Harry’s eyes were dark with desire and his heart under my hands was thudding. His mouth was trembling, just slightly, and he gazed into my face as if he would eat me alive.

‘It is a sin,’ he said in a low voice.

The world was spinning around me. I could hardly hear him; I could hardly find words to reply to him.

‘It is not,’ I said immediately. ‘It is not, Harry. It is right. You can feel it is right. It is no sin. It is no sin. It is not.’

His head came down to me and my eyes half shut in expectation of his kiss. He was so close I could feel his breath on my face and I opened my mouth and breathed in the air from his mouth in a little shudder of longing. But still he would not kiss me.

‘It is a sin,’ he said softly.

‘Worse sin to be married for ever to a woman who is as cold as ice,’ I murmured. ‘Worse to live with a wife who cannot love you, who does not know how to love, while I wear out my days in yearning for you. Oh, pity me, Harry! If you cannot love me, then pity me.’

‘I can love you,’ he contradicted me, his voice a husky rumble. ‘Oh, Beatrice, if you knew! But it is a sin.’

He was holding on to those four words as a talisman to keep his lovely head from coming down that fraction lower to crush his mouth on mine. I could feel his body was taut with desire and yet he had himself under control. He loved me, he desired me, and yet he would not touch me. I could bear his closeness and the half-inch between our mouths no more. I lunged up to him and bit him, as hard as I could, on his teasing, tormenting mouth. My riding whip was still looped on my wrist and I slid my hand from his chest and caught it dagger-like and stabbed it into his thigh.

‘Harry, I will kill you,’ I said and I meant it.

His mouth was bleeding and he took one hand from my waist to put the back of his fingers to his lips. He brought his hand away and saw it was stained with blood. Then he gave a great groan and flung his full weight on top of me. He ripped at my riding habit and as the buttons at the neck parted he moaned and buried his face in my breasts, kissing hard, and biting without mercy. I dragged his breeches down to his knees and he pushed up my skirts and petticoats.

Still half dressed and too desperate to care we rolled together on the grass as Harry thrust with impatient, unskilled stabs at my body, thumping his hardness into my thighs, at my back, against my wet softness until there was that one second of terrifying pleasure as frightening as falling from a tree, as painful as a knife blow and he found the sweet hidden secret place and pushed in, like a fist through curtains. For a split second we both froze still, stunned by the sensation, then he shook my body like a terrier holding a rat, and in seconds I was screaming. My legs and arms grabbed him to me and we writhed like frantic adders. With a great bellow Harry collapsed and lay still and I, hungry, greedy, insatiable, arched my back on the soft downs turf and rubbed and rubbed against him till I gave a great sigh of release and lay still.

Slowly I opened my eyes and saw Harry’s head against our blue sky and our larks singing up and up and up. The Squire of Wideacre lay heavily on me. His seed was in my body, his land beneath our coupled bodies; our grass was in one of my clenched hands, and the little meadow flowers and herbs drenched with my wetness beneath me. At last, at last, I had Wideacre and the Master. Our land beneath me, the Squire inside me. I gave a shuddering sob. The ache of longing I had carried with me all my life was gone, and my jealous anxiety had finally released me.

Harry tensed at the sound of my sob and rolled off me, his face a picture of guilt and misery.

‘My God, Beatrice, what can I say?’ he said helplessly. He sat up and buried his face in his hands. His shoulders sagged, his head bowed. I sat beside him and pulled my gown together at the neck, but not too close. I put a gentle hand on his shoulder. My body was still trembling with the shock of Harry’s rough loving; my mind was too dazed with delight to be able to think what was wrong with him.

Harry lifted his sad face at the touch of my hand and looked at me in abject misery.

‘My God, Beatrice! I must have hurt you so badly! And I love you so! What can I say? I am so ashamed!’

For a moment I gazed at him blankly, and then his words penetrated my dazed mind and I realized he was full of guilt at what seemed to him some kind of rape.

‘It is my fault,’ he said. ‘I have longed for you ever since the day when I rescued you from that brute. But God forgive me, Beatrice, I have kept seeing you in my mind as I saw you then, naked on the floor. Oh, that I should have saved you from him to ruin you myself!’ He dropped his head into his hands again in despair. ‘Beatrice, before heaven I never meant to,’ he said muffled. ‘I am a villain, but God knows not such a villain as to plan this thing. I did not dream such a thing could happen between brother and sister. I am totally to blame and I do not shirk my guilt. But, Beatrice, I did not know such a thing was possible.’

