The Favoured Child

11

No one expected Wideacre to show a profit that first season, but we had cut a good crop of hay – ‘Half flowers,’ Ralph said crossly – and that meant we could feed the sheep and the cows more cheaply through the winter. None of the fruit yielded that first year, of course, but we got the raspberry canes planted in straight smooth rows in the lower fields alongside the drive to Wideacre Hall. We planted the strawberries in a new field alongside the Fenny where we thought they would catch the sun and be sheltered from the wind which blows off the downs. My apple trees had taken and were growing straight and tall. They were spaced right too, which I thought something of a small miracle, so I took Ted Tyacke’s ironic congratulations at face value – and as no more than my due.

Richard was much away in the autumn, preparing for his entry to the University of Oxford after Christmas. Uncle John took him up to Oxford and left him there, coming back by London to advise the MacAndrew Company about the likely changes in India which would come from the French wars, so Mama and I had a few weeks alone together on the land, working like skivvies all day and meeting only at dinner.

Mama’s schoolchildren had progressed from their practical training and were starting to learn their letters; the parlour was littered every evening with brightly coloured paints and card which Mama used to cut out letter shapes.

I was working: in Acre, ordering repairs to cottages too long neglected; on the downs overseeing the planting of hedges and the building of fences to control the sheep; on the common, watching the coppices for the cutting and letting them collect firewood; and, mostly, in the fields. Wherever I was, crossing my fingers behind my back for luck as I made a decision, Ralph Megson was there too.

I could not have said what he was to me. Sometimes he was like a father, sometimes he was like a lover, sometimes he was like a teacher. All the time he was a friend. And as the days went past, and the November days got shorter and colder and more and more miserable for outdoors work, we became less like pupil and teacher and more like partners.

He met me on the bridge over the Fenny one day at the start of December. I had stopped Misty to watch the river swirling under the stone arches, and Ralph had strolled up the lane from Acre.

‘You look warm,’ he said.

I nodded. I had a new riding habit, as purple as a plum, made from thick wool. I had it buttoned tight around my neck, for the day was damp and there was the smell of slushy snow on the air.

‘Sheep all right?’ Ralph asked. He knew I had been up to check them that morning.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But I think Giles Shepherd is getting too old. He is ill again and his son Jimmy is too small to take over. Besides, Mama wants him in school.’

Ralph nodded. ‘I know,’ he said briefly. ‘There’s no one else who knows about sheep in the village. We’ll have to think about maybes hiring a shepherd for a season or two after Christmas. He could work with a couple of the village lads and teach them how it’s done.’

‘Mama would know which boys,’ I said. ‘But Jimmy does love the sheep. He’d be an obvious choice. His best friend is Simon. Perhaps they could work on the sheep together.’

Ralph nodded then clutched at my arm. ‘Look!’ he said. ‘Grilse! Coming upstream!’

I bent over and stared at the water. Very slowly, as if very weary, a female salmon was swimming heavily in the water. She had made the long journey up river from the sea, leaping over the dams for mill ponds, beating her way up against the current. She was heavy with eggs, and all the little salmon which hatched from the eggs would leave the Fenny, returning when they were grown.

‘I love salmon,’ Ralph said emphatically. ‘Miss Julia, you must excuse me for the day. I shall follow her, and when she has spawned I shall net her. And you will forgive me.’

‘I will indeed,’ I said, smiling at the absorbed face. ‘And you may send a couple of salmon steaks up to the Dower House and Mrs Gough will cook them for your dinner if you will dine with us.’

‘Aye,’ Ralph said absently. ‘Honoured.’ And he put two fingers in his mouth and let out a piercing whistle.

At once two of the little boys of Acre came running to him, and Ralph told them to watch the salmon and follow her wherever she went without molesting her, while he fetched his horse. Without another word to me he went as fast as his rolling stride could carry him, back to his cottage for his horse and his net.

Later that day three plump salmon steaks were carried to the back door by Little ‘Un, who presented Mr Megson’s compliments in a bashful whisper. That night for dinner we had salmon pie with a pale brown crust of pastry on top and a creamy white sauce inside.

