I dreaded the coming of my birthday in this dismal weather. I always thought of my birthday as the start of spring and yet it was like November when I awoke. I walked slowly downstairs knowing that I would find presents from Harry and Celia beside my plate. But the doorstep would not be heaped with little gifts from the village children. And baskets of spring flowers and posies would not arrive all through the day. And everyone would see what everyone knew: that I had lost the heart of Wideacre. That I was an outcast on my own land.

But, incredibly, it all looked the same. Three brightly wrapped presents sat beside my breakfast plate, from Harry, Celia and John. And on the table at the side, as ever, was a heap of small presents. My eyes took them in with a leap of gladness and a sigh, almost a gasp, escaped me. I felt a sudden prickling under my eyelids and could have wept aloud. Spring was coming then. The new season would make amends. And Acre had forgiven me. Somehow they had understood what I had never dared tell them outright. That the plough breaks the earth, cuts the toad, in order to plant the seed. That the scythe slices the hare while it is cutting hay. That the losses and deaths and grief and pain that had soured Acre all this freezing miserable winter and spring were like the pains of birth, and that the future, my son’s future, and Acre’s future were safe. But they had understood. They might have turned against me in bitterness and hatred for a while. But somehow they had understood.

I smiled and my heart was light for the first time since John had looked at me as he would look at a dying patient. I opened the presents by my plate first. I had a pretty brooch from Harry: a gold horse with a diamond inset as a star on its head. An ell of silk from Celia in a delicate lovely pewter grey. ‘For when we are in half-mourning, dearest,’ she said, kissing me. And a tiny package from John. I opened it with caution and then stuffed it back in the wrapping before Harry and Celia could see it. It was a phial of laudanum. On it he had written: ‘Four drops, four-hourly’. I dropped my head over my plate to hide my white face and shocked eyes.

He knew that I sought to escape the world in sleep. And he knew also that my sleeping and sleeping through these foggy weeks was a longing for Death. And he knew that I believed him when he had told me that Death was coming for me, and that I was ready. He was now giving to my hand the way to hurry towards it. And the corner outside the graveyard for suicides would be ‘Miss Beatrice’s Corner’ indeed.

When I gathered my courage and looked up, his eyes on me were bright, scornful. I had shown him the way. When he was struggling against drink he had found everywhere, at every hand, a dewy bottle with an unbroken seal. Now I knew that by my bedside every night would be a liberal supply of laudanum. And that the young doctor, who had loved me and warned me against the drug, would now supply me with as much as I wanted, until I slept and never woke again.

I shuddered. But my eyes slid to the little table heaped with presents.

‘And all these from Acre!’ said Celia marvelling. ‘I am so glad, so very glad.’

I nodded. ‘I am glad too,’ I said, my voice low. ‘It has been a hard winter for all of us. I am glad it is over.’

I walked to the table and unwrapped the first little parcel. Each one was no bigger than a cork from a wine bottle, all surprisingly uniform. All wrapped in gay paper.

‘What can it be?’ Celia exclaimed. She soon had her answer. From the pretty wrapping rolled a flint stone. It was white, and the grey shards on it showed where the white had chipped away. It was a flint from the common where the villagers could no longer go.

I dropped it in my lap and reached for another parcel. It was another flint. Harry exclaimed and strode over to the table. He opened half-a-dozen, ripping at the papers and scattering the wrapping on the floor. They were all flint stones. My lap was soon full of them. I counted them mechanically. There was one for every cottage, or house, or shanty, on our land. The whole village and every poor tenant had sent me a flint for my birthday. They did not dare stone me. Only one pebble had ever been shied at my gig. But they sent me, wrapped in pretty paper, a lapful of flints. I stood abruptly and showered them to the breakfast parlour floor. They clattered on the wood like monstrous hailstones in a storm of ice. Celia’s face was aghast. John was looking at me with overt curiosity. Harry was champing on his words, speechless with rage.

‘By God!’ he spluttered. ‘I’ll have the troops into the village for this. It’s an insult, a deliberate calculated insult. By God, I’ll not let it pass!’

Celia’s brown eyes suddenly filled with tears.

‘Oh, don’t let’s talk like that!’ she cried out in sudden passion. ‘It is we who have brought this on Beatrice. It is our fault. I have seen the village getting hungrier and more despairing and angrier. And all I have done is to try and ensure the very poorest families survived the winter. I never challenged what you and Beatrice were doing, Harry. But now I see the result of it. We have been all wrong, Harry. All wrong.’

