Ralph nodded. ‘And you, Master Richard, will you be going up to the top of the downs to welcome the spring?’ he asked.

Richard nodded. ‘I shall go,’ he said. ‘All that you describe sounds very pleasant, but I’m sure Lady Lacey would feel happier if I was there with Miss Julia.’

Ralph nodded, his eyes on the ground. He would not even look at Richard, and he had no friendly smile for me with Richard by my side. ‘I am sure,’ he said, and then he wheeled his horse around and trotted back into the field as if he had wasted too much time already.

Richard was wrong about Mama. She had no reservations about my bringing in the spring with Acre at all.

Oh, heavens, Richard,’ she said. ‘If I wanted Julia to behave like a proper young lady, I should have to kidnap her and lock her up in Bath! She has been riding out on the land unaccompanied ever since you went off to Oxford. John insists she will take no hurt, and I trust to her own common sense – and the fact that she is so well loved.’

Richard nodded. ‘It still seems most unconventional to me,’ he said. We were taking tea after dinner, and Richard stood with his back to the fire, a dish of tea in his hand. I saw Mama and Uncle John exchange a smiling glance to see Richard so masterful at the fireplace.

‘It is unconventional,’ Uncle John agreed. ‘But James Fortescue has no objection, and Wideacre has a tradition of eccentric women. At the moment Julia is the key to Acre and I have to use her. No one but Julia and Mr Megson carry any weight with Acre folk, and while we are dragging them back to work, it has to be Julia and Mr Megson in the traces.’

Richard gave a little bow. ‘I am sure your judgement could not be wrong, sir,’ he said. ‘But all the same, I shall be glad to escort Julia to this daybreak merrymaking.’

‘For tuppence I’d come too!’ Uncle John said. ‘I love these traditions. When I was a lad in Edinburgh, it was an Easter custom to roll hard-boiled eggs down Arthur’s Seat – a great hill on the outskirts of the town. You would roll it, without touching it with your hands, all the way down to the bottom and then crack it and eat it.’

‘Really!’ said Mama, instantly diverted. ‘Did all your family go? Your brothers and sisters too?’

‘Oh, aye,’ said Uncle John. ‘All of Edinburgh went. And the egg tasted better then, at dawn on Easter morning, than at any other time.’

‘I believe this expedition is just for the young men and women,’ Richard said quickly. ‘The girls wear white and the young men wear white favours.’

I could tell by Mama’s absorbed expression that she was trying to remember if I had a white gown and a white wrap against the chill. And I was right. When I went upstairs to bed that night, I found she had laid out her own white cashmere shawl on the bed for my use, with a bunch of white ribbons for Richard’s cockade and to tie around my branch when I brought the spring home.

I woke early and heard voices in the back garden outside my window. I jumped out of bed and pattered across the wooden floor. My feet were icy, and it was still dark. There were a couple of torches and, around them, perhaps ten or twelve of the young people from Acre, giggling and trying to start up a song. I pulled on my white gown and tied the white ribbon around my waist, without the help of a maid, for Jenny Hodgett was out with the merrymakers herself. Then I tossed the wrap over my shoulders and went up to tap on the door of Richard’s little garret bedroom.

He was ready, pulling on his boots, and I pinned the favour of white ribbons to his hat. Then we crept downstairs as quietly as we could so as not to wake the sleeping house. The kitchen was silent, lit by a warm red glow from the embers of the kitchen fire. A cat was sleeping in the fireplace, dusty from the ashes. Richard shot the iron bolts on the back door and we went out into the cold and the darkness.

The cedar tree was pitch black against the sky, the yellow torches no brighter than candles in the darkness. The moon was a slim white sickle and the stars shone like little pinpricks of silver in the purple blackness of the sky. Someone from the back of the crowd hummed a note and they sang a song like one of the ploughing chants, a three-or four-note song, refined by centuries of singing. It was sung only once a year, sung only now, in the blue-black hour before dawn on the first morning of spring, and always sung for the Queen of the May, to call her to her duties as the girl who brings the spring to the land.