‘Will we have a Christmas party this year?’ Mr Megson asked Mama. ‘I could set one in train in the village. You’d be cramped here.’

‘I’d like us to do something here at the Dower House,’ she said. ‘You organize a party in the village for Christmas; but we will have at least the children here later, perhaps at Twelfth Night. I must write and ask Dr MacAndrew what he would wish.’

‘Does he know when he is coming home?’ Ralph Megson asked, passing Mama a bowl of crystallized fruits.

‘Not yet,’ she replied. ‘The business of the MacAndrew Company is complex, and no one knows as much about India as John. Do you need him here?’

‘Not at all,’ he said, smiling at me. ‘He left behind a very competent deputy.’

Mama smiled. ‘I believe so,’ she said. ‘I cannot get a word of sense out of her unless it concerns something which grows on Wideacre or eats a Wideacre crop. I don’t believe she has opened a book or played a tune in months.’

I nodded my head. It was true.

‘She’s a Lacey,’ Ralph said softly. ‘She takes after her papa.’

‘After Harry?’ My mother’s eyes were suddenly sharp on Ralph’s face. ‘Do you think she resembles Harry?’

Ralph Megson nodded. I think only I would have known he was lying, and I knew why. He was trying to protect Mama and me from the whispers of the village which were growing into a chorus – the whispers which said that I was not just as like to Beatrice as two peas in a pod, but that I was Beatrice, that Beatrice the golden girl had come back to them to make the village good and the land grow again.

‘They talk in the village of her being a Lacey girl like Beatrice,’ he said, ‘but to my mind it is her father she resembles the most. And they tell me that when he inherited, at much the same age as Miss Julia, he was Wideacre-mad for many seasons.’

The tension around Mama’s brown eyes softened as if Ralph had given her a draught of poppies. ‘Indeed, yes,’ she said. ‘Harry was out on the land almost every day the summer before we were married. D’you know, Mr Megson, I had almost forgot! Everyone remembers Beatrice running the estate, but for a couple of years it was all Harry.’

Stride brought in the port, and Mama and I rose to leave Mr Megson with the decanter, but he stayed us with a gesture.

‘Please don’t leave me in solitary state,’ he said. ‘I am a working man, Lady Lacey, and I never drink port. May we have a glass of ratafia together – before I have to go home?’

So Ralph Megson, a labouring man, sat in our dining-room and laughed with me, and smiled at my mama, and went home under a clear sky with a cold wintry moon to light his way.

He took with him a secret, the open secret which everyone knew, which they whispered in Acre: every day I grew more and more like Beatrice, the last Lacey girl on the land. Every day I resembled her more closely, every day they heard her clear voice giving orders, they heard her laughter when someone joked with me. Out of respect to Mama and to me, no one spoke of it directly. But the whole village knew – in their credulous benighted imaginations – that Beatrice had come back to them.

That I was her.

I could not learn to laugh at it.

Often and often I heard the singing in my ears which meant that Beatrice was coming to me, and I would give an order, or answer a question, and have that strange dreamy sensation of having been in that field, waited by that gate before. And then the old man or old woman to whom I was talking would nod and smile at me and say softly, ‘Welcome, child, welcome,’ and I knew that they had been there with Beatrice, and that I had just spoken her words.

It made me shiver; even in the brightest wintry sunshine it would make me shiver when they looked at me and spoke to me thus. But I would shake my head, like a puppy coming out of a river, and say, ‘No! No! It is me! Julia Lacey! Don’t think of anyone else.’

And they would smile at me with their eyes bright with knowledge, with no sense at all that what they thought they saw, what they thought they knew, was quite impossible.

Christmas was quiet by old Wideacre standards, but Uncle John was home from London, and Richard home from Oxford, and that made Mama happy, and me happy. So Ralph held a Christmas party in the village and Mama planned a Twelfth Night party for her schoolchildren in the stable yard of the Dower House.

