now seemed more like a warning. I could not live in both worlds. I could not be the daughter my mama wanted and the tranced, passionate, careless girl of the Wideacre woods. I could not be both Quality and a girl who would throw her arm around a working man’s shoulders. I could not be freely myself and also be an indoor girl. I went home scowling against the bright sunlight. The thread of longing which had drawn me out into the woods like a golden skein pulled by a skilled spinner was now broken and crumpled. And it did not seem like gold, it seemed as if it were gilt. Muddy gilt, tangled; and all wrong.

Uncle John came home from Chichester after dinner, smiling but wan. ‘I think I have a compromise solution,’ he said.

‘Not now,’ Mama said firmly. ‘Now you must rest.’

He laughed a little at her authoritative tone, but went wearily enough to the stairs. ‘I should like to see Mr Megson in the library before supper,’ he said to Richard, who stood in the hall with me and watched him slowly mounting the stairs, his knuckles white on the stair-rail.

‘Richard may go and tell him,’ Mama said. ‘But tell Mr Megson not to be later than nine, and explain that John may not talk all evening, Richard.’

‘Make sure he knows that I am an utter baby who has to be tucked up in bed by eleven o’clock!’ Uncle John said with a sidelong gleam at Mama. ‘And say that if he is in any doubts about me, he is to call in Dr Celia!’

Mama chuckled at that, but her grip on Uncle John’s arm never wavered, and she led him upstairs without another word from him.

Richard watched them go, and his expression was sour. ‘Do you want to come too?’ he asked.

I shook my head. The wildness, the dreaminess, was gone from me. I wanted to be the girl behind the tea-urn at tea-time, the young lady of the house stitching in the parlour. The seedlings I had left so carelessly in the garden when I had run off were wilted, but might recover left in the cool and steeped with water. I wanted to sit in the front parlour and chat with Mama. I had a sudden distaste for the brightness of the sun outside the window, for the waves of sweet-smelling greenness and the summer heat. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Mama wants me at home. I’ll stay in.’

Richard shot me a swift searching glance. ‘Not like you,’ he said, ‘not like you not to want to come down to Acre with me.’

‘No,’ I said languidly. I was so tired I did not even care for the hint of complaint in Richard’s voice. He surely could not imagine himself neglected. And if he did, I should make it up to him another day. I simply could not face the walk down the dusty lane to Acre in the bright sunlight, and I did not want to see Ralph in that cramped little cottage with Becky Miles waiting on us, and Richard watching me.

‘I shall stay indoors this afternoon,’ I said again. The front parlour seemed like a refuge and I hoped the company of my mama would keep me safe from Beatrice and from the dreamy bliss I had known when I was Beatrice lying in Ralph’s arms.

‘All right,’ said Richard. ‘If you’ve developed a sudden liking for embroidery, I shan’t dissuade you. I’ll take tea with him if he asks me. I wonder if his goshawk has come yet.’

‘No, it hasn’t,’ I said, and could have bitten my tongue off with irritation at the slip. I knew, without being told, that Ralph would never have been out tickling for trout if his goshawk had just arrived, bumped and angry from the London stage.

‘How do you know?’ Richard demanded. He looked at me closely, and under his narrow scrutiny I felt my colour rise.

‘Mrs Gough told me,’ I said, grasping for the nearest lie. ‘She slept in Acre last night, with her sister. She said the London stage was delayed yesterday, so it can’t have come.’

Richard nodded as if he believed me, but there was a shadow in his blue eyes which warned me that he doubted what I had said. He chose not to pursue it then. ‘Tell Mama-Aunt I shall be back for supper,’ he said.

I nodded. He bent his head to kiss me on the lips at parting, but I turned my face away and his mouth touched my cheek instead. He drew back and looked at me curiously, but said nothing. He turned to the front door and I let him go.

I went to the window-seat in the parlour and watched him jog down the drive, his gait less coltish now he had grown broader and his legs seemed less long. Then the parlour door opened and Mama came in.

