That very day the weather changed and became cloudy and cooler. I was able to say at dinner that an east wind always made me irritable, and in the days that followed I continued to blame the weather. While the apple blossom went from pink to white and then snowed down upon the grass, we had week after week of low cloud and a glaring sky. The sky felt heavy, weighing down on the land. It was not grey, or dark, but bright, so bright I had to squint to look down the lane.

The lane itself blazed white and green; the gypsy’s lace on the verges was as thick as whipped cream, and the hawthorn flowers rose above them in clusters of whiteness like snowdrifts on the shiny-green hedges. The air was filled with the heavy scent of the summer flowers and weeds. The new cloverfields were purple with flowers and loud with the noise of addicted bees. On the common the bluebells were as thick as sea mist and on the downs the lower slopes were yellow with cowslips, and the air smelled of honey.

The chestnut trees flowered and then dropped their petals, and still the heavy clouds lay unmoving. The men from Acre stripped down to breeches to weed in the cornfields, but there was no sun, so their bodies stayed oddly white, like chalk men out of the chalk land. Sitting at the parlour window, listening to Mama play the pianoforte, I could not catch even a breath of wind. The sky sat on the hills of the downs like a cloth over a bowl of dough set out to rise. Under the soft lid, in the steamy heat, the grass grew and turned pale. The cream roses in the garden at the hall bloomed like an ominous reminder of the bowl of cream roses in my dream, and down the lane their lesser cousins, the dogroses, spotted the banks and the hedges, all as pale as fever patients against the vivid greenness of the bright patchwork counterpane of the Wideacre fields.


I had said I was perfectly well to Uncle John and Mama, but I had lied. I was not; I felt nauseous and tired. One morning, getting to my feet too swiftly from bending over a map in the library, I had stumbled with dizziness and was afraid I would faint. I was not hungry at mealtimes, but found I was tempted to Mrs Gough’s jars of bottled fruits and dried plums in the kitchen. My face was thinner and paler; my eyes, when I looked in the mirror, were hazy and fey. I was headachy and weary too, and for days at a time I made excuses and avoided riding out.

‘Come out for a drive,’ Mama said invitingly to me one morning. ‘It is not half so hot and humid this morning. Take me out in the gig and show me the hayfields. Mr Megson told me that they are nearly ready for cutting.’

I nodded and languidly went for my hat and gloves, but I saw the glance between Mama and Uncle John and his approving nod to her.

Mama was right, the weather had lifted. The feeling of the air being too thick to breathe had gone, and the light on the downs was clear and bright rather than too vivid. I clicked to the horse and we bowled down the road to Acre, the bit jingling with the brisk trot. The shadows of the trees flicked over us and the wind of our brisk passing blew in my face and brought some colour to my cheeks. The hay field I wanted to see was on the far side of Acre, and as we drove through the village, I twirled my whip in greeting to a couple of women working in their front gardens and waved to Ned Smith who was unloading charcoal in his yard.

A hayfield ready for cutting is a sea of palest green, knee-high, studded and scattered with blazes of colour: the scarlet of poppies, the deep blue of cornflowers, the pastel pinks and mauve and white of Lady’s smock, all growing spindly and tall up to the sunlight, pushing their bright faces through the grass. On the borders of the field the banks were bright with flowers: sweet-smelling clumps of cowslips, starry dogroses with their pale-pink faces and mustard-yellow stamens. And breathing over it all was the perfume of the wild bean flowers, sprawling over the hawthorn hedges and twining up the hazel and elder bushes.


‘It’ll be ready in three, four days of this weather,’ Miller Green said cheerily to me as we drew up alongside the lower meadow, where he leaned on the gate and smoked his pipe. I sniffed discreetly at the blue smoke. Tobacco. Miller Green had been smoking hawthorn leaves when he struggled to survive in a silent mill with no corn to grind. Now there were wages coming in, and he could buy his pinch of tobacco again.

‘It looks nearly ready,’ I agreed.

‘It’s the wheat I’m wanting,’ he said with longing. ‘I’ve been to the common field every day to see it. It’s a good crop, tall and strong, and thick as nettles on a dung heap!’

‘Good,’ I said. I got down from the gig so I could stand on the lower bar of the gate and scan the field to see if it was indeed near ready for cutting.

‘Thanks to you, Miss Julia,’ said the old man with a sly smile on his face.

‘Nonsense,’ I said evenly, but without heat. ‘You know that is nonsense, Miller Green. It’s a good crop because it was good-quality seed, thickly sown with the weather to suit it. Anything else is old wives’ nonsense.’

