I said, ‘Stand,’ to him and found I had lost none of my skill. I was on his back in one clear leap and his ears went forward as he felt me astride him as I had always ridden him before we came here. I touched him gently with a soft squeeze of both legs on his warm flanks, and he stepped out gently down the drive towards the old woodland track through the parkland to Wideacre.

A blackbird had started singing, his voice sounded surprised to be awake this early, but all the other birds were still silent. The sun was not yet up, the morning was cool and grey. Sea and I were like ghosts of ourselves, leaving in dawnlight as we had come in moonlight. I put my hand in my pocket and felt the golden guineas were still there safe. We could go as we had come and disappear into the world of the common people. The world of wagons and travellers and shows, and no one would ever be able to find us again. Wideacre could stay as it was – fair, fruitful, generous. Nothing need change if I was not there, demanding my rights like a late-hatched greedy cuckoo chick. Perry could drink and play, annoy his mother and seek her forgiveness without me. He would come to his fortune at the end. It would make no difference to Lady Clara.

I could sink from the sight of this new life and no one would grieve for me. Within three months they would have forgotten all about me again.

Sea’s hooves rang as he came out of the woods on to the stones of the lane towards Acre and I turned his head east towards my land. I had half a will to look at it once more and then to go, to leave it for ever. I belonged neither there on the land, nor in my old life without her. I belonged nowhere and I had nowhere to go and no idea what I should do. I rode as I had ridden that night, without direction and Sea stopped at the little stream, as he had stopped that night and dipped his head to drink while I smelled the cold mist off the water.

‘Sarah,’ a voice said, and I looked up. My eyes were blurred – they had been watering as I rode – and I blinked to clear them. It was Will Tyacke standing under the trees on the other side of the stream.

‘You,’ I said.

Sea put his ears forward and went out of the stream towards Will and put his great head down for a pat. He liked Will; he was the only man he did like.

‘Sarah, in your old clothes,’ Will said.

‘My riding habit’s being mended,’ I said. ‘I wanted to ride early.’

‘Sleepless?’ he asked.

I nodded and he gave me a little smile. ‘Too soft for you at Havering?’ he asked.

The months of our quarrel slid away from us both. ‘Too soft, too big, too grand,’ I said in a little voice. ‘It’s not my place.’

‘Where is your place?’ he asked. He patted Sea’s neck and came close to stand at his shoulder so that he could look up into my face.

‘Nowhere, as far as I know,’ I said. ‘I’ve come too late for this life, and I don’t care to go back to the old one. I’ll never learn to be a lady as Lady Clara. I suppose now I couldn’t be happy with the work I used to do. I’m betwixt and between. I don’t know where I should be.’

He reached up to me and rested his hand on my leg. I stayed still, I did not mind his touch. ‘Could you be here?’ he asked very low. ‘Could you be with us in Acre? Not up at the Hall as gentry, but in the village with the ordinary people? Living with us and working with us, making the land grow and feeding the people, selling in the market and working and planning?’

I looked down at his face and saw his brown eyes were full of love. He wanted me to say yes. He wanted me to say yes more than he wanted anything else in the world. Despite our quarrel, despite my turning from him to go to Lady Clara’s parlour, he wanted me to say yes and to go to Acre with him, as his equal.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Don’t waste your hopes on me. Will Tyacke. I am dead inside. There is no place for me to be happy, not in the Hall, not in the village, not at Havering nor Wideacre. Don’t look like that and don’t talk like that. You are wasting your time: I have nothing for you and nothing for the village either.’

He dropped his hand and he turned away. I thought he was going to walk from me in a rage but he took only a few steps and then he turned to face the stream and dropped down to his haunches and watched the flow of it go past us. Sea had stirred up the mud of the river bed and as we watched it grew clearer and then flowed clean again.

‘I’ve just walked back from Havering village,’ he said. ‘Some of them have moved into Acre, sharing cottages. One lass wanted me to see if I could find something she had left behind, but they have burned it out.’

I said nothing.

‘They even carted the stones away,’ he said wonderingly. ‘In a few months’ time you won’t be able to tell there ever was a village there. They have wiped the land clean of the people who lived there for hundreds of years.’

‘Were you there with the cart?’ I asked.

Will looked quickly up at me. ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘I didn’t see you.’

‘I was riding, up on the Common behind,’ I said. I suddenly remembered that I had been with Perry and that we had laughed at the woman who clung to the doorpost. ‘I wasn’t allowed to come near,’ I said. It was a weak excuse. ‘They had the typhus fever.’

