The Favoured Child

20

We rode home in silence, Richard and I. The accord we had formed after the quarrel on the downs had been broken by the odd, disturbing incident with Ralph’s goshawk. Mama and Uncle John were laughing at some private joke over dinner and did not notice that Richard and I were awkward and quiet. When it was my bedtime, I gave Richard my hand and said my farewells then; he would have left for the early stage-coach in the morning before I was awake.

Richard kissed my hand, and then drew me to him and kissed my cheek. ‘All all right?’ he asked in the phrase from our childhood.

‘All all right,’ I confirmed.

But we both knew that it was not.

Scheherazade had feared him. The sheep had mobbed him. And now Ralph’s goshawk had been afraid of him.

I expected Ralph to speak to me about Richard as soon as I rode into the common field on Monday morning – a grey damp Monday morning with no joy or magic to it that day – but he just tipped his hat to me and said not a word.

‘How is your hawk?’ I asked him when we stopped for breakfast.

He was sitting on horseback beside me, and the plough-boys and the sowing girls were standing in the squelchy mud to eat their breakfasts. He sank his teeth into a crust of bread and chewed slowly before he answered me.

‘I wrung her neck,’ he said, his voice even. ‘Her legs would not have mended strong enough to kill again, and I don’t keep pets. She was a working bird; I’d not have liked her to grow fat and idle.’

The shock showed on my face, but I did not offer Ralph Megson a sympathetic word.

‘Her nerve had gone,’ he said briefly. The words sounded very ominous. ‘She had never bated from the hand before in her life, not since I waked her – sat up all night with her – and trained her to the glove three years ago. But she didn’t like Richard, did she? Something about him scared her. Scared her so badly she broke her legs trying to get away from him.’

I said nothing. I sat on my horse like a grey statue against a grey sky. In my head was that deep low murmur as if a hive of sleepy bees were stirring, swarming.

‘You say you cannot hear it, or see it,’ Ralph said thoughtfully. He was staring out into the darkness, but he swung around in the saddle and scanned my face. ‘God lack! You’re a fool, Julia Lacey,’ he said abruptly. ‘I thought you’d learned to use the sight, but you only use it when it suits you. Listen to your voices. See with your eyes.’

I put out a hand to him, but he shrugged me off, and his horse, always sensitive to his movements, shifted to one side.

‘I’ve no patience with you!’ he said abruptly. ‘Beatrice would have taken her riding crop to you!’ He clicked to his horse and went to check the binding on the ploughshares, which was sound, and the state of the horses, which was good, and the straightness of the furrows, which was adequate. Then he called them back to work a couple of minutes before they were due, which was unheard of.

I watched them for half an hour after the breakfast rest and then I trotted over to Ralph and asked him if he had any errands for me. When he scowled and said, no, I said that I would come back to the field in an hour or so, but that I wanted to exercise Sea Mist on the common.

He nodded curtly. I was not forgiven, and every working day over the next few weeks there was a reserve between us because Ralph thought me wilfully stupid, and I was offended. If it had been in the middle of harvesting, we should both have been out of the sullens in a day because we would have been too busy for resentments, but the urgency of the early weeks of the spring was over. The ploughing was done, and the men and women could sow without being watched. The sheep on the downs had broken down some of the fences, and they had to be repaired, but that was swiftly done. The lambs were weaned and out on the grass and caused no trouble. The Fenny was flooded with melt-water and with water from some days of rain, and I went out daily to check that the banks were holding, for some of Beatrice’s cornfields had been dangerously close to the river edge and I was regretting that we had followed her lead.

Uncle John had bought half a dozen cows and a bull and we had turned them out on the lower fields by the Fenny. He was a great red animal with a strong ring in his nose. I was afraid of him at first and inspected the animals through the gate. But as I grew accustomed to them, and they to me, I would ride Misty right into their field to see that they were all sound.

