‘We will be off then!’ said Harry, his voice like a foghorn above the rising wind. ‘We will say goodnight, and thank you for your labours.’

I stepped into the carriage and sat beside Celia. Her hands were as cold as ice and she kept twisting them in her lap as if she were trying to pull invisible rings off her fingers. She shuddered every now and then, and gasped. I thought then that we might have got away with it, but I had forgotten Harry’s infallible instinct for doing the wrong thing.

He climbed into the carriage and then turned to call from the open door.

‘So Wideacre is not so bad, hey?’ he shouted. ‘There’s not many estates left where they still bring the harvest in with a free dinner, you know!’

The rising wind moaned and the muffled voices moaned with it. The hollow hungry despairing eyes lifted from the table and fixed themselves on Harry at the steps of the carriage, and me at the window as if they could burn us up with the hatred of their gaze.

‘What about the corn?’ yelled one voice, and the rabble’s chorus of hate swelled beneath it.

‘Wideacre grown should be Wideacre sold, Wideacre milled, Wideacre fed!’ they rumbled. At the kitchen door of the mill I saw Miller Green appear and his eyes met mine in a message of cold hatred.

Harry hesitated, as if to shout down the rising hum of voices, but I tweaked his jacket and said quickly, ‘Harry come!’ and he pulled in the steps and slammed the door. The carriage tipped as he slumped back in his seat opposite me. Celia was gasping like a beached salmon and her face was ashen in the darkness of the coach.

‘I cannot stand it,’ she said again.

‘What’s the matter?’ I asked, my voice arid.

‘I cannot stand living like this any longer,’ she said. Her eyes were burning. She grabbed my hand and held it so hard she hurt me.

‘I will not live like this,’ she said. ‘These people are dying of hunger. The children are starving and their arms and legs are like sticks. I cannot eat in the Hall while there is starvation in the village.’

The coach was wheeling around; we would soon be away. There was another flash of lightning and every detail of the death’s-head feast was as bright as white noon. They were still seated at the trestle and every great platter of food had been cleared; there was not even a crumb left behind. In one corner of the yard a hungry child was retching desperately, choked on his first decent meal in half a year. His mother was holding the little heaving body, tears pouring down her face. The young girls in stained and ragged linen were not flirting with the lads. They had laid their dirty weary heads on the table, or were staring dully into space as if they had no interest in courtship and love, with their hunger and the fear of hunger a hollow under their ribs.

It had taken less than a year to turn the thriving, jolly, noisy, courting, wedding, bedding village of Acre into a graveyard for the walking dead with hollow eyes and sad faces. They looked ready for the workhouse. They looked like labourers fit for the new workhouses where they like quick fingers, no strength, but a dogged determination to get through the day, to collect the penny to buy a crust of loaf and some gin to get through another despairing night.

These were the walking dead from Harry’s great vision of the future. I had known it would be like this. I had killed them.

The carriage rolled forward, and another flash of lightning cracked over our heads and made the horses shy. The villagers saw my white face staring from the window, and Harry’s fat head near mine. They saw the horror but no pity in my eyes. From the back of the yard I saw an arm swing and I jerked back from the window in an instinctive reaction. The stone smashed into the glass and splinters and shards shattered into the coach like ice. Celia’s fine silk and mine were sprinkled with splinters of glass and John and Harry’s boots crunched on the shards on the floor of the coach.

A scratch on the back of my hand welled red, and I dabbed at it with a ribbon, feeling a sliver of glass dig deep into the cut, but feeling no pain.

Neither pain nor resentment, while the coachman whipped up the frightened animals and Harry exploded with rage. Celia hid her face in her hands and wept like a comfortless child. The carriage swayed, the horses near bolting in their fright at the thunder and the wind lashing the trees. Over the noise of the rumble of wheels was the louder rumble of thunder as it rolled around the top of the downs, but still it did not rain. Through the jagged hole of the window hot air blew in my face making me gasp with the stifling heat of it.

‘If only it would rain,’ I said absently.

‘Rain!’ Celia cried out, and her gentle voice was harsh. ‘I wish it would rain a flood and sweep the whole of this cruel country away and Wideacre with it!’