The old fiddle-player of Acre had died long since, and we feared there would be no dancing. But on Boxing Day Richard came in and said that Jem had told him the gypsies on the common would play in return for their supper and a shilling, so the children of Acre could have their little dance after all.

All we had to worry about on the eve of Twelfth Night was that the starry sky would stay clear for a sunny day so that the children could eat and dance and romp in the yard.

We need not have worried. Uncle John’s greeting to Mama in the morning when she came downstairs was a joyous, ‘Good morning! The sun is smiling on the righteous and you have a wonderful day for your party!’

We breakfasted late, for Mama and I went down to the kitchen to prepare and bake tray after tray of sweetmeats for the party. Just as Stride was clearing away the plates, we heard the scrape of a violin and the sharp clear whistle of a wooden flute and we ran to the window to see the gypsies playing an introductory jig for us, just for us, on the front lawn of the house.

‘Oh! They’re very good!’ cried Mama, her feet tapping, and then she laughed aloud as Richard caught her around the waist and galloped her round the breakfast table, the china rattling and Mama’s silk skirts sweeping perilously close to the coffee-pots.

‘Not in here!’ she cried, breaking away. ‘Richard! You are a gypsy yourself! If you must dance, take Julia outside and dance on the lawn. There is not room in here to shuffle a minuet, let alone one of your gallops!’

Richard laughed and we opened the front door and tumbled out to dance on the lawn to gypsy music while Mrs Gough, Jenny, Stride and Jem laid the tables in the stable yard and the children from Acre lined up along the garden wall to wave and smile at us.

They came in quick enough when I called them to the stable yard and cleared the table so that not a crumb was left. I saw that they did not grab at the food as if they were starving, and they did not tuck food into the waistbands of their clothes for hungry mouths at home. The immediate provision in Acre had been the start of a long plan of putting money and food into the village, and there was no starvation in this part of the downs any more. John nodded at Mama and I saw her smile in return as they both recognized that Acre was coming right at last.

It was well the sun shone that day, for that was the last we saw of it for some time. We had constant snow and ice, but worst of all was the freezing fog which rolled up from the Fenny every night and morning and chilled the little house until the very sandstone walls seemed to hold the coldness and to ooze icy water like cold sweat. We had fires in every room and Mama marvelled that we had managed before with only one fire in the parlour and fires lit in the bedrooms only in the mornings.

The last weeks of January were no better, with gales which blew the fog away but set the house creaking like a ship at sea. In the nights we could hear slates clattering off the roof into the stable yard. The ground was frozen hard and there was no ploughing or planting possible until the freeze broke. The men did not even dig ditches. The only work they could do was cutting the hedgerows back, and that was a task which took some time.

So I had many hours sitting indoors and gazing blankly out of the Dower House windows at the freezing fog in the lane, and many evenings watching the firelight in the parlour. It seemed that whenever I was still and alone, whenever I had ears to listen, Beatrice was there.

And then one night I had a dream.

It started with that strange sweet singing which came in my ears sleeping or waking, warning me that Beatrice was near. I think I turned in my bed then, for I remember staring blankly at the ceiling of my room with wide-open eyes and seeing from the grey light of the ceiling that it was a cold dawn, and hearing the wind moan around the chimney-pots. It moaned like the ghost of someone just died, ill loved and locked out. I pulled the covers around my ears and buried my face deeper in the pillow to shut out the eerie calling.

And then I slept.

At once I dreamed I was in Acre, not the Acre of Beatrice’s day, with the front gardens bright with flowers, but Acre as it is now: walls newly lime-washed, roofs mended, and the front gardens a frigid mess of new-turned earth and dung ready for planting seeds. I was standing on the little patch of ground they called Miss Beatrice’s Corner, outside Acre church. The vicarage was in front of me, the tall spire of the church behind. And the wind was blowing through my hair and tearing at my gown in utter silence, in deathly quiet, though the rain was sheeting down upon me, around me, and when I turned my face up to the thick sky, I felt it was raining through me. But I was not cold. I did not even feel wet.

I was afraid then, for I knew it was not an ordinary dream. And I knew I had to do something, but I did not know what it was.

