Only Acre dared to tackle the blackness head-on, but Acre was wise in the madness of the Laceys. They had suffered from Laceys before and they knew the signs. I think they feared for me, for I had once been well loved.

‘What ails you, Miss Julia?’ Mrs Tyacke asked me. She had come to see Mrs Gough in the kitchen, and had begged leave to pay her respects to me as I sat idly in the parlour. I had called her out of her cottage before it was crushed by the falling spire. I had been her son’s friend and playmate, and she had not forgotten. They had not forgotten me in Acre. Her sharp eyes were bright on my face, but I could not summon a smile even for her.

I heard her question. I heard it over and over in my head. Then I recognized it. She had used the same words Ralph had used to Richard that day on the common when Richard had broken the legs of his hawk. ‘What ails you?’ he had said then. Wise Ralph had seen the madness of the Laceys in Richard. He had not seen it in me.

‘Is the baby too much for you?’ she asked.

‘No,’ I said quietly. ‘I am quite well.’

‘We are all afraid for you,’ she said blankly. ‘No one in the village has seen you for so long. You do not come to church and we never see you in Acre. When we ask your husband, he just laughs in his merry way.’

I looked up from the flames flickering around the logs. ‘Does he?’ I said.

‘It’s all gone wrong again,’ she said, and her voice quavered like a disappointed child’s. ‘It’s all gone wrong again.’


I nodded. There was little I could say.

Other places manage,’ she said. Other villages have estates which make a profit and keep a village and have a mill which keeps grinding. Why does it never work for Acre?’

Other places have squires who leave the land alone,’ I said listlessly. ‘Acre has always had squires who care so much for the land that they cannot leave be. Richard wants Wideacre to be the first estate in the land in the new century. He wants it to be the finest inheritance in the land for the son he is hoping will be born.’

‘And you?’ she asked me sharply. ‘You wanted something special for Acre too. You and Ralph Megson made Acre all sorts of promises.’

‘I was a Lacey squire too,’ I said dully. ‘The future I planned for the place was very different from the future it will have under Richard. But I was still a Lacey squire imposing my will on Acre then. Mrs Tyacke, I believe things will be wrong for Acre until there is no Lacey family on Wideacre and no squire in the hall, and no master over the village. I think Ralph was right all along, but much good that thought does the village now I am no longer the squire, but just the squire’s lady. And much good that does Ralph, locked away in some cell in London. And much good that thought does me,’ I added, my voice low.

‘And you’ll be the mother of the next Lacey squire,’ she said. ‘You’ll keep the line going.’

‘No,’ I said with certainty. ‘Not I.’

She nodded at my swelling belly as I sat carelessly, legs half apart to carry the load. ‘Too late to be rid of it now,’ she said. Her face was hard.

‘It’ll be born,’ I said bitterly. ‘I cannot prevent that. But it will never inherit if I can help it.’

She gave a sad, rueful smile, the smile of Acre when it knew it had lost the greatest gamble a landless people can play, when the stakes are land and independence against a servitude of uncertain and low-paid work. It was the smile of a woman legally bound to a master, who cannot prevent conception and cannot stop the birth of a child.


‘you cannot help it,’ she said sadly. ‘We are all trapped now.’

There was silence in the little room, a silence so quiet that the noise of the flames flickering around the logs was quite clear.

‘I’ll be off,’ she said, moving towards the door. ‘My son Ted, and many others in the village, wanted to know how you were. I’m sorry to have no better news for them.’

‘I’ll live,’ I said dourly. ‘You can tell them I do not ail.’

‘I’ll tell them you are sick unto death in your heart,’ she said plainly. ‘And so you are at one with the land again, Miss Julia, and at one with Acre too. For the land is muddy and lifeless, and Acre is cold and hungry and idle and in mourning.’

Our eyes met in one level look which exchanged no warmth except the bleak comfort of shared honesty. Then she was gone.

In all that hard cold month she was my only visitor, Mrs Tyacke, the widow from Acre. No Quality visited me while I sat, idle and plump, in my black mourning. Grandpapa Havering had been taken ill in town and Grandmama had gone up to nurse him. She was afraid she would be away as I neared my time, but I wrote to her that it did not matter, she was not to worry.

