All the equipment had to be bought new. What had been left after the ruin of the Laceys after the last harvest had been sold or bartered for pitiful amounts of food during the years of Acre’s poverty. We had to buy new ploughs, new work-horses, new seed. A whole generation of young men had to be trained to drive a horse and follow a plough, for they had never seen it done by their fathers, and they had never been plough-boys themselves.
‘It can’t be done!’ John would sometimes say to me when I came home tired out from a day’s riding and with a list of things which had to be ready before the spring weather came and set the land in its cycle of growth. ‘It cannot be done this year!’
But, from somewhere, I had a great fund of confidence. I would smile at John not like a sixteen-year-old green girl but like someone far older and far wiser, and I would say, ‘It can be done, Uncle John. Mr Megson thinks so too, and I am sure it will be all right. Acre is working all the daylight hours to be ready in time for sowing. It can be done. And you, and I, and Mr Megson, and Acre are doing it.’
As if the planning and the preparation for sowing were not enough, the flock of sheep Uncle John had bought were not hardy and took against the lower fields that we thought would suit them. We lost two or three lambs, and even a ewe, which was more serious. After that Ralph said that, cost what it may, the animals would have to lamb under cover.
The barn they had used in autumn was too small for the whole flock, and it was too far for the shepherd to go every day. All the old barns had been pulled down years ago, the wood taken for firewood and the stones for building. So we had to have the flock in the Dower House stable block, with beams thrown across the yard and a loose thatch over the top. The smell was appalling and the noise they made! Mama said that she would never again read poems about the life of a shepherdess with any pleasure.
‘Hey Nonny No,’ John said at dinner, and grinned at her.
We were not like Quality, that spring.
‘We are pioneers,’ Mama said; and I loved her for understanding that working Wideacre in this way felt less like farming an estate in the heart of England and more like building a new country, a fresh country where one might forget the mistakes of the past and try to make something new and clean.
‘Squire Julia,’ Clary Dench called me ironically when I met her in Acre lane. She had taken her father’s dinner to him and was coming home with a jug and a plate under her arm. He had been working on the ditches and Clary too was speckled with the sandy mud.
‘You’d better curtsy,’ I said dourly. I looked little smarter than she did. I was wearing my cream riding habit, but it had lost its early style and was now creased and crumpled with a darn on the skirt where I had taken a tumble and ripped it. I was on foot, leading two plough-horses down to the village to be shod and for the plough-boys to practise driving a team. Clary and I both walked awkwardly, with the glutinous mud sticking to our boots. Her boots were older, the soles patched and re-patched. But when we were both muddy up to our eyebrows, one could tell little difference between the young lady of Quality and the village girl.
Clary laughed. ‘You look a sight!’ she said.
‘I know,’ I said ruefully. ‘I can hardly remember Bath now, and it’s not been that long.’
She nodded. ‘Remember the time when the village was bad?’ she asked. ‘It’s not an easy life now, no one could say it was. Bui at least we can see where we’re going. This spring is going to bring the sowing, and then there’ll be haymaking and harvest-time. There will be a proper harvest home. All the old parties and fair-days will come back. My ma and pa can’t talk of nothing else but the sowing and the maying.’
‘Maying!’ I said, stopping the horses with difficulty. People like to think of the great plough-horses as gentle giants, but I had led these two down from the Dower House stables and I could attest that they were hulking idiots without a listening ear between them, and without a brain in their heads.
‘Woah! you two,’ I said crossly. ‘What happens at the maying, Clary?’
‘It’s the Whitsun festival,’ she said, ‘when all the sowing is done and the early spring work is over. It’s a celebration of the spring. All the young men and women, all the lads and maids go up on to the downs before it is light, before dawn. They cut branches of the hawthorn tree and they dress them with ribbons, and they see the sunrise and welcome the spring in.’
‘Oh, yes,’ I said. It sounded rather tame. ‘Is that all, Clary?’
