He was saying, ‘There’s where Arcadian Villages propose to build stage one of the estate. Stage two is planned for later and will reach up to the garden of the farmhouse. In all, a hundred and fifty houses.’

She felt his bitterness and anger, as sharp as the wind that was blowing away the rain. ‘I know a little of how you feel. I had someone trying to buy up my house. I can’t tell you how angry I felt.’ She remembered the hot rush of words as she had told Julian Knox that her house was not on offer. ‘So what is happening here exactly?’

He shrugged. ‘The council has turned down the initial planning application but we had a letter yesterday to say that it’s gone to a planning appeal, which will be heard in June. If we win, it will then go before the Environment Secretary and we can spin it out.

They were clever, these planners. They had a nose for the right setting. Agnes could see that. Situated where it was, close to the road, Andrew’s farmland was the obvious place to site Exbury’s overspill. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, with real distress.

‘They think I’m a pushover,’ Andrew said, more to himself than Agnes. ‘The capitalist pushing aside the small man. They can think again.’

The shyness and taciturnity were deceptive, for this was a man who was preparing to fight. And why not? She sneaked a look at his profile. Under the wind-scoured complexion, a fire obviously burned and people with a mission were, sometimes, magnetic: they had a way of drawing you in. Anyway, why should his carefully built-up farm be under threat? Agnes wanted to shout, ‘I’m with you.’ Then she felt rather stupid.

The wind had swung round and she buttoned up her jacket. The collar scratched damply at her neck. He let the bramble fall back into place, brushed against her and again she caught the faint scent of the farm.

‘What are those?’ she asked, indicating a series of white stands under the hedge.

He barely glanced at them. ‘My bees.’

As she drove past the oaks on her way home, Agnes glanced in the driving mirror. Hands stuffed into his pockets and shirt cuffs flapping, Andrew Kelsey was rooted to the ground in the yard, gazing up to the north field, which rolled out under the moor. Tense and intent, his pose had a monolithic quality.

It was late afternoon when Andrew returned home for tea. Penny did not look up from her magazine, but said, ‘She’s pretty and all that, but I don’t think she could cook for a moment.’

‘Probably not,’ said Andrew.

‘She’d be no good as a farmer’s wife.’

‘That’s lucky, then, as I don’t think there’s any question of it.’ He drank the tea. ‘Pen, if I nip down to the pub could you look in on the calves?’

‘Sure,’ she said.

It was not until he was ordering the beer in the company of his mate, Jim, that it struck Andrew that Penny had been quick to say yes. Usually, requests for pub slots required plea bargaining on a grand scale.

The weather had finally cleared, and the moon dominated the sky when Andrew drove back to Tithings, up the potholed road which, in turn, climbed past the oak clumps towards the moor. The axe he kept in the back of the van rattled against the tool box and he thought, Blast. There was always something that needed doing that he had not got round to, something he had not checked up on or put away.

It was old, old land, and demons raged over it. A fertile crucible, with blood-red soil, bisected by hidden lanes and drenched hedgerows. The wind that had blown all afternoon and evening stirred the oak branches as he passed. Hearts of oak. Andrew saluted them, symbols of liberty, stoutness, mercantile imperialism. Under their canopies had been consummated a marriage between the elements and all the best myths. The Green Knight, Robin Hood, the Forest of Arden…

Upstairs in the stuffy main bedroom of the farmhouse, the alarm clock ticked away in the dark. Andrew pulled back the bedcovers and encountered the patchwork quilt, made by Penny’s mother. This was strange. Always, without fail, Penny removed it from the bed and folded it carefully. He put out a hand, felt across the quilt for the warm hump of Penny and found nothing.

He snapped on the light. The bed was empty and so was the room. There was a note on the pillow, which he snatched up. ‘I’ve left you,’ Penny had written, ‘for Bob, who wants me. You don’t and you never have. I’ll fetch my things another time. Good luck with the fight.’

Andrew lurched into the bathroom and was violently sick.

When he finally managed to drop into a twitchy sleep, Andrew dreamed of Jack. He pictured him, tall and short-sighted, ranging the moor and thinking of Mary. He was a man who would have known how to calculate time and distance from the sun and moon, a man whose power and presence were growing as Andrew wrote him into the letters and prepared to deceive as many people as possible to save his farm.

