‘Sarah,’ I said. And she opened her eyes and looked into my face.

She was my child, in that moment. I knew her as well as I knew the horizon around Wideacre. And she was not mad, nor sick, nor corrupt, nor evil. She was just a little baby who needed nothing more than a chance to grow and live and be happy. She had some kind of right to that, as surely as every poor child born in Acre had a right to life.

I struggled to my feet, and as I did so a great frightening slithery blob of flesh came away and fell to the floor. I froze, aghast, but I did not seem to be mortally wounded, though there was a great pool of blood where I had been. Then I saw the cord and realized, foolish Quality miss that I was, that it was the afterbirth and I could nibble off the cord in safety. My child was truly born and separate.

I put my mouth down, as natural as a lambing ewe, and nipped away at the cord and put a clean handkerchief over the little trail of blood on her belly. Then I took a woollen shawl from the drawer and wrapped her up like a trussed chicken, and then another shawl on top again, for she and I were going out into the darkness of the night, and I could hear the storm getting up.

Holding her tiny body firmly in the crook of my arm, I opened my cupboard door and pulled out my winter cape, a thick one of navy-dyed wool, and swung it around us both, and pulled the hood up. My bloodstained nightdress flapped at my ankles, but I paid little heed to it. I was barefoot, but it did not trouble me.

The baby, pressed against my warmth, seemed quiet, sleepy. I held her tight, and then I opened my bedroom door and listened.

Stride and Jenny were in the kitchen, for I could hear Jenny’s high-pitched anxious voice as they waited for the great brass pans to boil so they could bring more hot water to the room. Mrs Gough was in the bedroom above mine, clumping around in her slippers getting the cradle ready and the fire lit, and the linen aired. I tilted my head to listen, but I could not hear Richard.

I shrugged as if it did not really matter, as if this madness could not be stopped by mischance. I held the precious slight bundle a little tighter under my cloak, and slid like a ghost to the top of the stairs.

Then I heard it. The clink of a decanter against a glass. Richard was in the library, drinking and waiting. Waiting for the accoucheur from Chichester. Waiting for him to come down the stairs with the new heir to Wideacre in his arms and say, ‘Squire, your child has been born,’ like the last page of a happy novel.

But that would never happen.

I knew I could pay the price. I had faced it when I was ready to die in my own bed with a murderer’s hands on me. I was ready even now, with my most precious little girl held close to me. I had to pay a price for being a Lacey. She was the price that had to be paid.

Richard would never see his child.

Wideacre would never have an heir.

Quiet as a shadow I crept down the stairs, my bare feet absolutely silent on the thick carpet. As I stepped delicately and quietly from one stair to another, little drops of blood ran down my legs and stained my feet so I left a spoor like a wounded animal.

The tracks would lead Richard, sniffing blood like some predator, across the hall and to the front door. But outside it was dark and the wind was tossing the trees around. Soon it would rain and all trace of me and my little child would be gone. The Fenny would be up, the waters very high. You can hide anything in the Fenny when it is in flood. Richard, of all people, who had thrown a young woman’s body into the river, should have remembered that.

The front-door latch clicked, but the noise was masked by the squeak of the tree branches rubbing together in the wind outside. The gusts of air whipped into the hall, but the library door was tight shut, and Richard did not know his house was wide open to the storm. He did not know that his front door was open to the wind, to anyone. And that the child he longed for was out in the rain, and would never come back.

I gasped as the rain slapped my face like an unforgiving enemy.


A great scud of water, hard as hailstones, smacked me in the face, and stayed like tears on my cheeks. I shook my head like a dog coming out of a river and tucked the baby more securely into my side.

My feet stung with the cold as I crept down the garden path and out of the gate into the drive. I was a fool to go barefoot, but I was not thinking. I was not thinking at all. I was on my way to the Fenny, and neither the stony drive nor the nettles and old brambles of the Wideacre wood footpaths would stop me.

I was biting my lip to stop myself whimpering with the pain as I walked up the drive, stumbling on the chalk stones and splashing in the puddles until the cape and the nightdress were drenched. There was only one dry spot on me and that was the warm little bundle in my left arm. I could feel her breathing softly and sweetly, and some distant thought in my mind said to her, ‘This is Wideacre, and you are a Lacey.’ But no words crossed my lips. This child, my daughter, would go out of the world as she had come into it – owning nothing.

