‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’ll come around to the stables tomorrow, same time.’

‘Yes, miss,’ he said politely. Then he corrected himself. ‘I mean, yes, Lady Havering.’

I hesitated on hearing my title, ‘Lady Sarah Havering’; then I shrugged my shoulders. It was a long way from the dirty little wagon and the two hungry children. She would laugh if she knew.

I grew stronger after that ride. I rode every day, I walked every day. Sometimes Perry was awake and sober and he came with me. Otherwise, in the middle of a dazzling London season I lived alone, in quietness and isolation. Sometimes they stopped in their carriages in the park to bid me good day and ask me if I would be coming to one party or another. I always explained I did not yet have my strength back, and they let me be excused. Sometimes I would be in the parlour when Lady Clara’s guests came in and I would sit quietly in the window for some time before saying that I needed to go to my room for I was still a little tired. They let me go. They all let me go.

I did not need to stay. I was accepted, I was an heiress in my own right, I had a title, I was married to the largest landowner in Sussex and, apart from Perry’s growing scandalous drunkenness, there was not a breath of rumour about me. I was odd and unsociable, certainly. But they could not complain of that. And I think the hard eyes of Meridon looked out from under the short-cropped hair, and they knew that I was strange and alien in their world. And they let me go.

36

Two days later I received a letter:

Dear Sarah,

I cannot tell you how sorry I am that I should have been away from home when you were ill and that in my absence your marriage took place. I understand from Penkiss and Penkiss that you have consulted them as to the legality of such a marriage and they have told you, and confirmed to me, that the marriage is legal. I feel deeply unhappy that I was not available to help you at that time. It is as if I had lost your mother all over again to serve you so badly.

I can offer you little consolation except to say that I do indeed believe that your husband may steady now that he is married, and that if he does not, he is well used to having his estate run by a woman. You may find yourself in the position of being responsible for the running of both Havering and Wideacre estates and you will find that work rewarding and enjoyable.

It would have been my wish that you had made a marriage of choice, for love. But I believe that you yourself had little wish for a ‘love marriage’. If that were the case then no arranged marriage could have been more suitable, if you and Lord Peregrine can agree. I know you liked him when you first met him, it will be my most earnest prayer, Sarah, that you continue to enjoy his company and that he treats you well. If there is anything I can do to assist you in any way, I beg you will ask me. If you two should not agree, I hope you know that whatever the world may say, you may always make your home with me, and I would provide for you.

I hope you forgive me for not being able to protect you from this marriage. I would not have left the country if I had known how ill you were. I would have come to London to see if I could serve you. Regrets do nothing, but I hope you believe that mine are sincere; and when I think of your mother and the trust she placed in me, my regrets are bitter.

Yours sincerely,

James Fortescue


PS. I have just this day heard from Will Tyacke. He tells me that he gave you notice that he would not serve under Lord Peregrine and he writes to offer his formal resignation which will take place at once. This worry I can help with. I shall advertise at once for a new manager to take his place. He will be sadly missed by his friends on Wideacre but perhaps a new manager to start with the new squire is advisable. Will has only just seen the notice of your marriage, apparently he did not know you were unwell. He has taken a post in the north of England and is leaving at once.

I read the letter through several times, sitting at the mahogany table in the parlour, the noises from the street very loud in the room. I was sorry James was so grieved that he had not protected me against the Haverings’ marriage plans. I could shrug that off. No one could have predicted that I would fall ill. No one could have foreseen that I would get well again. If I had died, as everyone had expected me to do, then there would have been little harm done. The Wideacre corporation, the great brave experiment of Wideacre would have been ended under a new squire, either way. It was bitter indeed that I should be persuaded of the rightness of running an estate as if the very poorest villager’s life was of value at the very moment when I had put a new man in the squire’s chair. But James was right, I would be the mistress in my house, the land would be run as I wished, and I would run Wideacre as Will had done. I made a sad little face. It would be a different place without him.

I opened the letter again and re-read the postscript. I nodded. He had said he would go when we had parted in anger, that day in the park. He had tried to warn me and I had refused to listen. He had tried to keep Wideacre safe as one of the few places, one of the very few, where the wealth of the land could go to those who earned it. Where people could work and earn the full benefits of their work – not what was left after the squire had taken his cut, and the merchant, and the parson. I had been on the side of the squires and the merchants and the parsons then. I was not now. Since then I had been as close to death as most people ever get, and I had felt someone take my sweating hand and sign away my land for me. I would never again believe that some people deserved higher wages or finer lives than others. We all had needs. We all sought their satisfaction. Some people were clever rogues, they managed to get a little more – that was all the difference there ever was.

I would never be able to tell him that. He had gone, as he had sworn he would go, to a new corporation, a new attempt at creating some real justice in the way England was run. Not words on paper, not ideas in people’s minds, not pleasant civilized chat across a dinner table. Real changes for real people. And I knew that after that experiment failed – as fail it surely would, for it was too little in a world too big and too implacable – after that he would go to another, and to another and another. And though Will might never win he would never stop, travelling from one place to another, doing whatever he could in small brave ways to set a wall against the greed and corruption of the world we of the Quality were building.

I folded the letter carefully and then I bent down and poked it into the fire. It would be of no help to me, nor to any of the Haverings if they knew that I would have gone against their wishes if I could. I had spoken once against Lady Clara, I had accepted Perry’s awkward apology. They had won as the rich always win. They write the rules. They make the world. They win the battles.

I was sorry it had taken me this long to learn it. I had come from a poverty so grinding that I had seen the Quality as a race apart, and knew nothing more than a longing to be part of them. They made it look so easy! They made fine clothes and good food and polite chatter look like a God-given right. You never saw their struggle to keep their money earning more and more money. You never saw the ill-paid servants and clerks who serviced their needs, who earned the money for them. All you ever saw was the smooth surface of the finished work – the Quality world. I leaned against the mantelpiece and looked down at the fire. It was as if I were to say that marble like this of the mantelpiece came straight from the ground smooth and carved, and never needed working. They managed to pretend that their wealth came to them naturally – as if they deserved it. They hid altogether the poverty and the hardship and the sheer miserable drudgery which earned the money which they spent smiling.

I had been as bad as any of them – worse; for I had known what life was like down at the very bottom, and I had thought of nothing but that I should be free from that hardship, that I should win my way up to the top. And sour it was to me, to learn when I made it there, when I was little Miss Sarah Lacey, that I felt as mean and as dirty as when I had been a thieving chavvy in the streets.

It is a dirty world they’ve made – the people who have the power and the talents and who show no pity. I had had enough of it. I would be little Miss Sarah Lacey no more.

There was a knock on the parlour door. ‘Lady Sarah, there is a parcel for you,’ the parlourmaid said.

I turned with a scowl which made her step swiftly back. I had forgotten I was little Miss Sarah no more. Now I was Lady Sarah and damned nonsense it was to talk of being on the side of the poor while I sat in the parlour of the great Havering town house and was waited on by a dozen ill-paid people.

I took the parcel with a word of thanks and opened it.

It was from my lawyer, Mr Penkiss. It was the contracts for the marriage and the deeds of Wideacre for Perry. Wideacre was out of the hands of the Laceys. Wideacre was mine no more.

I spread the old paper out on the parlour table and looked at it. It meant nothing to me, the writing was all funny, and the language was not even English. But I liked the heavy seals on the bottom, dark red and cracked, and the thick glossy pink ribbon under them. I liked the curly brown lettering and the old thick manuscript. And now and then, in the text I could see the word ‘Wideacre’ and knew it was telling of my land.