‘Aye,’ he said, accepting the reproof without caring, ‘but widely believed, Miss Julia. They all say in the village that you have the Lacey knack of making the wheat grow. It’s a good crop, and you get the credit.’

I shrugged and turned my gaze back to the rippling sea of green. ‘As you will,’ I said easily. ‘Is Mrs Green well, and your sons?’

‘Aye,’ he said, satisfied. ‘We’re all well. All of Acre is well. I can scarce remember such a spring and a summer.’

I nodded in farewell and went back to the gig where my mama sat under her grey silk parasol.

‘Is it ready?’ she asked. ‘It still looks very green to me.’

‘Three or four days,’ I said. ‘I’ll just drive down to the common to look at the wheatfield, and then we’ll go home.’

‘Certainly,’ she said, and waved her gloved hand at Miller Green, while I clicked to the horse and we turned down the track that leads to the common field.


The field was like a miracle to me. I was Wideacre bred, but I had never seen a wheatfield growing on Wideacre. Yet here it was before me, and the land and the village restored in one season’s work by the combination of Uncle John’s money, Ralph’s authority, my name and the irresistible magic of the Wideacre soil, which I believed would grow orchids and palm trees if one planted them.

The crop was a foot, even eighteen inches high, the kernels of the wheat, green and sweet and small, encased tightly in the blade like tiny peas in a pod. The field was huge; I could still remember how it had been, with the heather and the bracken encroaching on the margins and straggly weeds and tall armies of purple loosestrife and rose-bay willow-herb growing alongside and starving the self-sown crop. Now the drudgery of the weeding had won us a wide sweep of field, properly fenced and clean at the rims and green as green, with all the shrubs and bracken pulled clear. Beside it was the orchard I had planted on that cold grey day, the trees standing tall, and little green berries of apples showing the crop we would have. The wheatfield was a world of waving smoothness, green speckled with flowers and the bright blaze of poppies and misty-blue cornflowers.

Oh, it’s so lovely,’ I exclaimed involuntarily. I handed the reins to Mama in a sort of dream and slid down from the gig and went through the gate to stand amid the wheat in the field in its promise of green. ‘It’s so lovely,’ I said to myself, and lifted my skirts clear of the growing shoots and skirted the field to see the crop from another angle.

In my head I could hear the sweet singing noise which sometimes came to me on Wideacre, or when I was missing it. And the feel of the earth under my shoes was like a guarantee of happiness. In the days since Clary’s death and my own confusion I had lost my joy in the land. I had lost my ears to hear the singing, and I had lost my delight in the smell and feel of the place. Now, like a waterfall tumbling full upon me, it was coming back to me. Careless of my gown, I knelt down in the earth and sniffed at the crop as if it were a bouquet of flowers. It had the lightest aroma, like grass, but a little sweeter. Then I picked a stem and looked at the sound seeds which would grow and grow and ripen until we could cut it and thresh it, and grind it and bake bread with it, so that no one in Acre need ever go hungry again.

I put the seed in my mouth and nibbled at it like a ravenous harvest mouse. It was hard, not sweet yet. But when I bit on the stalk, I could taste the sap inside the stem, and I turned back to the gig with it in my mouth.

Oh, Julia,’ Mama sighed with a faint smile. ‘Do take that bit of grass out of your mouth. You look like an absolute natural.’

I whipped it out with a little jump. ‘I am sorry, Mama, I was in an utter daydream. The field is so wonderful.’

She smiled ruefully. ‘When Beatrice was a girl, she was just the same,’ she said. ‘She loved the land rather like you do, I think. And they used to say all sorts of things about her ability to make the land grow.’

I climbed back into the gig. ‘They say it about me too,’ I said, rather pleased. ‘I know it is nonsense, Mama, but it is a rather nice idea that the land grows well for the Laceys.’

She gave a little sigh. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I know you like that thought. I suppose I am not country born and bred, and so the passion for a field is never one that I feel. But your papa loved his land very well too.’

I gave one last lingering look at the common field and turned the gig for home. ‘It should be ready for harvesting by August,’ I said.

Oh, good,’ Mama said, ‘for Richard is hoping to come home in time to see it.’ She paused. ‘What has gone wrong between you and James, my darling?’ she asked tentatively. ‘I have been waiting and waiting for you to take me into your confidence. You have not had a letter from James for nearly three weeks, and yet he should have come home to England by now. I did not want to press you, especially with you seeming unwell, but you should tell me.’