‘Go to sleep, Julia,’ Mama said softly, taking up her candle and going to the door.
‘Goodnight,’ I said and obediently shut my eyes. But I lay half wakeful, listening as the house settled for the night. I heard Mama’s footsteps in her room and the creak of her bed as she sprang in quickly, for the floorboards were icy to bare feet; the night-time noises of Stride bolting the back door, checking the front door – as if there were anything to steal! – and then his heavy tread up the back stairs to his bedroom at the top of the house.
Then the outside noises: a trailing creeper tapping at a window-pane, the distant call of a barn owl flying low across a dark field and away in the woods the abrupt bark of a dog fox. I imagined myself, high as the owl, flying over the sleeping fields, seeing below me the huddle of cottages that is Acre village, with no lights showing, like a pirate ship in a restless sea, seeing the breast of the common behind the village with the sandy white tracks luminous in the darkness and a herd of deer silent as deep-sea fish, winding across it. Then, if I were an owl, I would fly to the west wall of the hall of Wideacre, which is the only one left standing. If I were an owl I would fly to the gable head of it, where the proud roof timbers once rested, where it is scorched and blackened by the fire that burned out the Laceys, that wrecked the house arid the family. I would sit there and look with round wide eyes at the desolate fields and the woods growing wild and call, ‘Whoo! Whooo! Whooo!’ for the waste and the folly and the loss of the land.
I knew, even then, that there is a balance of needs on a land like ours. The masters take so much, the men take so much, and they both keep the poor. The land has its rights too: even fields must rest. My Aunt Beatrice was once the greatest farmer for miles around, but somehow, and no one would ever tell me quite how, it all went bad. When my Aunt Beatrice died and my papa died in the same night, the night of the fire, the Laceys were already ruined.
After that day nothing went right on Wideacre: not in the village, where they were as dirty as gypsies and as poor, and not for the Laceys. Mama and I were the only survivors of the great Lacey family, and we went in darned gowns and had no carriage. Worse than that, for Mama, we had no power. Oh, not in the way that many landowners have power. I don’t think she would ever have missed the power to order men as if they were all servants. But when things were wrong in the village, she had no power to intervene. No one could help Acre now it was in the hands of the Poor Law authorities. Not even Dr Pearce, who came riding up the drive with his fat bay cob actually sweating at the neck and withers one hot day in summer when I was ten. He asked to see Mama urgently and came into the parlour on Stride’s heels. I was seated by the open window, trying to get some air while I transposed a score Richard wanted to sing. Richard was idly fingering chords on the pianoforte. Mama was darning.
‘Forgive this intrusion, Lady Lacey,’ Dr Pearce said, his breath coming in pants from his hurried ride. ‘There are dreadful doings in Acre. They are taking the children.’
‘What?’ Mama said. She cast one fearful glance towards the window, and I shrank too, afraid – like a child – of being ‘taken’, whatever that meant.
Dr Pearce stripped off his riding gloves, and then, uselessly, put them back on again. ‘It’s the parish overseer from Chichester,’ he said, half stammering in his haste. ‘He has an order from some manufacturing gentlemen in the north. They want able-bodied pauper children for apprenticeships.’
Mama nodded.
Dr Pearce pulled his glove off one hand. ‘It is a slavery!’ he exclaimed. ‘Lady Lacey! They are taking them without consent! Any child whose parents cannot support them can be taken. That is all of Acre, for none of them are in regular work. They have a great carriage and they are going through Acre and taking the pick of the healthiest largest children. They had chosen three when I came here to you.’
I looked up at my mama’s face. She had risen to stand by the empty hearth. Her face was so white she looked sallow in the bright summer light. ‘Why did you come to me?’ she asked, her voice low.
Dr Pearce pulled off his other glove and slapped them in his hand. ‘I thought you would know what to do!’ he said. ‘I thought you would stop them!’
Mama made a slow gesture with one stiff hand, which took in the bare parlour, the chipped table, the old pianoforte and the single rug before the fire. ‘I am a woman of neither means nor influence,’ she said slowly.
