Uncle John had bought half a dozen cows and a bull and we had turned them out on the lower fields by the Fenny. He was a great red animal with a strong ring in his nose. I was afraid of him at first and inspected the animals through the gate. But as I grew accustomed to them, and they to me, I would ride Misty right into their field to see that they were all sound.

I was starting to find myself with time on my hands. My work checking the land would take me all the morning, but in the afternoon there was little for me to do. It was a warm spring. I could feel the sun warming the land like my own skin. Everything on Wideacre was pairing, courting that spring. Everywhere I went I could hear birds calling and calling for a mate, or pairs of birds playing tender silly courtship games, feeding each other, feathers fluffed out and mouths agape, or nest-building together in a frenzy of displaced desire. When I walked down to the Home Farm, I saw the great shire stallion in the field tossing his mane as thick as sea spume and hollering for a mare.

On the downs the lambs were growing strong and the ewes were surrounded by dozens of young. In the field by the river the bull grazed with his herd, his favourite cow always at his shoulder, their heads rubbing together when they walked. They would freeze for minutes at a time while he licked their faces with his massive rubbery tongue as if there were love between them as well as an insistent need to couple.

I missed James more than I could have believed possible. I walked alone under trees full of birds singing love-songs, under a sky criss-crossed with nest-building flights, watched the red deer nuzzling together in the twilit evenings; at night I could not sleep, for I fancied even the owls were calling to each other of their passion and their desire under an enlarging moon.

After I had finished my farming work in the morning, I was free for the afternoons. Mama and Uncle John took out the gig for little drives together and I put on my coolest muslins with a light shawl and walked and walked in the deep greening woods and daydreamed of how my life would be when James came home and we were married. Above me, in the great trees of Wideacre, the birds mated and nested and then brooded under the safe canopy of the opening leaves. Wideacre swelled with life like the fat buds on the trees. Everything was courting, mating, birthing that spring, and I was full of longing for my own lover as I wandered alone in the woods with my straw hat on my fair head, my muslin pale among the green shadows, my feet awash in the bluebells.

Richard was due home before May Day and wrote that he would be in on the early-morning stage-coach. I had Misty saddled and rode up the lane towards the stop leading Prince to meet him.

The stage-coach sets down passengers for Acre at the corner where the lane meets the Chichester-London road, and I sat there on Misty’s back in the spring sunshine, waiting for it. It had been warm and dry the previous week, and the deep rutted tracks of the lane were dried out at last from the winter mud. I turned my face up to the sunshine and felt its warmth on my closed eyelids. Prince dropped his head to the fresh leaves of the hedge and cropped them, his bit jingling as he munched. In the distance I could hear the creaky rumble of the stage-coach and the chink of the harness. The road was hilly, and I could see the hats and shoulders of the roof-passengers rising and falling as the coach breasted the hills and sank into the hollows of the road. The horses were labouring as they came into sight towards the Acre corner, and when the guard saw me waiting, he blew his horn and shouted a ribald comment about a lucky passenger being met at Acre corner.


The coachman pulled his horses up and tipped his whip to me. I smiled and nodded and watched as they let down the steps and Richard came out of the coach, rubbing his eyes and yawning. They passed down his box and Richard humped it over towards me.

I bent down for his kiss and hugged him around the shoulders. Some wag on the roof of the stage-coach cheered, but many of the passengers were Midhurst people and knew me by sight and nudged him into silence.

‘What about my box?’ Richard asked. ‘It weighs a ton.’

‘Oxford fashions?’ I teased him.

‘Holiday reading,’ he said with a grimace. ‘My Greek is still supposed to be a disgrace. I’m bid to work with Dr Pearce through this holiday.’

‘You can leave it here,’ I said. Richard pushed it into the hedge behind the stage-coach. The Acre carter could collect it for us later in the day. ‘I thought you’d like a ride.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’ve been cooped up in that coach for half a lifetime.’

He swung into the saddle and we turned the horses’ heads for home. Richard made me laugh with sketches of his fellow passengers – the farmer’s wife who would insist on carrying a basket with a live hen in it on her lap, the country wench who giggled every time she caught Richard’s eye.

‘And how’s everything here?’ he asked. ‘Papa and Mama-Aunt all right? You?’