‘Oh, good!’ she exclaimed, seeing me waiting for her. ‘I wanted you to help me choose a new brocade for the seats and the curtains in the dining-room.’

I crossed the room to her and hugged her tight. ‘You know I have no eye for colour,’ I said, ‘but I shall agree with you. I want to work indoors this afternoon, Mama,’ I said, ‘and I wish you would find me something to do indoors tomorrow as well. The sun hurt my eyes in the garden this morning, and I feel weary,’

Her soft brown eyes examined my face carefully. ‘I had thought you were not yourself,’ she said gently, ‘when you were so irritable at dinner. What is the matter, my dear?’

‘It’s…’ I started and then stopped. Then I spoke in a rush. ‘It is since I put up my hair and Uncle John came home, and I reminded him of Beatrice, Mama. Everyone in the village, and even Mrs Gough and Stride, look at me as if they half expect to see her. It makes me feel so odd. And she was not even a very nice woman, was she?’

‘No!’ Mama said instantly. ‘She was many things, but she was never that. There is much about her that I feel I should tell you, my dear. But not while we are here on Wideacre. Not while there are so many people around us who are still so haunted here. While we live here, I just want you to remember that you are Beatrice’s kin, but you are my daughter. Any resemblance between you and her is because you have the Lacey pride, and the Lacey tilt to your head. All else is fancy and the fault of this tiny little world where no one goes anywhere but Chichester, and there are long nights to make up nonsense and frighten each other half to death with ghost stories.

‘You are my child,’ she said firmly, as if that were the key to keep me safe. ‘Whatever your breeding, I reared you for my own. I am not haunted by Beatrice or Wideacre, and you need not be either. Anyway,’ she said, reliably prosaic, ‘you are just a girl growing up, my dear, and they are the moodiest people in the world. My half-sister was a thousand times worse than you at your age. She once threw a plate at a footman! My mama had her whipped. You will have to learn to curb your temper and your tongue, whatever your feelings. Everything else is just fancy.’

I shifted along the window-seat and laid my head on her shoulder, and she put a protective arm around me. I closed my eyes and sniffed the sweet flower water she wore on her hair and silks, and we sat in the sunshine in the bow-window for a long, long time, until the sun started dropping behind the higher trees of the park, and I no longer ached for Ralph, Beatrice’s young lover, Ralph, nor shied away in fear from the thought of him.

After tea in the parlour, when Uncle John did not join us, nor Richard return home, Mama ordered Stride to lay up a little tray with a scone and some jam and cream, a couple of macaroons and a pot of fresh-brewed Indian tea – the way Uncle John liked it, strong and black with neither cream nor lemon nor sugar-and carried it herself into the library. She closed the door behind her, but I heard his soft words of welcome to her and his exclamation at the pretty tray, and then her voice explaining something to him, asking something of him. I guessed that she was talking about me and took care to close the parlour door so I should not be tempted to eavesdrop. I took my seat in the parlour, the tea-urn still hissing softly before me, and I longed to be the girl my mama thought she had, a good daughter whose only wildness was due to her being reared with a boy cousin in rural isolation, and whose only moodiness was due to her becoming, slowly and awkwardly, a woman.

I did not open my eyes, even when the tea things were cleared. It was not Stride waiting in the parlour, but Jenny Hodgett from the lodge gate, who had been trained at Havering Hall and was now back to work on Wideacre. Her parents had kept the gate at the hall for my papa and for his papa before him. When the hall was burned down and the squire died, no one thought to evict them. So they stayed on, keepers of an open gate, guardians of a deserted drive. She cleared the things as softly as she could and took the urn from the table without disturbing me. I heard the door close behind her and then I think I dozed, for when I opened my eyes again my mama was there, and she had been in the library with Uncle John for some time.

‘Tired, my dear?’ she asked gently.

‘A little,’ I acknowledged, smiling to take the invalidish tone out of the words.