I was starting to find myself with time on my hands. My work checking the land would take me all the morning, but in the afternoon there was little for me to do. It was a warm spring. I could feel the sun warming the land like my own skin. Everything on Wideacre was pairing, courting that spring. Everywhere I went I could hear birds calling and calling for a mate, or pairs of birds playing tender silly courtship games, feeding each other, feathers fluffed out and mouths agape, or nest-building together in a frenzy of displaced desire. When I walked down to the Home Farm, I saw the great shire stallion in the field tossing his mane as thick as sea spume and hollering for a mare.

On the downs the lambs were growing strong and the ewes were surrounded by dozens of young. In the field by the river the bull grazed with his herd, his favourite cow always at his shoulder, their heads rubbing together when they walked. They would freeze for minutes at a time while he licked their faces with his massive rubbery tongue as if there were love between them as well as an insistent need to couple.

I missed James more than I could have believed possible. I walked alone under trees full of birds singing love-songs, under a sky criss-crossed with nest-building flights, watched the red deer nuzzling together in the twilit evenings; at night I could not sleep, for I fancied even the owls were calling to each other of their passion and their desire under an enlarging moon.

After I had finished my farming work in the morning, I was free for the afternoons. Mama and Uncle John took out the gig for little drives together and I put on my coolest muslins with a light shawl and walked and walked in the deep greening woods and daydreamed of how my life would be when James came home and we were married. Above me, in the great trees of Wideacre, the birds mated and nested and then brooded under the safe canopy of the opening leaves. Wideacre swelled with life like the fat buds on the trees. Everything was courting, mating, birthing that spring, and I was full of longing for my own lover as I wandered alone in the woods with my straw hat on my fair head, my muslin pale among the green shadows, my feet awash in the bluebells.

Richard was due home before May Day and wrote that he would be in on the early-morning stage-coach. I had Misty saddled and rode up the lane towards the stop leading Prince to meet him.

The stage-coach sets down passengers for Acre at the corner where the lane meets the Chichester-London road, and I sat there on Misty’s back in the spring sunshine, waiting for it. It had been warm and dry the previous week, and the deep rutted tracks of the lane were dried out at last from the winter mud. I turned my face up to the sunshine and felt its warmth on my closed eyelids. Prince dropped his head to the fresh leaves of the hedge and cropped them, his bit jingling as he munched. In the distance I could hear the creaky rumble of the stage-coach and the chink of the harness. The road was hilly, and I could see the hats and shoulders of the roof-passengers rising and falling as the coach breasted the hills and sank into the hollows of the road. The horses were labouring as they came into sight towards the Acre corner, and when the guard saw me waiting, he blew his horn and shouted a ribald comment about a lucky passenger being met at Acre corner.

The coachman pulled his horses up and tipped his whip to me. I smiled and nodded and watched as they let down the steps and Richard came out of the coach, rubbing his eyes and yawning. They passed down his box and Richard humped it over towards me.

I bent down for his kiss and hugged him around the shoulders. Some wag on the roof of the stage-coach cheered, but many of the passengers were Midhurst people and knew me by sight and nudged him into silence.

‘What about my box?’ Richard asked. ‘It weighs a ton.’

‘Oxford fashions?’ I teased him.

‘Holiday reading,’ he said with a grimace. ‘My Greek is still supposed to be a disgrace. I’m bid to work with Dr Pearce through this holiday.’

‘You can leave it here,’ I said. Richard pushed it into the hedge behind the stage-coach. The Acre carter could collect it for us later in the day. ‘I thought you’d like a ride.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’ve been cooped up in that coach for half a lifetime.’

He swung into the saddle and we turned the horses’ heads for home. Richard made me laugh with sketches of his fellow passengers – the farmer’s wife who would insist on carrying a basket with a live hen in it on her lap, the country wench who giggled every time she caught Richard’s eye.

‘And how’s everything here?’ he asked. ‘Papa and Mama-Aunt all right? You?’