I looked at her, my face blank. Everywhere I went I seemed to hear echoes of the message that Wideacre had gone wrong, had gone badly wrong. Whereas I believed, I had to believe, that it was all coming right. With fifty flints on the floor around my feet I stared at Celia, reproaching herself for the sorrow and hardness that had come to the land, and at Harry, speechless with anger. And at John, staring at me.

‘There’s one you missed,’ he said quietly. ‘Not a stone, a little basket.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Celia hopefully. ‘A pretty little basket like the children make with reeds from the river.’

I looked at it dully. It was Ralph’s basket, of course. I had been waiting for it all day. Now it sat on the table and I noted with dark eyes that he had lost none of the skill with his ringers, even if he would never walk or run or jump again. It was exquisitely made. He had taken time and trouble to make his threat to me delightfully pretty, inviting.

‘You open it, Celia,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to.’

‘Are you sure?’ she asked. ‘It cannot be anything bad. Look at the work that has gone into this lid, and the exquisite little catch.’ She slid back the little splinter of wood that served as a bolt and lifted the latch. She raised the lid with gentle ringers and parted the straw packed inside.

‘How odd,’ she said in surprise.

I had expected a china owl, like the last present. Or some horrid trick like a model of a mantrap or a china black horse. But it was worse than that.

I had braced myself for months, knowing that my birthday was coming, sensing Ralph somewhere near my land. I had expected some warning from him. Some coded threat. I had imagined all the forms that it could take. But it was worse.

‘A tinderbox?’ asked John. ‘A little tinderbox? Why would anyone send you a tinderbox, Beatrice?’

I drew a deep shuddering breath and my eyes turned to Harry, the plump pompous fool who was my only help and support in this hating world that I had made all around me.

‘It is the Culler,’ I said in despair. ‘He sends me that, to tell me he means to fire the house. He will come soon.’ And I reached out to Harry as if I were being swept down the Fenny on a flood tide and the waters were closing over my head. But Harry was not there. The mist was in my head and before my eyes again, and this time the greyness was not damp and cold, but hot.

And it smelled like smoke.


I took to my bed like some London miss in a decline. I could think of nothing else to do. I feared and hated the village and did not want to go there. I could not hear the heartbeat of the land so the woods and the downs were no comfort to me. I knew that somewhere, in some secret hollow, Ralph was hiding, watching the house with his hot black eyes. Waiting for me. My office and my maps, my rent table and my accounts were just so much paper that would blaze up if someone set a tinderbox to them. There was nothing for me to challenge so I stayed in bed. I lay on my back and looked at the great carved canopy over my head, at the profusion of fruit and flowers and animals and I longed for a land like that. Where good things grew and one could eat and enjoy without starving another. And I knew, in my secret, despairing heart, that Wideacre had been a land like that before I had gone mad, and lost myself, and lost the heartbeat, and lost the love, and lost the land. All I had left to cling to was the future, was Richard and Julia and the world they might make if I could keep Wideacre long enough to hand over to them. But I was lost.

They treated me like an invalid. The cook dreamed up delicate little dishes to tempt me. But I had no appetite. How could I have? I had eaten hearty on days when I had roamed the land like a gypsy and come home dog-tired and starving. They brought Richard in to see me, but he would not sit still beside me, and the noise he made hurt my head. Celia sat by my bed by the hour, sewing in the window seat with the warm May sunshine lighting her brown hair, or reading a book in companionable silence. Harry came in, clumsily tiptoeing, twice a day. Sometimes with a sprig of hawthorn for me or bluebells. And John came in, night and morning, with a cool hard look at me on his entrance. A phial of laudanum if I asked for it, and an expression in his pale eyes that was sometimes akin to pity.

He was working against me. I knew it without having to steal his letters or check the postbag. He had been in touch with his father, and with his father’s sharp Scottish lawyers, to see if they stood a chance of reclaiming what was left of his fortune. To see if they could disinherit my son. But I knew I had tied that rock-solid. I trusted my lawyers to have forged a contract that could be broken only by the signatories. And while I held Harry in the palm of my hand, Wideacre was safe for my son. And John could do nothing against me. But he stopped hating me throughout May while I lay in my bed dozing the warm days away. He was too good a doctor. All he could do, all his disposition and training and habits forced him to do, was to watch me and note the paleness in my cheeks and the shadows under my eyes, and the way I stared sightlessly at the wooden ceiling of my bed.