She gave me a sideways smiling glance. We had both grown up from the little girls who fought in the woods. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘it’s no accident that there’s a lot of marriages six months after that day. There’s a lot of courting that goes on while the sun is coming up, you know, Julia. And there are no elders there, and no one thinks the worse of anyone who slips away up on the downs. No one watches and no one counts, because it is the maying, you see.’
I smiled a little. ‘Oh,’ I said. I was a child compared to Clary, who had helped at childbirth and had wept already over a stillborn babe which would have been another sister for her. Clary and all the Acre children knew all about lust and birthing and dying, while Richard and I in the Dower House were naive beginners. But I had been in James’s arms, and felt his mouth on mine, and longed for his touch again. And I had Beatrice’s knowledge and Beatrice’s desires in my head. So I gave Clary a little smile and said, ‘Oh,’ which acknowledged that I was not squire, nor Miss Julia, but a maid like her with love to give and a longing to receive it.
‘Would you come out with us?’ she asked invitingly. ‘There’d be no harm. Many lasses just come out to watch the sunrise, and to cut the branches and take the spring home to their families.’
‘I should like that,’ I said.
‘I’ll tell ’em you’ll come out with us,’ said Clary. ‘Maybe they’ll make you the Queen of the May. And you tell your ma and your Uncle John that the village will take a week for the festival. At least some days.’
‘I will,’ I said. ‘But what happens?’
‘It’s the festival of misrule,’ Clary said. I turned the horses’ heads and she took one of the reins to help me lead them towards the forge. ‘Everyone dresses up in costume and there is a feast. The farmers with money give some when the band come around and demand a fee. The people who have no money give food for the feast. The Wideacre people go over to Havering, or to Singleton, or to Ambersham, and wherever they go, there is a party and dancing and free drink and free food. Then next year we have the other villages back to us. It’s been so long since Acre could dance that this year it is to be our turn.’
‘And who is the Queen of the May?’ I asked.
‘She’s queen of the feast,’ said Clary. ‘She wears a crown of hawthorn blossoms and she brings in the spring, and she sets the plough going, and the dancers dancing. And if I tell ’em all that you are coming, it will likely be you!’
I beamed. ‘Tell them I’ll come, then, Clary, for it sounds such fun. And I’ll tell Mama and Uncle John that there will be a holiday.’
Clary nodded and led the horse into Ned Smith’s yard, then waved goodbye to me and went home to her own cottage. I stayed only to see the plough-boys were waiting to take the horses when they had been shod and trudged home alone up the lane. I would be late for dinner again, but during those days of readying the land for the plough I was hardly ever on time.
*
We did not sow until quite late, the ground was so hard from the frost, and then so wet. But Ralph and John and I had to pick a day. ‘Let it be Miss Julia’s birthday, for luck!’ Ralph said. So we told the village when it would begin, and then crossed our fingers for luck that the village which had been away from the ploughshare and away from sowing for so long would remember how the work went, and would forget about the anger of the year they sowed pain and reaped a riot.
The wind had warmed overnight and the sun was shining. All the wisps of cloud and the lumpy sleet thunderheads had been torn aside and rushed over the
head of the downs in a hurrying breeze which smelled of salt from the sea. Chased off like a scattered flock, they went, and when I looked out of my bedroom window in the morning, the sky was a clear opalescent blue, innocent of shadow, and the sun a warm spring yellow.
‘A happy birthday to you, and it is a good drying day,’ said Mrs Gough in the kitchen as I went in to beg a last cup of coffee on my way to the stable. She was thinking of linen and I was thinking of land, but our satisfaction was mutual.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We’re sowing today. I must be off.’
Her head came up from her work; she was patting the breakfast rolls into shape. ‘I’ll send Jem down with your breakfast to the field if you wish,’ she said with unusual kindness. ‘I dare say you won’t want to come back once the work has started.’
‘Thank you, Mrs Gough,’ I said, surprised.
She gave me one of her rare smiles. ‘I hear all around you’re working hard on the land, Miss Julia. They do say you’re as good as Miss Beatrice was when she was a girl. I don’t hold with women owning land, but I know you’re getting it in good heart for Master Richard.’