‘Yes,’ I said, nodding. ‘Everything is just the same. Mama is quite well again now, though she still gets a little tired. She and Uncle John have a ritual drive out for her health every afternoon in the gig like a pair of tenant farmers.’

‘Heard from Mr Fortescue?’ Richard asked with careful nonchalance.

I kept my eyes on the greening hedge. ‘Yes,’ I said. I could not keep the tenderness from my voice. ‘He writes to me every week and I reply when I have an address for him. He is back in Belgium at the moment, but he has been travelling around. His father is importing lace and James is responsible for finding reliable suppliers.’

‘Any date for the wedding?’ Richard asked lightly.

‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘His papa’s lawyers and Uncle John’s man are drawing up the marriage contract to arrange the dowry and an allowance for me. We can hardly plan until we know when he will come home.’

Richard nodded. ‘It could be some time, then,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I said. I could not keep the longing out of my voice. ‘It sometimes seems like years and years. It should be this summer. We can announce our betrothal when he comes home.’

‘And the hall?’ Richard said. ‘The builders are working well? Are the roofbeams in place?’

‘Yes,’ I said reassuringly. ‘You would be the first to hear if anything had gone amiss. It is all working well. And the crop is just about showing in some fields already!’

‘And what are they doing here?’ Richard asked, pulling up Prince at a gateway. It was one of the new fruit fields where Uncle John had insisted that we should try raspberries. They looked a sorrowful little crop, row upon row of spindly canes with the tiniest green buds showing on each one. Down each narrow gangway between the rows were Acre women weeding, a rough piece of cloth beside each of them piled high with the bolting weeds of this damp warm spring. The lovely sun-warmed hollow was as sunny as in midsummer. I looked along the line of bent backs for Clary, but I could not see her. A cloud came over the sun and I shivered in the sudden chill. Richard and I pulled up at the gate and Ralph trotted over.

‘Good day,’ he said to us both and then spoke directly to me. ‘I started them weeding while the men finish the sowing today,’ he said with a note of pride in his voice. ‘They’ve never sown quicker, I don’t think.’ He tipped his hat carelessly to Richard. ‘Good morning,’ he said coolly.

There was an awkward silence. Ralph’s dislike of Richard was almost tangible on the warm air. Richard flushed and I spoke quickly to mask the silence. ‘Then let’s hope it grows at record speed too,’ I said. ‘The village always used to take a holiday after the sowing was done, did it not?’

‘Aye,’ Ralph said. ‘I’ve reminded Dr MacAndrew that they’ll want to keep the maying in the old way. They tell me they’d like you to be the Queen of the May if you’d go out on the hills to bring the spring in with them tomorrow at dawn.’

‘I will!’ I said. ‘Clary spoke to me about it.’ Then I paused as my training as a Bath young lady struck me, and I glanced at Ralph and asked him, ‘It is all right, isn’t it, Ralph? I mean, it’s not fearfully improper or anything?’

Ralph’s face looked as if he had bitten on a lemon rind. ‘Don’t ask me!’ he said curtly. ‘You know I know nothing about it. Ask your mama about these things, and take her advice.’

‘She does not know the traditions of Acre,’ I challenged him. ‘You’re the one who knows Acre. I’m asking you if it is all right for me to go.’

Ralph looked at me, wearied of the whole question. ‘I should not pass on an invitation if I did not think it was all right,’ he said carefully. ‘You will come to no harm out on the downs at daybreak with all the young people of Acre village. You will pass your time until the sun comes up in picking hawthorn branches and tying ribbons to them. Then they will crown you with a circlet of flowers, mount you on a white horse, if they can find one – perhaps you would lend them your mare – and then you will ride down to Acre and bring in the spring. For three days after – for Dr MacAndrew does not think we can afford a week of idleness, and neither do I – you can be the queen of any revels they devise, or not, as you wish. There is nothing proper or improper about it – as far as I can see. But don’t ask me about ladylike behaviour, Miss Julia, for I am but a poor working man.’ This last was said with an absolutely grave face and with a tone so ironic that I wondered Richard could not hear the insult behind it.