‘I say!’ said Harry feebly. ‘You’re upset, Celia, and no wonder! Villains they are! I’ll have the whole village cleared! I’ll not have them on my land!’

Celia turned on him, her eyes blazing. ‘It is we who are the villains, not they!’ she said, half stammering in her rage. ‘How could you, how could you, have let such a life come about? On your own land, Harry! We treat the poor worse than a northern coal baron! We feed the horses in our stables with more care than those little children are fed! We should be the ones who are chased by soldiers in the wood and hanged. It should be us who go hungry, for it is the four of us who let this plague of unhap-piness loose on Wideacre. John and I are to blame as well as you, for we stood by and tried to help in foolish little ways. But it is you and Beatrice who are most at fault, Harry, for you should never have farmed in this way that kills people. You are ploughing lives into Wideacre, not seaweed. You are sowing our downfall, not seeds. And I will not have it!’

The carriage stopped outside the Hall and Celia pushed past me, swung open the door and jumped down in a shower of glass. I would have grasped Harry’s hand for a few urgent words but John swept him in after Celia and there was no time to prompt him.

‘We farm Wideacre in the only way there is to produce a good yield,’ said Harry defensively, standing before the empty grate of the parlour. The thunder rumbled outside in a nightmare contradiction, half drowning his words.

‘Then we must content ourselves with less yield,’ said Celia sharply. She was riding the storm of her anger. Her moral force was based on her certainty of being right. Celia never spoke as a stratagem; she only ever spoke out when her stern, unswerving conscience told her she must.

‘Yields are hardly a matter for you, my dear,’ said Harry, with a warning note in his voice.

‘They are when the carriage is stoned with me inside!’ Celia retorted, her colour blazing in her cheeks. ‘They certainly are when I cannot pray in my parish church because behind me there are hungry people, dying people, facing starvation.’

‘Now!’ said Harry, raising his voice. ‘Now, I won’t have this, Celia.’

I nodded at John. ‘Come,’ I said, and turned towards the door.

‘Oh, no,’ said John not moving. ‘This is not a private affair between Harry and Celia that they should settle in privacy. This is an issue that concerns us all. Like Celia I cannot live here while this starvation goes on. Another winter is coming, and the last one took famine within a hair’s breadth of that village. I won’t leave this room until we have decided to restore the common plots for vegetables and you have agreed to open up the common land again.’

‘What do you know about farming?’ I demanded rudely. ‘Either of you! All you have seen, John, have been the Edinburgh drying greens; and all you know, Celia, is the inside of your parlour. If we do not farm in this way we will lose Wideacre!’ I stopped on a shaky half-laugh as a great crack of lightning lit up the room and showed me Harry’s aghast face.

‘I am not exaggerating,’ I said. ‘We are desperately overstretched and we have to keep on this course or we will lose all. No Wideacre for us, no Wideacre for Julia. The poor carry the brunt of it, of course they do. The poor always do. But once the profits of this season come in we will be able to ease the burden a little. And then yearly it will get better.’

‘No,’ said Celia. She was standing by the window, the sky livid behind her, the black clouds underlined with the garish orange light of the setting sun.

‘This is not a time for gradual improvements,’ she said. ‘We must change completely. It is not right that we should eat well at table while people starve on our land so that we can grow rich. It is not Christian, it is not right, that there should be such a great gulf between rich and poor. I will not accept that this is the way it has to be. You are a tyrant on Wideacre, Beatrice; you can decide absolutely how things are to be. But you may not decide that the poor starve — I will not allow it!’

‘I manage Wideacre in the only way there is to increase yields …’ I started but Celia’s voice broke in over mine, clear and sharp with her anger.

‘You do not manage Wideacre, Beatrice,’ she said, and her voice was full of scorn and disdain. ‘You ruin it. You ruin everything you love. You are a wrecker. I have loved you and trusted you and I was mistaken in you. You adored Wideacre but you have destroyed every good thing about it. You loved the meadows and they are gone. You loved the woods and they are sold or uprooted. You loved the downs and your ploughs are going higher and higher. You are a wrecker and you destroy the very things you work for.’ Her eyes flickered from me to John and I knew she was also thinking of how I had tried to wreck him too, the man I loved.