He loved duets, but neither threats nor blandishments could make me hold a tune. ‘Listen, Julia! Listen!’ he would cry at me, singing a note as pure as spring water, but I could not copy it. Instead I would strum the accompaniment as well as I was able, and sometimes in the evening Mama would hum the lower part while Richard’s voice soared and filled the whole of the tiny parlour and drifted out of the half-open window to rival the birdsong in the twilit woods.

And then, when Richard was singing and the house was still, I could feel them. The ghosts who were always around us, as palpable as the evening mist filtering through the trees from the River Fenny. They were always near, though only I could feel them, and only at certain times. But I knew they were always near, those two – Richard’s mama, Beatrice, and my papa, the squire, who were partners in the flowering and destruction of the Laceys in the short years when they made and wrecked Wideacre.

And when Richard was singing and my hands were stumbling but picking out the tune and Mama dropped her sewing unnoticed in her lap to listen to that high sweet tone, I knew that they were waiting. Waiting almost like the three of us. For something to happen.

For something to happen on Wideacre again.

I was older by a year; but Richard was always bigger than me. I was the daughter of the squire and the only surviving Lacey; but Richard was a boy and the natural master. We were raised as country children, but we were not allowed into the village. We were isolated in threadbare gentility, hidden in the overgrown woods of the Wideacre parkland like a pair of enchanted children in a fairytale, waiting for the magic to set us free.

Richard was the leader. It was he who ordered the games and devised the rules; it was I who offended against them. Then Richard would be angry with me and set himself up as judge, jury and executioner, and I would go white-faced and tearful to my mama and complain that Richard had been mean to me, gaining us both a reliably even-handed punishment. We were often in trouble with my mama, for we were a bad team of petty sinners. Richard was often naughty – and I could not resist confession.

I once earned us a scolding from Mama, who had spotted my stained pinafore and taxed me with stealing bottled fruit from the larder. Richard would have brazened it out, blue eyes persuasively wide, but I confessed at once, not only to the theft of the bottle of fruit, but also to stealing a pot of jam days before, which had not even been missed.

Richard said nothing as we left Mama’s parlour, our eyes on the carpet, uncomfortably guilty. Richard said nothing all day. But later that afternoon we were playing by the river and he was paddling in midstream when he suddenly said, ‘Hush!’ and urgently beckoned me in beside him. He said there was a kingfisher’s nest, but when I tucked my skirts up and paddled in alongside him, I could not see it.

‘There!’ he said, pointing to the bank. ‘There!’ But I could see nothing. As I turned, he took both my hands in a hard grip and his face changed from smiles to his darkest scowl. He pulled me closer to him and held me tight so I could not escape and hissed, ‘There are water-snakes in this river, Julia, and they are sliding out of their holes to come for you.’

He needed to do no more. The ripples in the river were at once the bow waves from the broad heads of brown water-snakes. The touch of a piece of weed against my ankle was its wet body coiling around my bare foot. The splash of a piece of driftwood in the flow was a venomous dark-eyed snake slithering in the river towards me. Not until I was screaming with terror, my cheeks wet with tears and my wrists red from trying to pull away, would the little tyrant let me go, so that I could scramble for the bank and fling myself out of the water in a frenzy of fear.

And then, as if my tears were a salve for his rage, he forgave me. He took my handkerchief out of my pocket and dried my eyes. He put his arm around me and talked to me in a tender voice, and petted me, and called me sweet little names. And finally, irresistibly, he sang for me my favourite folk-songs about shepherds and farming and the land and crops growing ripely and easily, and I forgot to cry, I forgot my tears, I forgot my terror. I even forgot that Richard had been bullying me at all. I nuzzled my head into his neck and let him stroke my hair with his muddy hand, and I sat on his lap and listened to all the songs he could remember until he was tired of singing.

When we splashed home in the golden sunlight of the summer evening and Mama exclaimed at my dress, my pinafore, my hair all wet and muddy, I told her that I had fallen in the river and bore her reproaches without one murmur. For that I had my reward. Richard came to my bedroom later in the night when Mama was sitting downstairs trying to work by the light of only two candles. He came with his hands full of sweet things begged or stolen from Mrs Gough, the cook. And he sat beside me on my bed and gave me the best, the very best, of his haul.