‘Tell them to come for me before daybreak, then,’ I said. ‘And tell them they can take my mare from the stables as soon as I have done with her today.’

Ralph nodded. ‘And you, Master Richard, will you be going up to the top of the downs to welcome the spring?’ he asked.

Richard nodded. ‘I shall go,’ he said. ‘All that you describe sounds very pleasant, but I’m sure Lady Lacey would feel happier if I was there with Miss Julia.’

Ralph nodded, his eyes on the ground. He would not even look at Richard, and he had no friendly smile for me with Richard by my side. ‘I am sure,’ he said, and then he wheeled his horse around and trotted back into the field as if he had wasted too much time already.

Richard was wrong about Mama. She had no reservations about my bringing in the spring with Acre at all.

Oh, heavens, Richard,’ she said. ‘If I wanted Julia to behave like a proper young lady, I should have to kidnap her and lock her up in Bath! She has been riding out on the land unaccompanied ever since you went off to Oxford. John insists she will take no hurt, and I trust to her own common sense – and the fact that she is so well loved.’

Richard nodded. ‘It still seems most unconventional to me,’ he said. We were taking tea after dinner, and Richard stood with his back to the fire, a dish of tea in his hand. I saw Mama and Uncle John exchange a smiling glance to see Richard so masterful at the fireplace.

‘It is unconventional,’ Uncle John agreed. ‘But James Fortescue has no objection, and Wideacre has a tradition of eccentric women. At the moment Julia is the key to Acre and I have to use her. No one but Julia and Mr Megson carry any weight with Acre folk, and while we are dragging them back to work, it has to be Julia and Mr Megson in the traces.’

Richard gave a little bow. ‘I am sure your judgement could not be wrong, sir,’ he said. ‘But all the same, I shall be glad to escort Julia to this daybreak merrymaking.’

‘For tuppence I’d come too!’ Uncle John said. ‘I love these traditions. When I was a lad in Edinburgh, it was an Easter custom to roll hard-boiled eggs down Arthur’s Seat – a great hill on the outskirts of the town. You would roll it, without touching it with your hands, all the way down to the bottom and then crack it and eat it.’

‘Really!’ said Mama, instantly diverted. ‘Did all your family go? Your brothers and sisters too?’

‘Oh, aye,’ said Uncle John. ‘All of Edinburgh went. And the egg tasted better then, at dawn on Easter morning, than at any other time.’

‘I believe this expedition is just for the young men and women,’ Richard said quickly. ‘The girls wear white and the young men wear white favours.’

I could tell by Mama’s absorbed expression that she was trying to remember if I had a white gown and a white wrap against the chill. And I was right. When I went upstairs to bed that night, I found she had laid out her own white cashmere shawl on the bed for my use, with a bunch of white ribbons for Richard’s cockade and to tie around my branch when I brought the spring home.

I woke early and heard voices in the back garden outside my window. I jumped out of bed and pattered across the wooden floor. My feet were icy, and it was still dark. There were a couple of torches and, around them, perhaps ten or twelve of the young people from Acre, giggling and trying to start up a song. I pulled on my white gown and tied the white ribbon around my waist, without the help of a maid, for Jenny Hodgett was out with the merrymakers herself. Then I tossed the wrap over my shoulders and went up to tap on the door of Richard’s little garret bedroom.

He was ready, pulling on his boots, and I pinned the favour of white ribbons to his hat. Then we crept downstairs as quietly as we could so as not to wake the sleeping house. The kitchen was silent, lit by a warm red glow from the embers of the kitchen fire. A cat was sleeping in the fireplace, dusty from the ashes. Richard shot the iron bolts on the back door and we went out into the cold and the darkness.

