The Favoured Child

18

‘I am writing a letter to Richard,’ Mama said to me that evening. ‘You’ll want to write him a note to go in it?’ ‘Yes,’ I said. Indeed it was time.

I had written regularly to Richard from Bath, but he had never replied. His work on the hall and in the village was sufficient excuse.

Then, when the rebuilding of the Acre cottages was well under way, he had gone back to university. I knew he would have heard from Uncle John that I had made many friends in Bath, and that he would have heard of James Fortescue. But I did not know whether he would have guessed how far matters had gone between us.

I was in love, and I felt careless. I was happy and I could not believe that anyone could begrudge me such happiness. Richard’s open enmity towards me before I left for Bath seemed part of the past when I had been so frightened and so distressed because the whole world seemed to be conspiring against me. I could forgive him his greed about the estate. We were both grown now, and I was engaged to marry the best man I had ever known. I felt able to be generous with Richard. So I wrote him a light-hearted note which said with certainty that I knew he would be happy to hear the news that I was engaged to marry James Fortescue. And – best news of all, as far as I was concerned-that James had seen and liked Wideacre and wanted us to live on the estate.

I said little more about him. I wanted Richard and James to be friends. I had enough sense – even in my dizzy mood of courtship – to remember that Richard never liked to be anything but first. I thought that if they had a chance to meet without prejudgement on either side, they might be friends. In any case, I could not write at length, for Ralph Megson was waiting for me down at Three Gate Meadow where we had wild garlic growing in the very field we were ploughing for corn.

Ever since my return from Bath, I had been out on the land from morning till dinner-time, checking the crops, checking the animals, organizing hedging teams, ditching teams and bands of women to weed and clear the fields. The roads were too muddy for anything but horseback, and Uncle John wanted to stay indoors to watch over Mama’s convalescence. The work of the estate was left almost entirely to me – and to Ralph Megson.

He taught me. He taught me like a man handing over the reins of a most valuable carriage and pair to a novice. He never once met me in the lane, or at a barn, or just leaning on the bridge and watching the Fenny flow below me, without telling me something about the land, about the northerly movement of the birds, or about the weather we might expect.

I was in training as an apprentice squire, and Ralph was a stringent master. He took me for long punishing rides all around the estate, teaching me the name of every field, showing me every sort of fungus or disease in the woods, naming the weeds which seemed to be shooting up even as we watched and arguing with me, constantly arguing, about who should own the land and the rights they had on it.

We argued about poachers, we argued about gleaners, we argued about payment in kind, about house servants, about the rights of tenants. Every imposition a landlord legally makes on his workers to gain a little extra from them, Ralph opposed. He would have resisted every claim of a landlord, until in impatience one day I accused him of not being our farm manager at all, but owing all his loyalty to the village.

Oh, yes,’ he said, quite unperturbed. ‘I am working for the good of Acre. I care nothing for the benefit of the Laceys.’

I gaped at him. We were riding around the back of the cornfields on the common, checking that they had been properly fenced, for the common was overrun with deer that not even the appetite of Acre could keep down.

‘We pay your wages,’ I retorted. I should have been more sensible than to use such an argument with Ralph – it was simply giving him the victory.

‘Don’t be silly, Miss Julia,’ he said gently. ‘There aren’t wages minted that could buy my loyalty against my own people. You know that.’

‘But why did you agree to work for my Uncle John?’ I demanded. ‘He employed you as the Lacey manager.’

‘And I work as the Lacey manager,’ Ralph said. ‘The Laceys’ future depends on giving the land to the people who live on it and work it.’

We turned our horses away from the field and trotted down the broad sweep of sand which cuts across the common. It was overgrown with bracken, and heather was encroaching on the edges.

‘This must be cut back,’ Ralph said, indicating the dead-looking heather clumps and the brown bracken. ‘It will soon be spreading over, and if you have a heather fire, it will blaze out of control. I’ll have a couple of men out on it before the end of the week.’

I nodded. ‘Don’t turn the talk, Mr Megson,’ I said. ‘You know that Uncle John’s plan was profit-sharing. There was never any suggestion that there should be outright gifts from the estate. You cannot imagine that my uncle is going to give the Wideacre estate to Acre village.’

Ralph smiled his dark slow smile. ‘Hardly,’ he said. ‘He’s a good man, but he was born to wealth and he knows the value of his land. He won’t be giving anything away.’

‘What are your hopes, then?’ I demanded.

‘I think you will give it,’ said Ralph as if it were the simplest thing in the world.