Richard closed the door behind us and I stood still on the doorstep in my pale dress and let the chant sweep over me. The air was as cold as spring water, but Mama’s wrap was warm and I held it tight around me. I felt magical, as though the great tree and the stars and the song and I were all part of some timeless powerful pattern which drew a continuous line down through the centuries and would go through me to the Laceys who came after me. Underneath the chant I could hear a drumbeat, a deep and solemn sound, and I knew there was no drum but my own thudding heart and the sound of the land itself.

The song finished and I gave a deep sigh; I looked at the bright faces of the young people from Acre who were ready to call me their friend and had wanted me to be the girl who brought in the spring.

Then we turned without speaking and I led the way out of the garden under the ghostly arch into the silent stable yard and out of the Dower House grounds, along the drive towards the footpath to the downs. I glanced up at the dark bulk of the house as we went past. Mama’s window was dark, and Uncle John’s. Everyone in the whole world was asleep except the young people in all the downland villages who would be walking quietly through the Sussex lanes and climbing up the dark grassy shoulders of the downs to see the sun rise pale over the land.

Richard walked beside me and I glanced at him and smiled. He took my chilled hand and slipped it in the pocket of his jacket and held it, and we walked hand-clasped in the centre of the crowd along the pale road towards Acre.


When we turned right up the bridle-way to the downs, there was room for no more than two abreast, and the others fell into line behind us, two by two, some girls walking side by side and some lads with each other, but mostly Acre was in pairs. The spring had been calling to them as insistently as it had been calling to me, and the young people of Acre were impatient to be courting.

We climbed up the little path, and my boots slid on the mud and I was glad of Richard’s firm grip. He did not say a word to me and I felt more and more dreamlike as we walked together under the great beech trees of the coppice with courting couples behind us and nothing but the sleeping land around us.

It was a long walk, for I was accustomed to ride, and I was surprised how breathless and slow I was in getting to the top. At the very head of the footpath was a fence to keep the sheep in, breached by a kissing gate. Richard stood back to let me go first and as I closed the gate to let myself out the other side, he put his hands on top of mine to hold me still, with the gate between us. I looked up wonderingly into his face and he bent his dark head slowly down to me. My lips parted and his mouth came down and gently, gently, kissed me, as soft as a moth to a candle-flame.

I stepped back with a little gasp, but behind Richard were the Acre young people and they were all smiles. I looked among them for Clary’s dear face and I saw her beam at me and wink, inviting me to romp in a hollow with Richard and deny my loyalty to James and my training as an indoor child. I frowned at her, for she should know well enough by now that Richard would never touch me in that way. But she smiled on, unrepentant.

Matthew was near her, but walking at arm’s length, and when she came through the gate, he did not take the opportunity to kiss her as the following couples did.

‘What’s the matter with you two?’ I asked as she came to where I waited on a little bank of downland turf, watching the others come through the gate.

Clary gave a grimace. ‘We’re at daggers drawn,’ she said. ‘He’s a fool. Everything’s spoiled.’


‘Why, what’s happened?’ I asked.

‘It’s those silly rhymes he’s always been writing,’ she said impatiently. ‘I never paid them no mind. But he showed them to some publisher in Chichester and the damned man has printed them and is selling them and all.’

‘But, Clary, that’s wonderful…’ I started.

Clary rounded on me, her eyes flashing. ‘Wonderful it is not!’ she said, crudely mimicking my word. ‘The man took his poems and printed them all pretty in his little book. And d’you know what they’ve called it? They’ve called it Cuckoos Calling: The Poems of a Sussex Simpleton.’

I gaped. ? what?’ I asked. I could not believe I had heard aright.

‘Yes,’ Clary said viciously. “? Sussex Simpleton”. And they’ve told him he has a fine untutored voice and that he is in touch with the beauty of nature because he is an idiot! So that’s why I am not as proud as Punch for him. Just when everyone was forgetting that the parish guardians ever called him simple in the first place!’ She ended on a little sob.

‘How did they ever think it?’ I demanded bewildered.

‘His gran told them,’ Clary said, dashing at her eyes with the hem of her gown. ‘The silly old fool told them his entire life-history when they came out to Acre in their fine carriage to tell him they liked his poems and ask if he had any more. She told them that he had been left behind when the parish roundsman took the other children because they thought he was simple. She told them that he stammered and that he could not speak right when he was a lad. So they are calling him the dumb nightingale. And the newspaper called him the idiot songster…’ She broke off and openly wept with her apron up to her face.