I turned around to look at the church, and as I did so there was a deep heart-stopping roar of thunder, as if the very clouds were bumping together right overhead, and a crack like the spheres breaking as a shard of lightning came down and rammed a cross-bow bolt into the church spire.

It split it – as a good archer can split a wand. I watched in silence as the spire peeled apart like a shredded bough and leaned perilously outward. And fell – still in the dreamy absolute silence – towards the cottages. The pretty little cottage where Ted Tyacke and his mother lived, the Brewers’ one next door and the third cottage in the row, which belonged to the Clay family – all of them came under the grotesque shadow of the falling spire.

I opened my mouth to scream for them, to warn them; but no sound came. The tower fell upon them like the finger of a cruel god and crushed the houses into dust.

I stood in the rain, the silent rain, and watched.

At once the fire bloomed out of the ruins like some mad weed, too fast in the growing. It shot great fat greedy flames into the rain and hissed against the water like a nest of snakes. It leaped down the ruins, feeding on the thatch of the cottages and the light wood of the inside walls and floorboards. And I waited in silence, for I knew I could say nothing and do nothing as it ran riot down the thatched roofs of the row of cottages.

People tumbled screaming out into the street in the pouring rain, one of the Carter children with her nightgown afire. I saw them jump on her to try to smother the flames and I saw her mouth open to scream, but I could hear nothing. Her father tried to plunge back into the burning house, for one of the children was left behind, and I saw his face, as naked as an anguished animal’s, when they held him back.

The fire took long effective strides down the street, and every house it touched bloomed red. Acre was wrecked.

I woke then, shuddering with a cold sweat, and with my bedclothes on the floor. It was early, it was too early to rise. It was only just dawn. It had been the noise of the high wind which had given me the dream, the high wind and the sound of the rain on my window-pane. A fearful dream. A most frightful dream.

I shivered as if I had really been out there in the storm, and leaned out of my bed and heaved my blankets back on to the bed. I burrowed down in them like a chilled and frightened child.

I dozed at once.

At once I was standing on the corner of grass outside the churchyard and I was in the dream again. I looked around again and saw the lightning split the spire in two. I heard the great boom of thunder, and saw the spire toppling sideways to crash down on to the Tyackes’ cottage, and I cried out for Ted and his mother, and my voice made no sound in the silent storm.

I could feel myself tossing in my bed to be free of the dream, and I could feel it holding me like a torturer in a merciless grip; and I had to watch it, all over again: the fire, the burning child, the end of Acre.

Then it stopped, and I felt my half-waking body shudder and sob, and turn over once again for sleep.

And then it started again.

I was outside the churchyard on the patch of ground they called Miss Beatrice’s Corner.

I dreamed that dream over and over again like a trapped ferret which runs up and down its cage on a treadmill which no one but it can see.

‘Miss Julia?’ said Jenny, standing by my bedside with my hot chocolate in her hand. ‘Are you ill?’ I gaped up at her.

Oh, Jenny, I’m so glad you woke me!’ I exclaimed. ‘I have had such a nightmare you wouldn’t believe! And I dreamed it over and over!’

I sat up in bed and pushed the hair from my forehead. It was lank and damp as if I had been tossing on my pillow and sweating all night.

‘Did you dream true?’ she asked. She turned her back to me and went to tend the fire. ‘If you dream over and over, ‘tis said to be a message,’ she threw over her shoulder. ‘Was there a message, Miss Julia?’

Her hand was on the coal-scuttle, and I saw her fingers. They were clasped in the age-old sign against witchcraft: thumb between the first and second finger, to make the one-handed sign of the cross to ward off the devil and his sisters. The sign, her words, the dream, all came together and I lost my wits indeed.

‘Yes,’ I said. And it was not my voice which spoke. ‘I must dress and go to Acre,’ I said, and my tongue felt heavy in my mouth.

She shot one frightened look at me, but I did not mind her. ‘It’s raining…’ she said weakly.