He turned his horse’s head down the track towards the park and set it at a canter towards the little jump over the newly repaired wall. I gaped at him and nearly lost my balance as Misty followed his lead and popped over the wall without a touch of command from me.

‘I will?’ I asked, coming up alongside him. ‘Why should you think that I would give Wideacre away? After all you have said about Lacey women loving the land!’

‘Aye,’ said Ralph calmly, and then he chuckled to see my rising colour. ‘Don’t be so vexed, Miss Julia,’ he said comfortably. ‘I thought you were no true Lacey when I saw you trying to throw away your share of the estate and make yourself into something you are not. But the ideas I have for you and Wideacre are not the worries of a young girl. They are the way that I think the whole country will have to go if it is to avoid cruelty and great sorrow.’

We turned the horses for home down the bridle-way under the great smooth beech branches, their hooves squelching in the mire.

‘Now, look,’ he said, suddenly serious, ‘we live in a cruel world. You saw the poverty in Acre, you don’t need me to tell you of the harshness of this world. That whole village could have died of starvation and no one would have cared. There were numberless unnecessary deaths – young babies and old people, dying in cold weather, dying of little ailments because their bodies were too frail to take the burden of illness. You know that. You saw it.’

I nodded. I had seen it in Acre. It was true.

‘It is not just Acre,’ Ralph said, his voice low. ‘There are whole parts of this country where the same thing is happening. Sometimes it is an accident – a crop fails and there is no food, an incompetent squire and no charity. Sometimes it is worse. There are places north of the border where the landlords have decided they want their estates cleared of people – and they have done just that.’

‘Cleared?’ I asked, challenging that odd, ambiguous word.

‘They want sheep-runs,’ Ralph said. ‘Or deer for game. Or, nearer to Wideacre, they want a pretty view from the parlour windows. If there is a village in the way, they simply pull it down, or burn it.’

‘And the villagers?’ I asked.

‘Some of them leave when they are asked,’ Ralph said. ‘They became vagrants then, for no parish will take them in. Some of them refuse to go and try to take the great landlords to court.’ He smiled mirthlessly. ‘That’s a painful process,’ he said. ‘The law is drafted by landlords, the courts are ordered by landlords and the judges are landlords. It’s likely they’d hand down a judgement against themselves.’

I said nothing. I had heard Grandpapa Havering crowing at sentencing a man to death for stealing to feed his starving family. I knew what Ralph meant. And I had seen some of the consequences of the way we chose to live in the streets behind the Fish Quay.

‘Some of them refuse to go altogether,’ he said. ‘I’ve heard of people dying in their homes, burned alive when the villages are fired. And of ugly pitched battles between starving people and armed bailiffs. It happens, Julia. It is the power of the landlord. That is why I wanted guarantees from you and Richard.’

‘I would never let it happen on Wideacre!’ I said fiercely.

‘You’re not perfect,’ Ralph said simply. ‘Your young man, James Fortescue, might suddenly want to try his hand at modern farming, or picturesque landscaping. Or you might find yourself short of money and decide to sell off in packages, or break your agreements with Acre and make them work for day wages again. You cannot tell what you would do when you have the power to do as you please.’

I waited. Ralph was leading me somewhere, and I could not yet see where he was taking me.

‘You must rid yourself of the power,’ he said solemnly. ‘You must not be satisfied with John’s scheme of sharing the profits, and perhaps the tenants becoming wealthy enough to buy long leases. That would take years and years and years, and perhaps be unworkable at the last. It only needs a change of heart by one Lacey, and then the whole thing is lost. I want to see changes made at once. I want to see it done in my lifetime. I want you to be the Lacey who does it. You will return the land to Acre, and everyone in the village will have a right to decide what crops are grown and what plans are made. No one will take a wage, they will all share in the profit. And your only fortune will be the share you take in the profits. The whole of the estate will be given back to the people who had it before the Laceys, to run as they know how, for their own security.’

I looked at Ralph blankly. ‘Is that what you want me to do?’ I asked incredulously.

Ralph beamed at me. ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘Mad scheme, ain’t it?’

And he clicked his horse into a trot, as though he had not a care in the world, and slumped in his saddle as he does since he cannot rise to the pace because of his legs. I cantered behind him and caught him up.

‘It would never work,’ I said.

Ralph grinned at me.

‘They would farm the land out,’ I said. ‘They would forget to rest it. They would plant only vegetable crops for themselves. They would not have the capital to buy good seed-corn, to buy new animals for stock.’

