‘Steady!’ Ralph shouted in a tone I had never heard him use before. He grabbed Richard’s arm and held it still, then he put his other hand under the twisting flailing bird and cradled her breast. Richard still had the leash tight in his hand so Ralph lifted her gently, as gently as if he were holding a fledgling, back to Richard’s glove.

The second her feet were on it she bated again, directly towards Ralph, as in a panic to be with him and away from Richard. Ralph instinctively put his hands out to catch her and released Richard’s arm. Richard jerked hard on the leash, as he would have pulled a dog to heel, and we all heard a horrid crack, crack, like two twigs breaking.

Misty reared up as if the ground had opened beneath her front hooves, and I tumbled from her back with a spinning thud which knocked the breath out of me. I ducked my head down and bunched up small in instinctive fright while she reared over me and wheeled away, then slowed and dipped her head to some fresh heather a few yards away. I had kept my hold on Prince’s reins, and he stood steady, though his eyes showed white.

Ralph snatched the leash from Richard’s fist and looped it quickly around his own. Then he caught his bird, pinning her two wings to her side so she could flutter no more. He held her head into his jacket with one broad hand while he searched in his gamebag with the other. He brought out a little hood, intricately worked and made of exquisite soft leather, with a little crest of hen’s feathers on the top. He hooded her smoothly, pulling the hood tight with his teeth and hand on the leather thongs. Then he pulled out something like a stocking from the bottom of the bag and pulled it over her head so her wings were held to her side; he laid her in the bag, on top of the rabbit she had killed when she had been a proud free hawk and not a trussed bird.

Only then, when she was safely hooded and muffled and lying soft in his bag, did he turn to look at me and ask, ‘All right, lass?’

I nodded and got to my feet. We both stared at Richard who stood, guilty, in front of us.

Ralph eyed him warily. ‘What ails you?’ he asked very low.

Something in the way he said that made me cold.

He was not asking Richard in the way a man with a beloved hawk just injured would speak. He was not shouting in hot anger. He was not even icy with rage. He asked Richard in a voice which put Richard at a distance so that Ralph could inspect him. He spoke as if Richard had some secret dangerous ailment which could infect us all. He stared at him as if he would see into his very soul.

Richard was scarlet to his hairline. ‘I don’t know,’ he said awkwardly. ‘She flew off my wrist and I did not know what to do. I did not know what I was doing.’

There was a desert of silence.

‘I am sorry, Mr Megson,’ Richard said. His voice had gathered strength and I saw him shoot a sideways glance at Ralph. ‘I would not have frightened your hawk for the world. I hope she is not hurt?’

‘You know full well that both her legs are broken,’ Ralph said evenly. ‘You heard them snap when you jerked on the leash. Why did you pull her like that?’

‘I did not!’ Richard said, blustering. ‘That is not so! She simply flew out and I held the leash to keep her safe!’

‘You did not,’ said Ralph, and his voice was like ice. ‘You jerked her back in a rage.’

He hesitated, and he looked at Richard thoughtfully. ‘Many people have held her and she has never bated before,’ he said to himself. There was a long silence while Ralph thought something through. ‘Animals don’t like you, do they?’ he said.

Richard said nothing. I reached out a hand to touch Prince’s thick neck, as if to reassure myself that the real world was still there. The voices in my head had grown in strength like a dozen, twenty people murmuring at me to be warned, to listen, to take care, to know real danger when I saw it. I felt hazed, almost snow-blinded. There was a buzzing in my head as if Beatrice were very near to me, somehow trying to summon me, a hard insistent calling. I should be listening to something, I should have ears to hear her message. The balls of both my thumbs were as sore as if they were bleeding from a hundred tiny pinpricks.

I was distressed for the hawk and afraid of Ralph’s anger, and concerned for Richard.

Ralph turned abruptly to me. ‘You have the sight, Julia,’ he challenged me. ‘You should know. What do you see when you look at Richard?’

I turned my eyes to my cousin and he looked at me with his clear blue stare. The noise in my head was too loud for me to think of anything. I saw Richard, my beloved Richard, my coheir and the playmate of my childhood. And I saw as well some awful danger and fear and horror.