As I turned under the shelter of the trees, the rain stopped beating in my face and I could breathe a little better. My feet had stopped hurting, for they were numb with cold. When I glanced down at them, I thought they were black with mud in the moonlight, but then I realized that they were cut and bleeding. The birth and the loss of blood, the pain of my feet and the storm had all made me light-headed, and instead of stumbling and struggling down to the Fenny, I felt I was gliding, dancing along the little path. Some old strange magic of Wideacre was singing in my head, and I knew with utter certainty that I was at last in command of myself and in tune with the land around me.

I stumbled over a tree root, and there was the Fenny before me, and I gasped. I had been out so little, I had not seen it since this year’s rain had started swelling it and making the waters flow faster and faster. It was frightening. It was boiling like a great dangerous flood, up to the very rim of the steep banks, and threatening to swell over at any moment and drown the whole Wideacre valley. The tree behind me seemed to be trembling with fear at the thought of that flood, and I put my hand out on the trunk to reassure myself that the dry land and the tall trees were safe.

The river roared like some great animal; it was not like the safe waters where I had played. I would hardly dare come to the bank now for fear that it would give way beneath me. Nothing, least of all a little baby, could go into the flood and come out alive.

I looked upstream for the fallen tree which spans the river and serves as a crossing point. I could not see it at all and I thought it must have been swept right away. Then I looked downstream and could see the great spouts of water where the river had overflowed at a weak part of the bank and was engulfing even the trunks of the big trees and slamming against them in great rocking waves. Above the roar of the river and the noise of the creaking branches and the rush of the wind I heard myself give a little sob of fear.

But I knew what I had come to do.

And nothing, now, could stop me.

I knew what I had to do: to set myself free, to set Acre free, to finish the Laceys and to destroy Richard.

I left the shelter of the oak tree and went as near as I dared to the bank. I could feel the ground shudder with the water rushing past it and as I watched, a huge lump of riverbank was peeled away and fell with a splash into the torrent. The ground beneath me seemed to be shaking, and I put out a hand to steady myself on the root of a fallen tree.

I balanced myself against the tree and put my cold hand carefully in under my cape. Sarah sighed as I lifted her clear of my protecting warmth and opened her eyes and looked directly at me. I held her to my cold rain-washed face and then I bent down to the flood and lowered her towards it as tenderly as I might have put her in a cradle.

The sound of the river was as deafening as if I were drowned myself and it was flowing through my head, so I heard nothing; but I saw, like a silent ghost, a woman detach herself from the shadow of the trees on the other side of the river.


I froze. Sarah was just inches away from the water, her eyes wide, her mouth opened, crying, but I could hear nothing above the awful roar, roar, roaring of the hungry river.

The woman came to the bank of the river on the other side; she crossed over and came to me. I stared at her as if she were a ghost. From my position, bent low over the water, it looked like she had just walked across the river, walking lightly on the flood as if it were as safe as a dancefloor, but as I straightened up, I saw she had been walking on the tree-bridge. It was half covered with water and in shadow, so I had not seen it properly.

She moved back to the bridge, and then she turned and walked away from me again. I stared after her, and then, not knowing why, I raised Sarah up and tucked her into my side again. I scrambled to my feet and went up river till I came to the bridge. I clung to Sarah with one hand and then stepped cautiously into the swirling, ankle-deep water and picked my way on the slippery wood, clinging to the branches of the tree to keep me steady.

She was waiting for me on the other side. She had glided across as if she knew the bridge and the woods even better than I did, or as if she were indeed a ghost which need not fear death by drowning in a tumbling river.

As soon as I reached the bank, she turned and walked away from me and I followed her in a dream. The storm was still blowing loudly enough, but here in the shelter of the woods I could scarcely hear anything. The noise of the river died away behind us as the deep-green curtains of spruce and pine enfolded us. I followed her, stumbling, but she did not stumble. She walked lightly and did not seem to touch earth.