‘Aye,’ said Ralph. ‘You’d have to put up the capital to make it work.’

‘Why should I?’ I demanded. ‘Why should anyone choose to chance their money for a scheme which might not even work?’

Ralph wheeled his horse around suddenly so that it blocked my path. He looked down on me from its high back and his face was very dark and very stern. ‘Because there are things which matter more than two per cent on Consols,’ he said. ‘Because you have been a privileged person in a country where there are people going hungry and you know there can be no peace for you. Because you know that to be one of the lucky ones when there is poverty all around is not to be lucky at all. It is to be miserable without even seeing your own misery. For it leaves you with a choice either to rejoice that you are doing well, when you know there are others who are doing badly, most badly, or to harden your heart. There are those who learn to harden their hearts so well that they can actually forget what has happened. They teach themselves to believe that they are rich through their own cleverness, or as a just reward for their virtues. They force themselves to think that the poor are thus because they are stupid, and deserve their poverty. And when that has happened, you have a country divided into two. And both sides are most ugly.’

I gasped. I could not keep up with Ralph. I had heard the complacency in the voices of the wealthy, I had heard the desperation in the voices of the poor. I wanted to belong to neither. ‘It would never work,’ I said uncertainly.

Ralph gave a little ‘Pfui!’ of disdain and turned his horse for home again. It was growing darker with the speed of a spring evening and the wood-pigeons were cooing lovingly, longingly. The rooks were flying late, crossing the grey sky with beakfuls of twigs. The blackbird sang as clear as a flute.

‘It would never work,’ I said again.

‘It’s not working now, is it?’ Ralph said lightly, as if the statement hardly merited an answer. ‘Thousands dying of want in the countryside, hundreds dying of dirt and drink and hunger in the towns. You can hardly call that “working,” can you?’

We came on to the drive while I was still puzzling for a reply, and minutes later we had reined in at the garden gate of the Dower House. Ralph would not come in but sat on his horse while Jem came out into the lane and helped me down.

‘You are not…angry, Mr Megson?’ I asked tentatively, watching the darkness of his face under his tricorne hat.

At once his face cleared and he smiled at me. ‘Lord love you for a fool, Julia Lacey,’ he said easily. ‘So full of your own importance that you think you are responsible for the Norman Conquest and for the abuse of the lords of the land ever since. Nay, I’m not angry, Miss Vanity. And if I was, it would not be with you.’ He paused and scrutinized me, his head on one side. ‘And furthermore, if I was, you would be quite able to tell me to keep my ill humour to myself, wouldn’t you?’

I hesitated at that. I had gone to Bath as a girl who was used to watching Richard’s face for the warning signs of his displeasure.

But I had come back a woman with confidence in herself and in her gifts. I looked at Ralph and I smiled at him and narrowed my eyes. ‘I think I could,’ I said.

‘You surely could,’ Ralph said, and grinned at me in his democratic, disrespectful fashion. Then he leaned down low and pulled me to his horse’s side, and before the parlour window of the Dower House he gave me a kiss on the cheeks as if I were a serving maid to be kissed in the lane. Then he straightened up, tipped his hat to me and trotted off down the drive.

I took one horror-struck survey of the Dower House windows, to check that Mama had indeed not seen, made one fearful scowling face at Jem to wipe the grin from his face at my discomfort, then I picked up the trailing hem of my riding habit and ran indoors with a ripple of laughter caught inside me at Ralph Megson’s impertinence.

I was so very busy that spring that if I had wanted to mope around, missing James, I would not have been able to do so. Uncle John and the Chichester lawyers had drawn up a set of contracts between the workers, the tenant farmers and the Wideacre estate. But I wanted to be there when they signed the contracts. It should be clear to them that I was giving my word as they were giving theirs. I spent many hours in the library with John, making sure that I understood the agreements we were making, the length of the individual leases, the proportion of the wages which were to be paid into the common fund, the time for repayment of loans for seed and equipment to tenant farmers and the interest we decided to charge. Often it was I who checked the lease through and exclaimed, ‘But, Uncle John! In addition to his debt to us, this tenant has to pay the poor rate and tithes. He has too costly a burden; we must make the debt run longer or he will not make enough to keep himself and a family in the first few years!’ Then John would recheck the figures and nod and say, ‘You are right, Julia. But it cuts back Wideacre profits.’

