‘Yes,’ I said coldly, acknowledging like her the physical perfection of the oval face in the glass.

‘I’ll wear the green silk,’ I said, rising from the glass and dropping the damp towel on the floor for her to stoop and pick up. ‘I’m sick of greys and dark colours. And no gentry will be there.’

Lucy opened the wardrobe and shook out the deep green sack dress. A matching green stomacher tied tight at the front and a wide swaying panel shimmered loose at the back.

‘Good,’ I said, as she slid it over my head and tied the stomacher tight. ‘But I cannot breathe in here. Open the window, Lucy.’

She threw open the casement window but the heat and the damp air flowed in like a river of steam from a kettle to scorch the inside of my mouth and nose. Involuntarily I gave a little moan.

‘Oh, if only this weather would break,’ I said longingly. ‘I cannot breathe this air. I cannot move in this heat. Everything is so unbearably heavy all around me!’

Lucy looked at me without sympathy.

‘It’s affecting the children, too,’ she said. ‘Master Richard’s nurse asked if you would step into the nursery when you were changed. He is fretting and she thinks he may be cutting a tooth.’

I shrugged my shoulders. The fresh silk was already feeling too warm and sticky.

‘Ask Mr MacAndrew to go,’ I said. ‘I have to get ready to go to the mill. Mr MacAndrew will know what to do, and Richard minds him.’

Lucy’s eyes met mine and I read her instant condemnation of a woman who would not go to her own child when he was in pain and calling for her.

‘Oh, stop, Lucy!’ I said wearily. ‘Just tell him to go to the nursery at once, and then you come back and powder my hair.’

She went, obediently enough, and I moved to the window to try to breathe. The rose garden was drained of colour. I could not even remember how pretty it used to be before this nightmare light closed in. The green grass of the paddock was grey and ghostly looking. The scarlet roses in the garden looked green and sickly. The belly of the storm was leaning on the rooftop of the house and I looked up to a ceiling of purple clouds as billowing and claustrophobic as a tent. It stretched from the top of the downs to the top of the common without a break, without a chink to admit either light or air. The only light was the great dropping wall of sheet lightning that cracked as if the back of Wideacre had broken in two on the rack of my plans. The white light burned my eyes. I was still dazzled while Lucy powdered my hair and handed me my wrap.

‘I’ll take nothing. It’s too hot,’ I said. The merest touch of the pure wool on my fingers had me sweating and itchy.

‘You don’t look well,’ said Lucy coolly. She cared nothing for me now. I could be dying and she would not care.

‘I am perfectly well,’ I said coldly. ‘You may go, Lucy. I shall not want you any more tonight. Are you and the valets and Lady Lacey’s maid going down to the mill?’

‘If we may,’ she said with a hint of insolence in her voice.

‘You may,’ I said, too weary to challenge her again. I had worn out any affection for me. I had worn out all the love that everyone had felt for me. I was still only a young woman but I had already lived too long. I had enjoyed my best years, the years when I was surrounded with love and everyone adored pretty Miss Beatrice. Now I was old and tired and longing for sleep. I swept past her, my silk train hushing behind me and rippling like a flood of green poison all the way down the stairs. I had lost my quick easy stride; I felt less like a pretty girl than a snail with its sticky trail over everything it touches.

They were waiting for me in the hall and the carriage was at the door. Harry, portly and pompous in his grey silk with a black embroidered waistcoat and silver grey stockings. Celia, drained of colour in a navy silk dress, which made her strained face haggard in the yellowish storm light. John, handsome and meticulous as ever, and glowing with the knowledge that none of this could go on for much longer; that, like the storm, something was certain to break. Their faces turned to me as I came through the west-wing door and, in a sudden spurt of rebellion, I said to myself in horror, ‘My God! What have I done? I have planned my life and waded through blood; I have wilfully killed and accidentally killed and gone on and on with my heart growing harder and colder, so that this useless trio should live here in wealth and ease with clean consciences. So that I can see them every dreary day for the rest of my life. So that my long struggle should have as its goal seeing Harry, Celia and John every day until I die.’

I mastered my face with an effort and put my fingers to my forehead to smooth out the skin and the sudden expression of despair from my face.

