Wideacre

2

I don’t know what I’ll do without you when you leave,’ Papa said casually to me one day as we rode down the lane to Acre village to see the blacksmith.

‘I’ll never go,’ I said, my confidence unshaken. I was only half attending for we were each of us leading one of the heavy plough horses to be shod. That was easy for Papa, high on his hunter, but my dainty mare only came up to the work-horse’s shoulder, so I had to keep her alert and wide awake to follow his great strides.

‘You’ll have to go some day,’ said Papa, looking over the hedges to see the plough using the second team of horses starting to turn over the sluggish winter earth. ‘You will marry and leave with your husband. Perhaps you’ll be a fine lady at Court, not that there’s much of a Court left and all filled with ugly German women, Hanover rats, they call ‘em; but you’ll be away and care nothing for Wideacre.’

I laughed. The idea was so ludicrous and adulthood so far away that nothing could shake my belief in the trinity of Papa, and me, and the land.

‘I won’t marry,’ I said. ‘I shall stay here and work with you and look after Wideacre, like you and I do now.’

‘Aye,’ Papa said tenderly. ‘But Harry will be Master here when I’m gone, and I would rather see you in your own home than rubbing against him. Besides, Beatrice, the land is well enough for you now, but in a few years you will want pretty clothes and balls. Then who will watch the winter sowing?’

I laughed again with my childish confidence that good things never change.

‘Harry knows nothing about the land,’ I said dismissively. ‘If you asked him what a short-horn was, he would think it was a musical instrument. He’s not been here for months — why, he hasn’t even seen the new plantation. Those trees were my idea, and you planted them just where I thought they should be. The man said I was a proper little forester — and you said I should have a stool made from the wood of my trees when I was an old lady! Harry cannot be Master here — he is always away.’

I still had not understood. Silly fool that I was. Though I had seen enough older sons inheriting the farms and enough younger sons working as day labourers or going into service before they could marry their patient sweethearts, I had never thought of them as landowners as we were.

I never imagined that the rule that favoured older sons to the exclusion of all others could ever, possibly, apply to us — to me. I had seen village girls of my age working as hard as adult women to earn money for the family coffers. I had seen their sisters, a few years older, on the look-out for older sons — always the eldest — to marry. But I never thought that the rigid, crazy rule that the first boy takes all could apply to us. It was a feature of the lives of the poor, like early death, poor health and starvation in winter. These things were not the same for us.

Oddly, I had never thought of Harry as the son and heir, just as I had never thought of Mama as the Mistress of Wideacre. They were simply private individuals, seldom seen outside the walls of the park. They were the background to the glory of the Squire and me. So my father’s words had not disturbed me — they had passed me by.

I had much to learn, the little girl that I was then. I had never even heard of ‘entail’, the legal process of tying up a great estate so it is always handed to the next male heir — be he ever so distant, even if there are a hundred daughters loving the land before him. With childlike concentration I still had the ability to hear only what interested me — and speculation about the next Master of Wideacre was as remote as the music of the spheres.

While I dismissed the thoughts from my mind, my father had pulled up his hunter to chat with one of our tenants trimming his boundary hedge of blackthorn and dogroses.

‘Good morning, Giles,’ I said, my seat in the saddle, the tip of my head, a perfect copy of my father’s friendly condescension.

‘Mistress.’ Giles touched an arthritic hand to his head. He was years younger than my father but bent double with the burden of poverty. A lifetime of waterlogged ditches, muddy fields and frozen pathways had permeated his bones with agonizing arthritis which no amount of dirty flannel wrapped round his skinny legs seemed to cure. His brown hand permanently ingrained with dirt (our dirt) was as knotted and as gnarled as a holly trunk.

‘A grand little lady she’s becoming,’ he said to my father. “Tis sad to think she’ll have to leave us some day soon.’ I stared at the old man. My father picked a sprig of clipped elder from the hedge with the butt of his whip.

‘Aye,’ he said slowly. ‘But a man must run the land and maids must marry.’ He paused. ‘The young Master will be home soon when he’s finished with his books. Time enough then to learn of country ways. The fields and the downs are good enough for a girl with the teaching her mother gives her, but these are bad times. The next Master of Wideacre will need to know his way in the world.’

