Harry’s other nonsense could have cost lives, and that I found hard to forgive. He had some textbook clever ideas for controlling the flow of the Fenny, which, since time began, had been wide and fast and prone to flooding in springtime, and slow and sluggish in summer. Since everyone (everyone except Harry, of course) knows this, all the farmers whose lands run alongside the Fenny are ready for the spring floods and winter high water, too. In the flatter fields they leave unploughed the great dried-out ox-bows where the flood waters can overspill and roar and loose their speed and power before rejoining the main torrent. In an average season we may lose a sheep or a silly calf, or once — I remember — an ill-guarded child, in the flood. But this is no mountain torrent. It is just the sweet Fenny. It can be managed; it can be watched in the old, sound ways.

But they were not good enough for Harry. He calculated that if the water level were to be regulated at its source in a little steep-sided downland valley with a wall to hold back the growing river, then all the extra field space we allowed for flooding could be ploughed up and used. The empty extra curves around the riverbed, the water-meadows that flood twice a year, could all be put under his blessed plough to grow more and more of his damned wheat. So Harry listened courteously and politely to all the wise old men, and paid them no heed. My letters of excitable remonstrance he ignored, too. Too clever for his own good was Harry, and the old tenants sent their sons out to build his dam and fit its pretty little sluice gates and dig out its little channels, and they laughed behind their hands at the waste, and the cost and, I dare say, at what Miss Beatrice would have to say when she came home, and the rage she would be in.

What happened next could have been predicted by any fool except the fool who now squired Wideacre. The waters behind Harry’s, new-built dam backed up in the little valley far faster than he had anticipated. He had measured the flow of the Fenny, but not allowed for the fact that when the snow melts and we have heavy spring rains the whole land becomes wetter and there are streams where he had never guessed streams would flow. The swelling lake drowned a hazel coppice that was older than Wideacre itself, and waterlogged some good dry upland meadow fields. As the waters built up, the nice little sluice gates struggled to open and close to control the flood; the new plaster in the wall melted like springtime ice; the dam crumbled and a great wall of water, high as a house, thundered down the little valley towards Acre.

It knocked out the road bridge in the first splashy roaring collision and Harry could thank his fool’s luck that there were no small children sitting on the parapet or old men smoking and staring at the stream when that deadly wall of water ripped the sound old bridge out by its roots.

It spread then, a wide sweep of destruction as careless as a fan brushed across a table of ornaments. Crops, shrubs, bushes and even large shallow-rooted firs were bowled over in a broad swathe for twenty feet on either side of the banks. So Harry’s proud new wheat crop on the old water-meadows was ripped out of the earth before it had even rooted, and all his newly claimed fields were littered with mud and rubble and broken trees.

The flood hit the new mill with some of its force spent and, although the yard was flooded, the building had stood firm. Ground-floor windows and doors were staved in and some of the grain spoiled, but the new buildings were sound and strong. The old mill, where Ralph and I had met and loved, and Meg’s rickety hovel were swept away altogether. Only two walls of the mill were left standing and that sweet flowering green bank washed clean of our footprints. Even the straw he had picked off my skirts was gone, whirling downstream on the floodtide.

Then the worst of the flood was spent and the river returned to its banks. Harry wrote me that he had been greeted with anxious faces when he rode out the next day, but I knew there would have been smiles behind his back. Every scrounger on Wideacre would have profited from the Squire’s folly and the claims of flood damage would be sky high. Harry had to find the money and the workers to rebuild the bridge and the road; he had to compensate the tenants whose lands had been damaged and crops spoiled. He had to buy Mrs Green new glass for her windows and chintz for her curtains. When I read his doleful letter describing the damage and the claims he faced I had been hot with rage at his folly and the waste of it all. But now I was just as anxious to be home so I could set all to rights again.

