He leaped down the bank in one fluid movement, faster than I would have thought he could move. He was in the water and at my side in an instant and Sea shied sideways with a snort of fright. He laid hold of my knee and my waist and then my arm and pulled me off Sea’s back and down so that I tumbled into the stream beside him and my best new riding boots were knee-high in water. He grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me so that my head rocked on my neck.

‘What?’ he shouted. ‘What are you saying? What are you saying?’

I blazed back at him, angry and unafraid of his violence. ‘That I’m marrying Lord Peregrine,’ I said. ‘His mother knows. It’s to be announced. It’s true.’

His brown eyes burned at me for one moment longer then he flung me away from him so that I stumbled backwards against Sea. He waded downstream to the shallow part of the bank and stumbled up it, his boots heavy with water. I turned and vaulted on to Sea’s back as easy as if I were in the ring and I wheeled him around like a triumphant cavalryman.

The look on Will’s face wiped the smile off my face with the shock. He looked as if I had stabbed him in the heart. I gasped when his eyes met mine, his gaze was so intent.

‘You will marry him?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ I said low. All the anger had gone, there was nothing in the world except his brown eyes, dark and narrowed as if he was hurting inside.

‘You’ve told James Fortescue?’

‘I will write today.’

‘This is your wish, Sarah?’

‘Yes,’ I said. I wanted so much to tell him that it was my wish because I did not know who I was nor where I should go. Because I had to have some family, some place where I belonged. Because Perry and I were two of a kind: both lost, both unloved, both unlovable.

‘I’ll leave on your wedding day,’ he said coldly. ‘And I’ll warn the village that everything – all our hopes and plans for the future, all the promises made by the Laceys – everything is all over for us.’

He turned and walked away from the stream. Sea and I looked after him. His waterlogged boots squelched at every step. His shoulders were bowed. I tried to laugh at the picture he presented, but I could not laugh. I sat very still on Sea’s back and watched him walk away from me. I let him go. Then I turned Sea’s head and rode back to Havering Hall.


I did as I had said I would, and everything followed on from that almost without my choosing. I wrote and told Mr Fortescue of my decision and I waited and read his reply without emotion. He was concerned and unhappy but there was nothing that he could do. His honest, anxious, stumbling reply made me feel that I was running very fast in the wrong direction, but Lady Clara insisted on seeing it, and read passages aloud, and rocked with laughter.

She composed for me a cold-hearted rejoinder which thanked him for his advice but said that my mind was made up. It referred him to the Havering lawyers if he had any queries.

‘You had best remind him that he is a little late in the day breaking his heart over your happiness. He never made much effort to find you in all the sixteen years when you were lost, by all accounts. Too busy re-creating Eden at Wideacre, I daresay.’

That made me angry and resentful, and the letter I sent to Mr Fortescue was cold and ungenerous. I did not hear from him again.

I heard no more from Will, either. I often seemed to see his face looking at me with that especial sharp anger. Once I dreamed of him trudging away from me, heavy-footed with wet boots. In my dream I called out to him and when he turned around he was smiling in a way I had never seen him look. But when I woke I knew that I had not called out to him, that I never would call out to him. That a gulf had opened between us which was too deep for mere liking and sympathy to bridge.

Perry and I grew closer, he was my only comfort in the late summer days while Lady Clara taught me how to pour tea and how to deal cards like a lady and not like a card-sharper. Perry would sit with me now during my lessons and when his mama praised me for doing well he would beam at me like a generous incapable student watching some bright friend do better.

‘You will be the toast of the Season,’ he said to me idly, as he watched his mama and me take a hand of picquet.

‘I don’t know about that, but she will be the gambler of the Season,’ Lady Clara said, discarding cards and finally conceding the game to me. ‘Sarah, whatever hell you learned to play in must sorely miss you.’

I smiled and said nothing, thinking for a moment of Da and his seductive pack of greasy cards on an upturned beer-keg outside a country inn.

‘Anyone fancy a game?’ he would offer. ‘Playing for beer only, I don’t want to be taken for a ride, I just want a fair game, a bit of sport.’ One after another they would come. Plump farmers with rents in their pocket. Middling tenants with their wives’ butter money burning a hole in their jackets. One after another Da would pluck them. Drunk or sober it was one of the things, perhaps the only thing, that he did quite well.