‘I love you when you are good, Julia,’ he said, holding a cherry to my lips so I turned up my face like a questing lap-dog.

‘No,’ I said sadly, as I spat out the cherry stone into his warm little palm. ‘You love me when I am bad. For lying to Mama is not good, but if I had told her about you and the water-snakes, she would have had you whipped.’

And Richard laughed carelessly, seeming much older than me, not a year younger.

‘Shhh!’ I said suddenly. I had heard a floorboard in the uncarpeted parlour creak and the scrape of her chair.

Richard gathered the remains of our feast in his hands and slid like a ghost in his nightgown towards the bedroom door. Mama came slowly, slowly up each step as if she were very tired, and Richard melted up the stairs to his attic bedroom at the top of the house. I saw the ribbon of light from Mama’s night-time candle widen as she pushed open my bedroom door. I had my eyes shut tight, but I could never deceive her.

Oh, Julia,’ she said lovingly. ‘You will be so tired tomorrow if you don’t go to sleep at the proper time.’

I sat up in bed and stretched my arms to her for a goodnight hug. She smelled faintly of lilies and clean linen. Her fair hair was full of silver and there were lines around her brown eyes. I could tell by the weariness on her face that she had been worrying about money again. But she smiled tenderly at me and the love in her face made her beautiful. There might be a darn on her collar, and her dark dress might be shiny with wear, but just the smell of Mama and the way she walked told you she was Quality born and bred. I sniffed appreciatively and hugged her tight.

‘Were you writing to Uncle John?’ I asked as she pulled up my bedclothes and tucked them securely around me.

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘Did you tell him that Richard wants singing lessons?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ she said, smiling, but I saw her eyes were grave.

‘Do you think he will send the money?’ I asked, my concern for Richard making me press her.

‘I doubt it very much,’ she said levelly. ‘There are more important bills to pay first, Julia. There are the Lacey creditors to repay. And we have to save for Richard’s schooling. There is not a lot of money to spare.’

Indeed there was not. Mrs Gough and Stride worked for love, loyalty and a pittance paid monthly in arrears. The food on the table was game from the Havering estate or fish from the Fenny. The vegetables were grown in the kitchen garden, the fruit came from Grandmama at Havering Hall and wine was a rare luxury. My dresses were hand-me-downs from my distant Havering cousins, and Richard’s shirt collars were turned and turned and turned again until there was neither shirt nor collar left. Mama would accept clothes and food from her mama, my Grandmama Havering. But she never applied to her for money. She was too proud. And anyway the Havering estate, our nearest neighbour, was itself derelict through neglect.

‘Go to sleep, Julia,’ Mama said softly, taking up her candle and going to the door.

‘Goodnight,’ I said and obediently shut my eyes. But I lay half wakeful, listening as the house settled for the night. I heard Mama’s footsteps in her room and the creak of her bed as she sprang in quickly, for the floorboards were icy to bare feet; the night-time noises of Stride bolting the back door, checking the front door – as if there were anything to steal! – and then his heavy tread up the back stairs to his bedroom at the top of the house.

Then the outside noises: a trailing creeper tapping at a window-pane, the distant call of a barn owl flying low across a dark field and away in the woods the abrupt bark of a dog fox. I imagined myself, high as the owl, flying over the sleeping fields, seeing below me the huddle of cottages that is Acre village, with no lights showing, like a pirate ship in a restless sea, seeing the breast of the common behind the village with the sandy white tracks luminous in the darkness and a herd of deer silent as deep-sea fish, winding across it. Then, if I were an owl, I would fly to the west wall of the hall of Wideacre, which is the only one left standing. If I were an owl I would fly to the gable head of it, where the proud roof timbers once rested, where it is scorched and blackened by the fire that burned out the Laceys, that wrecked the house arid the family. I would sit there and look with round wide eyes at the desolate fields and the woods growing wild and call, ‘Whoo! Whooo! Whooo!’ for the waste and the folly and the loss of the land.

I knew, even then, that there is a balance of needs on a land like ours. The masters take so much, the men take so much, and they both keep the poor. The land has its rights too: even fields must rest. My Aunt Beatrice was once the greatest farmer for miles around, but somehow, and no one would ever tell me quite how, it all went bad. When my Aunt Beatrice died and my papa died in the same night, the night of the fire, the Laceys were already ruined.