Who sows a field or trains a flower

Or plants a tree, is more than all.

5

Early in February Agnes received a packet from Andrew Kelsey containing seventeen letters from Jack to Mary and dropped everything to read them.

She held them gingerly. These were fragile artefacts from which secrets must be coaxed. Written on various kinds of papers, they were mottled and foxed with age and, in places, worn almost into transparency. Some were in thick lead pencil, some in watery navy blue ink. The handwriting varied in its legibility, and showed signs of stress and cramped conditions. The sifting and making sense occupied Agnes for a whole afternoon.

Afterwards, shaken and moved, she sorted them into date order. It appeared that Mary had left the farm without an explanation and, vague as to where she was going, abandoned the lover who was too old? medically unfit? to fight. To reassure her, remind her, perhaps, Jack wrote in minute detail of life on the farm and, always, of his love for Mary. The list of her beauties was tenderly couched – the shape and colour of her eyes, her slender back and arched feet. A man of deep emotions and some poetry, he described over and over how he had fallen in love with her at first sight. ‘I had no idea,’ he wrote, ‘how completely and utterly you know within the instant. How mind, body and spirit fuse as the spear strikes into the soul.’

After she had finished, Agnes paced up and down her uncle’s study, which was large enough to allow her to do so. Her study now. The letters had convinced her that this was a subject which would work. But how? She picked up the phone and put a call through to Dickie, a commissioning editor at the BBC with whom she had collaborated on several projects.

An hour later she was checking over her diary when Maud appeared in the study doorway. ‘There’s someone on the phone who wants to speak to you,’ she said, in the ultra-polite manner that always gave Agnes pause.

‘What are you up to, Maud?’

‘Rien,’ said Maud, and disappeared.

Agnes picked up the phone. ‘Will you come out for a drink with me?’ said Julian Knox. ‘Please.’

‘Why should I?’

‘Why shouldn’t you?’ he replied. ‘Six thirty at Buzacki’s on Tuesday next week?’

Agnes sighed. ‘I suppose you’ve been talking to Maud.’

‘As a matter of fact, I have.’

‘Then I must come and put the record straight.’

‘Exactly,’ he said.

At Buzacki’s there was a discreet clink of glasses, the glitter of mirror and chrome, and bowls on tables heaped with expensive nuts and handmade crisps.

After a moment or two’s study, she modified her first impressions. This was a different man from the successful opportunist prowling around the walled garden. He was still as sleek and groomed, but more fatigued, troubled, and she wanted very much to know why.

‘Within the instant,’ it had said in Jack’s letter. Agnes helped herself to the nuts. ‘I gather you laid siege to my aunt again. It wasn’t very honest.’ She gave him a direct look. ‘Was it?’

‘Honest? Yes and no. Your aunt was very keen that I had a go at changing your mind. I was interested in seeing you again. Ergo. Is that dishonest?’

She leaned forward. ‘Preying on an old lady?’

‘Is that what you call it?’ He ran his fingers through his red-gold hair, which destroyed the sleek look and replaced it with a boyish one. ‘I was practically kidnapped over the phone by your vigorous aunt and I had to swear on the blood of Julie Andrews that I would try to talk you round.’

Agnes almost felt sorry for him. ‘So she mentioned The Sound of Music?’

He opened his hands in a gesture that said, I quite understand, enjoy even, the absurdities of human nature but this was a tough one. ‘Put it this way, I hadn’t appreciated its merits before. But by the time she had finished I did.’

Kindness to elderly ladies what not what she had expected, or the humour. Perhaps he was a Jekyll and Hyde character, a fiend in the boardroom, wise and tolerant at home. They did exist. Whatever, he was a little mysterious and that always appealed to her. Agnes rolled the wine-glass idly between her fingers. It never did to make assumptions and she should know that by now.

‘Decent homes mean decent lives,’ he said, laying out his case like gems in a jeweller’s window. ‘We need profit. Why not combine the two?’

‘Flagge House is not a proposition.’

‘Of course.’ He poured out more wine. ‘I quite understand. But situations have a way of changing, believe me. And you will be saddled with its upkeep.’ He paused. ‘Not to mention fending off everyone who wishes to give you advice.’

‘Tell me, who should I trust?’

Again the quick, ironic smile. ‘Obviously not me. But now that that’s been said, and I have done what I promised your aunt, shall we change the subject?’