I said nothing. Ralph still did not look at me.

‘So if you’ve been romping with your cousin up on the downs, you’re not bound to him,’ he said to the sunlight on his eyelids. ‘You could refuse him and marry another man tomorrow and no one would know. Anyone who did know would only be Acre folk, and they’d not think the worse of you for it’. He paused. ‘And no husband you brought here would ever hear any gossip from us,’ he said.

I got to my feet. Ralph opened his eyes and shaded them with his hand, for I stood against the bright sky. My face was in deep shadow.

‘Thank you, Ralph,’ I said formally. ‘I know what you have been saying, but I have no need of any help which you could give me.’

Ralph made a little dismissive gesture with his hands. ‘I am yours to command,’ he said ironically. ‘Excuse me for not getting up.’

I smiled at that; despite my cold darkness I smiled at his flowery courtesy and his idleness. I turned on my heel and went out of that humming flowering summery garden and drove up to the Dower House where my mama was singing at the pianoforte, not knowing that in a few days I was going to walk into the peaceful home she and John had so painstakingly made and break her heart.

The wheat was ripe before Richard was due to come home.

I was glad. Even in the depths of my despairing sorrow I could be glad that we might get this first Wideacre crop safely gathered in and threshed and stored before I was forced to let loose the storm on our heads and before Uncle John and I could no longer talk of farming.

The weather had got sultry again, and when I met Ralph down at the mill, he spoke of letting the wheat go another few days so that the storm might pass. ‘Funny sky,’ he said, squinting up at the thick-bellied white clouds and the sun shining so hot on them, but not breaking through.

‘It feels as if there should be a storm,’ I said, ‘but it was like this at haymaking and the weather never broke properly then.’

‘If I was at sea, I should run for a port,’ Ralph said. He was looking towards the horizon where there was a yellow tinge to the sky over the top of the downs.

‘How long can the wheat wait before we cut it?’ I asked.

‘It can’t,’ he said with finality. ‘We have to start tomorrow unless the storm actually breaks tonight. We cannot tell how long the sickle gangs will take; the old men are badly out of practice and the young ones have never reaped in a gang before. Some of them have even had to go to their fathers to learn how to use a sickle. We can’t waste time waiting for bad weather which may not come. We’ll start tomorrow.’

‘I’ll tell John,’ I said and turned to my horse which was tethered in the mill yard.

‘Aye,’ said Ralph. ‘And you’ll be down to the common field yourself in the morning, won’t you, Julia? Everyone would want you to be there.’

‘I wouldn’t miss it for a fortune,’ I assured him with a smile. ‘It’s my first harvest too, you know.’


I smiled at him, but my face felt stiff. It was the golden time of the year, but I was in shadow. The wheat was ripening, but I felt like ice. I rode home like one of Richard’s childhood lead soldiers on a lead horse. My heart felt like lead too.

We dined early and I went to bed early, with Mama and Uncle John wishing me a good day’s harvesting tomorrow and promising to visit me in the field with my dinner in a box.

I fell asleep almost at once. Then I had a dream.

Where it came from, I do not know – perhaps Ralph’s reference to the gypsies, perhaps my memory of the gypsy who played for us last Christmas. I dreamed almost at once of a gypsy girl who sat at the front of a cart pulled by an old black horse, a horse as big as a hunter, well bred and ill suited to the work of pulling a tawdry painted cart. It was night and the weather was foul, and we were on some empty waste land, perhaps the common. In my dream she was holding a baby in her arms; the reins for the horse were slack on its back and her man was walking by its head. The pots on the side of the cart, the carved sticks for sale and the withe baskets holding clothes-pegs jiggled as the cart rocked on the uneven surface of the track. She went past me, soundless, and I turned to see her go. The rain scudded into my face and I could scarcely see her for the darkness and the driving rain. She had an old cape or a blanket over her shoulders and pulled up to cover her head, and the silhouette of her back was shapeless. One little lantern bobbed at the side of the cart; and it was going away from me.

Inside me, in a burning pain under my ribs, was a great wrench as I saw the cart go, and I called out something into the wind and knew, with despair, that she would not have heard me. I shrieked it again, but the wind was too loud and the rain too strong. I did not even know myself what it was that I had called.

