I gasped and fell back in my chair, and Harry stepped forward with bullying authority.

‘Now see here, that’s enough!’ he said. ‘You’ve upset Miss Beatrice. Hold your tongue!’

George Tyacke nodded his head, his eyes still upon me burning with reproach while Harry crossed to the bell and ordered the carriage for Chichester.

‘Harry,’ I said urgently. ‘This is nonsense and it must stop now.’

He hesitated at my tone and looked from me to George Tyacke.

‘I’ve come to give myself up to you,’ said George. ‘But I can go to Lord Havering. I’m prepared to take the punishment.’

‘It’s too serious to let pass, Beatrice,’ said Harry, his tone reasonable but his babyish face alive with excitement at the drama of these petty, deadly events. ‘I’ll take Tyacke here to Chichester at once and make my deposition. You come along, now,’ he said rudely to Tyacke and took him from the room.

I saw the carriage go past the window and I could think of no way to stop it. I could think of no way to stop anything. I sat with my head in my hands by my desk for a long, long hour. Then I went up to my nursery to find my son, the future Squire.


They hanged him.

Poor, old, brave, foolish, Gaffer Tyacke.

The two lads would not agree that it was all his doing but the court was happy to have a man who confessed to breaking fences, trespassing on property and burning wood. So they hanged him. And Gaffer Tyacke went with steady steps to the scaffold and his old shoulders straight with pride.

The two lads, Hunter and Frosterly, they transported. Ned Hunter caught gaol fever and died while he was awaiting transportation. They said that Sam was with him all the time and he died in Sam’s arms, his lips black with the fever, longing for a sight of his home and the touch of his mother’s hand. Sam Frosterly sailed on the next ship out, and his family had a letter from him, just once. He was in Australia, a hard life and a bitter life for a lad reared in the gentle heart of Sussex. He must have longed and longed for the green hills of home. And they said it was the homesickness, not the heat or the flies or the dreadful bloody brawls, that killed him. He died within the year. If you are Wideacre born and Wideacre bred you cannot be happy elsewhere.

I heard of the deaths — Gaffer’s through the trapdoor, and Hunter’s on the convict ship — with a thin mouth, a white face, and dry eyes. After Hunter’s death, John Tyacke, the young lovely grandson and the pet of the village, disappeared. Some said he had run off to sea, some said he had hanged himself in the Wideacre woods and would be found when the autumn winds came and swept the leaves away from shielding him. He was gone, anyway. And the three of them would roister arm in arm down Acre lane no more. And when they brought the harvest in, John Tyacke would not swirl me round in a leaping jig while the others twisted their caps in their hands and giggled and nudged each other. The three of them were gone.

And something had gone from me, too.

I could not hear the heartbeat of Wideacre any more. I could not hear the heartbeat; I could not hear the birdsong. As the spring warmed up, slowly, slowly, as if there was a lump of ice at the heart of England that year, I did not warm. The cuckoos were calling in the woods; the larks started to make small experimental upward flights and try their voices, and I did not warm. My heart did not sing. The spring, with all its bobbing wild daffodils in the woods, and its scattering of meadow flowers, with all the leaves and the sweetness, and the rushing of the Fenny, the Wideacre spring came, but I did not melt from my winter coldness.

I could not tell what was happening. I could neither hear nor see. Nothing, nothing in my life seemed real to me any more and I looked out on the greening, damp land as if I were looking through a wall of ice that would separate me for ever from the land I had loved, and the people I had known.

I spent much time gazing out through the window, through the glass pane. Looking incredulously at the greening woods, which were as bright and as fluttering as if everything was still the same, as if my heart still pattered to the tune of the steady thud of my home. I did not dare to go out. I was weary of driving and not yet released from mourning so I could not ride. But I did not even wish to ride. I did not care either to walk in the fields. The warm moist earth that caked on my boots seemed to pull me down like a bog of clay — not like Wideacre’s soft loam at all. When I was driving it seemed such an effort to turn the horse’s head, to click to him to trot, to hold him steady on the road.

And this spring the countryside was not so lovely; it was too bright. The colours of green this spring hurt my eyes with their vibrant growth. I squinted when I tried to look towards the downs, and the sunshine put hard lines around my mouth and on my forehead where I found I was scowling.