‘Yes,’ I said, nodding. ‘Everything is just the same. Mama is quite well again now, though she still gets a little tired. She and Uncle John have a ritual drive out for her health every afternoon in the gig like a pair of tenant farmers.’

‘Heard from Mr Fortescue?’ Richard asked with careful nonchalance.

I kept my eyes on the greening hedge. ‘Yes,’ I said. I could not keep the tenderness from my voice. ‘He writes to me every week and I reply when I have an address for him. He is back in Belgium at the moment, but he has been travelling around. His father is importing lace and James is responsible for finding reliable suppliers.’

‘Any date for the wedding?’ Richard asked lightly.

‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘His papa’s lawyers and Uncle John’s man are drawing up the marriage contract to arrange the dowry and an allowance for me. We can hardly plan until we know when he will come home.’

Richard nodded. ‘It could be some time, then,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I said. I could not keep the longing out of my voice. ‘It sometimes seems like years and years. It should be this summer. We can announce our betrothal when he comes home.’

‘And the hall?’ Richard said. ‘The builders are working well? Are the roofbeams in place?’

‘Yes,’ I said reassuringly. ‘You would be the first to hear if anything had gone amiss. It is all working well. And the crop is just about showing in some fields already!’

‘And what are they doing here?’ Richard asked, pulling up Prince at a gateway. It was one of the new fruit fields where Uncle John had insisted that we should try raspberries. They looked a sorrowful little crop, row upon row of spindly canes with the tiniest green buds showing on each one. Down each narrow gangway between the rows were Acre women weeding, a rough piece of cloth beside each of them piled high with the bolting weeds of this damp warm spring. The lovely sun-warmed hollow was as sunny as in midsummer. I looked along the line of bent backs for Clary, but I could not see her. A cloud came over the sun and I shivered in the sudden chill. Richard and I pulled up at the gate and Ralph trotted over.

‘Good day,’ he said to us both and then spoke directly to me. ‘I started them weeding while the men finish the sowing today,’ he said with a note of pride in his voice. ‘They’ve never sown quicker, I don’t think.’ He tipped his hat carelessly to Richard. ‘Good morning,’ he said coolly.

There was an awkward silence. Ralph’s dislike of Richard was almost tangible on the warm air. Richard flushed and I spoke quickly to mask the silence. ‘Then let’s hope it grows at record speed too,’ I said. ‘The village always used to take a holiday after the sowing was done, did it not?’

‘Aye,’ Ralph said. ‘I’ve reminded Dr MacAndrew that they’ll want to keep the maying in the old way. They tell me they’d like you to be the Queen of the May if you’d go out on the hills to bring the spring in with them tomorrow at dawn.’

‘I will!’ I said. ‘Clary spoke to me about it.’ Then I paused as my training as a Bath young lady struck me, and I glanced at Ralph and asked him, ‘It is all right, isn’t it, Ralph? I mean, it’s not fearfully improper or anything?’

Ralph’s face looked as if he had bitten on a lemon rind. ‘Don’t ask me!’ he said curtly. ‘You know I know nothing about it. Ask your mama about these things, and take her advice.’

‘She does not know the traditions of Acre,’ I challenged him. ‘You’re the one who knows Acre. I’m asking you if it is all right for me to go.’

Ralph looked at me, wearied of the whole question. ‘I should not pass on an invitation if I did not think it was all right,’ he said carefully. ‘You will come to no harm out on the downs at daybreak with all the young people of Acre village. You will pass your time until the sun comes up in picking hawthorn branches and tying ribbons to them. Then they will crown you with a circlet of flowers, mount you on a white horse, if they can find one – perhaps you would lend them your mare – and then you will ride down to Acre and bring in the spring. For three days after – for Dr MacAndrew does not think we can afford a week of idleness, and neither do I – you can be the queen of any revels they devise, or not, as you wish. There is nothing proper or improper about it – as far as I can see. But don’t ask me about ladylike behaviour, Miss Julia, for I am but a poor working man.’ This last was said with an absolutely grave face and with a tone so ironic that I wondered Richard could not hear the insult behind it.

‘Tell them to come for me before daybreak, then,’ I said. ‘And tell them they can take my mare from the stables as soon as I have done with her today.’