I listened, silent. Even my mare seemed to freeze as my father spoke and the great shire-horses dropped their heads as if to listen while my father tore down the secure world of my childhood with his quiet, deadly words.

‘Yes, she’s a good girl and as sharp on the land as a bailiff for all she’s so young. But she’ll be off to marry some lord or other some day, and young Harry will take my place. He’ll be all the better for his learning.’

Giles nodded. There was a silence. A long, country silence punctuated with the springtime birdsong. There was no hurry on that timeless afternoon which marked the end of my childhood. My father had said all he had to say and said nothing. Giles said nothing, thought nothing, gazed into space. And I said not a word for I had no words to deal with this pain. In a series of clicks, like the moving parts of some strange and cruel clock, all my pictures of the adult world were falling into place. The precious elder son always took the land — and the redundant girls could go where they could find a man to take them. My residence at Wideacre was not an exclusive favour, and Harry’s departure an exile — but I was kept at home because I was not worth educating.

Harry’s school was not an interruption of his Wideacre life but an essential preparation for it. While I had been revelling in the land and the freedom of being the only child at home, Harry had been growing stronger and more skilled and would return to expel me from my home. Papa did not love me best. Papa did not love me best. Papa did not love me best.

I took a deep shuddering breath, softly, softly, so that no one could hear. And I looked at my father with a new, strange clarity. He might love me tenderly, but not enough to give me Wideacre. He might wish the best for me, but he could see no further than a good match and permanent exile from the one place in the world that was my home. He might plan ahead for Harry’s future but he had forgotten me. Forgotten me.

So that was the end of my childhood; that warm spring day on the lane to Acre with the two great shire-horses beside my papa and me, and Giles, blank as chalk scree, staring at nothing. The absolute security of owning the land I loved left me, then, in that moment, and I never had it fully back. I left my childhood with my heart aching and my mind full of anger and resentment. I started adulthood with a bitter taste in my mouth and a formless determination that I would not go. I would not leave Wideacre. I would not surrender my place to Harry. If it was the way of the world that girls left home, then the world would have to change. I would never change.

‘You’ll have to hurry and change,’ my mama said in her continual, unconscious contradiction of me. She held the hem of her green silk dress clear of the puddles in the stable yard as we clattered in. Always, she had this way of innocently opposing me, just as she continually opposed my father. From her I learned early that you do not have to argue or to state your beliefs to oppose someone. You can simply turn your head from them; from their ideas, from their loves and their enthusiasms. Without Papa, she might well have been a more direct, a sweeter-natured, woman. With him, her sense of her own purpose had soured into frustration. What should have been directness and honesty had become unspoken opposition.

‘You must hurry and change into your pink silk,’ she repeated with emphasis as I slid from the saddle and tossed the reins to a waiting stable lad. ‘We’ve a special guest for dinner — Harry’s headmaster.’

My father directed a long, silent look at her.

‘Yes,’ she said defensively. ‘I did ask him to visit. I am worried about the boy. I’m sorry, Harold, I should have told you earlier, only it is some time since I wrote and I thought he was not coming at all. I would have mentioned it before …’ She broke off and stopped. I understood my father’s rising irritation. But his reply was checked, as a man all in black except for the white band of a clerical collar appeared at the rose-garden gate.

‘Dr Yately!’ my father said in a tone of convincing delight. ‘How good to see you! And what a surprise! I should have been home to meet you had I known you were coming.’

The tall man nodded and smiled and I gained a quick impression of a cool, astute man of the world. I dipped my curtsy and shot another look at him as I rose. This was no social call. He had come for a purpose and he was anxious to complete his mission. I saw his wary eyes assessing Papa, and I wondered what he wanted of us.

He had come, it was clear, to do Mama’s work for her. She still longed to have Harry home to fill the gap his absence had left in her life. Dr Yately, for reasons I could not yet guess, was ready to take the part of the pale wife against the Squire himself. For some reason, he was as anxious to be rid of Harry as Mama was to have him home.

I attended dinner in the girlish dress of maidenly pink and correctly said not a word except in reply to a direct question — and I had few of them. I sat facing my mother. It was one of my father’s foibles that a male guest should take the foot of the table and he the head. So Mama and I — equally unimportant — sat in silence while the men talked over our heads.