I cried out in my sleep and the sound woke me. It was morning, it was the morning of my first Wideacre harvest, and the rain and the storm had been in my dream and not in real life. Yet I awoke with a sudden lurch of my stomach which felt like fear. As soon as I awoke I held my breath as if to listen, like a householder alerted in deepest sleep by the creak of a floorboard in a silent house. I lay quiet and listened to the fast thudding of my own heart.

My bedroom ceiling was grey-white, and when I raised myself in bed, I could see the sky still unbroken, with slabs of clouds overlying each other, conspiring to roof us in. Tight as slates they lay along the crest of the downs over the roof of the Dower House; although I knew the bright sun was behind them, I could scarcely believe I should ever feel hot sunlight again.

I gave a sigh as if I were not a young woman but an old lady, wearied with the heat of many summers, and I pulled the covers back and got slowly out of bed as if I were tired and defeated. The wooden floorboards were hard under my feet. The water in my ewer was cold. The sky outside the window was too bright and yet it was white, not blue. I splashed water on my face and felt my skin tighten. I dressed in my old grey riding habit, pulled my hair up on my head in a careless knot, crammed my hat on top and pinned it on. My eyes under the pale brim were dull and weary. Then I went down the stairs to the kitchen where Mrs Gough was up early, whisking eggs in a bowl.

She poured me a cup of coffee and I drank it standing by the back door, looking out over the back garden. I felt it scald my tongue, but it did not warm me. It was heavy with sugar, but did not taste sweet. I gave a little sigh. There are some days when nothing seems right, and this day was one of them. She gave me my breakfast in a kerchief, a pastry, a bread roll with butter and honey, a few slices of meat and a peach from Havering.

I went out to the stable; Jem had overslept and Sea Mist was not ready for me. I heaved her saddle out of the tack room and carried her bridle over my shoulder. I tacked her up on my own and hauled myself on to her high back from the mounting-block with no one to help me, and no friendly smile to wish me good harvesting as I trotted out of the yard and turned right down the drive for a canter over the common before I started the day’s work.

The field was lined with people when Sea Mist came trotting down the hill from the wild side of the common, Ralph among them at the gate, watching Miller Green hand out sickles from his cart.

‘Good morning, Miss Julia,’ he said courteously, and I said, ‘Good day’ to him and to all the people around him who smiled and called to me.

‘Miss Julia!’ a voice said at my horse’s head, and I looked down. It was one of the carter’s children, a thin, blue-eyed waif, eight years old.

‘There are no biscuits for you, Emily, until you have done a morning’s gleaning,’ I said with mock severity.

She giggled, showing a gap in her teeth and thrust a grimy fist in her mouth to stop the laughter. ‘Nay,’ she said, ‘but could I have a bit of ribbon off your gown, Miss Julia?’

I followed her eyes. The grey habit was well past its best, and when I had finished ripping out my hems walking through the stubble of this crop, I would order another. When it was new and smart, it had been trimmed with satin ribbon and little bows at the cuffs and around the hem. Despite Mama’s coercion and my occasional repairs, some of the bows had gone missing. The one on my right cuff was hanging by a thread.

‘Of course,’ I said kindly. I imagined the child had seen few pretty things in her childhood in Acre. I tugged at the bow until the thread snapped, and I held it out to her. Her white face lit up and she bobbed me a little curtsy – an unschooled copy of her mama’s careful downward sweep – and scurried back to the group of her friends who were gathered in the lee of the fence.

‘You supervise this field,’ Ralph said to me. ‘I want to take a Chichester hay merchant around the stacks. Will you be all right on your own?’

‘Yes,’ I said. I looked around at the men sharpening their sickles and the women rolling up their sleeves. ‘They hardly look unwilling!’

‘They can’t wait to cut it,’ Ralph said with satisfaction. ‘Your job is merely to stand by in case they have any problems. Anything you cannot resolve on your own, come to me. I shall be in the meadows by the Acre lane.’


I nodded and moved my horse out into the middle of the field.

They knew far better than I what they should be doing. Indeed, it seemed that my function was almost ceremonial. They arranged themselves in a line, each as carefully spaced as drilling guardsmen, and the reaper at the end nearest me looked up at me on top of my horse and said, ‘Wish us good harvesting, Miss Julia, and put some Wideacre magic into the wheat.’