Uncle John and Ralph and I also had long planning sessions in the library with the maps of Wideacre spread before us. Ralph understood the land and could say what crops would grow and what would not take to the chalky Sussex earth. But John had read much about modern agricultural experiments and had lived on Wideacre during its prime and could speak about crops. I stayed quiet, but I kept my eyes and ears open, and I learned all I could during those friendly, easy talks.

Ralph and I were the ones out on the land, up on the downs checking the sheep, through the village checking for hardship as the cold weather grew damp and the frosts melted and became slushy and chill, riding around the lanes checking the hedges and the ditches. Sheep-proof and flood-proof, we wanted the land to be, and everything in readiness for the ploughing.

All the equipment had to be bought new. What had been left after the ruin of the Laceys after the last harvest had been sold or bartered for pitiful amounts of food during the years of Acre’s poverty. We had to buy new ploughs, new work-horses, new seed. A whole generation of young men had to be trained to drive a horse and follow a plough, for they had never seen it done by their fathers, and they had never been plough-boys themselves.

‘It can’t be done!’ John would sometimes say to me when I came home tired out from a day’s riding and with a list of things which had to be ready before the spring weather came and set the land in its cycle of growth. ‘It cannot be done this year!’

But, from somewhere, I had a great fund of confidence. I would smile at John not like a sixteen-year-old green girl but like someone far older and far wiser, and I would say, ‘It can be done, Uncle John. Mr Megson thinks so too, and I am sure it will be all right. Acre is working all the daylight hours to be ready in time for sowing. It can be done. And you, and I, and Mr Megson, and Acre are doing it.’

As if the planning and the preparation for sowing were not enough, the flock of sheep Uncle John had bought were not hardy and took against the lower fields that we thought would suit them. We lost two or three lambs, and even a ewe, which was more serious. After that Ralph said that, cost what it may, the animals would have to lamb under cover.

The barn they had used in autumn was too small for the whole flock, and it was too far for the shepherd to go every day. All the old barns had been pulled down years ago, the wood taken for firewood and the stones for building. So we had to have the flock in the Dower House stable block, with beams thrown across the yard and a loose thatch over the top. The smell was appalling and the noise they made! Mama said that she would never again read poems about the life of a shepherdess with any pleasure.

‘Hey Nonny No,’ John said at dinner, and grinned at her.

We were not like Quality, that spring.

‘We are pioneers,’ Mama said; and I loved her for understanding that working Wideacre in this way felt less like farming an estate in the heart of England and more like building a new country, a fresh country where one might forget the mistakes of the past and try to make something new and clean.

‘Squire Julia,’ Clary Dench called me ironically when I met her in Acre lane. She had taken her father’s dinner to him and was coming home with a jug and a plate under her arm. He had been working on the ditches and Clary too was speckled with the sandy mud.

‘You’d better curtsy,’ I said dourly. I looked little smarter than she did. I was wearing my cream riding habit, but it had lost its early style and was now creased and crumpled with a darn on the skirt where I had taken a tumble and ripped it. I was on foot, leading two plough-horses down to the village to be shod and for the plough-boys to practise driving a team. Clary and I both walked awkwardly, with the glutinous mud sticking to our boots. Her boots were older, the soles patched and re-patched. But when we were both muddy up to our eyebrows, one could tell little difference between the young lady of Quality and the village girl.

Clary laughed. ‘You look a sight!’ she said.

‘I know,’ I said ruefully. ‘I can hardly remember Bath now, and it’s not been that long.’

She nodded. ‘Remember the time when the village was bad?’ she asked. ‘It’s not an easy life now, no one could say it was. Bui at least we can see where we’re going. This spring is going to bring the sowing, and then there’ll be haymaking and harvest-time. There will be a proper harvest home. All the old parties and fair-days will come back. My ma and pa can’t talk of nothing else but the sowing and the maying.’

‘Maying!’ I said, stopping the horses with difficulty. People like to think of the great plough-horses as gentle giants, but I had led these two down from the Dower House stables and I could attest that they were hulking idiots without a listening ear between them, and without a brain in their heads.

‘Woah! you two,’ I said crossly. ‘What happens at the maying, Clary?’

‘It’s the Whitsun festival,’ she said, ‘when all the sowing is done and the early spring work is over. It’s a celebration of the spring. All the young men and women, all the lads and maids go up on to the downs before it is light, before dawn. They cut branches of the hawthorn tree and they dress them with ribbons, and they see the sunrise and welcome the spring in.’

‘Oh, yes,’ I said. It sounded rather tame. ‘Is that all, Clary?’