Dr Yately had evidently come to persuade my father to remove Harry from his expensive, exclusive school. But if he succeeded, he stood to lose a pupil who had taken every costly extra, who was likely to need a tutor from the school to attend him to university, and who might well choose to take that tutor with him to Europe on the Grand Tour. With the disappearance of Harry, Dr Yately could say goodbye to thousands of pounds of fees. So why should he want to be rid of him? What could Harry have possibly done that was too gross a secret for a frank explanation to my father, and too shameful for Dr Yately simply to overlook and continue to pocket the fees?

The clever man knew his business. He kept off the subject of Harry but praised the roast beef and relished the wine (only our second-best claret I noticed). He clearly knew nothing about farming but he drew my father out to talk about some of the new techniques we might try. My father grew expansive, jovial. He even offered Dr Yately the chance of a few days’ hunting next season if he could take a holiday. Dr Yately was polite, but noncommittal.

Once Papa started melting towards the visitor and broached another bottle, Mama was in a hurry to leave the gentlemen together. With the sharp regret of a fourteen-year — old girl who had been on horseback all day, I watched some apple charlotte returning untouched to the kitchen. But Mama rose from the table and Dr Yately and Papa politely bowed us from the room and settled down to their port and talk.

My mother’s pale face was flushed with pleasure as she opened her workbox and handed me my embroidery.

‘Your brother Harry will come home as soon as term ends, and never go to that dreadful place again, if only your papa agrees,’ she said, elated.

‘So early?’ I asked, keenly defensive of my position. ‘Why? What has he done?’

‘Done?’ Her eyes met mine directly, no subterfuge in their pale shadows. ‘Nothing! Whatever could he do? It’s what those brutes of boys have done to him.’ She hesitated and chose a strand of silk.

‘When he was last home for the holidays he needed a chest plaster, do you remember?’ Of course I did not. But I nodded.

‘Both Nurse and I saw marks on his poor body. He had been beaten, Beatrice. He begged me to say and do nothing, but the more I thought of it the more certain I was he should be taken away from that school. I wrote to Dr Yately and he replied that he would see what was happening. Then he arrived here today!’ My mother’s voice was full of pride that she had taken action that had produced results, and dramatic results. ‘He tells me that Harry has been forced to join one of the boys’ gangs, and that in their games they have some shocking rules and punishments. The worst boy — the ringleader — is the son of … ‘ She paused. ‘Well, never mind who, precisely. But it is someone the Doctor simply must not offend. This boy has established some sort of hold over Harry. He made him sit next to him in class, have his bed next to him in the dormitory and has teased and bullied him all term. Dr Yately says he cannot separate them and he suggests — Oh! I hope your papa agrees — that Harry is of an age when he could pursue his studies at home and learn about the estate at the same time.’

Unseen by Mama, my head low over my embroidery, I raised ironic eyebrows. Harry learn about the estate, indeed! He had lived here all his life and did not even know the exact lie of our borders. He had driven through Wideacre wood every Sunday, and yet he did not know where in the wood there was a nightingale’s nest, or where in the stream you could always find trout. If Harry was going to learn about the estate it was to be hoped he could find it in a book, for he had never even glanced from the library windows when he was last home.

But my confidence was undermined by a shiver of unease. All Harry knew about Wideacre at the moment could be written in a chapbook. But once he was home at the request of Mama, and not because Papa needed him, he might become the son my papa had wanted; had sought in me. He might become, in truth, the heir.

The gentlemen did not come to the drawing room for tea and Mama sent me early to bed. After my maid had twisted my chestnut hair into one fat plait down my back, I sent her away and climbed out of my bed to sit on the window seat. My bedroom was on the second floor, facing east, overlooking the fat sickle of the rose garden, which curves around the front and east of the house and with a glimpse of the peach trees and fruit cages of the kitchen garden. Not for me the larger bedrooms in the front of the house, like Harry’s room, which faces south. Still, from where I sat I could see the garden in the moonlight and the wood pressing up to the garden gates. The cool night air carried countryside smells to me. The promising scent of growing meadows, damp with dew and the occasional warble of a restless blackbird. From the woods I heard the abrupt bark of a dog fox and from downstairs I could hear the rumble of my father’s voice as he talked about horses. I knew then that the quiet man in black had got his way with Papa and Harry would be coming home.