‘You are the squire’s widow!’ Dr Pearce exclaimed.
Mama grimaced. ‘And you are the parson,’ she said bitterly. ‘But neither of us is able to stop what is happening down there.’
‘Your father? Lord Havering?’ Dr Pearce suggested.
Mama sat down in her chair again. ‘He says it is a village of outlaws,’ she said. ‘He would not lift a hand if the whole village were to be moved. Besides, he believes in these new factories. He has invested in them.’
Dr Pearce slumped down into a chair without invitation and rolled his gloves into a tight ball. ‘We do nothing?’ he asked helplessly.
My mama lifted her work to the light and started again to sew. ‘I can do nothing to stop this,’ she said. ‘Is it being done legally?’
‘Legally, yes!’ Dr Pearce said. ‘But morally?’
‘Then I can do nothing,’ Mama said again. ‘Perhaps you could ensure that the parents have the addresses of where the children are sent? So that they can bring them home when times improve.’
‘When times improve,’ Dr Pearce repeated. He got to his feet.
Mama looked up at him. Her face was stony, but her eyes were filled with tears. ‘When times improve,’ she said.
He took her hand and bowed over it as though she were a great lady receiving a courtier. ‘I’ll go back, then,’ he said. ‘The mood in the village is going to be very ugly. But I’ll do what I can.’
‘Will they listen to you?’ Mama asked.
Dr Pearce pulled his gloves on, and for the first time that day he smiled his sweet helpless smile. ‘I doubt it,’ he said wryly. ‘They have never done so before. But I will do what I can.’
He was right in thinking there was little he could do. The quicker parents had hidden their children as soon as the carriage had come into the village. In the end only six children were taken, taken away to work in the mills in the north. The roundsman said that they would serve a proper apprenticeship and be able to send home good wages. They would have an education and a religious upbringing. They would probably be home in a few years, a credit to their parents and to their employers. Acre heard that out in silence, and let the children go.
My grandmother took us to Chichester Cathedral in her carriage every Sunday for a month. Mama did not want to go to Acre church. But then Dr Pearce wrote her a note to say that there was no cause for concern in Acre, we could come and go quite safely. It was as it had been before.
Only I noticed that it was not as it had been before.
The children who sometimes used to come and peep through our front gate came no more. The girls who would bob a curtsy to Mama as we went down the aisle from church no longer looked at her or grinned impertinently at me. The whole village became as quiet as if every child had been stolen away by some malevolent Pied Piper. And every child learned to run like the wind up to the common and hide if they saw a strange coach come down the lane.
There were only six children lost, but it was not as it had been before.
It stayed hot all that summer. Hot, and quiet. Mama was ill with headaches and weariness; she trusted us to go no further than the common and the Wideacre estate and let us roam. Not for the first time I asked her where the money had gone, and why the hall had been burned, and why she – who was all powerful in my little world – could do nothing in the wider world of Acre and Chichester. And not for the first time her face took on that frozen look which both Richard and I had learned to dread, and she said softly, ‘Not now, darling. I will explain it all to you when you are old enough to understand it. But I will not tell you now.’
And with that Richard and I were content. We had only the casual curiosity of children. Having seen the hall in ruins and the land idle all our lives, we could hardly imagine a time when it had been whole any more than we could imagine a time when we were not there. Left to ourselves for that hot summer, we walked, and lazed, and dreamed, and played, and talked.
‘I wish I were a Lacey,’ Richard said to me, as we lay sprawled in the bracken of the common, looking up at the blue sky rippled with white clouds.
‘Why?’ I asked, as idle as he. I had a grass stalk between my thumbs and I was blowing and blowing, producing the most painful shrieks from it.
‘To be a Lacey of Wideacre,’ he said. ‘To be known as the owner of Wideacre. To have been landowners for so many years that no one could ever challenge you…’
I dropped my grass stalk and rolled over beside him, my head butting companionably against his skinny chest. ‘When we are married, you can take my name,’ I offered. ‘Then you’ll be a Lacey, if you like.’