‘It will be worse than rain if I do not go,’ I said, and I slid out of bed and did not feel the floorboards cold and hard beneath my bare feet. She held out my linen to me and I did not feel it chill against my skin. I let her pull my laces tight and I did not breathe in against the constriction. She held out my riding habit to me in silence and I wordlessly stepped into it. Then she dipped a curtsy and whirled from the room while I twisted my hair into a knot and pinned my hat.

She would tell Jem I needed Misty, I knew. And sure enough, when I walked hazy-eyed into the stable yard, he was holding her reins and waiting for me.

‘Jenny’s a fool,’ he said abruptly. ‘What are you doing up this early without notice to your ma?’

I looked at him without seeing him. ‘I have to go to Acre,’ I said. ‘There is danger for them in the village.’

Jem scowled in anger. ‘I don’t believe in none of that,’ he said truculently. ‘What are you doing in the village, Miss Julia?’

TU see Ralph,’ I said.

At once Jem looked relieved and put his hand out to throw me up into the saddle. ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘Ralph Megson’ll know what’s best.’

Misty stood as still as a statue, her coat darkening with the drenching rain. I felt a trickle of water dripping from my hat and going down my back but I did not shiver. I clicked to her and she went smooth-paced out of the stable yard into the mire of the drive. It was heavy going, but she managed a canter out of the drive and down the lane towards Acre. And all the time, though my body moved with the horse, my mind was enmeshed in the dream. AU I could see was the spire splitting like an axed stake.

Ralph was awake and out of his bed. I could see his silhouette before the firelight in the front room. He turned his head at the sound of the hoofbeats, came to his front door and opened it to look out.

‘Julia!’ he said in surprise. ‘What’s the matter?’

I stayed on horseback looking down on him, and I knew that I had the face of a madwoman. A face without expression, a face blank with fear at a horror which no one but me could see.

‘We have to clear the cottages on the north side of the lane,’ I said. It was hard to speak. I could scarce move my tongue or my lips. ‘The church spire is going to be struck by lightning and it will fall on the Tyackes’ cottage, and on the Brewers’ and the Clays’. Then there will be a fire. It will wipe out Acre,’ I said, my voice very low. ‘We have to clear them out of those three cottages and then we have to make a fire-break.’

Ralph stared at me. He opened his mouth to speak, and then he stopped. He strode out into the rain and glared at me, trying to read my mind in my face. ‘Julia?’ he asked.

‘It is true,’ I said. ‘I have dreamed it over and over all night. I know it is true, Ralph. And if you will not help me, then I will order them out on my own.’

‘Wait,’ he said, and turned back into his house, leaving me like a wet marble statue on a wet marble horse in the rain.

I meant to wait. Who in Acre ever disobeyed an order of Ralph’s? But as soon as his back was turned on me, I touched my heel against Misty’s side and rode back up the lane towards the church.

I did not dare stand where I had stood in the dream. I feared that would make the thunder bellow and the lightning come down upon us. I could not remember from the dream what time of day it had been. I did not know how long we had to save Acre, to keep the Carter girl from burning, to keep the dreadful weight of the broken spire off the fragile roof above Ted and his mother, but I knew we did not have long.

The sky had been grey in the dream and I could not tell if it was a stormy dawn or stormy noontide; but the little girl had been in her nightshift, and the Carters were early risers.

I slid from the saddle and tied Misty to the vicarage gate – the south side of the street – and then I ran up the front path to Ted Tyacke’s cottage, hammered on his door and stepped back so he could see me.

‘Julia! What is it?’

‘Come down, Ted,’ was all I said. And I waited for my old playmate in the rain by his cottage door.

He had pulled on his breeches and a jerkin but was still barefoot. ‘Come in,’ he said, and took my hand to draw me into the cottage out of the rain. I shied back like a frightened horse and took one scared look over my shoulder at the church spire beside the cottage.

‘No!’ I said.

He saw the fright on my face and that scared him. It made him listen to me as I told him I had dreamed I saw his home crushed and Acre fired. Then he turned his head and called to his mother, and went indoors and pulled on his boots. ‘I believe you,’ he said briefly. ‘We’ll get our things out into the lane. Go and wake the others.’

