‘My God, Julia,’ he said breathlessly. He pulled back a little. ‘I am sorry,’ he said awkwardly. ‘Did I startle you?’

I smiled at him as an equal. I knew he was apologizing for this sudden eruption of passion into our temperate life. He was anxious in case I was a true Bath miss, full of fluster and girlish fears.

I beamed at him. ‘Startle me again,’ I recommended.

We collapsed with giggles at that.

‘Strumpet,’ James said with deep satisfaction, and he cupped his hand under my chin and turned my face up to him. I gazed into his brown eyes without a flicker of unease. If he had wanted, he could have taken me, then and there, on the deep carpet in the afternoon sunshine.

‘Julia Lacey,’ he said slowly. ‘I want you to know that it is only the chaperon system which stands between you and total dishonour.’


‘You love me dishonourably?’ I asked, a little smile lurking at the back of my voice.

‘Deeply dishonourably,’ he assured me, and he bent his brown head down and his mouth sought mine.

We stood, locked in each other’s arms, for long minutes. I was pressing closer and closer to him so that I could feel him down the length of my body; as he tasted my mouth, he groaned very softly.

There was a tap on the door behind us. We moved apart as slowly as if we were swimming underwater. I looked at James. His eyes were dark with desire, his hair rumpled. I put my hand to my head and tried to pin a straying ringlet. Neither of us was able to say, ‘Come in.’

The door opened with commendable caution, and Marianne put her head around it.

‘My reticule,’ she said conversationally to the carpet midway between James and me, ‘was in the hall, where it has been all along. I have now collected it. I am now ready to leave. However, if it is your wish that I should chaperon the two of you from beyond your front door, I should be very glad to have a rug and a cushion on the step, and perhaps a candle at nightfall.’

James laughed and took his sister’s hand. ‘Forgive us,’ he said. ‘We treat you shamefully. Let me take you home now.’ He turned to me with a smile. ‘Until tomorrow, Julia Lacey,’ he said. Then he walked out of the drawing-room and was gone.

I sank down into the window-seat and leaned my head against the shutter and did not know whether to laugh or to weep in my delight at being so well loved. So well loved at last.

Mama remained ill, and she was especially restless in the early hours of the morning. James wanted me to hire a night nurse and undertook to find me one, but four interviews convinced him that there was no one in Bath he would trust.

‘Besides, the doctor is confident that her illness is reaching a crisis and then she will be better,’ I said to him. ‘I am sure it is the fault of the horrid damp city. If she were on Wideacre, she would be well again.’


He nodded. The dry weather had broken and the days I had spent indoors had been damp, foggy and cold.

‘It has been miserable,’ he said. ‘Thank God we got little Rosie Dench out of that cellar before this bad weather started. I don’t think she would have survived.’

James went every day to visit the Acre four. He said they were settling into their new quarters fairly well. Nat was gradually getting a little paler as the years of soot wore off under his enthusiastic scrubbing. Jimmy Dart was fattening up daily, and Rosie was coughing still, but looking better, and could get up and sit in the parlour downstairs most days. Only Julie seemed unable to settle.

‘They do understand why I have not been to see them, don’t they?’ I asked.

James nodded. ‘I made sure they did,’ he said reassuringly. ‘And they know we are just waiting for the reply from Acre to say that all is ready for them to leave.’

That reply came the next day, in Ralph’s untutored script.

Send them home, he wrote. Everyone here wants them back. And everyone here blesses you for finding them.

Come back with them. Come back in time for the sowing. You should be here then.

I showed the letter to James.

‘Not a man for lengthy speeches, is he?’ James said, smiling.

‘And he’s not vague,’ I said, pointing to the paragraph which started, ‘Come back with them.’ ‘That sounds very like an order to me,’ I said.

James nodded. ‘The best servants are our masters,’ he said lightly. ‘My papa has a chief clerk who runs the business all on his own. If he ever knew how valuable he was, he could indent for twice the salary. Your Mr Megson sounds like that.’

I laughed. ‘Mr Megson knows exactly how much he is worth,’ I said ruefully. ‘The only reason he does not charge a king’s ransom is because he wants to work on Wideacre, and work for the good of the village. It was he who developed the profitsharing scheme and persuaded the village. My Uncle John says that he would go further if he could.’

