‘They’ll not like it, Mrs MacAndrew,’ he said, his voice expressing contempt for such people who would refuse to work when and where the Quality and their dogs like him bade them.

‘I don’t expect them to like it,’ I said indifferently. ‘I merely expect them to do it. Can you get enough men together for tomorrow, or should we wait a day?’

‘I have the men to do the work.’ His hand gestured towards the shuttered cottages where idle men were sitting, heads in hands beside empty tables. ‘Every man in the village wants work. I can pick and choose. But they will not like the job of fencing in the common, fencing themselves out. There may be trouble.’

‘These are my people,’ I said with the indifference of a local for a stranger’s advice. ‘There will be no trouble that I cannot manage. You get the men there. There is no need for you to tell them what job they are to do. And I will meet you there. And any trouble I shall deal with.’

He nodded and I held Sorrel in, my hard eyes on him until he turned the nod into the full bow that I expect from my people in my village. Then I gave him a tight smile and said abruptly, ‘Good day, Brien, I shall see you at the beech coppice tomorrow, with twenty men.’

But when next day I trotted my gig down the lane and turned the corner to the start of the common land I saw there were not twenty men, there were more like one hundred. Wives too, and children, and the old people too aged for work. And a handful of the poorer Wideacre tenants, and about a dozen of the cottagers. The whole of the poor community of Wideacre was out to greet me. I halted Sorrel and took my time in tying his reins to a bush. I needed time to think; I had not expected this. When my head came up from fumbling with the reins my face was Clear and serene, my smile as lovely as the bright morning.

‘Good day to you all,’ I said. My voice was as bright and as untroubled as the robin in the beech tree over my head who started a clear and lovely warble at the pale blue sky.

The older men were in a little cluster, conferring among themselves. They jostled each other like boys caught in an orchard and then George Tyacke stepped forward, the oldest man in the village, still hanging on to life and his cottage, though he was stooped and bent with rheumatism and his hands shook with palsy.

‘Good day, Miss Beatrice,’ he said with the gentle courtesy of a patient man who has spent his life at other men’s bidding, and yet never lost temper or dignity.

‘We have all come out today to speak to you about your plans for the common,’ he said. His voice had the soft accent of the Sussex downland. He had been born and bred here, spent all his life within this circle of green hills. His family had never lived anywhere else. It was probably his ancestors whose bones lay in Norman Meadow. It was probably his land before my ancestors stole it.

‘Good day, Gaffer Tyacke,’ I said, and my voice was gentle. Today might see a hard act, a harsh act, against the poor of Wideacre, but I could never keep a smile from my eyes when I heard the slow drawl of my home. ‘I am always pleased to see you,’ I said with courtesy. ‘But I am surprised to see so many from Acre village, and others, too.’ My eyes flicked towards the tenants: my tenants, whose roofs depended on my goodwill, and they shuffled their feet at my scrutiny. ‘I am surprised that so many of you should think you have anything to say about what is done by me on my own land.’

Gaffer Tyacke nodded at the reproof, and the tenants looked as if they wished they were elsewhere. They knew that in that one swift glance I had noted every one, and they had an uneasy fear that they would pay for it. As indeed they would.

‘We are just worried, Miss Beatrice,’ Gaffer said gently. ‘We did not want to come up to the Hall and when we first heard of your plans we did not believe that you would do it. So we have left it so long to speak to you.’

I set my hands on my hips and looked around at them. In the winter sunshine my driving dress glowed a deep black. Under my neat black riding hat my hair gleamed as ruddy as an autumn beech tree. They had formed a circle around me but it was the circle of a court, not that of a mob. I was in utter control of this scene and they all knew it. And even old George Tyacke with his dignity and wisdom could not keep the servility from his voice.

‘Well,’ I said, and my tone was clear and loud so even the most distant of my shrinking tenants could hear me. ‘I’m damned if I can see it’s anyone’s business but my own, but since you’ve all made a day’s holiday to be here, you’d best tell me what it’s all about.’

It was as if a flood had broken through a dam.

‘It’s the rabbits! I can’t buy meat, they’re the only meat we eat!’ said one woman.

‘Where am I to get kindling from if I can’t come here?’ said another.

‘I’ve a cow and two pigs and they’ve always grazed here,’ said one of the villagers.