The cedar tree was pitch black against the sky, the yellow torches no brighter than candles in the darkness. The moon was a slim white sickle and the stars shone like little pinpricks of silver in the purple blackness of the sky. Someone from the back of the crowd hummed a note and they sang a song like one of the ploughing chants, a three-or four-note song, refined by centuries of singing. It was sung only once a year, sung only now, in the blue-black hour before dawn on the first morning of spring, and always sung for the Queen of the May, to call her to her duties as the girl who brings the spring to the land.

Richard closed the door behind us and I stood still on the doorstep in my pale dress and let the chant sweep over me. The air was as cold as spring water, but Mama’s wrap was warm and I held it tight around me. I felt magical, as though the great tree and the stars and the song and I were all part of some timeless powerful pattern which drew a continuous line down through the centuries and would go through me to the Laceys who came after me. Underneath the chant I could hear a drumbeat, a deep and solemn sound, and I knew there was no drum but my own thudding heart and the sound of the land itself.

The song finished and I gave a deep sigh; I looked at the bright faces of the young people from Acre who were ready to call me their friend and had wanted me to be the girl who brought in the spring.

Then we turned without speaking and I led the way out of the garden under the ghostly arch into the silent stable yard and out of the Dower House grounds, along the drive towards the footpath to the downs. I glanced up at the dark bulk of the house as we went past. Mama’s window was dark, and Uncle John’s. Everyone in the whole world was asleep except the young people in all the downland villages who would be walking quietly through the Sussex lanes and climbing up the dark grassy shoulders of the downs to see the sun rise pale over the land.

Richard walked beside me and I glanced at him and smiled. He took my chilled hand and slipped it in the pocket of his jacket and held it, and we walked hand-clasped in the centre of the crowd along the pale road towards Acre.

When we turned right up the bridle-way to the downs, there was room for no more than two abreast, and the others fell into line behind us, two by two, some girls walking side by side and some lads with each other, but mostly Acre was in pairs. The spring had been calling to them as insistently as it had been calling to me, and the young people of Acre were impatient to be courting.

We climbed up the little path, and my boots slid on the mud and I was glad of Richard’s firm grip. He did not say a word to me and I felt more and more dreamlike as we walked together under the great beech trees of the coppice with courting couples behind us and nothing but the sleeping land around us.

It was a long walk, for I was accustomed to ride, and I was surprised how breathless and slow I was in getting to the top. At the very head of the footpath was a fence to keep the sheep in, breached by a kissing gate. Richard stood back to let me go first and as I closed the gate to let myself out the other side, he put his hands on top of mine to hold me still, with the gate between us. I looked up wonderingly into his face and he bent his dark head slowly down to me. My lips parted and his mouth came down and gently, gently, kissed me, as soft as a moth to a candle-flame.

I stepped back with a little gasp, but behind Richard were the Acre young people and they were all smiles. I looked among them for Clary’s dear face and I saw her beam at me and wink, inviting me to romp in a hollow with Richard and deny my loyalty to James and my training as an indoor child. I frowned at her, for she should know well enough by now that Richard would never touch me in that way. But she smiled on, unrepentant.

Matthew was near her, but walking at arm’s length, and when she came through the gate, he did not take the opportunity to kiss her as the following couples did.

‘What’s the matter with you two?’ I asked as she came to where I waited on a little bank of downland turf, watching the others come through the gate.

Clary gave a grimace. ‘We’re at daggers drawn,’ she said. ‘He’s a fool. Everything’s spoiled.’

‘Why, what’s happened?’ I asked.

‘It’s those silly rhymes he’s always been writing,’ she said impatiently. ‘I never paid them no mind. But he showed them to some publisher in Chichester and the damned man has printed them and is selling them and all.’

‘But, Clary, that’s wonderful…’ I started.

Clary rounded on me, her eyes flashing. ‘Wonderful it is not!’ she said, crudely mimicking my word. ‘The man took his poems and printed them all pretty in his little book. And d’you know what they’ve called it? They’ve called it Cuckoos Calling: The Poems of a Sussex Simpleton.’

