I could have walked easier but for my burden. The only warm dry part about me was the little bundle of a new-born baby which I was holding tight to my heart under my cape. I knew that this baby was my responsibility. She was mine. She belonged to me; and yet I must destroy her. I must take her down to the river and hold that tiny body under the turbulent waters. Then I could let her go, and the little body in the white shawl would be rolled over and over by the rushing flood away from my empty hands. I must let her go.

The roaring noise of water got louder as I struggled down the muddy footpath, and then I caught my breath with fear when I saw the river – broader than it had ever been before, buffeting the trunks of the trees high on the banks, for it had burst out of its course. The fallen tree across the river which served as a bridge was gone, hidden by boiling depths of rushing water. I gave a little cry, which I could not even hear above the noise of the storm, for I did not know how I was to get the baby into the river. And she must be drowned. I had to drown her. It was my duty as a Lacey.

It was too much for me, this fresh obstacle on top of my tears and the pain in my heart and the pain in my feet, and I started to struggle to wake. I could not see how to get this warm soft sleeping baby to the cold dashing river water, and yet I had to do it. I was stumbling forward, sobbing, towards the river, which was boiling like a cauldron in hell. But at the same time a part of my mind knew it was a dream. I struggled to be free of it, but it held me. I was imprisoned in the dream, even though I knew also that I was tossing in my bed in my little room and crying like a baby for my mama to come and wake me. But the dream held me, although I fought against it. I knew I was dreaming true. I knew that I saw now what I would one day be: an anguished woman holding a baby warm and safe in her heart, with an utter determination to drown her like an inbred puppy in the cold waters of the river which rushed from the slopes of the downs and through Wideacre and away.

I awoke to daylight and a blue sky with ribbons of clouds tearing northward from the sea winds. The dream of the darkness and despair should have faded before the bright sunlight. But it did not. It stayed with me, a hard lump of prescience and foreboding. I looked wan and low in spirits, and Mama insisted that I stay in bed all that day, and the next, as though I were in the grip of some strange unknown malady. I took her hand and kissed it as she smoothed my forehead. It was as if someone had told me, for the first time in my life, that everyone had to die one day. For the first time in my life I realized that my mama would not always be at my side when I needed her.

She patted my cheek. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘You have been overworked and overtired, and your brain has become feverish. You shall rest and you will soon be well again.’

I felt tears starting to roll down my cheeks. I was as weak as if I were mortally ill. ‘Such a dreadful dream…’ I said. But she would not hear it.


‘No more dreams, my darling,’ she said gently, and bent and kissed my forehead with her cool lips. ‘I do not want to hear about them, and you must forget them as you wake. Dreams are meaningless. They are nothing. Go to sleep now for me, and sleep without dreaming. I shall sit here and do my sewing, and if you have a bad dream I shall wake you.’

She took a little wineglass from my bedside table and gave it to me. ‘John left this for you,’ she said. ‘It will help you to sleep without dreaming. So drink it all up and rest, my darling.’

I took it, obedient as an invalid and drank it up and lay back on my pillows. Through a golden sleepy glow I saw my mama pull a chair over to the window and take up her sewing. She sat beside me, a guardian of my peace, and I watched her until my eyelids closed and I slept.

Mama sat with me all the time as I slept and woke and dozed again. I did not dream. John’s medicine lifted me into a daze of sleepiness. But I did not dream.

On the second day my grandmama, Lady Havering, drove over from Havering Hall for a dish of tea, and stumped heavily up the uncarpeted stairs to my little room to regard me with jaundiced eyes through her lorgnette.

‘You seem to be blooming on it,’ she remarked acidly. ‘Eccentricity always did become the Laceys.’

‘I am not eccentric, Grandmama,’ I said politely. ‘At least, I do not mean to be.’

She smiled at that and gave me a gentle pat on the cheek. ‘No, my dear,’ she said. ‘That would be quite unbearable.’

With that she went downstairs to what was a full family conference, with her and Uncle John and Mama – and even Richard, come home from Oxford on the stage-coach that morning.

‘You’re to go to Bath,’ Richard said smugly. He had come upstairs with my dish of tea and a slice of apricot bread from the tea-tray. ‘They’ve been talking it over since dinner and they’ve decided that you are going to go to Bath with your mama as soon as you are well enough. Your mama says that you are highly strung and need a rest. Papa says that there is bad blood in the Laceys and it is coming out in you. Your grandmama says that the Laceys were always a wild lot, and that the best thing they can do is get you married to someone normal at once. So you’re to leave.’