‘Yes,’ he said, pleased. ‘And we can rebuild the hall and make it all just as it was. And I shall be the squire as my mama wanted me to be.’
I nodded. ‘Let’s go to the hall on our way home,’ I said.
I pulled Richard to his feet and we went in single file down the narrow sandy path that leads to the back of Wideacre woods from the common. There were gaps all around the smooth perimeter of the park wall, and rabbits, deer and foxes and the two of us could pass freely from common land to parkland, as if there were no ownership of land or game at all.
The poachers from Acre could go where they wished. Bellings, the man who used to be gamekeeper, was as bad as any of them. But they avoided the ruined hall. It was a place still owned exclusively by the Laceys. I went there with Richard, but apart from us the roofless half-walls echoed only to the sound of the Lacey ghosts.
‘Let’s be Saracens,’ said Richard with the abruptness of a child, and we both broke stick swords from the hazel bushes and held them before us. Richard made a quick gesture and we dropped to our bellies in a well-practised dive as we sighted the house. Wriggling like worms we came through the overgrown kitchen garden – meadowsweet and gypsy’s lace as tall as a jungle and brambles everywhere – and then Richard gave the order to charge and we thundered around the back of the stable block and tumbled into the yard with a triumphant shout.
The grass was thick between the cobbles, the pump rusted with its handle up, the water stagnant in the trough beneath the spout.
‘Lacey squires,’ Richard said, changing the game and offering me his arm with a courtly bow. I swept him a curtsy, holding my mud-stained muslin dress wide, and came up with a simper to take his arm. We processed, heads high, around to the front of the house, play-acting the people we should have been.
‘Damned good run with that fox!’ Richard said.
‘Damned good,’ I echoed, as daring as he.
And then we faced the house and ceased the play to look up at it. The house stared blankly at us, its honey-yellow sandstone colour streaked and black with the smoke of that long-ago fire, a buddleia plant, like a plume on a hat, growing from the crumbling wall near the top of the house. When the wooden floors and beams were burned, they crashed down, and the east wall, over the rose garden, collapsed. The facade of the house was still holding, but people came in secret and quarried away at it for the stone. It stared like a sightless giant over the nettles and rose-bay willow-herb in the rose garden and over the paddock, all dry and self-seeded. The great front door was gone, either burned out or stolen for the wood. The terrace, where Mama had taught me to walk, was chipped; and the cracks between the stones sprouted groundsel and dandelions.
That was our legacy. The ruin, a ledgerful of debts and a handful of fields which we could neither rent nor farm. The Wideacre woods were still ours, but Uncle John would not sell the timber yet. We still owned a few farms. But the tenants were dilatory with the rent and Mama could not force them to pay. All we owned, all that we were certain of, was the smoke-smudged ruin and the ground beneath our feet where we stood in the weed-strewn garden.
And it gave me such joy!
From babyhood, I think, I loved this place. Whatever else might happen in my life, I knew I must wake every morning to see that high forehead of the downs and to smell the heather and the bracken on the common. When my feet were on Wideacre earth, I knew who I was. When my face was turned to that sweet salt-stained wind from the south, I feared nothing. And when I put my hand to one of our great grey-barked beech trees or put my cheek to the turf, I could feel the pulse of Wideacre, feel the great secret heart of the land beating in time with mine.
Then I looked at the sun dipping down towards the common and realized we were late for dinner again. We trotted side by side down the drive at the steady pace we had learned almost in infancy. Richard might be skinny as a poor boy and I might be tall ‘and narrer as a broom handle’ as Mrs Gough would say disapprovingly, but we could run like poachers’ dogs; and we loped for home without needing to stop once to catch our breaths. With a wary eye on the parlour window, we ran around to the back of the house to the garden and tumbled in the back door to find the kitchen scorching from the heat of the oven and Mrs Gough hot and cross.