Mama nodded and went to her usual seat at the hearth, where the grate was now filled with a little pot of pale peonies I had dug up in the garden of Wideacre Hall and brought on in the warmth of the room.

‘I have been speaking to your uncle about his plans for us all,’ she said. ‘And I have some ideas of my own too!’

‘Were the Chichester solicitors helpful?’ I asked politely. ‘Can he offer some guarantees for Acre?’

‘Yes,’ Mama said. ‘The Wideacre heir and Acre village have to be equally bound by a legal contract, and they will both contribute to a savings scheme. Both can withdraw, but Acre keeps the fund. And if Acre is sold within five years, then a proportion of the profit is to be paid to Acre as compensation.’

I nodded. ‘Is Uncle John going to ask Mr…Megson what he thinks?’ I asked. I hesitated over his name, and it sounded odd in my voice.

‘Of course,’ said Mama. ‘John thinks that Mr Megson is the key to winning Acre to the plan. It will only work if all of us, Mr Megson, Richard, you and I are prepared to work very hard until the village is put to rights again, she said. ‘John wants me to take responsibility for the health and education of the village children and babies. He wants Richard to supervise the rebuilding of the hall, and he wants the two of you to assist Mr Megson on the land.’

I said nothing, but looked at her wide-eyed. She gave me a little smile. ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ she said wryly. ‘You are thinking that you have never seen me involved with Acre. That I was afraid of the village and did not like you going there. That was once true, but it all must change. Everything must change on Wideacre if this experiment is to work.

‘And I was not always afraid of Acre,’ she said honestly. ‘There was a season, two seasons, when I was very much, involved in the lives of the village people. Now I have something to offer them, something more than mere sympathy. I want to go back into the village and set things to rights, as I should have done earlier if we had had the money to do it.’

I looked at her with new respect. This was a side to Mama that I had not seen before when I had thought of her as the frightened widow in the Dower House, dependent on her step-papa’s charity for her food and on her brother-in-law’s gifts for her money. Something of that must have shown in my eyes, for she gave a little chuckle of amusement.

‘I am well aware, Julia, that you think that no one knows the land but you and Richard! But I do assure you that I am not entirely incompetent!’

‘Not at all, Mama!’ I said hastily and untruthfully. ‘But what does Uncle John want me to do? And when do I start?’

‘You may as well start at once,’ Mama said calmly. ‘And so may I. Mr Megson is coming this evening, and if he agrees to the new proposals, then I shall go down to the village tomorrow and speak to Dr Pearce about opening the village school again. You and Richard and Mr Megson will have to decide about priorities on the land. I suppose you’ll start ploughing and sowing?’

‘Too late this season,’ I said. ‘But if Uncle John plans to use turnips, and also wants to try some new crops of fruit, we could get them in ready for them to be productive next year.’

Mama looked at me shrewdly. She had supervised my education, taught me my letters and the names of the birds and flowers. She had seen me learn Latin and Greek at Richard’s shoulder. She knew full well that no one had ever taught me the times when the land should be readied and crops sown, and that I had never seen a ploughing team on Wideacre. ‘How do you know?’ she asked softly.

I met her wary look with absolute honesty. ‘I don’t know,’ I said truthfully. ‘I just do.’

She nodded as if it confirmed something she had already heard from John. ‘It would be possible to make a great deal of fuss about that,’ she said levelly, ‘and about the slight resemblance you bear to your Aunt Beatrice in your looks. But it is essential, Julia, that you do not concern yourself with it. Your Uncle John believes that you have inherited the Lacey ability to farm. All well and good. But do not start worrying that you are therefore like your Aunt Beatrice. You are my daughter, and as such you can be a farmer, just as I shall have to be a village schoolteacher for this next year. We are all going to have to work for the good of Wideacre.’

I beamed at her. I had a wonderful sense of home-coming, of growth, of at last seeing my way before me. And if I could feel unafraid of the dream and unafraid of Beatrice, and work and live on Wideacre then I should have an enviable life indeed.