I clattered my dish of tea on the tray and put out both hands to Richard in alarm. ‘Not for ever!’ I exclaimed. ‘Not for ever, Richard!’

‘No,’ he said, ‘just for a couple of months. Your mama wants you to take the waters, and my papa wants you to see a doctor who is a friend of his, and your grandmama wants you affianced. They think a couple of months in Bath should do all that.’

I looked at him carefully. He was smiling, but it was a tight mean smile. He was angry with me and trying not to show it.

‘And you,’ I asked breathlessly, ‘what did you say?’

‘I said nothing,’ he said. ‘There was little I needed to say. I have my own opinions as to what you were doing, and I shall keep them.’

‘I shan’t go,’ I said.

‘It’s quite decided,’ Richard said blithely. ‘You’ll go with your mama, and the two of you will stay at some dreary lodging-house. I should think it’s fearfully slow. You’re to leave as soon as they confirm the booking of the rooms and as soon as my papa has ordered horses for the journey. You’ll see this friend of his, a specialist. They trained together at Edinburgh, but since that time this doctor has specialized in particular complaints.’ His look at me was radiant. ‘Don’t you want to know what complaints those are?’ he asked.

I hesitated. Some streak of self-preservation in my head warned me that I did not want to know what they were. But I felt as weary and defeated as if that dream had been a promise of my future. ‘What?’ I said.

‘Insanity in young ladies,’ Richard said sweetly. ‘He specializes in young ladies who have gone off their heads. And he is the one you are to see in Bath. For they all think you are mad. They think you are off your clever little head.’

My plate clattered to the floor as I reached out for his hand. ‘No, Richard,’ I choked. ‘I will not go. They are wrong, you know they are wrong.’

He twisted away from my grasp. ‘That’s not all,’ he said. ‘Until you leave, you are not to go into Acre at all.’

I gaped at him. ‘Am I in disgrace?’ I asked. ‘Are they angry with me for what happened in Acre?’

‘They say they are afraid for you,’ Richard said smugly. ‘It’s to be given out that you are unwell. But they all believe that you are going mad.’

I put one hand on the wooden headboard of my bed, and the other hand to my cheek to steady myself. ‘This is nonsense,’ I said weakly. ‘I have always had dreams. This was just a dream like the others. It was a seeing. Everyone knows about seeings.’

‘Dirty old gypsies have seeings,’ Richard said cruelly. ‘Young ladies do not. Unless they are going mad. You have always tried to resemble my mama, Beatrice; they all say that in the end she went mad. Now they are saying it is a family madness. That you are going mad too.’

The room swam around me. ‘No, Richard,’ I said steadily. ‘It is not like that. You know it is not like that.’

‘I don’t know,’ Richard said swiftly. ‘I used to think I knew you, but ever since my papa came home, you have been trying to be his favourite. Ralph Megson arrived in the village and you have tried to make yourself first with him, and first with Acre. Just because you are friends with those stupid little peasants, you are queening it around the whole time trying to play the squire. I get sent to my lessons, but you roam around as you please. Then as soon as I have to leave for Oxford, you are down there all the time, making up to Megson and pretending to work the land as if you were my mama come again. Now you see what comes of it! Much good it has done you! You plotted to make it seem as if you are the favoured child and now no one believes you; they just think you are crazy.’

‘I am not!’ I said, suddenly angry, fighting through the soporific haze of the drug and through my sense of fatigue and defeat. I threw back the bedcovers and started to rise. ‘I have the sight,’ I said defiantly. ‘And it meant I was able to save the village from the falling spire and from the fire. I did not plan to do it. I did not plot. I was drawn down there and I could not help myself. It was Beatrice. It was a seeing.’

He put hard hands on my shoulders and pinned me, seated, to the bed. ‘There are no such things,’ he hissed, his face black with fury. ‘There are no such things as seeings. Beatrice is dead, and what you just said proves that we are all right and you are mad. You are going mad, Julia, and we will have to put you in a madhouse; and you will never live in the new Wideacre Hall, and you will never be the favoured child in Acre.’