‘I set my beehives out on the common for the heather honey,’ said one of the tenants.

‘I cut peat for my stove on the common!’

‘I gather my brushwood here!’

‘My sheep graze here in autumn!’

And above the babble of voices Gaffer Tyacke’s old-man trembly tenor carried to my ears.

‘Look behind you, Miss Beatrice,’ he said. I turned. I had been standing in front of a great oak tree, one of the oldest in the woods. It was a pretty tradition of the village that lovers plighting their troth should seal their engagement by carving their names in its bark. From as high as a tall arm could reach, down to the roots, were love knots and names entwined and hearts carved, sometimes exquisitely carved, in the bark.

‘There’s my name, and my wife Lizzie,’ said George and pointed behind my head. Carefully I stared at the knots and whorls of the tree trunk and made out, as lichened as an old headstone, the heart shape and ‘George’ and ‘Lizzie’ carved inside.

‘And above them is my pa and ma,’ said George. ‘And above that is their pa and ma, and the names of my family go back as far as anyone remembers until you cannot read the names but see only a chip in the old bark where a name was.’

‘So?’ I said coldly.

‘Where are my grandchildren going to carve their names when they are courting?’ Gaffer said simply. ‘If you fell this tree, Miss Beatrice, it will not be like courting at all for the Acre bairns.’

There was a murmur of support from the crowd. The main issues were those of food and fuel, but even the poor have their sentiments.

‘No,’ I said uncompromisingly. It had been on my lips to offer to leave the tree and to run the fence around it so that the couples of Acre could still walk the dark lane on summer nights and carve their names together, then stop in dark undergrowth to make love on the way home. But it was folly and sentiment. And it was nonsense to put a kink in a straight fence for the happiness of children as yet unborn.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I know you are set in certain ways at Acre and you all know that I have stood your friend in the past. But Wideacre is changing and the way we have to farm is changing. There are still acres of common left that will not be enclosed this season. You may go on grazing your beasts and snaring rabbits, and gathering firewood there. But this area is to be sown for wheat.’

‘It will be a bad day when there are wheatfields all around Acre and no one with the price of a loaf inside the village,’ called a voice from the back of the crowd, and there was a murmur like a groan of support.

‘I know you, Mabel Henty,’ I said certainly. ‘You owed me three months’ rent last quarter day and I let the tally run. Don’t you raise your voice against me now!’

There was a ripple of laughter from some of the other villagers and Mabel Henty flushed scarlet and was silenced. No one else took up the cry. I let my gaze roam around the circle of faces until all the eyes had dropped under my hard green glare. They were all looking at their boots. Only Gaffer’s head was still up; only Gaffer Tyacke’s eyes still met mine.

‘I am an old man, Miss Beatrice,’ he said. ‘And I have seen many changes in my life. I was a young man when your pa was a boy. I saw him wed and I saw him buried. I saw your brother married and I was at the church gate to see you go in a bride. I was at the back of the church when they buried your ma. I have seen as much here as anyone. But I have never seen a Squire at Wideacre who went against Acre village. Nor heard tell of one. If you go on with this when we have asked you, begged you, not to, then you are not the Master as your pa was, nor as his pa was. There’s been a Lacey at Wideacre for hundreds of years. But they’ve never given the poor cause to groan. If you go on with this plan, Miss Beatrice, you will break the heart of Wideacre.’

I nodded quickly to clear my head. A dark mist seemed to swell up from the ground and I could only dimly hear the murmurs of support from the crowd. To fail the land, to fail the people, seemed more than I could bear. In that second as I shook my head like a weary deer surrounded by hounds, I felt afraid. I felt afraid that I had, somehow, lost my way, had mislaid the whole thread and purpose of my life. That the steady constant heart of Wideacre would no longer beat when I listened. I put my hand to my head, the anxious faces around me had blurred into a circle.

John Brien’s face stood out. Bright, curious, uncaring.

‘You have your orders, Brien,’ I said, and my voice seemed to be someone else’s, a distant clear tone. ‘Put the fences up.’

I took half-a-dozen unsteady steps to the gig and clambered up into it. I could see little for my eyes were filled with hot tears and my hands were shaking. Someone, Brien, untied the reins and handed them to me. My hands, as automatically skilful as ever, backed Sorrel and turned the gig.