James took my hand and raised it to his lips very gently. It was a courteous kiss to bid me goodnight, but he kept my hand for a moment longer than I expected, and he smiled at me with his brown eyes crinkled. ‘I have bad dreams too,’ he said. ‘Especially when I have eaten toasted cheese for supper.’

Marianne and I both laughed, then Mama was at my side and it was time for me to go. But I knew I liked James Fortescue, and I smiled all the way home at the thought of telling Dr Phillips that I dreamed because I ate toasted cheese late at night.

14

I truly was a Sussex milkmaid, for it took me several days to realize that I had been adopted by the best society that Bath had to offer this season.

That first day set the pattern for my days in Bath. In the morning I would go to the doctor and sit in his soft armchair by the flickering fire and tell him about Wideacre and about the dreams. I tried to hold tight to what I was saying, to keep as much as I could from him. There was so much I did not want him to know: the lightning glinting on the blade of the knife and Ralph’s face in the thunderstorm when Beatrice went out in the rain to meet him; the dream I had of love-making in the summer-house with Ralph and the knowledge I had that no young lady should have of that delight, the secrets of Acre, the way animals feared Richard, that night of dark unsayable pleasure before the fire; and the dream that had come over and over again of the falling spire and me standing under the lich-gate calling the people to pull down the cottages to make the village safe.

I did everything I could to lie to Dr Phillips and to lock the Wideacre secrets safely away in a corner of my mind. But he was clever, and the room was too hot, and the firelight flickered as I watched it, and day after day he drew more and more from me until I felt robbed and betrayed, and I knew I was losing my Wideacre self. It was being sucked from me and I was becoming an empty, pretty shell.

‘Now, tell me,’ he would say insinuatingly. And something inside me would flinch as if a snail had crawled on to my hair as I lay in the grass. ‘Tell me about this woman, your Aunt…Beatrice, is it? Tell me why you think you are like her.’


And I would start haltingly to tell him, trying all the time to tell him as little as possible. ‘I look like her, I suppose,’ I ventured. ‘And everyone in the village says I look like her.’

‘Have you seen her picture?’ Dr Phillips asked.

‘No,’ I said slowly. I shifted in my chair. The cushions were very deep and soft, the firelight flickered on my face.

‘Then how do you know you look like her?’ he asked. Whenever he asked a question like that, his voice took on a slightly querulous note of surprise. He was inviting contradiction.

‘Because…’ I broke off. ‘They all say I do,’ I said.

‘I don’t think so!’ he said sweetly. He almost sung the words. ‘I don’t think that is why. Have you dweamed her, Julia? You can tell me, you know.’

‘I have not seen her in dreams,’ I temporized. But he was quick to hear the note of deception.

‘But you have dweams with her in them?’ he asked.

I sighed. There was a strange perfume about the room, as if the windows were never opened, as if all the air had been burned away by the flickering flames, as if I should never be free, like some poor Persephone, underground, for ever.

‘Yes, I have dreams with her in them,’ I said wearily.

‘And yet you say you do not see her?’ His voice was very soft, very sweet.

‘Only in a mirror,’ I said.

‘In a mirror’ he repeated as if that were a little bon-bon to be savoured. ‘How do you see her in a mirror? Are you beside her?’ He did not wait for me to reply. ‘Beside her? In fwont of her? Behind her?’

‘I am her!’ I broke in, suddenly impatient. ‘I dream that I am her!’

I expected him to be shocked. Instead he put his pudgy fingers together like a little tower over his rounded waistcoat and said softly, ‘Vewy good, and I think that is enough for today.’

It was like that every time. At the very point when I thought I had said something so startling that it would break the spell of the room, shake his poise, release me, then it was always time for me to go. The next day when I went again, he would start from where we had left off. And somehow, in the interval, the shock had gone from what I said. It had become his information. My dream had become his dream. I was, each day, diminished by the loss of my dreams and my secrets.

There was nowhere I could be renewed. Every morning the dreams I spoke of seemed more and more remote. The sight seemed less likely, a mistake, or a lucky guess. Soon Dr Phillips was not just listening to me, he was telling me that I must have misunderstood, that things could not happen the way I had thought, that Beatrice could not walk Wideacre and see through my eyes, that the land had no heartbeat.