She gave me a sideways smiling glance. We had both grown up from the little girls who fought in the woods. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘it’s no accident that there’s a lot of marriages six months after that day. There’s a lot of courting that goes on while the sun is coming up, you know, Julia. And there are no elders there, and no one thinks the worse of anyone who slips away up on the downs. No one watches and no one counts, because it is the maying, you see.’

I smiled a little. ‘Oh,’ I said. I was a child compared to Clary, who had helped at childbirth and had wept already over a stillborn babe which would have been another sister for her. Clary and all the Acre children knew all about lust and birthing and dying, while Richard and I in the Dower House were naive beginners. But I had been in James’s arms, and felt his mouth on mine, and longed for his touch again. And I had Beatrice’s knowledge and Beatrice’s desires in my head. So I gave Clary a little smile and said, ‘Oh,’ which acknowledged that I was not squire, nor Miss Julia, but a maid like her with love to give and a longing to receive it.

‘Would you come out with us?’ she asked invitingly. ‘There’d be no harm. Many lasses just come out to watch the sunrise, and to cut the branches and take the spring home to their families.’

‘I should like that,’ I said.

‘I’ll tell ’em you’ll come out with us,’ said Clary. ‘Maybe they’ll make you the Queen of the May. And you tell your ma and your Uncle John that the village will take a week for the festival. At least some days.’

‘I will,’ I said. ‘But what happens?’

‘It’s the festival of misrule,’ Clary said. I turned the horses’ heads and she took one of the reins to help me lead them towards the forge. ‘Everyone dresses up in costume and there is a feast. The farmers with money give some when the band come around and demand a fee. The people who have no money give food for the feast. The Wideacre people go over to Havering, or to Singleton, or to Ambersham, and wherever they go, there is a party and dancing and free drink and free food. Then next year we have the other villages back to us. It’s been so long since Acre could dance that this year it is to be our turn.’

‘And who is the Queen of the May?’ I asked.

‘She’s queen of the feast,’ said Clary. ‘She wears a crown of hawthorn blossoms and she brings in the spring, and she sets the plough going, and the dancers dancing. And if I tell ’em all that you are coming, it will likely be you!’

I beamed. ‘Tell them I’ll come, then, Clary, for it sounds such fun. And I’ll tell Mama and Uncle John that there will be a holiday.’

Clary nodded and led the horse into Ned Smith’s yard, then waved goodbye to me and went home to her own cottage. I stayed only to see the plough-boys were waiting to take the horses when they had been shod and trudged home alone up the lane. I would be late for dinner again, but during those days of readying the land for the plough I was hardly ever on time.

We did not sow until quite late, the ground was so hard from the frost, and then so wet. But Ralph and John and I had to pick a day. ‘Let it be Miss Julia’s birthday, for luck!’ Ralph said. So we told the village when it would begin, and then crossed our fingers for luck that the village which had been away from the ploughshare and away from sowing for so long would remember how the work went, and would forget about the anger of the year they sowed pain and reaped a riot.

The wind had warmed overnight and the sun was shining. All the wisps of cloud and the lumpy sleet thunderheads had been torn aside and rushed over the head of the downs in a hurrying breeze which smelled of salt from the sea. Chased off like a scattered flock, they went, and when I looked out of my bedroom window in the morning, the sky was a clear opalescent blue, innocent of shadow, and the sun a warm spring yellow.

‘A happy birthday to you, and it is a good drying day,’ said Mrs Gough in the kitchen as I went in to beg a last cup of coffee on my way to the stable. She was thinking of linen and I was thinking of land, but our satisfaction was mutual.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We’re sowing today. I must be off.’

Her head came up from her work; she was patting the breakfast rolls into shape. ‘I’ll send Jem down with your breakfast to the field if you wish,’ she said with unusual kindness. ‘I dare say you won’t want to come back once the work has started.’

‘Thank you, Mrs Gough,’ I said, surprised.

She gave me one of her rare smiles. ‘I hear all around you’re working hard on the land, Miss Julia. They do say you’re as good as Miss Beatrice was when she was a girl. I don’t hold with women owning land, but I know you’re getting it in good heart for Master Richard.’

I could have argued with that. I could have said that I was getting it in good heart for a dowry for James. Or I could have said that I was getting it in good heart to hand back to the people who worked it. But in truth, in those days, I was working in the same way that a sheepdog gathers the flock: I could not be myself and do anything else. It was as natural for me to farm the land as it was for me to breathe. So I held my tongue and just smiled at Mrs Gough and slipped out of the back door.