Indeed it did not matter.

I thought that nothing mattered very much.

I thought that nothing would ever matter very much again.

The baby grew in my belly, as babies will, unbidden. I slept less and less at nights while the little growing limbs pressed inwards against me, or dug outwards against the soft wall of my belly. Towards the end of December I could sometimes discern a little limb pushing out, and once I felt with my fingertips the outline of a perfect tiny hand as the child flexed against the walls of its soft prison. It put me in mind of Ralph, in a prison where the gates would not open, where it was not warm and dark and safe. But as I sat in my chair, or gazed out of the window, or lay on my back on my bed, I could not even feel that Ralph mattered very much.

Richard was much away from home. I knew that they talked of it, in the kitchen, in the stable. Some nights he did not come home at all but appeared at breakfast, bright-eyed and rumpled, speaking quickly and loudly of a cocking match at Chichester, or once of a bull which someone had brought on to Acre. It had been baited with dogs, and it had killed two fine mastiffs. When Richard told me how it had ripped out the belly of one dog, I turned pale and the breakfast table swam before my eyes. I saw Stride give a quick movement as if he would stop Richard from speaking, but Stride had been in service all his life, and could not stop the squire. No one could stop Richard.

They all feared him, both in our household and on our land. They feared him because he would use the vested legal power of the squire in any way he could. He would cancel their tenancies, stop their wages, throw them out of the parish or have them arrested for insolence. And they feared him because they knew, as all the animals around him had always known, that there was something bad about Richard.

Not I. I had recovered from my fear of him. I feared no one now. I feared neither injury nor death, and if Richard had come to me and tightened his hands around my throat, I would have felt no fear. I would not even have flinched. My mama was dead, Clary was dead, Ralph and Acre were betrayed. I had sworn the baby in my belly should not inherit. If Richard had murdered me on one of the nights he lurched against my door on the way to his own room, he would have done me a favour. I feared him no more. I feared nothing. Everything I had cared for was already gone. If he had opened my door on those nights when I heard him scrabbling on the stairs and giggling drunkenly, if he had stumbled into my room and offered once more to touch me, I think I would have welcomed him and let him lie on me in the hope that he would put his long strong hands around my throat and finish me. But he did not do so. He never touched me again.

He did not like me. He only half knew his own madness; I don’t think he ever clearly saw what he had done. I think that chilling little giggle was the closest he ever came to knowing what it was he had done, or what he could do. But on that one occasion when he had touched me and seen my eyes go dark with horror and then grow like pale glass with madness, he had known then that I was crazed. And knowing I was mad was like an enchanted mirror held up to his own face. Our joint corruption was too strong even for him.

Now I no longer feared him, because he feared me. I carried around with me a great strength and a great power: the magic of my growing belly which housed the child he so badly wanted, and the utter potency of not caring whether I lived or died. Richard could never frighten me again.

But nothing could touch him. In the little world which enclosed the Laceys nothing could touch Richard. With Lord Havering away, Richard’s word was law for miles in every direction. If he had killed again, there would have been no hue and cry after the murderer. Richard was his own master and was safe from every threat I could imagine.

He feared only one thing. Fool that he was, he let that fear show in front of me.

We were at breakfast and Richard was in one of his sulky tired states. I sat at the foot of the table with a letter from my grandmama by my place, sipping tea. Richard had a hearty meal of cold meat, bread, hot potatoes and eggs and small ale. He was reading the newspaper as he ate, careless of the splattering of fat on the pages.

‘Good God!’ he said, around a mouthful of food. Some tone in his voice made me jerk up my head like a pointer in August, with the half-forgotten scent of pheasant on the ground. I think I actually sniffed like a dog. There was a sudden smell of fear in the room, unmistakable. Richard was sweating with fright, and the scent was as good to me as frying bacon to a starving pauper. He shot a quick, furtive look at me, and my gaze was blank. I could have been deaf, I could have been insensible. Then he glanced at Stride, whose face was wooden.

‘Excuse me,’ Richard said, and he crumpled the newspaper in his hand and left the room, his plate abandoned, piled with steaming food, his small ale cold and inviting in his mug.