A dark shadow crossing the lawn interrupted my thoughts. I recognized the gamekeeper’s lad, a boy of my age, built like a young ox, with a lurcher dog — a poacher’s dog to catch poachers — at his heels. He saw the candle in my window and came from the garden (where he had no business to be) to stand beneath my window (where he had no business to be), one hand casually on the warm sandstone wall. The silk shawl I had over my nightdress seemed too flimsy when I saw his warm eyes on me, and his smile as he gazed upwards.

We were friends, and yet not friends, Ralph and I. One summer, when Harry had been especially unwell and I had been left to run wild, I had found this unkempt boy in the rose garden and, with the haughtiness of a six-year-old, ordered him out of the gate. He tipped me into a rose bush with one hard shove as his reply, but when he saw my shocked, scratched face, he kindly offered to pull me out again. I took his proffered hand and, as soon as I was on my feet, I bit it as hard as I could and took to my heels — not to the Hall for shelter, but through the lychgate to the wood. This refuge was impenetrable to Mama and Nurse who were ignorant of the little animal pathways among the thickets, and were forced to stand at the gate, calling and calling, until I chose to reappear. But this stocky child wormed along the tracks as fast as I went, and arrived at a little hollow among brambles, roses and bushes on my heels.

His dirty little face was split in a broad grin and I grinned back. It was the start of a friendship that, childlike, lasted the summer and then stopped as quickly and as thoughtlessly as it had begun. Every day during that hot, dry summer I would escape from the busy parlourmaid, who had suddenly found my care added to her duties, and skip down to the woods. Ralph would meet me by the Fenny and all morning we would fish and splash in the stream, go on great expeditions all the way to Acre lane, climb trees, rob birds’ nests, or catch butterflies.

I was free because Harry was watched night and day by Nurse and Mama. Ralph was free from the day he could walk because his mother, Meg, a slattern in a tumbledown cottage in the middle of the woods, had never troubled where he went or what he did. This made him a perfect playmate for me — and he taught me all the paths and trees of Wideacre woods in a great sweep around the Hall as far as my little legs could carry me in a morning.

We played like country children, speaking little and doing a lot. But the summer soon ended; Harry recovered, and Mama returned to her eagle-eyed scrutiny of the whiteness of my pinnies. Mornings were again given over to lessons, and if Ralph waited in the woods while the leaves turned yellow and red, he would not have waited for long. Very soon he had given up playing altogether and trailed around behind the gamekeeper, learning the skills of keeping game and killing vermin. Papa heard Ralph’s name as the handiest lad in the village for pheasant chicks, and by the time he was eight he was paid a penny a day in the season.

By the time he was twelve he was earning half a man’s pay but doing a man’s job in and out of season. His mother had come from nowhere; his father had disappeared, but that meant he was free of the family loyalty that kept poachers safe in Acre village. And his tumbledown house in the woods was an advantage too. They put the pheasant breeding pens all around the dirty little cottage by the Fenny and Ralph’s deepest sleep could always be broken by the crack of a twig near the game birds.

Eight years is a lifetime in childhood, and I had almost forgotten the summer when the dirty little urchin and I had been inseparable. But somehow, when I was mounted on my pretty mare, with my tailored habit and tricorn hat, I felt awkward riding past Ralph. When he pulled his forelock to Papa and nodded to me I did not feel easy and gracious as I said, ‘Good day.’ I did not enjoy stopping and talking with Ralph, especially if I was riding alone. And I did not like now the way he leaned, so self-possessed, against our wall and looked up at me, illuminated by my candle.

‘You’ll take cold,’ he said. His voice was already deep. He had filled out in the past two years and had the solid strength of a young man.

‘Yes,’ I said, shortly. I did not withdraw from the window for that would somehow have been a concession to his advice … and an acknowledgement that I was conscious of his eyes on me.

‘Are you out after poachers?’ I asked, unnecessarily.

‘Well, I’m not going courting with a dog and a gun,’ he said in the slow drawl of the downs. ‘A fine lass I’d get with a gun and a trap, don’t you think, Miss Beatrice?’

‘You’re too young to think of courting,’ I said dictatorially. ‘You’re no older than me.’