All at once the sight and smell of Wideacre tumbled over me like a spring flood over a waterfall. Before me the cedar tree showed the tiniest hint of lime green about its lower branches, and the rising sap oozed at the cut in its trunk where we had lopped a dangerous branch. I could hear a thrush singing, and from behind the house came the insistent coo of a wood-pigeon, trying out his voice after the season of silence. Behind the cedar tree was the paddock and the buds on the apple tree were as small as rice grains but scarlet with promise. Beyond the paddock the earth of the old meadow turned cornfield was white with frost, but away from the lee of the hedges I could see the weeds growing green, and beyond it and to my left was the common, rolling as sweet and free as wind-fetched breakers on an empty sea, yellow-brown with last year’s bracken and just a promise of green in the sleepy valleys.

To my right, southwards, were the high smooth folds of the downs, like green-velvet shoulders shrugging off the uneven borders of our fields, and I knew, although I could not see them, that the flock with the new lambs would be out on the fresh grass today. I stepped out into the garden and gulped in the scents, the sounds, the warmth of Wideacre on a sweet spring morning, and I felt my shoulders drop, and my lips smile, and my face turn blindly, like a winter mole, to the sunlight.

Minutes I stood there, half dazed and then – above the bird-song, above the pulse that was my own heart beating (though it sounded like a heart in the very land itself) -I heard a high sweet humming as if the waking earth were calling to me to come out and plough and sow and make it grow.

Ralph was already down at the field. We were starting with Three Gate Meadow, and then we would split the sowers into teams and ride among them to check the supply of seed-corn, the strength of the new ploughs and the ability of lads who had never ploughed a furrow before and men who had last ploughed fifteen years ago. I turned my mare towards Acre and Three Gate Meadow, with no one to break the daze upon me which came from the sudden sunshine and the promise of the day and the magic of Wideacre which was part of my blood and bone.

I slid from my mare’s back and tied her to the gate. The sowers were in the field, and their great bags filled with seed-corn bulged before them like the fat bellies of pregnant women. They had chosen Jimmy Dart – the lost son of Acre – to take the plough for the first wobbly furrow for luck. As I walked through the gate, I saw the plough coming towards me, his slight city-starved body hanging on to the handles for dear life, his weight too light to keep it straight.

‘Speed the plough!’ I called, and everyone waiting around the field turned and smiled at me and called, ‘Speed the plough!’ in return.

Clary was by the gate, a great bag of seed-corn over her shoulder and she gestured to me to take it from her. ‘Happy birthday, Julia!’ she said sweetly. ‘I’ve been waiting for you. You sow the first seeds. Everyone ’ud like it. It’d be good luck. Take a handful of seeds and just scatter them out in a big sweep.’

I half staggered under the weight of the bag and waited until the first furrow had been cut. The great horses bent their necks to pull the plough, knowing the work better than Jimmy. I stepped into the furrow behind him and dug deep into the bag that was weighing me down. The seeds stuck, moist and pale, to my hands and I threw them in a great flinging sweep out to the very boundaries of Wideacre so the whole green world should grow at my bidding and there should never be hunger on my land again.

Again and again I cast the seed in generous prodigal fistfuls, up to the sky as if I wanted the greedy wheeling seagulls to share in the bounty of the land so that there should be no crying – not even the crying of gulls on this day. In my head was a great sweet singing as the seed flew out in acres of silver and fell on the deep thick mud. I felt so strong, and so magical, that I half expected it to sprout as it fell.

I hardly heard the sound of hooves in the lane, I was so absorbed with keeping my balance on the heavy new-turned earth, and with the fascination of the damp sticky seed-bag and the sight of the flung seed. But then I heard someone call my name, and I looked around to the gate. There at the entrance to the field, sliding from his horse, with his black hair all curly and windblown and his eyes bright, was Richard.

I walked towards him in a dream, my hands still full of seed. He seemed to be the centre of the world whose heartbeat I had heard in my head this morning, his feet planted as surely as a rooted tree in the safe earth of Wideacre, his head warmed by the Wideacre sun.

The bedraggled muddy hem of my riding habit flapped around me as I staggered across the furrows, and the mud of Wideacre was caked on my boots. Richard reached out a soft white hand to me and drew me towards him, without saying a word. With the eyes of all of Acre upon us and with the plough-boys stopped to watch, I turned my face up to Richard like a common girl and let him kiss me long and passionately under the spring sky.