There was no pleasure for me out on the land this spring, I could not tell why. And there was no pleasure for me in the village either. As I had ensured, no one noticed the lack of kindling from the enclosure. I had timed the fencing in of the common carefully. They should not have reproached me for that. No one went cold in the village that spring by my action. So I did not do all things badly.

But they gave me no credit. Just as that year with Ralph the greening of the shoots and the warming of the land had seemed all part of my magic, all part of my good blessings on the land, now everything that went wrong was laid at my door. The Sowers’ cow died and that had to be my fault, for she had not been able to graze on the good green shoots of the common. One of the Hills’ children fell sick, and that was my fault for my husband doctor was far away and they could afford no other. Mrs Hunter sat by a blackened grate and wept without ceasing for the shame that had taken her son from her. And because he had died calling for her and she could not go to him. That was my fault, they said. That was my fault.

And I knew that it was.

When I had to drive through the village I kept my head high and my eyes blazed with defiance. There was still no one who could meet my gaze then, and they looked away with surly faces. But when I saw Mrs Hunter through her cottage window, sitting motionless beside the black grate, and noted her chimney with no little swirl of smoke, I did not feel defiant. I did not feel ready to brazen out the disaster on my land. I just felt afraid, and comfortless and cold. I pulled up at the cobbler’s one chilly afternoon and called out, ‘Mrs Merry!’ to the group of gossiping women. Their faces turned on me were sulky and closed, and I remembered in disbelief the time when they would have called out ‘Good day’ and smiled, and crowded around the gig to tell me the village gossip. Now they stood in a circle like a gang of hanging judges and looked at me with cold eyes. They parted to let Mrs Merry come to the carriage and it struck me she came towards me dragging her feet. She did not smile to see me, and her face was guarded.

‘What is wrong with Mrs Hunter?’ I asked, gathering reins into one hand and fitting my whip into the stock.

‘No physical ill,’ said Mrs Merry, her eyes on my face.

‘What ails her then?’ I asked impatiently. ‘Her fire is out. I have driven past the cottage three days running and she is always sitting by the empty fireplace beside a cold grate. What ails her? Why don’t her friends go in and light the fire for her?’

‘She does not wish it lit,’ said Mrs Merry. ‘She does not want food. She does not want to speak with her friends. She has sat like that since last week when they sent her Sam Frosterly’s letter that Ned was dead. I read it to her, for she cannot read. She reached to the bucket and poured it over the fire and sat by the wet ashes till I left her. When I returned in the morning it was the same.’

My face stayed hard, but my eyes were despairing.

‘She will recover,’ I said. ‘It is just a shock for her to lose a son. Her a widow, and him her only child.’

‘Aye,’ said Mrs Merry.

A cold hard monosyllable from the woman who had delivered my child, who had been with me during that crisis of effort and pain, who had promised me she would not gossip, and who had kept that promise. The woman who had told me I was just like my papa in my care for Wideacre people.

‘It is not my fault, Mrs Merry,’ I said with sudden passion. ‘I did not mean it to happen like this, I did not plan this. I only had to increase the wheatfields; I did not dream the lads would pull the fences down. I meant them to have a fright with the soldiers and cease teasing me. I did not think they would be caught. I did not think Gaffer would go. I did not think he would be hanged, and Ned die, and Sam be sent far away. I did not mean this.’

Mrs Merry’s eyes had no pity.

‘You’re the plough that does not mean to slice the toad then,’ she said dourly. ‘You’re the scythe that does not mean to maim the hare. You go your own sharp way and do not mean to cut those who stand before you. So no one can blame you, can they, Miss Beatrice?’

I put out a hand towards Mrs Merry, the wise woman.

‘I did not mean it,’ I said. ‘Now they blame me for everything. But my son will set it to rights. Tell Mrs Hunter I will see that her lad is brought home to be properly buried in the churchyard.’

Mrs Merry shook her head.

‘Nay, Miss Beatrice,’ she said with finality. ‘I’ll carry no message from you to Mrs Hunter. It would be to insult her.’

I gasped at that, and dropped my hands on the reins. Sorrel started forward and I snatched the whip from the stock to flick him into a canter. As I pulled away from the women I heard the clatter of something against the side of the gig.