‘Late again, you two,’ she said, her arms akimbo, floured to the elbows. ‘Mr Stride is just about to announce dinner and here you two are looking like a pair of paupers.’
I sidled past her like a stable cat, anxious to get to my room and change before dinner. But Richard could always rely on his charm.
‘Oh, Mrs Gough, Mrs Gough,’ he said winningly, and slid his little arm half-way around her broad waist. ‘We forgot the time and I was so looking forward to your pheasant pie! Don’t tell me it will spoil if Stride waits just a few minutes until we are dressed for dinner.’
‘Waits long enough for you to change so you can pretend to your mama you’ve been home all this while,’ Mrs Gough said as she bridled.
Richard gleamed at her. ‘Yes,’ he said candidly. ‘You wouldn’t get me into trouble, would you, Mrs Gough?’
‘Be off with you,’ she said, giving him a little push towards the door, her smiles all for him. ‘Be off with you, Master Richard, and try and get a comb through that mop of black curls of yours. You look like a tatty-bogle. I can keep dinner hot for ten minutes without it spoiling, so you be quick, both of you.’
We did not need telling twice and were up the stairs, washed and changed and down in the parlour seconds before Stride came to announce dinner.
Mrs Gough was always easy on Richard. He could charm her with one upturned roguish smile. He was the boy of the household. It was natural for him to be indulged. But Richard was more than that: he was the only hope for the Laceys, the only hope for the Wideacre estate. He and I were joint heirs of the ruin, but it was on Richard that all the hopes rested. We were as poor as tenants, but Richard must be educated and prepared for the future he would have when his papa came home. And then, however long it took, Richard would rebuild the great house of Wideacre, take the great Wideacre estate back in hand, and there would be money in Acre and work for the men and the women, and it would be paradise regained for this little corner of Sussex. And Richard would marry me.
Mama was against our childish betrothal. She never told us why it could not be; we were just aware – in that simple way of children – that she did not like the idea, that she did not like to hear us speak of it. And in the simple way of children, we did not challenge her judgement or lie to her. We just kept our promise and our plans to ourselves.
She explained only once, when I was seven and we were still allowed to bathe together before the fire in the great wooden tub Stride carried up from the kitchen. Mama had left us to play and, when she came back, I was in my white nightdress with a white towel on my head and a curtain ring on my finger. Richard, naked with a small towel twisted on his head like a turban, was playing the bridegroom.
Mama had laughed when
she had seen us – Richard’s brown limbs gleaming in the firelight and my little face so grave. But when she had heard we were playing at weddings, she had frowned.
‘There are good reasons why you two cannot marry,’ she had said solemnly. ‘In very old families, in very noble families such as the Laceys, there is too much marrying, cousin with cousin. You are too young to understand now, and I shall explain more when you are older. But there are some sorts of Lacey behaviour which could do with diluting – with new blood. The Lacey passion for the land has not always been a happy one. Both Harry and Beatrice loved this land very dearly. But their judgement was not always sound. Your Uncle John and I have agreed that you two should never marry. Do not play at getting married, and do not think of it. It is better that you both marry outside the Lacey family. You will marry people who do not have the Lacey blood, and the Lacey weakness.’
We had nodded at that, and ceased our game to please her. Richard climbed into her lap and demanded kisses and cuddles as he was dried. ‘And dry my special mark,’ he commanded, and Mama took the towel and softly patted the little circular scar at his throat. ‘And tell me the story about it,’ he said, snuggling into her lap. I wrapped the warm towel around my skinny little body and sat at my mama’s feet and put my head against her knees. Richard’s bare feet kicked me gently away, matching the rhythm of Mama’s voice.
‘It was when you were a little tiny one, new born,’ she said softly, using the same words as always. ‘Your papa and I were with Dr Pearce at the vicarage. It was during the hard times in Acre, and your papa and the vicar and I were trying to find some way to feed the people. Your mama, Beatrice, was driving you in the sunshine. You were held by your nurse. Suddenly your mama saw that you had swallowed the bell of your little silver rattle!’