Besides, there were things I could not ask Harry, but could only see for myself. How the young doctor was getting on, and whether Lady Havering had managed to catch him for one of Celia’s pretty sisters; if he remembered his passing liking for me. My heart stayed rock-steady at the thought of him — he was not a man who would excite or challenge me — and he could not gain me Wideacre — but his attention had flattered my vanity at a time when I needed a diversion, and he intrigued me. He was so unlike the men I knew — men of the land like squires, bluff farmers and county leaders. But my heart beat no faster at the thought of him. He had no mystery, no magic like Ralph. He did not hold the land and charm me like Harry. He could only interest me. But if he were still single, and still smiling with cool blue eyes at me, then I was happy to be interested.

I gazed out to sea where the waves followed each other like wandering, rolling hills and faced the principal question that awaited me at home: if the villains of the Kent attack had all been rounded up, sentenced and hanged; or whether one — just one, the leader with his two black dogs and his black horse — was still free. The question no longer woke me screaming every night, although the black horse continued to ride through my occasional nightmares. But the thought of my lovely strong Ralph swinging himself about on crutches, or worse still shuffling his body along the ground like a dog in the gutter, would always make me feel sick with fear and disgust. I took care to keep the picture from my mind, and if it came, unbidden, when I closed my eyes for sleep I took a good measure of laudanum and escaped.

If the corn rioters were all taken I could sleep in peace. He might well be dead already. He could have been executed in his disguise and no one ever thought to tell Wideacre, and certainly no one troubled enough to send the news to us in France. The figure who still haunted my darkest nightmares might be a ghost indeed, and I had no fear of dead men.

But if he were dead I felt I would mourn him. My first lover, the boy, then the man, who had spoken so longingly of the land and pleasure and the need to have them both. The clever youth who saw so young that there are those who give and those who take love. The daring, passionate, spontaneous lover who would fling himself on me and take me without doubt and without conscience. His frank sensuality had matched mine in a way that Harry never could. If he had only been of the Quality … but that was a daydream that would lead nowhere. He had killed for Wideacre; he had nearly died for it. All I had to hope was that the noose had done what the spring of the mantrap had half done, and that the love of my childhood, girlhood and womanhood was dead.

‘Is that — can that be land?’ asked Celia suddenly. She pointed ahead and I could see the faintest dark smudge like smoke on the horizon.

‘I don’t think it can be yet,’ I said, straining my eyes. ‘The captain said not till tomorrow. But we have had good winds all day.’

‘I do believe it is,’ said Celia, her pale cheeks flushed with pleasure. ‘How wonderful to see England again. I shall fetch Julia to catch her first glimpse of her home.’

And away down the hatch she went and came up with the baby, nurse and all the paraphernalia of infancy so that the baby could be pointed to the prow and face her homeland.

‘It’s to be hoped she’s more excited by the sight of her father,’ I said, watching this nonsense.

Celia laughed without a trace of disappointment. ‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘I expect she’s far too young to pay much heed. But I like to talk to her and show her things. She will learn soon enough.’

‘It won’t be for lack of teaching if she does not,’ I said drily.

Celia glanced at me and registered the tone of my voice.

‘You don’t … you don’t regret it, Beatrice?’ She stepped towards me, the baby against her shoulder. Her face showed concern for me and my feelings, but I noticed she had tightened her grip on the baby’s shawl.

‘No.’ I smiled at her suddenly scared face. ‘No, no, Celia. The baby is yours with my blessing. I only spoke thus because I am surprised to see how much she means to you.’

‘How much?’ Celia stared at me, uncomprehending. ‘But, Beatrice, she is so utterly perfect. I would have to be mad not to love her more than my life itself.’

‘That’s settled then,’ I said, glad to let the matter drop. It seemed odd to me that Celia’s instinctive, passionate love for the child, which had started at the news of my pregnancy, had flowered into such devotion. My enthusiasm for the boy I dreamed I carried blinded me to the prettiness of the girl who was born. But then Celia had wanted a child to love, any child. I wanted only an heir.

I got up and strolled across the gently rocking deck to gaze across the sea to England, which was becoming a darker smudge every moment. I leaned against the ship’s rail and felt, half consciously, the sun-warmed wood pressing against my breasts. Tonight, or at the latest tomorrow night, I should be in the arms of the Squire of Wideacre once more. I shivered with anticipation. It had been a long, long wait but my homecoming to Harry would make up for it.