His arms held me tight to him and I was enveloped by his driving cape, which swirled around us. Sheltered by it, half hidden by it, I put my hands inside his cape and around his hard hot back, and clung to him as though I were drowning in the river. His head came down harder and I opened my lips under his and tasted his mouth on mine.

As if that taste had been poison, I suddenly leaped backward, struggling out of the folds of his cape, shrugging off his grip. Heedless of what he would think I put the muddy back of my hand to my mouth and rubbed hard, wiping away the taste of Richard’s tongue.

‘Don’t, Richard!’ I exclaimed and there was no magic between us, and no mindless delight left in me at all.

Richard’s face was as black as thunder. ‘I got your note…’ he started.

But then there was a warning call from Clary at the gate. ‘Look out, Julia, ‘tis your ma!’

I stumbled back another pace and looked guiltily down the lane. Uncle John’s curricle was turning from the drive into Acre lane and coming towards us, but I guessed they would have seen nothing more than Richard and I exchanging a hug of greeting. I coloured scarlet in a great wave of shame. I could not raise my eyes from the ground. I could not look around the field for fear of someone beaming at me, or winking at Richard. Even if my mama had not seen, it was not fear of her disapproval which made me recoil from Richard. I had jumped back from his embrace because his touch – which I had once loved so well-seemed suddenly heavy with evil.

I did not look at him. What he was thinking, I could not imagine. And when I thought of James, and of myself as his promised bride, I felt hot and kept my eyes down.

Not Richard. He always had a way of sailing through scrapes and he turned from me and strode up to the curricle. ‘Mama-Aunt!’ he said with delight, and leaped up to the step to give her a hearty kiss. ‘And Papa!’ he said, and stretched across my mama to shake John’s hand. ‘You will think me undutiful,’ he said, ‘but as I rode towards home I saw some people coming this way and they told me it was the first sowing day. I would not have missed it for the world. And here in the middle of the field was Julia, casting corn away as if she were feeding seagulls.’

Uncle John laughed. ‘We came to see the ceremonial ploughing, but I see we are too late.’ He nodded at Ralph, who came to the gate to greet them. ‘Good day, Mr Megson. Here is Richard home on a surprise visit for Julia’s birthday and to see your sowing.’

Ralph nodded to Mama and to Richard. I knew him well enough by now to know he could be trusted never to breathe a word that I had fled into Richard’s arms as if we were acknowledged lovers. No one in Acre would ever betray me on purpose. Only Ralph knew that I was affianced to another man and Richard should be no closer than arm’s length, but Ralph of all people would not care for that. I moved towards the plough and scowled at Ralph to warn him against teasing me. I might as well tell the sun to stop shining.

‘Hussy,’ he said in a provocative whisper, and I flamed scarlet again and frowned at him.

No one now would expect me to take my breakfast in the field with the sowers and the plough-boys but I was stubborn. ‘You go on home, Richard,’ I said pleasantly. ‘You will have things you wish to unpack. Have breakfast with Mama and Uncle John. I will be home as soon as ever I can, but I have promised to do a full day’s work here. If you want to come out again, I shall either be here or in Oak Tree Meadow. I cannot leave the ploughing now it has just started, there is too much for one person to watch alone. Mr Megson cannot be left with the work like that.’

Uncle John nodded his approval, but I saw the shadow cross Richard’s face. ‘I know everything comes second to the Wideacre crop,’ he said.

‘It is not that,’ I said softly. ‘It is just that I promised to work here today and I cannot break my promise.’

‘Well, come home as soon as you are done,’ Mama said tactfully, ‘and do be home in time for an early dinner, Julia. Mrs Gough is planning something special for you.’

‘I will, I will,’ I said, smiling.

Richard came close to help me up into the saddle. ‘I shall be waiting for you,’ he said softly. ‘You are mine.’

I knew it was wrong.

I knew he was wrong to say it and I should contradict him at once. I should remind him that the childhood betrothal had not been a serious wish of his for many years now. It was me who had clung to that game long after it should have been outgrown. The last time we had been together he had not behaved anything like a lover.

I let it go for now. The shock of seeing him at the gate when the world seemed so lush and fresh and fertile, when I had seeds still clinging to my hands like some spring goddess, had been too much for my thin veneer of town gloss. If he had wanted to lie with me in the furrow then and there, I would have done so. I was as amorous as this morning’s wood-pigeon, as naturally fertile as the new-turned soil. I was a Lacey woman on Wideacre, and Lacey women care for nothing more than love and the land. This morning, with Richard waiting for me at the side of a newly ploughed field, I could not resist.

