‘I love to hear them sing,’ said Harry, reining in beside me after he had been for a ride on the downs. I had been all day in the field. I trusted this crop, which could save Wideacre, to no other.

I smiled. ‘So do I,’ I said. ‘They keep time better and the work goes faster.’

‘I might take a sickle out myself,’ said Harry. ‘It’s years since I went reaping.’

‘Not today,’ I cautioned him. ‘Not on this field.’

‘As you wish,’ he said, dense as ever. ‘Shall we wait for you at dinnertime?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Tell them to leave something for me in my office. I may well stay over their dinner break to see they are back to work promptly after they have eaten.’

Harry nodded and wheeled away. As his horse passed the reapers who had reached the end of the field he pulled up to watch them straightening their backs, with a grimace from those who were crooked with rheumatism. They cleaned their sickles with weary sad faces, and fell into line again like pressed infantrymen. Harry cried a cheery ‘Good day! Good harvesting!’ to them. I doubt very much that he noticed no one replied.

They worked until noon and still the field was barely half cut. They were not going slow — I would have been on to that in a flash and they knew it. And they were too unused to the idea that this harvest would profit them not at all to cheat on the work. They still loved the great pale forest of wheat as I did, and they swung along in a steady easy river of movement expressing their joy in the great fertility of the land in every purposeful, painful swing. But still the field waved high. It was so huge! Only now, when I saw the gang reaping and reaping for half a day, did I realize what a massive acreage I had laid to wheat, and what a triumph this wheat harvest was.

The women and the children and the old folk followed the reapers, clasping great heaps of wheat to their bodies, banging the stalks against their knees and twisting a plait of wheat around to make a tight heavy-headed stook. The women had fewer illusions than the men about this explosion of fertility from the new field, and I watched them like a covetous hawk as they snapped off the odd head of wheat and stuffed it into their apron pockets. Poor beggars! Turning their backs to me that I should not see them pocket the traditional favours of the harvest. Gazing around with innocent-seeming, sly eyes and dropping a few stalks of wheat to the ground so that one of them, not even the culprit, might have some good gleaning later.

It was the tradition, always had been the tradition, that the gleaning at Wideacre was generous. The land grew so rich, the crops so tall, that no Squire had ever done more than smilingly grumble at the rituals of the informal robbery.

But now it was different.

It had to be different.

I waited until the little children had come down the lane with the pitchers of ale and the hunks of bread and cheese for their parents’ dinners. This year I saw the bread was greyer than it should be, made with as little flour as possible eked out with powdered pease or grated turnip. There was no cheese for anyone. And the pitchers held only water. These men and women were working under a burning July sun with only a hunk of grey bread to eat, and water to drink. No wonder they looked pale beneath the grime and the sweat. No wonder the dinner break was no longer a time for laughter and jokes and sharing of gossip and baccy. They were smoking hawthorn leaves in their pipes. And when they laid back to doze, the younger men put their hands behind their heads and stared silently at the sky as if they longed to see a future there that might free them from this unending round of poor drudgery.

After they had had thirty minutes, to the second, I called in my clear confident voice ‘All right! Back to work!’

The men and the women got to their feet as willingly as pigs coming out of mud to the killer. They glared at me, surly and cross, but no one did more than mutter. The sun was at its highest now. Mounted on my horse, unmoving, I could feel the heat of it baking on the coiled hair at the nape of my neck and the sweat making my silk gown damp. The men who had been hobbling, bent-backed, back and forth through the corn, swinging their sickles, looked like fever patients, so white and drenched in sweat. And the women look drained, mortally ill.

‘Gather round,’ I said peremptorily, and waited until they stood around me docile as cattle in a head-bowed half-circle. I noted, with a shiver of displeasure, that no one stepped on my shadow. When Tobermory shifted his weight so the shadow moved, the crowd swayed like a wheatfield with him, so my shadow touched no one.

‘Turn out your pockets,’ I said baldly. And my gaze drifted over every head bent with weariness and humiliation at this fresh shame.

‘Turn them out, I say.’

There was a dull silence. Then one of the young men, one of the Rogers lads, stepped forward.