‘How?’ James asked.

Oh, I don’t know,’ I said idly. We were taking tea together in the parlour, and Marianne was nobly sitting at the window and alternately looking at the passers-by and at a newspaper. Under the cover of the tea-table James took my hand.

‘I think he would like the village to have common rights to all the land,’ I said. ‘He would have them own the land outright and farm it in common, in the old way.’

James looked extraordinarily interested. ‘He’s not the only one in the country to be thinking of such ideas,’ he said. ‘Could such a scheme work?’

‘It might,’ I said cautiously, ‘if the land was handed over to the people in good heart, and they had enough funds to buy equipment and stock and enough cash to pay wages until the profits could be shared. Under those circumstances it would work. But of course those circumstances never come about. No landlord would hand over good land. No one would gift the sort of amounts of money one needs to launch such a massive estate.’

James looked at me, half serious. ‘I tell you what, Julia Lacey,’ he said. I paid a great deal of attention. Whenever James called me Julia Lacey, I listened well. It was generally something very loving, or something very shocking, or – best of all – both. ‘I tell you what,’ he said again. ‘,’ have those sorts of funds, and if you tell me that you and I and then our children would have a good life in Acre if the village owned its own land, then I would be prepared to offer that sort of capital. We could build our own house and have our own share in the village, and yet not be the sort of squires and the sort of masters who bring about the poverty which we saw in Fish Quay Lane.’

I hesitated. ‘No,’ I said. ‘It is your inheritance, not mine. Before you decide how it is spent or where you wish to live, you must see Wideacre and the village. I cannot imagine being happy living all my life anywhere else. But you and I must agree such things together. It would be as unjust to you if we were all our days at Wideacre as it would be unjust to me if you took me to Bristol and I could never see my home again.’

James held his free hand out across the tea-urn in a parody of a street trader. ‘Done,’ he said. ‘And remember what I have offered. My papa calls me a radical and a Jacobin, but I have no use for such labels. What I do care about is trying to follow the French lead in an especial English way. To make a new society here, as they are trying to do there. I want to do so with you, for I think I loved you the most when I saw you in the best fashion shop in Bath telling the proprietor she was worse than a madame in a bagnio. I have been a rebel all my life and I want to find a way to make that rebellion a comfortable way to live – something for the future rather than just a reaction against the way things are.’

‘Yes!’ I said, and my heart leaped to think of trying to build a life in Acre where there were no masters and squires but just James and me and our children, and Clary Dench and Matthew Merry and their children, and all the other village children living as neighbours.

‘If you two are holding hands above the tea-urn as well as below it, then I cannot help but feel that my presence here is somewhat superfluous,’ Marianne observed drily.

We released each other and laughed like a pair of guilty children.

‘Never that,’ James said, and crossed to the window to kiss her cheek. ‘At your least you are always ornamental. Tell us what Dr Phillips said today,’ he commanded, sitting beside her and taking the newspaper from her. ‘Julia has to see him for the first time in days tomorrow and she is going to tell him that she will discontinue her visits. They need her back at home and since she has survived perfectly well without seeing him, I am trying to convince her that she is as sane as anyone in the world, and a good deal saner than anyone I have ever known before.’

Marianne shot me a shy smile. ‘Except for your liking for my brother, I would agree,’ she said. Then her face grew graver. ‘Dr Phillips is working very hard to help me cat properly,’ she said. ‘Even if I find it sometimes very wearying, I cannot deny that he is very painstaking. I cannot help but wish that sometimes everyone would just leave the whole thing alone. If I was on a desert island, I am sure that I would be hungry and eat. It is just that everywhere I go, people press food on me, and when I refuse, they look at me and argue with me. Since I have been to Dr Phillips, and Mama has told people about it, everything has got worse.’

‘When we are married, and living in earthly paradise in the heart of Sussex, you shall come and stay with us and you shall eat nothing!’ James promised. ‘Nothing at all for days at a time until you feel you could fancy a little something. And no one will look at you, and no one will question you.’