I put my hand tenderly on his silly head.

‘You are not totally to blame,’ I said gently. ‘And there is no blame. You have been dreaming of me, and I have been dreaming of you. There is no need for guilt.’

Harry raised his tear-filled eyes to my face with a glimmer of hope.

‘It is a sin though,’ he said uncertainly.

I shrugged, and at the movement my dress parted and one silky shoulder and the curve of my breast caught Harry’s gaze.

‘I cannot feel it is a sin,’ I said. ‘I know when I am doing wrong and this does not seem to me wrong. It seems to me where I should be, where I have been going towards all my life. I cannot see this as something wrong.’

‘It is wrong though,’ said Harry. He could not take his eyes from the gap in my gown. ‘It is wrong,’ he repeated. ‘And one cannot say something is not a sin just because it feels right …’

His voice, the voice of the authoritative know-all male tailed off as I lay back and shut my eyes. Harry leaned beside me, supported on one elbow. ‘You are not thinking logically, Beatrice …’ he said, and he said no more. He leaned forward and kissed my eyelids as gently as a downland butterfly alighting on a flower.

I made not a move; I barely sighed. I lay as still as a leaf as he traced a line of gentle kisses down my cheek, down my throat, and down the smooth flatness between my breasts. He pushed at the gown with his forehead and rubbed his face, as gentle now as he had been rough before, along the swell of my breasts and then took the crowning nipple in his mouth.

‘It is a sin,’ he said muffled.

His eyes were shut so he could not see me smile.

I lay still with the sun on my eyelids and felt Harry’s weight shift over to come on me again, and felt his insistent hardness. He might have all the resources of education in rhetoric but I had the high singing magic of Wideacre, and the easy pull of two young bodies. We moved together and there was a spark of pleasure like lightning before a storm as we touched, but came no closer. We rubbed like courting otters; face to face, body to body, legs entwined, biding our time.

‘It is a sin and I will not do it,’ said Harry. His denial was exciting to both of us.

‘I will not,’ he said again as he did. We rocked together and he slid inside me like an otter entering deep water.

‘Beatrice, my darling,’ he said. I opened my eyes and smiled at him.

‘Harry, my love,’ I said. ‘My only love.’

He groaned and fell on my mouth, and his tongue and his body stirred me at once. This time we were slower, more sensuous. I slithered down on him and twisted to give him as much awareness of me as I could. Harry’s ignorant bumpings on me had me shuddering with delight. Then we moved faster and faster till a great explosion of feeling when Harry reared up and banged my head and shoulders on the son turf of the downs in ecstasy and triumph.

Then we were still for a long, long time.

We rolled apart and dressed. I was quiet in my mind and sore in my body. From a saddlebag I unpacked ham, floury bread still warm from the baking, beer for Harry in a stone jug with a glass stopper, and a broad withy basket of Wideacre strawberries. We sat side by side looking out over our lands and wolfed the food. I was as hungry as if I had been fasting for a week. Harry fetched me a glass of water from the spring further down the hill at the start of the beech coppice and I drank in silence. It wells out of the chalk here as pure as filtered rain. It was icy cold and tasted green and sweet.

After the last strawberry we still had said nothing. I rolled on my back and gazed up at the sky and after a little hesitation Harry lay down beside me, then raised himself to look at my face. He rested his head on one hand and touched my face gently, nervously, with the other hand. As I smiled he took one tress of my loosened chestnut hair and wound it around his finger.

‘It pleased you,’ he said. It was not a question. He had seen and felt my delight, and it was with relief that I saw there was no need to lie.

‘Yes,’ I said, rolling to lie on my side as we faced each other mirror fashion.

‘Does it seem wrong to you?’ Harry’s moral certainties had been overthrown by his body, but always he would need words. Even now, sticky with pleasure and worn out from lovemaking, he needed to talk, to put into words the speechless magic that was in the air and the earth all around us.

‘We are the Laceys of Wideacre,’ I said simply. That statement of family pride still seemed to me the only explanation I would ever need for my behaviour, even though the man who had said it was dead and his son, my brother, had lain in my arms.