‘I can see nothing. Nothing,’ I said desperately. ‘I can hear nothing and see nothing. I do not have the sight as you think. I cannot see.’ I turned my head from Ralph and spoke to Richard. ‘I want to go home,’ I said, as pettish as a schoolgirl.

Ralph limped over to where Sea Mist restlessly cropped the heather. As she saw him coming, she wheeled around and put her hindquarters to him as if she thought of kicking – Misty, who had never shown an ounce of spite in all the time we had known her.

‘Give over,’ Ralph said gruffly, and walked towards her and took her reins to lead her back to me. He threw me up into the saddle and said not a word more, not to Richard, not to me. We rode away in silence. He let us leave without a word. We left him standing before that little coppice with his gamebag on his back and his black dog lying at his feet. As we left him, I felt his eyes on my back and I felt him brooding, brooding, over the two of us, and watching us all the way home.

20

We rode home in silence, Richard and I. The accord we had formed after the quarrel on the downs had been broken by the odd, disturbing incident with Ralph’s goshawk. Mama and Uncle John were laughing at some private joke over dinner and did not notice that Richard and I were awkward and quiet. When it was my bedtime, I gave Richard my hand and said my farewells then; he would have left for the early stage-coach in the morning before I was awake.

Richard kissed my hand, and then drew me to him and kissed my cheek. ‘All all right?’ he asked in the phrase from our childhood.

‘All all right,’ I confirmed.

But we both knew that it was not.

Scheherazade had feared him. The sheep had mobbed him. And now Ralph’s goshawk had been afraid of him.

I expected Ralph to speak to me about Richard as soon as I rode into the common field on Monday morning – a grey damp Monday morning with no joy or magic to it that day – but he just tipped his hat to me and said not a word.

‘How is your hawk?’ I asked him when we stopped for breakfast.

He was sitting on horseback beside me, and the plough-boys and the sowing girls were standing in the squelchy mud to eat their breakfasts. He sank his teeth into a crust of bread and chewed slowly before he answered me.

‘I wrung her neck,’ he said, his voice even. ‘Her legs would not have mended strong enough to kill again, and I don’t keep pets. She was a working bird; I’d not have liked her to grow fat and idle.’


The shock showed on my face, but I did not offer Ralph Megson a sympathetic word.

‘Her nerve had gone,’ he said briefly. The words sounded very ominous. ‘She had never bated from the hand before in her life, not since I waked her – sat up all night with her – and trained her to the glove three years ago. But she didn’t like Richard, did she? Something about him scared her. Scared her so badly she broke her legs trying to get away from him.’

I said nothing. I sat on my horse like a grey statue against a grey sky. In my head was that deep low murmur as if a hive of sleepy bees were stirring, swarming.

‘You say you cannot hear it, or see it,’ Ralph said thoughtfully. He was staring out into the darkness, but he swung around in the saddle and scanned my face. ‘God lack! You’re a fool, Julia Lacey,’ he said abruptly. ‘I thought you’d learned to use the sight, but you only use it when it suits you. Listen to your voices. See with your eyes.’

I put out a hand to him, but he shrugged me off, and his horse, always sensitive to his movements, shifted to one side.

‘I’ve no patience with you!’ he said abruptly. ‘Beatrice would have taken her riding crop to you!’ He clicked to his horse and went to check the binding on the ploughshares, which was sound, and the state of the horses, which was good, and the straightness of the furrows, which was adequate. Then he called them back to work a couple of minutes before they were due, which was unheard of.

I watched them for half an hour after the breakfast rest and then I trotted over to Ralph and asked him if he had any errands for me. When he scowled and said, no, I said that I would come back to the field in an hour or so, but that I wanted to exercise Sea Mist on the common.

He nodded curtly. I was not forgiven, and every working day over the next few weeks there was a reserve between us because Ralph thought me wilfully stupid, and I was offended. If it had been in the middle of harvesting, we should both have been out of the sullens in a day because we would have been too busy for resentments, but the urgency of the early weeks of the spring was over. The ploughing was done, and the men and women could sow without being watched. The sheep on the downs had broken down some of the fences, and they had to be repaired, but that was swiftly done. The lambs were weaned and out on the grass and caused no trouble. The Fenny was flooded with melt-water and with water from some days of rain, and I went out daily to check that the banks were holding, for some of Beatrice’s cornfields had been dangerously close to the river edge and I was regretting that we had followed her lead.