‘Sarah will restore the family fortunes in cash as well as in land,’ Peregrine said lazily with a smile at me. He did not see the sharp look his mama shot at him. I did. It warned him to be silent about the Havering debts.

She was wrong to fear me knowing, I was no fool. I would tell my lawyers to ascertain how much the Haverings owed before I honoured my promise to marry. Mr Fortescue was a careful man and would make sure that the capital of the land was entailed upon my children in such a way that no husband, however spendthrift, could waste it on gambling. Perry and I smiled at each other with easy knowledge. We needed each other, we liked each other, we trusted each other. We neither of us wanted very much more.

We walked that evening in the garden. It was getting colder at nightfall and he put his silk embroidered evening jacket around my shoulders and offered me his arm. I took it. We must have made a pretty sight, the two of us, my auburn ringlets brushing his shoulder and my head held high. My green gown hushing the grass and Perry as golden and as lovely as an angel. We walked together in the twilit garden and we talked of money and friendship. We did not talk of love. It never entered our heads. When Perry saw me to my bedroom door at night he stooped and kissed me on the lips and his touch was as cool as his mama’s social pecks.

I stopped him as he turned to leave. ‘Will you never feel desire, Perry?’ I asked.

He looked frankly alarmed. ‘I doubt it, Sarah,’ he said uncomfortably. ‘Would you ever want me to?’

I paused. It was as if there were two people inside me: one the girl who could not bear to be touched except by one other person, the girl who had seen too much and heard too much at too young an age to ever think that love could have anything to do with a heaving bunk and a rocking wagon. The other was a girl growing into womanhood who had seen a man look at her as if she had murdered him by leaving him. A man who looked at her with passion and love and then turned and walked away.

‘No Perry,’ I said honestly. ‘I would never want desire from you.’

He smiled at that, his blue eyes a little blurred for he was a little drunk as usual. ‘That’s fine,’ he said encouragingly. ‘For I do like you awfully, you know.’

I smiled wryly. ‘I know,’ I said. ‘It is all I want from you.’

I opened the heavy panelled door and slipped inside. I paused and heard his footsteps go waveringly down the long corridor. There was a sudden clash and clatter as he stumbled into the suit of armour which stood at the corner and his owlish, ‘I beg your pardon,’ to it. Then I heard his feet scrabble on the stairs and step one after another, until he reached the top and was gone to his room.

28

I went over to the window to draw back the curtains. It was still early and the moon was coming up. As I stood, looking out towards the moonlit Common, I saw a horseman come riding down the silvery track towards the back garden of Havering Hall. I saw him ride under the lee of the wall and then I lost sight of him. He must have left his horse tied up, because in a few moments the figure appeared on the top of the wall, swung a leg over and dropped down into the informal garden at the back of the house. I watched in silence. I would have known Will Tyacke from fifty miles away.

He walked across the lawn as if he did not care who saw him trespassing in darkness, and then he stopped before the house, scantling the windows as if he owned the place. A low laugh escaped me and I leaned forward and pulled up the sash window and stuck my head out. He raised a hand in greeting and came unhurriedly to the flower bed beneath my window and for a moment I thought of some other Lacey girl, and some other young man, who had whispered together on the night air and known they were talking of love.

‘What is it?’ I said peremptorily.

Will’s face was in shadow. ‘It’s this,’ he said. He had something white in his hand. I could not see what it was. He stooped to the path at his feet, and straightened up, wrapping the paper around a stone.

‘I thought you would want to know,’ he said. He was almost apologetic. ‘From something you once said, earlier this summer, when we were friends.’

He made as if to throw it, and I stepped back before I could ask if we might still be friends. His aim was sure, the stone came sailing through the window wrapped in the white paper. By the time I picked it up and was at the window again he was walking across the lawn and scaling the wall. I watched him go. I did not call him back.

Instead I unwrapped the stone he had thrown for me and smoothed out the paper. The white was the wrong side, the blank side. On the inside, very creased as if half a dozen people had pored over it, spelling out the words, was a bright scarlet picture with a white horse in the middle and two trapeze flyers going over the top: a man and two girls. In curly letters of gold it said: Robert Gower’s Amazing Equestrian and Aerial Show.