‘Oh, but I do think of courting,’ he said. ‘I like to think of a warm, friendly lass when I wait alone in the woods on a cold night. I’m not too young for courting, Miss Beatrice. But you’re right, we are the same age. Are girls of near fifteen too young to think of loving and kisses on warm summer nights?’

His dark eyes never left mine, and they seemed somehow to shine in the moonlight. I was very glad — and yet somehow sorry — that I was safe in the house, high above him.

‘Ladies are,’ I said firmly. ‘And the village girls would know better than to think of you.’

‘Ah.’ He sighed. The country silence filled the pause. His dog yawned and stretched out on the gravel at Ralph’s boots. Contradictorily, I wished with all my heart that he would look at me again in that shining, hot way, and that I had not called myself a lady and reminded him that he was nothing. His head dropped and his eyes no longer stared up at me, but were fixed on the ground. I could think of nothing to say; I felt awkward and foolish and also sorry, sorry, sorry, to have been arrogant to one of our people. Then he shifted his weight and hefted his gun over his shoulder. Despite the shadows I could see he was smiling, and that he needed my pity not at all.

‘A lady is the same as a village girl in the cold, or in a quiet hayloft, or in a little hollow of the downs, I reckon,’ he said. ‘And if fifteen is old enough for me, I reckon it’s old enough for you, too.’ He paused. ‘My lady,’ he added, and his voice made it into an endearment.

I choked with shock, and while I said nothing like a fool, Ralph whistled to his dog, a black dog, his shadow, and left me without even a by — your — leave. He walked like a lord across his own acres, a dark shape in the shadowy garden, over our lawn and through the little gate to our woods. I was stunned at his impertinence. Then, with a sudden spurt of rage, I bounced from my window seat to go down to the Squire, who should have him whipped. Dragging on my wrapper, I was halfway to the door before I paused. For some reason, I could not think why, I did not want Ralph whipped — or thrown off Wideacre. He should certainly be punished, but not by my father, nor the gamekeeper either. I, alone, should find some way to wipe that insulting, warm smile from his face. I went to bed planning revenge. But I could not sleep. My heart was thudding so loud. I was surprised it should beat so fast with rage.

In the morning, I had all but forgotten him. It meant nothing, nothing at all, that I chose to ride in the direction of his home. I knew he would have been watching for poachers in the woods all night, and so would be home till noon at least in the horrid, damp cottage near the disused mill on the River Fenny. The flow had never been reliable there, and my father’s father had built a new mill to grind our corn further upstream. The old mill had fallen into disrepair and the tiny worker’s cottage alongside seemed to be sinking into the boggy ground. The woods grew close to the back door of the low-roofed shack, and as Ralph grew taller I believe he must have stooped all the time indoors. It was a two-roomed place, more a hovel than a cottage.

His mother was a dark, large-boned woman with wild, dangerous looks like his. ‘A gypsy of a woman,’ my father called her with relish.

‘Really?’ said my fair-haired mother coldly.

We often rode this way, my father and I. He would stop outside the poor cottage and Meg would come out to him, stooping under the low eaves, her skirt held high above the mud, barefoot, her strong brown ankles splashed and dirty. But she met my father’s eyes with a proud, bright smile like an equal, and brought him home-brewed ale in a rough cup. When he tossed her a coin she caught it as if it were her due, and sometimes I saw the hint of a smile of understanding between them.

There could not be secrets between this wild and lonely woman and the Squire, my father. But once or twice when he had ridden fast from home, full of impatience with my mother and her small, fiddling ways, we had seemed naturally to drift towards the Fenny and the little cottage in the woods where Meg, the gypsy woman, swayed towards us with her barefoot dancing step and her eyes bright with knowledge.

She was supposed to be a widow. Ralph’s father, the black sheep of one of the oldest families in Acre, had been pressed into the Navy and disappeared: dead, or missing, or run away. The other men of the village followed her with their eyes like hungry dogs but she looked neither to right nor left. Only my father, the Squire, brought a smile to her eyes, and those dark eyes to his face. No other man was ever worth a second glance. So, although she had offers, oh, many, she and Ralph never moved from the dark little house by the river.

‘A hundred years ago she would have been burned for a witch,’ said my father.

‘Oh, really?’ said my unbewitching mother.