I gaped. ? what?’ I asked. I could not believe I had heard aright.

‘Yes,’ Clary said viciously. “? Sussex Simpleton”. And they’ve told him he has a fine untutored voice and that he is in touch with the beauty of nature because he is an idiot! So that’s why I am not as proud as Punch for him. Just when everyone was forgetting that the parish guardians ever called him simple in the first place!’ She ended on a little sob.

‘How did they ever think it?’ I demanded bewildered.

‘His gran told them,’ Clary said, dashing at her eyes with the hem of her gown. ‘The silly old fool told them his entire life-history when they came out to Acre in their fine carriage to tell him they liked his poems and ask if he had any more. She told them that he had been left behind when the parish roundsman took the other children because they thought he was simple. She told them that he stammered and that he could not speak right when he was a lad. So they are calling him the dumb nightingale. And the newspaper called him the idiot songster…’ She broke off and openly wept with her apron up to her face.

‘They can be stopped…’ I said. ‘We can stop them publishing the book. We can stop them talking about him like that in the newspaper. They won’t speak of him like that when we explain…’

‘He won’t!’ Clary said sharply. ‘I never thought he was a fool until the day I saw him smile at a newspaper which had called him an inspired natural for all the world to see – and him glad about it. They’ve paid him twelve guineas already, and that’s just to buy him paper and pens. They’re going to pay him more. He is set to be a rich young man. And he thinks he’ll go to Chichester and then to London. He thinks he’ll be taken around to the great poets and writers and they will like him. And he’ll never come back to Acre at all!’

‘Clary!’ I said aghast.

‘I hate him!’ she said with sudden energy. ‘You’d have thought he’d never walked all night for me with one of the babbies. You’d have thought he’d forgotten what the real world is like. He thinks he’ll take me with him. He told the gentlemen that he’s betrothed to a girl from his village, and they asked him if I was presentable.’ Clary broke off. ‘Presentable!’ she said scathingly. But then her anger fell away from her as rapidly as water off a water-wheel. ‘Julia, I tell you true, I think he’s broke my heart,’ she ended.

I put my hands out to her and she moved to me and laid her head on my shoulder. ‘Oh, poor Clary,’ I said to her, as tenderly as her mother. ‘Don’t cry, Clary, darling, I’ve never seen you cry. It’ll come out right. Matthew could never love anyone but you. There could never be anyone for you but Matthew. This has just turned his head for a little while. But look – he’s up here on the downs with us today. He’s not that different. He’ll maybe stay a little while in London, but he’ll come home again. He’d always come home to you.’

Clary pulled away from me and rubbed her red eyes. ‘I’ll not have him!’ she declared. ‘I’ll not have a man who will let people call him an idiot and think himself clever. I’ve not told him so yet, but I will tell him that I won’t marry him; and I’ll tell him why and all. He’s shamed me. He’s shamed himself. I’ll tell him that and I’ll break our betrothal.’

I put my hands out to her in a helpless gesture, half trying to hold her. I pitied Matthew and I feared for their happiness. But in the back of my mind was a voice as deep as a tolling bell which warned me to hold Clary, to keep her beside me, to keep her near me, as if some mortal danger threatened her.

But she would not stay. She tore away from my embrace and rubbed her eyes again. ‘I’m a fool to have come,’ she said bitterly. ‘I thought it would be like the old days when my ma and pa came up here when the land was good and they were courting. I thought we would make friends – him and me – up here when the sun came up. But he brought his silly little pen and his paper and he told me he would write a poem about it. And now I have lost my temper, and cried, and told you. I had thought to keep it all a secret. I’ll go home,’ she said briskly. ‘There’s nothing to keep me here.’

‘Clary, don’t go,’ I said urgently. I felt I should never see her again if I let her go. ‘Stay with me. Richard and I were just going to walk around and pick hawthorn. Stay with us, Clary, dearest. Don’t go.’