I could have argued with that. I could have said that I was getting it in good heart for a dowry for James. Or I could have said that I was getting it in good heart to hand back to the people who worked it. But in truth, in those days, I was working in the same way that a sheepdog gathers the flock: I could not be myself and do anything else. It was as natural for me to farm the land as it was for me to breathe. So I held my tongue and just smiled at Mrs Gough and slipped out of the back door.
All at once the sight and smell of Wideacre tumbled over me like a spring flood over a waterfall. Before me the cedar tree showed the tiniest hint of lime green about its lower branches, and the rising sap oozed at the cut in its trunk where we had lopped a dangerous branch. I could hear a thrush singing, and from behind the house came the insistent coo of a wood-pigeon, trying out his voice after the season of silence. Behind the cedar tree was the paddock and the buds on the apple tree were as small as rice grains but scarlet with promise. Beyond the paddock the earth of the old meadow turned cornfield was white with frost, but away from the lee of the hedges I could see the weeds growing green, and beyond it and to my left was the common, rolling as sweet and free as wind-fetched breakers on an empty sea, yellow-brown with last year’s bracken and just a promise of green in the sleepy valleys.
To my right, southwards, were the high smooth folds of the downs, like green-velvet shoulders shrugging off the uneven borders of our fields, and I knew, although I could not see them, that the flock with the new lambs would be out on the fresh grass today. I stepped out into the garden and gulped in the scents, the sounds, the warmth of Wideacre on a sweet spring morning, and I felt my shoulders drop, and my lips smile, and my face turn blindly, like a winter mole, to the sunlight.
Minutes I stood there, half dazed and then – above the bird-song, above the pulse that was my own heart beating (though it sounded like a heart in the very land itself) -I heard a high sweet humming as if the waking earth were calling to me to come out and plough and sow and make it grow.
Ralph was already down at the field. We were starting with Three Gate Meadow, and then we would split the sowers into teams and ride among them to check the supply of seed-corn, the strength of the new ploughs and the ability of lads who had never ploughed a furrow before and men who had last ploughed fifteen years ago. I turned my mare towards Acre and Three Gate Meadow, with no one to break the daze upon me which came from the sudden sunshine and the promise of the day and the magic of Wideacre which was part of my blood and bone.
I slid from my mare’s back and tied her to the gate. The sowers were in the field, and their great bags filled with seed-corn bulged before them like the fat bellies of pregnant women. They had chosen Jimmy Dart – the lost son of Acre – to take the plough for the first wobbly furrow for luck. As I walked through the gate, I saw the plough coming towards me, his slight city-starved body hanging on to the handles for dear life, his weight too light to keep it straight.
‘Speed the plough!’ I called, and everyone waiting around the field turned and smiled at me and called, ‘Speed the plough!’ in return.
Clary was by the gate, a great bag of seed-corn over her shoulder and she gestured to me to take it from her. ‘Happy birthday, Julia!’ she said sweetly. ‘I’ve been waiting for you. You sow the first seeds. Everyone ’ud like it. It’d be good luck. Take a handful of seeds and just scatter them out in a big sweep.’
I half staggered under the weight of the bag and waited until the first furrow had been cut. The great horses bent their necks to pull the plough, knowing the work better than Jimmy. I stepped into the furrow behind him and dug deep into the bag that was weighing me down. The seeds stuck, moist and pale, to my hands and I threw them in a great flinging sweep out to the very boundaries of Wideacre so the whole green world should grow at my bidding and there should never be hunger on my land again.
Again and again I cast the seed in generous prodigal fistfuls, up to the sky as if I wanted the greedy wheeling seagulls to share in the bounty of the land so that there should be no crying – not even the crying of gulls on this day. In my head was a great sweet singing as the seed flew out in acres of silver and fell on the deep thick mud. I felt so strong, and so magical, that I half expected it to sprout as it fell.