She did not seem surprised to see me at her garden gate alone, but then nothing surprised her. She nodded and brought me a cup of milk in the way of country hospitality. I drank, still sitting sidesaddle on my mare and, as I drained the cup, Ralph came like a midnight shadow from the woods. He had a pair of dead rabbits hanging from one hand and his dog, as ever, at his heels.

‘Miss Beatrice,’ he said in a slow greeting.

‘Hello, Ralph,’ I said graciously. In the bright daylight his night-time power had gone. His mother took my cup and we were alone in the sunlight.

‘I knew you would come,’ he said confidently. It was as if the sun had gone out. Like a mesmerized rabbit I gazed straight into his dark black eyes and could see nothing, nothing, but his eyes fixed on mine and the slow smile of his mouth, and the way a small pulse was beating quick under the tanned skin of his throat. The tall youth had all the power of last night. He carried it with him. He stood at my mare’s head and I was glad to be seated above him, at shoulder height in the saddle.

‘Oh, really?’ I said, in unconscious imitation of my mother’s frigid tones. Abruptly, he turned, and walked away from me, through the purple willowherb to the Fenny. Without thinking what I was doing, I slid from the saddle, hitched my horse’s reins to Meg’s ramshackle fence and followed him. He never glanced behind, he never waited for me. He walked as if he were quite alone, down to the riverbank, and then turned upstream to where the ruins of the mill stood, the deep millpond dark behind it.

The wide, arched door where they used to load the wagons stood open. Ralph never looked back and I followed him without a word inside. A half-floor for storing sacks stretched across the room, a rickety ladder leading up to it. In the warm gloom of the old building I could smell the fusty, safe odour of old straw and feel the thick softness of dusty chaff underfoot.

‘Want to see a swallow’s nest?’ Ralph offered nonchalantly.

I nodded. Swallows are lucky and their little mud and grass cup-shaped nests on beams or ledges under the eaves always pleased me. He led the way up the ladder and I followed unhesitatingly. When he reached the top he stretched out a hand to pull me up, and when I stood beside him, he did not let my hand go. His eyes met mine in a long, measuring stare.

‘There they are,’ he said. He pointed to the nest being built on a low beam under the roof. As we watched, a parent bird swooped into the barn with a tiny beakful of mud to add to the growing sides and swooped away. We watched in silence. Ralph let my hand go and slid his hand around my waist, drawing me closer. We stood side by side and his hand smoothed over the velvet of my gown up to the curve of my small breast. Without speaking a word, we turned together and he dipped his head to kiss me. The kiss was as gentle as the flight of the swallow.

His mouth brushed mine with soft, gentle touches. As he repeated them, I felt him tense, and the grip on my waist grew tighter. Swoony with pleasure, I found my knees giving way beneath me and I sank on to the dusty straw-strewn floor with my arms around him.

We were half children, half adult. I knew everything about mating animals, but nothing of kisses and lovemaking. But Ralph was a country lad and had been drawing a man’s wage and drinking with men for two years. My hat fell off as I tipped my head back to meet his kisses, and it was my hands that opened the neck of my gown to his exploring, clumsy fingers, and opened his shirt so I could press my forehead to his chest and rub my burning face against him.

Somewhere in the back of my mind a voice said: ‘Fever. I must have a fever.’ For my legs were too weak to rise and somehow I was trembling, trembling all over. In the core of my body, under my ribcage, was a fluttering, painful feeling. Down my spine was a long, long shiver. Ralph’s smallest move made me shudder. When his forefinger drew a line from under my ear to the base of my neck, he could feel me tremble all over. ‘I must be ill,’ said my drowning consciousness. ‘I must be very, very ill.’

Ralph eased back from me and leaned on an elbow looking down into my face. ‘You should go,’ he said. ‘It’s getting late.’

‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘It can’t be two o’clock yet.’

I fumbled in my pocket for my silver watch, a miniature copy of my father’s, and opened it.

‘Three!’ I exclaimed. ‘I shall be late!’ I jumped to my feet, reaching for my hat and shaking the straw from my skirt. Ralph made no effort to help me, but leaned back against an old stook of straw. I buttoned the front of my gown, watching him covertly under my eyelashes. He pulled a straw from the stook and chewed on it, watching me, impassive. His dark eyes showed nothing. He seemed as content to be left as to be visited, as still as a secret pagan god left neglected in old woods.