‘Those are reaper’s rights,’ he said. His young voice clear as a mellow-toned bell.

‘Let’s see yours,’ I said instantly on the attack. ‘Turn them out.’

He clasped his hands over the pocket flaps of his leather breeches.

‘Those are reaper’s rights,’ he said. ‘You should not muzzle the ox that treads the corn. We’re not oxen in Acre, yet. We’re reapers, skilled reapers. And a handful of corn, morn and night, is the reaper’s due.’

‘Not any more,’ I said coldly. ‘Not on Wideacre. Turn out your pockets or turn out of your cottage, young Rogers. The choice is yours.’

He glared at me, baffled.

‘You’re good for us no longer, Miss Beatrice,’ he said in despair. ‘You held to the old ways once, and now you’re worse than a workhouse ganger.’

He pulled up the pocket flaps of the breeches and took a dozen heads of wheat out of one pocket, and a dozen from the other.

‘Throw them down,’ I ordered. He did so without another word. But he kept his eyes to the ground. I had a fleeting insight that he would not look at me so that I should not see that he, a youth earning a man’s wage, was weeping.

‘And now the rest of you,’ I said without emotion.

One by one they stepped forward like mummers in a play and threw down the heads of wheat until it made a tiny, insignificant pile in the deep rich field before me. A meagre theft. Enough to make little more than a couple of loaves. They would have used it for thickening soup, to stretch the bacon and water a little further. To make some gruel for the children, or some pap for the unweaned baby who cried and cried at a dry breast. Altogether it was little gain for the village, and a loss to the estate of a few pence.

‘This is thievery,’ I said.

‘Reaper’s rights!’ someone called from the back of the crowd.

‘I heard you, Harry Suggett,’ I said, raising neither my eyes nor my voice so there was a ripple of fear at my instant identification of the anonymous challenge.

‘This is thievery,’ I said again quietly. ‘You know what Dr Pearce says about thievery: that you will go to hell. You know what the law says about thievery: that you will go to gaol. Now hear what I say about thievery. Anyone I catch with one grain, just one grain, of wheat in their pocket will be handed over to a Justice of the Peace at once, and his or her family, every one of them, will be homeless that same night.’

There was a breath from the crowd, almost a groan, a great ‘ooohhh’, instantly stifled.

‘And there will be no gleaning for Acre until the Chichester workhouse gang have been through the fields gleaning for me first,’ I said firmly. ‘Only when the field is cleared as I wish may you come to see if there is anything left.’

Again there was the sigh of consternation. But they could say nothing. At the back of the crowd was a woman, a young girl, Sally Rose, a mother but no husband to provide for her and the babe. Her coarse apron was up over her head and she was weeping very quietly.

‘Now get to work,’ I said gently. ‘If there is no thieving, and no cheating, you will not find me unfair.’

At the softer note in my voice their eyes flashed to my face. But they were full of suspicion and unease, and all around the circle hands were clenched in the old sign against black magic.

I stayed out in the field all day, and we still had not cut it all. It was an unbelievable harvest, a miracle of a harvest. The untouched common land grew corn as if it had been longing all those innocent heather-filled years to burst into ripple upon ripple of pale yellow. No one filched wheat as far as I could see, and my eyes were sharp enough to see all around the field, although my mind was sluggish and cold and slow.

When the sun started sinking, late in the afternoon, and the sky was like warm mother-of-pearl with fleecy clouds of pink and the pearly greyness of twilight, I said, ‘All right. You can stop now.’

I waited while they cleaned their sickles and stacked them tidily on the wagon. Then they put on their jackets and the women threw shawls over their shoulders for the weary walk home. I watched them file out of the field, all silent, as if they were too tired and too sad for speech. A newly wed couple walked as a pair, with arms around each other, but she rested her head on his shoulder in a gesture that seemed more like sympathy than passion. The older couples walked side by side with a yawning gulf between them that comes from poverty miserably shared that has no ending. A lifetime filled with regrets. I checked that they had fastened the fence carefully behind them, and watched them down the track towards Acre. I kept my horse still until they were out of sight around the corner and I was alone in the glooming wood. Then I set Tobermory to ford the Fenny and cantered along the track towards the drive and my home.