I turned back to the lane and Ralph Megson was there, waiting beside my horse, his dark face inscrutable, his greying hair spiky with the wet. ‘What now?’ he asked as though he had nothing to say in the matter.

‘We must wake the village,’ I said. ‘The first three cottages will be wrecked, but if we pull down the next two – the Smiths’ and the Coopers’ – then that can be a fire-break. We can fight the fire there.’

Ralph nodded.

‘Will you ring the church bell?’ he inquired.

‘Oh, yes!’ I said. I had not thought of it before. ‘Yes!’ But then I stopped dead at the thought of going into the church with the storm coming nearer. And as I hesitated, there was a dull rumble of thunder at the head of the downs and the sky darkened.

I gave a little sob. ‘I don’t dare,’ I said.

Ralph folded his arms. ‘Your dream,’ he said coldly. ‘Your sight. If you think you have seen aright, then you must do it.’ And he turned his back on me to loosen Misty’s girth as if I were paying a social call to Acre and as if there were not a thunderstorm at our heels and the rain pouring down on our heads.

‘Ralph…’ I said. It was the first time I had ever deliberately used his first name.

He turned, and his smile was as old as the land. ‘If you are the favoured child, then you are in the right,’ he said softly. ‘Prove yourself, Julia.’

I gasped and whirled on my heel and ran up the couple of steps to the lich-gate and flung it open. I was inside the church porch before I had time to think of it, before I had time to be afraid; and I had the furry bell-pull in my hand before I took breath. I dropped my weight on it and gritted my teeth when there was no sound. The wheel-mounted bell had moved, but not enough for the clapper to strike. I took my feet off the ground and swung like a playing child, and then I heard the deep loud tolling of the bell and tugged it down and dropped my weight on it for half a dozen times before I left off and went back outside.

The sky had darkened even in that short time and its ominous yellowy tinge made the faces of the people in the lane look white. They had gathered around Ralph, but I saw him nod towards me and I knew he had refused them an explanation. I came down the church path and paused at the head of the steps where they could see me.

‘I had a dream,’ I said awkwardly. I could hear my voice was thin, girlish, without authority. I sounded silly; it needed only one laugh, only one quick jest and they would go back to their houses cursing the vanity of a girl who would drag them out of warm beds into the rain because she had a nightmare.

‘Listen to me!’ I said desperately. ‘I dreamed there was a storm and the church was struck and the spire fell down that way.’ I made a chopping gesture with my hand towards Ted’s cottage. ‘It crushed the three cottages, and then they caught fire. The fire spread down the row.’

I paused. Ned Smith, his face blurred with sleep, rubbed his hands across his face. ‘Are you saying you dreamed true?’ he demanded.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I am sure.’

‘We must pull down two cottages, the two after the Clays’,’ I said. ‘That’s the Coopers’ cottage…and yours, Ned Smith.’

His face darkened, and there was a murmur from the crowd. ‘Pull down my cottage for a fire-break for a fire which has not happened?’ he demanded.

I looked around for Ralph. He was at the back of the crowd beside my horse. He was not going to help me. Ted was there, and Matthew Merry; Clary was running up the lane, her skirts held high out of the mud, her legs bare. But none of them could help me; not even those three, my best friends, could help me. I feared I could not do it on my own. I waited for a moment. There was nothing I could say.

And then, like the answer to a prayer, I heard the high sweet singing over the noise of the wind and the rain and the rumble of thunder ringing on the downs.

‘Yes,’ I said, and there was something in my voice which would not be contradicted. ‘Yes. I know it is necessary. I would not order it if I did not know.’

There was a sigh, like the wind before a rainstorm, which ran through all the older ones when they heard me speak thus. And I knew it was because they recognized my voice. Her voice.

‘I am Beatrice’s heir,’ I said, calling on her name recklessly, regardless of what it would cost me come the time I wanted to be an indoor girl again. ‘I am the favoured child. I have the sight. Pull down the houses.’