I hardly heard the sound of hooves in the lane, I was so absorbed with keeping my balance on the heavy new-turned earth, and with the fascination of the damp sticky seed-bag and the sight of the flung seed. But then I heard someone call my name, and I looked around to the gate. There at the entrance to the field, sliding from his horse, with his black hair all curly and windblown and his eyes bright, was Richard.
I walked towards him in a dream, my hands still full of seed. He seemed to be the centre of the world whose heartbeat I had heard in my head this morning, his feet planted as surely as a rooted tree in the safe earth of Wideacre, his head warmed by the Wideacre sun.
The bedraggled muddy hem of my riding habit flapped around me as I staggered across the furrows, and the mud of Wideacre was caked on my boots. Richard reached out a soft white hand to me and drew me towards him, without saying a word. With the eyes of all of Acre upon us and with the plough-boys stopped to watch, I turned my face up to Richard like a common girl and let him kiss me long and passionately under the spring sky.
His arms held me tight to him and I was enveloped by his driving cape, which swirled around us. Sheltered by it, half hidden by it, I put my hands inside his cape and around his hard hot back, and clung to him as though I were drowning in the river. His head came down harder and I opened my lips under his and tasted his mouth on mine.
As if that taste had been poison, I suddenly leaped backward, struggling out of the folds of his cape, shrugging off his grip. Heedless of what he would think I put the muddy back of my hand to my mouth and rubbed hard, wiping away the taste of Richard’s tongue.
‘Don’t, Richard!’ I exclaimed and there was no magic between us, and no mindless delight left in me at all.
Richard’s face was as black as thunder. ‘I got your note…’ he started.
But then there was a warning call from Clary at the gate. ‘Look out, Julia, ‘tis your ma!’
I stumbled back another pace and looked guiltily down the lane. Uncle John’s curricle was turning from the drive into Acre lane and coming towards us, but I guessed they would have seen nothing more than Richard and I exchanging a hug of greeting. I coloured scarlet in a great wave of shame. I could not raise my eyes from the ground. I could not look around the field for fear of someone beaming at me, or winking at Richard. Even if my mama had not seen, it was not fear of her disapproval which made me recoil from Richard. I had jumped back from his embrace because his touch – which I had once loved so well-seemed suddenly heavy with evil.
I did not look at him. What he was thinking, I could not imagine. And when I thought of James, and
of myself as his promised bride, I felt hot and kept my eyes down.
Not Richard. He always had a way of sailing through scrapes and he turned from me and strode up to the curricle. ‘Mama-Aunt!’ he said with delight, and leaped up to the step to give her a hearty kiss. ‘And Papa!’ he said, and stretched across my mama to shake John’s hand. ‘You will think me undutiful,’ he said, ‘but as I rode towards home I saw some people coming this way and they told me it was the first sowing day. I would not have missed it for the world. And here in the middle of the field was Julia, casting corn away as if she were feeding seagulls.’
Uncle John laughed. ‘We came to see the ceremonial ploughing, but I see we are too late.’ He nodded at Ralph, who came to the gate to greet them. ‘Good day, Mr Megson. Here is Richard home on a surprise visit for Julia’s birthday and to see your sowing.’
Ralph nodded to Mama and to Richard. I knew him well enough by now to know he could be trusted never to breathe a word that I had fled into Richard’s arms as if we were acknowledged lovers. No one in Acre would ever betray me on purpose. Only Ralph knew that I was affianced to another man and Richard should be no closer than arm’s length, but Ralph of all people would not care for that. I moved towards the plough and scowled at Ralph to warn him against teasing me. I might as well tell the sun to stop shining.
‘Hussy,’ he said in a provocative whisper, and I flamed scarlet again and frowned at him.
No one now would expect me to take my breakfast in the field with the sowers and the plough-boys but I was stubborn. ‘You go on home, Richard,’ I said pleasantly. ‘You will have things you wish to unpack. Have breakfast with Mama and Uncle John. I will be home as soon as ever I can, but I have promised to do a full day’s work here. If you want to come out again, I shall either be here or in Oak Tree Meadow. I cannot leave the ploughing now it has just started, there is too much for one person to watch alone. Mr Megson cannot be left with the work like that.’