But we would not always meet at a field gate. As I rode home, I knew there would be words between Richard and me and that when we spoke, I should use the wisdom I had learned in these last few months. I should use that wisdom to defend myself against him. I was not the child who had left for Bath, left her home to be run by someone else, frightened of herself and of the land, and ready to give the land away as carelessly as a shanty cottage. I was not the child who feared her own nature, who feared male authority, who feared everything.

I had stood against the most fashionable doctor in Bath and shrugged aside his influence as if he were an outgrown toy. I had raised my voice in the best modiste’s shop in Bath and felt my cheeks blaze with anger. I had looked into the eyes of the man I loved and learned that he was just an ordinary man, with ordinary failings; and loved him just the same. I was no longer Richard’s plaything for the bidding or the breaking. I might have been in a dream of pleasure with seeds in my hands this morning, but this afternoon I would be my own self.

I cantered home in an easy stride with the dusk falling around me and a clear sky above me promising good weather for a working day tomorrow. Behind me were two fields, nearly ploughed and sown, under the sickle moon, and around me were acres of land waiting for the plough under the cold skies.

I tossed the reins of my mare to Jem and made my way indoors and up to my bedroom. Stride was crossing the hall as I went upstairs. ‘You’ve not long before dinner, Miss Julia,’ he said warningly.

I gave him a grimace and put my hands together in a mock prayer. ‘Stride, have a little pity,’ I said. ‘I have been in the fields since early morning. If you want to eat Wideacre bread again, you must treat the sowers well. Please delay dinner for me for half an hour so I can soak in a bath and get the stiffness out of my body. I feel like an old lady.’

It was another measure of the way things had changed that Stride did not scold me as he would a naughty child late for dinner. Instead he looked at the grandfather clock at the foot of the stairs and said, ‘Very well, Miss Julia, I will tell Lady Lacey and Dr MacAndrew that dinner will be delayed.’

So I had a bath so hot that my skin turned as pink as a river trout, and I came downstairs with my face damp from the sweat at the heat of it, smelling expensively of best Bath soap and toilet waters and dressed in a silk gown of pale blue.

Richard saw my newly acquired confidence. He saw it in the way I joked with Uncle John, and in the way I nodded to Stride. He saw how I had changed towards my mama – no less loving and tender than in the childhood days, but we now talked as equals. Bath had put a veneer of fashion on me. Bath had curled my hair and taught me how to dress and how to dance, and how to make small talk. Conquering my fear of Beatrice and my fear of the sight had turned me into a woman who could make decisions, who could give and take orders, who could make a promise and keep it and who would never, never be bullied by imaginary fears.

Or so I thought that evening.

It was my evening. There were hot-house flowers at my place and a basket full of prettily wrapped presents from as far away as James’s hotel in Belgium, and as near as Jimmy Dart’s cottage. But it was also Richard’s evening. We all wanted to know how he found university life and whether he had made many friends. We wanted to know about his lodgings, and about his tutors, and whether he liked his studies. Richard laid himself out to be entertaining and had us laughing and laughing with tales of the older students in his college.

‘They sound fearfully wild,’ Mama said anxiously. ‘I hope that is not your set, Richard.’

‘Nonsense, Mama-Aunt!’ Richard said cheerfully. ‘They are the greatest of fellows, but they won’t have a thing to do with me. Students who have just arrived in town are just about the last entrants on the great chain of being, I assure you! They have no time for me at all!’

He laughed heartily at that, but I knew my cousin Richard, and I knew that a state of affairs in which he was not highly regarded would not strike him as amusing at all. It was odd indeed that at the very time when I had been finding my feet on the land, discovering I was a young woman with desires of my own and finding a serious job to do, Richard had become the youngest and least important young man in a town where young men were not taken seriously.

I looked at him with judging eyes. He would always be my darling cousin, and today the earth and the sky and the humming in my head had been too much for me and I had gone to him and he had held me and he could have taken me, as if I knew nothing of the indoor Quality life at all; but when I was back in my senses, I could see him clearly. I think I saw him that evening for the first time…and I saw a young man whom I would not trust with a ploughing team.

I laughed out loud at that thought and Mama asked me what had amused me, and I had to invent some taradiddle to divert the attention away from me. For now Richard was home from Oxford and I had been out on the fields all day, it was obvious, as it had been obvious at the start to Acre, to Ralph Megson and to Uncle John, that I was the one who had inherited the Lacey love of the land, and Richard would never love it and care for it and work it as I did.