I was ready to go and should have been hurrying away, yet the flutter under my ribcage had become some sort of ache. I did not want to leave just yet. I sat down again beside him and laid my head prettily on his shoulder.

‘Say you love me before I go,’ I whispered.

‘Oh, no,’ he said without heat. ‘I’ll have none of that.’

In surprise I jerked my head back to stare at him.

‘You don’t love me?’ I asked, astounded.

‘No,’ said Ralph. ‘You don’t love me, do you?’

I paused, a cry of outrage on my lips. But I could not say I did love him. I liked the kissing very much, oh, so very much, and I would like to meet him again, here in the darkness of the old mill. Perhaps the next time I would slide my dress off and feel his hands and lips all over me. But he was, after all, Meg’s son. And he lived in such a dirty little cottage. And he was only the gamekeeper’s lad and one of our people. And we let him and Meg live in the cottage for practically nothing; it was almost charity.

‘No,’ I said slowly. ‘I don’t suppose I do.’

‘There are those who love and there are those who are loved,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘I’ve seen grown men weep like babies for my mother, and she never look at them. Gentlemen, too. I’ll never be like that for a woman. I’ll never love and pine and fall sick for someone. I shall be the one who is loved, and gets the presents and the loving and the pleasure … and then moves on.’

I thought swiftly of my father, bluff and heart — whole, and of my mother’s stifled sighs and pining for the love of her son. Then I thought of the girls I had seen in the village follow a lad with their eyes and blush scarlet and grow pale. Of the village girl who drowned herself in Fenny pool when her lover went into service in Kent. Of the constant pain there is for a woman in loving, and wedding, and childbirth and the loss of looks and then the loss of love.

‘I shan’t be the one who loves either,’ I said firmly.

He laughed aloud.

‘You!’ he said. ‘Oh, you are like all the Quality. All you care for is your own pleasure and owning the land.’

Our pleasure and owning the land. It is true. His kisses had been pleasure; wonderful swoony pleasure. Good food, a taste of wine, hunting on a frosty morning; these things are pleasure. But to own Wideacre is not pleasure; it is the only way to be alive. I smiled at the thought. He smiled kindly in return.

‘Oh,’ he said longingly, ‘you’ll be a proper little heartbreaker when you are ready. With those slanty green eyes of yours and your beechnut hair, you’ll get all the pleasure you want, and all the land, too.’

Something in his voice convinced me he was telling the truth. I would have all the pleasure, and all the land as well. My misfortune of being born a girl would not be my destiny. I could take pleasure, and I would take land, too, just like a man. And the pleasure I would have in courting would be far more than any man would have. Ralph had enjoyed our kissing, I knew, but his pleasure had been nothing to mine. I had been faint with delight at the feelings of my silky skin. My body was a perfect animal, so lithe and slim and sweet. I would get pleasure with any man I wanted. I would get the land, too. I wanted Wideacre with every waking thought, and breath, and dream. And I deserved Wideacre, too. No one cared for it as I did, or loved it as I did, or knew it as well as I.

But I looked at Ralph speculatively. I had heard something else in his voice, and his eyes were no longer impassive; they were warm and sensuous again.

‘You could love me!’ I said. ‘You nearly do already.’

He threw out a hand in the way the lads do when they wrestle and want to surrender.

‘Oh, yes,’ he said, as if it hardly mattered. ‘And perhaps I could make you love me. But there would be no place for us. You belong at the Hall and I belong in Meg’s cottage in the woods. We can meet in secret and take our pleasure in dark and dirty places, but you will marry a lord and I will marry some slut from the village. If you want love, you must find someone else. I will take you only for pleasure.’

‘For pleasure then,’ I agreed, as seriously as swearing to a covenant. I turned my face to him and he kissed me solemnly as a binding pledge. I scrambled to my feet, but then I paused to look at him. Leaning against the stook of straw, he looked like some dangerous harvest deity. I smiled at him, almost shyly, and went back to stand before him. Lazily, he reached up a hand to me and pulled me down to him. I was in his arms once more; we smiled into each other’s eyes like equals, as if there were no Hall and no cottage. Then his hard mouth came down on mine and my hat fell off again.

I did not get any dinner that day.

But I was not hungry.