Bath itself eroded the bedrock of my certainties. Ralph Megson was right when he said that if one was to choose anywhere to forget the land, then Bath would be a good place. I sighed for the smell of Wideacre air as I walked in the parks and gardens. Bath was so paved and cobbled and tiled that I never saw a scrap of pure earth all the time I was there. I never saw a leaf that had not been trimmed into some fashionable shape. I never saw a flower which had grown of its own free will. Even the river, flowing through the town, was walled in and channelled and guided under the pretty bridge and over the stone-built weir.

As for the hot springs, I thought them simply disgusting. Not just disgusting to drink, which Mama insisted we did – three glasses every day! – but I found the very idea of hot water coming out of the ground quite repellent. It was hot enough to bathe in! Every time we passed the bath-houses and smelled the steam coming out and the hot metallic odour of the water, I longed for the downs at Wideacre, where all along the spring line the water comes out from the chalk as cold as ice and tasting of clean rain.

I longed for Wideacre then, when I smelled the baths. I longed for Wideacre when I awoke in the morning and looked out of my window and saw row on row of stone-tiled roofs, stretching, it seemed, for ever and ever. I longed for Wideacre at night when I could not get to sleep. The rattle of the coach-wheels on the cobbles seemed to be sounding inside my head, and my bedroom grew bright and then black as the dipping light of a link-boy went past, instead of being lit by the cool beam of a Wideacre moon. I longed for Wideacre at meal-times when I thought the bread looked grey and the milk tasted strange, and we did not know where either had come from, whose cows had given the milk, whose wheat had made the flour.

I longed for Wideacre most of all when I walked in the park and all there was to see was a frozen patch of ice with sulky ducks around it begging for bread, and nowhere to walk but meandering little paths which ran round and round in circles instead of going the quickest straight route as we do in the country. But in the country we walked because we wanted to get somewhere, not because we wanted to waste time. In Bath wasting time was all people ever did. Every day I spent there was full of minutes and hours when my only occupation was spreading out little tasks to fill up the emptiness. Then I would walk in the park and look at the toes of my new half-boots – which would not have survived one minute in the mire of Acre lane – and wonder what on earth I was supposed to do with myself to fit myself for the life they wanted me to lead. I did not know how I could bear to change that much.

One day I was so deep in such hopeless rebellion that I did not hear at first when someone called my name.

‘Julia!’ the voice said again, and I looked up and saw Mary Gillespie.

‘You were far away!’ she said teasingly. ‘Were you dreaming of James Fortescue? Elizabeth will hardly speak to you this morning. You danced twice with him last night, you know!’

I laughed and smiled at Elizabeth, who looked not in the least piqued. She was a large fair girl, very placid and sweet-natured, and she bore her sister’s teasing with the equanimity of the eldest.

‘It is true!’ I said promptly. ‘I can think of nothing but him.’

‘But really,’ Mary said and drew my arm through hers, ‘you must like him, Julia. He is absolutely the catch of the season.’ She caught Elizabeth’s scowl and tossed her brown ringlets.


‘Well, I know it is vulgar, but he is! And he has simply heaps of money, and his papa would let him marry a church mouse as long as she had a good name and title to an estate – and Julia has both!’

I made a little grimace. ‘Not much of an estate,’ I said. ‘If you could see it, you would not speak of it like that. No house at all but a ruin, and only crops planted this season!’ I stopped, because just describing Wideacre like that brought a lump to my throat. I was very, very homesick. ‘And I have only a right to half of it,’ I finished gruffly.

‘Yes, but do you like him?’ Mary persisted, wanting to hear of love when my heart was aching for two hundred acres of mixed arable and woodland, common and downs.

‘Oh, no,’ I said absently, thinking of the smell of the wind that comes down the hillsides through Acre on cold days like this one.

‘Then it’s the cousin at home!’ Mary proclaimed triumphantly to her sister across me. ‘I knew it was all along! You’ve come to Bath to have your season and then you’ll go home and be married as soon as you are of age, and live in the lovely new house and we will all come to visit you when we have married our lords.’