They moved then, they moved as if we were all in a dream, as if we were all as mad as one another, and they went into the cottages which were to be pulled down, and into the cottages which would be crushed, and carried out the furniture and stacked it in the street. They made a chain of people and passed the bedding and dry goods hand to hand into the Smiths’ loose boxes; and then Ned Smith took his bill hook and his axe and started ripping the thatch off his house and throwing it down in the street, and the other men climbed up with hatchets to hack the rafters out.

The vicarage door opened, and I saw Dr Pearce, his face white, his wig askew, tying the cord of his dressing-gown as he ran down the garden path to the gate where my horse was tied.

‘Are you mad?’ he demanded. ‘Have you all gone quite mad? Julia! What are you…’ His hand was on the latch and he would have come out into the lane, but Ralph put a hand down on the top of the gate and held it shut. ‘Away, Vicar,’ he said softly. ‘This is not for you.’

They had wavered at the sound of Dr Pearce’s voice. The voice of the real world, the world where seeings could not happen, that voice called to them from a well-kept garden. But Acre had been steeped in madness and magic for years, and they carried on, wrecking their own houses, tearing a great gap in the village street.

‘What are they doing?’ Dr Pearce demanded of Ralph. ‘What do they think they are doing?’

‘Get you inside, Vicar,’ Ralph said gently, ‘and watch.’

Dr Pearce looked blankly at Ralph, and then at me. I tried to smile at him, to find some words to say, but I knew my face was tranced, mad. ‘Go!’ I said to him. And it was not me speaking. ‘Don’t stop us. We have little time.’

Dr Pearce looked again at Ralph barring his gate, as moveable as a block of granite in a chalk landscape, and then he turned and went back into his house. I saw the curtains of his study flutter and I knew he was watching.

The storm was growing nearer, and I was starting to feel afraid. The thunder was louder and the sky had grown darker just in the short time since I had been on the church steps. They were working fast now. The Smiths’ cottage was down – just the walls left standing – and the dry floorboards and the tinder-box rafters were piled higgledy-piggledy in the yard of the forge. The next-door cottage, belonging to the Coopers, was half down. At least the roof was off, and then I heard a dull rumble of thunder and a crack of lightning so loud that I thought it directly overhead.

‘It is here!’ I called to Ralph, and I was utterly afraid.

And Ralph – that creature of madness and bad weather-smiled at me as I knew he had smiled at Beatrice when he and the storm had come for her. ‘Well, they are ready,’ he said, and he might have been speaking of a field fit for sowing.

I stepped down from the lich-gate and was going towards him, afraid of being too close to the church, when a sudden rumble of thunder, infinitely menacing, made me lose my footing and stagger to one side. I was on the patch of grass they called Miss Beatrice’s Corner and the rain was sheeting down on me like a river off a water-wheel. The thunder was right overhead in a bang like a thousand cannon, and I spun around and saw the lightning come down, an angel’s arrow, and split the church spire like a cleaver through a carrot. I screamed then, but in the storm and the thunder I made no noise, and, deafened by the thunder, in a silence as deep as the dream, I saw the spire topple and fall on to the three empty cottages and the cloud of dust grow from the rubble.

It was not dust, it was smoke, heavy dull-red smoke, and then bright flames leaped and stretched out, seeking to swallow all of Acre. Misty threw up her head and shrieked in her terror, and Ralph had tight hold of her reins. I wanted to go to her, but I found I was on my knees in the soaking grass, trembling with fright and waiting for the horror of the burning child and the wreck of the village.

The chain was handing buckets down the line towards the fire. They had thought of that -I had not. And they were soaking the ruins of the Smiths’ cottage and the Coopers’ cottage so that the greedy flames had nowhere to go but up into the grey sky, into the rain, and they grew more and more smoky and I choked in the smoke when the wind spun the clouds of grey around, and then I got to my feet and stumbled through the rain and the smoke towards Ralph. He spoke to me, but my head was full of the noise of the thunder, and my eyes were blinded by the lightning, and I heard nothing, nothing at all. I just put out my hands to him, and my knees buckled beneath me, and I went down before he was near enough to catch me.