She slipped from my hands even though I was clinging to her. ‘Nay,’ she said sadly. ‘I’m away. I’ll see you this afternoon, at the dancing?’

‘Promise you’ll be there,’ I said urgently. The tolling noise inside my head was louder. I felt I needed Clary to swear she would be there, without fail.

‘Where else should I be?’ she said wearily. ‘I’m not likely to write a sonnet on my walk home. I’ll be there, Julia,’ she said as she gently unlaced my fingers from the corner of her shawl. ‘Do you have a pleasant time maying now; I’ll see you this afternoon, and I shall tell Matthew I will not stand for it, and break the betrothal as soon as they have brought the spring home.’

‘Clary…’ I said, making one more effort to keep her by me. ‘Don’t go, Clary. I have the sight. I am sure there is some danger.’

She smiled at me, an old wise smile, a smile as wise as a woman who has no foresight except the knowledge that all women are born to grieve. ‘Never mind,’ she said sadly. ‘I have had the worst pain these past few days I am ever likely to have. If he had killed me with his own hands, it would not have been worse than to see him taken away from me and from Acre for such a trumpery cause. But the worst of it is over now. I fought against the men from Chichester, and they have won. All I have to do now is to tell him I will see him no more. That I love him no more. And then the worst will be over. Let me go now, Julia,’ she said sweetly. ‘There’s no trouble you, or your sight, can save me from. There is just me, and my anger, and Matthew’s folly. And the sorrow we make out of that is our own concern.’

She left me then. She turned away from me and made her way back through the kissing gate where Matthew had not kissed her, and down the track to Acre, to her little cottage, to think about the love she had known, and the promises she had made, and the future she had planned with the lad who no longer knew where his heart lay.

I stood as cold as a marble statue in the darkness, and then someone called to me in a friendly voice, ‘You must find a hawthorn bush and pick a branch, Miss Julia! We all gather at the head of the chalky streak when the sun comes up!’

It was Jimmy Dart, with his arm around Rosie. She was flushed from the walk but scarcely out of breath. I could not have recognized in her the pale girl who coughed over her work in the dirty cellar. She laid her head on Jimmy’s shoulder; the love between them was as strong and as warm as the night breeze blowing.

‘Are you robbing Ralph Megson of his apprentice?’ I accused her in mock severity. She and Jimmy exchanged a glance and laughed.

‘It’s from his being a linkboy,’ she explained. ‘He can’t stop himself crossing the road.’

I laughed too. Ralph’s cottage was on the other side of Acre lane from the little cottage where Rosie lived, and Jimmy crossing from one side of the lane to the other was a regular sight.

‘We’re betrothed,’ Rosie said shyly. ‘We’ll marry when we’re sixteen. Mr Megson has promised us a cottage of our own.’

I nodded, smiling. Ralph had mentioned it to me, and I had written the news to James. ‘No more glove-making,’ I said with satisfaction.

Rosie looked sly. ‘Just one last pair,’ she said. ‘I’ve started them already, but I don’t know when they’ll be needed.’ She gleamed at me. ‘Your wedding-day gloves, Miss Julia! For the day you marry Mr Fortescue. I’m making you special Wideacre gloves, with a sheaf of wheat on them!’

Oh, Rosie!’ I said in delight. ‘Thank you! But you know the engagement has not been announced yet. Mr Fortescue and I are not betrothed.’

Jimmy laughed aloud at that. ‘Not formally engaged!’ he exclaimed. ‘Why the first time I ever met you, he wouldn’t have a light because he wanted to walk you home from the Pump Room in the dark!’

‘Come on,’ Richard interrupted suddenly. ‘Come on, Julia!’ His arm slid round my waist and his face was so close to me that I could feel the warmth of his breath on my hair. ‘Come on, my springtime lady, and let us search for your hawthorn bush,’ he said softly, drawing me away from the others. We walked slowly to the right along the hilltop, seeking the darker shadow of a hawthorn bush.