‘I am sorry to have kept you waiting,’ I said. ‘Shall we go?’

Only Coachman Ben was there to drive us. The footmen were down at the mill released by dear Celia for a night out with the villagers. So John pulled in the steps and shut the door. The rocking of the carriage in the eerie light reminded me of my sickness at sea, and I pressed my lips together. Celia and John spoke in an undertone about the failure of their charity to make any real difference to Acre, and I heard again the rising note of panic in Celia’s voice when she said privately to John, ‘Whatever we do is simply not enough. However much we spend we seem only to delay a crisis. We solve nothing, and winter is coming.’

Her anxious voice set my teeth on edge and her words made me tense with foreboding. I bit my lips to keep my anger quiet.

The carriage rolled in the mill yard and a hundred pinched faces, greenish in the storm light, turned towards us. Celia alighted first, and there was a gentle murmur of called greetings for her. I came down the steps into a stony silence as cold as the millpond, but every woman dropped into a curtsy and every man doffed his cap or pulled his forelock. John was greeted with a few ‘Good days’, but Harry’s bluff shout, ‘Good day! Good harvesting!’ fell into an icy well of resentful silence.

‘Better get it over and done with,’ he said in a loud undertone to Celia, easing a finger under his tight stock.

‘Very well,’ she said. ‘Will you say grace?’

Harry looked abashed but strode over to the trestle table and waited until everyone was settled on a bench. Then he gabbled a string of Latin, which he may have understood once, and waved to Mrs Green at the kitchen door.

She marched out, her face set, carrying shoulder-high the great tray of sliced ham and chicken and beef, and crashed it on the table. Behind her came the Wideacre kitchenmaids all carrying great platters of cheeses and, behind them, the footmen with great loaves of our golden bread. There was no ripple of pleasure at the sight, no cheers as the enormous amounts were laid on the table. The heart was out of Wideacre. They were hungry; they were starving. And they had forgotten the taste of meat. There was no fighting. They were too exhausted to fight. Their good behaviour was partly a courtesy to Celia and John, but also because they had gone beyond fighting. They were resigned now to dying of hunger together, and there was no one sufficiently angry or sufficiently hopeful to grab his neighbour’s portion. The natural leaders of the village — old Tyacke and the three lads — were gone. All there was left were the miserable poor, enduring their hunger in silence. Expecting death this winter, and fearing it no more. They were so hungry — it gave me a shiver to see — they could not eat.

At the Christmas party they had scrambled for food, clawing like savages, as wild as hungry animals. But now at the harvest dinner the sharp new hunger had gone from them. They could eat little or nothing. They had forgotten how to relish food; the tasty cheese and the sweet-cured ham had lost their savour. And their poor shrunk bellies could manage proper amounts of food no more. They were used to famine. And they could eat only little.

Instead they shamelessly folded great doorstep slices of bread and meat and cheese and stuffed wedges of food in every pocket and handy corner of their clothes. They took food like squirrels preparing for a hard winter — in enormous amounts. But even then they did not grab. They helped each other now, and the frailest older people were given their share by young men whose own cheeks were pinched and white. Saddest of all was the way that these old people in their turn pressed extra pieces of meat on the mothers with small children. One girl, with a look of blank despair on her face, was pregnant, and with tender courtesy her neighbours on either side of the bench ensured she had wrapped up meat and cheese in her kerchief to take with her. They no longer grabbed food from each other’s mouths. They had learned the discipline of hunger, and they had been shocked by wintertime deaths. Now they shared, even when their own bellies rumbled and pained them.

The ominous dark sky billowed overhead but here on the lower ground we could not even feel the slight breeze that had blown at the Hall. We could see its passing in the way the treetops swayed and the pine trees moaned as it grew stronger. Then there was a crash like a thousand trees falling and the scene was suddenly frozen in a snowy glare and the thunder roared at us. Celia beside me suddenly swayed, and grabbed my arm.

‘I can’t stand this,’ she gasped. John instantly had an arm around her waist supporting her.

‘Get her away!’ he said abruptly to Harry, and supported Celia the few steps to the carriage. Coachman Ben, a hearty eater at the Hall kitchen, had not joined his hungry family at the table but came out of the purple shadows when he saw we were ready to leave.