Richard was wearing his driving cape and as we walked arm in arm, he swung the side of it around me in a gesture which both warmed and claimed me for his own. I felt light-headed and sure-footed, walking on my land in the darkness.

We startled a ewe and her lamb, and they jumped up before us with a complaining bleat and scurried off into the darkness. The patch of grass where they had been lying was warmed and smelled of fleece. Richard tossed his cape down and I sat on a corner, then he wrapped the rest around me.

I was tense, remembering the last time we were on the downs together when he had kissed me without invitation and touched me against my will. But he held true to his word, and his arm around my shoulders was friendly, brotherly, nothing more.

We sat in silence for a time while the morning skies grew pearly; all around us the grass seemed at first grey, then it slowly grew green as the colour seeped into it with the morning warmth.

‘I love you, little Julia,’ Richard said softly, his voice tender. ‘I wish you would forget your city friends and come back to me, come back to me and to Wideacre.’

I looked at his hazy smiling eyes and saw my old love, the love of my childhood and girlhood.

‘It’s too late,’ I said, half regretfully. ‘You will understand when you fall in love, Richard. You will understand then.’

His smile in the brightening light was rueful. ‘I think I will never love anyone but you,’ he said sweetly. Then he said no more.

The sky was growing brighter now, and the first tentative notes of birdsong were growing louder, with more birds waking and singing too. All about us couples were rising up and out of the hollows, brushing off their clothes and smiling at each other, sly-eyed with stolen pleasures.

Everyone was making their way towards the head of the downs where the hills looked down into Acre. There was an outcrop of chalk there which could be seen from anywhere on Wideacre, like a white stripe up the forehead of the downs. They called it Chalky Streak, and when Richard and I were little children and had lost our sense of direction, we could always find our way home by putting Chalky Streak directly before us and walking towards it. Now the young people from Acre and Richard and I stood at the top of it and waited for the sun to rise.

We faced the east, and the rising sun turned our faces rosy with its pink light. They sang the song again. I had learned the chanting little tune now and I could sing it with them. I was happy there, in the sunlight, with Richard holding my hand and the young people of Acre around me. But my heart was heavy, thinking of Clary, and when I looked around for Matthew, I saw that he was gone too. I shuddered. Some shadow touched me.

We finished our song with a little ripple of half-embarrassed laughter, and then turned towards the gate to walk back down the footpath to Acre. They had brought Misty for me, and Richard cupped his hands for me and tossed me up into the saddle. She was a carnival horse, with a wreath of hawthorn around her neck. They gave me a flower crown and a peeled wand to carry in my right hand and told me to lead them down the track to Acre. Misty tossed her head – disliking the flowers around her neck – and I had my usual trouble with riding side-saddle in a walking dress. I pulled my skirt down as well as I could. Ted Tyacke gave me a cheeky wink at seeing my ankles, but I could not play the Bath miss at dawn on the top of the downs.

They sang as we came down the track, and together we brought the spring home to Acre and the springtime jokes with us. In the old tradition the young people went around the village with their branches and played little tricks on the villagers. A spinster who loved a boy who did not care for her knew her secret was a public joke when she opened the door and found a stripped wand of willow on the step. A husband who was ruled by his wife was left a branch and a hen’s feather to take in to her when he prepared the breakfast that morning. A father whose discipline of his son seemed too stern to the crowd had an ash twig pinned to his door, and a wife who smiled too easily at the young men of Acre had the dubious compliment of a hawthorn branch with red ribbons left at her gate.

On Clary’s doorstep they put one half of a flowering branch of hawthorn, and the matching half was pinned to Matthew’s door. The most popular couple in Acre was blessed with the crowd’s goodwill. Only I felt uneasy and saw them as funeral flowers, not good-luck charms at all. Only I knew that this very day the betrothal which had started in the bad days of Acre would be ended just when things were coming right.