Will shook his head. ‘Nay,’ he said. He was angry but his voice was so low and soft no one but me could have guessed it. ‘There was a woman there who was feverish and delirious through hunger. She didn’t have typhus, she was dying in a fever. She had been giving her smallest child the breast to try and keep her alive and so when there was no food to be begged or bought it hit her the hardest.’

‘Did she cling to the doorpost?’ I asked.

‘You saw that, did you?’ Will asked. His voice was thick with condemnation of someone who could see that naked need of a woman and leave her to the mercies of paid wreckers. ‘Aye, she clung to the doorpost. She had nowhere to go. She was afraid of going to the poorhouse and the babbies being taken off her. I’ve taken her into my cottage and her three children. It’ll do for them for a while.’

‘Will you play nursemaid to three little babies?’ I said laughing. I wanted to hurt him, I wanted him to flare up at me since he thought I was so much in the wrong. I was angry with him for taking the woman and her children in. I did not like the thought of him living there, like a husband and a father with a sickly wife and three babies.

‘I’d rather live with three babbies than up at the Hall with one great baby and his ma,’ Will said, scowling at me.

‘You mean Lord Peregrine?’ I said in a tone as near to Lady Clara’s disdainful drawl as I could manage.

Will got to his feet and met my eye squarely. ‘Don’t speak to me like that, you silly slut,’ he said. ‘I’ve heard you learn to talk like that and I’m damned if I know why you want to turn yourself into something you’re not. I’ve heard Ted Tyacke talk about your ma, Lady Lacey she was, and she once rolled in the mud cat-fighting with one of the Dench girls. Her best friend was a village girl and she was in love with James Fortescue. She’d never have talked like that! And your grandma Beatrice swore like a plough boy and would have tanned your backside for talking to a working man like that.’

I dug my heels in Sea and turned him so sharply that he nearly reared. He plunged down the bank into mid-stream again and from there I turned and yelled at Will: ‘You’re sacked, Will Tyacke!’ I shouted. ‘Sacked and you can get off my land and go to hell! You’ll pack up today, you and your cottage-full of drabs. Get off my land all of you, and don’t you dare come back.’

He put his fists on his waist and shouted back at me. ‘You don’t own this place or run it, Sarah Lacey. You’re a minor still, you can sign nothing, you can appoint no one, you can sack no one. I takes my orders from James Fortescue and I will do for another five years. So take that back to Lord Perry with the compliments of his neighbour.’

‘I’ll have you off the land in a twelvemonth,’ I shrieked back at him, all my grief and anger and frustration boiling over at once like a pot with a lid forced on too tight. ‘I’m marrying Lord Peregrine as soon as the deeds are drawn and the Season over! Then he and I will own all the land from Midhurst to Cocking and we’ll see then who gives orders and who takes them, and whether you can ever find work in west Sussex again.’

He leaped down the bank in one fluid movement, faster than I would have thought he could move. He was in the water and at my side in an instant and Sea shied sideways with a snort of fright. He laid hold of my knee and my waist and then my arm and pulled me off Sea’s back and down so that I tumbled into the stream beside him and my best new riding boots were knee-high in water. He grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me so that my head rocked on my neck.

‘What?’ he shouted. ‘What are you saying? What are you saying?’

I blazed back at him, angry and unafraid of his violence. ‘That I’m marrying Lord Peregrine,’ I said. ‘His mother knows. It’s to be announced. It’s true.’

His brown eyes burned at me for one moment longer then he flung me away from him so that I stumbled backwards against Sea. He waded downstream to the shallow part of the bank and stumbled up it, his boots heavy with water. I turned and vaulted on to Sea’s back as easy as if I were in the ring and I wheeled him around like a triumphant cavalryman.

The look on Will’s face wiped the smile off my face with the shock. He looked as if I had stabbed him in the heart. I gasped when his eyes met mine, his gaze was so intent.

‘You will marry him?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ I said low. All the anger had gone, there was nothing in the world except his brown eyes, dark and narrowed as if he was hurting inside.

‘You’ve told James Fortescue?’

‘I will write today.’

‘This is your wish, Sarah?’

‘Yes,’ I said. I wanted so much to tell him that it was my wish because I did not know who I was nor where I should go. Because I had to have some family, some place where I belonged. Because Perry and I were two of a kind: both lost, both unloved, both unlovable.

‘I’ll leave on your wedding day,’ he said coldly. ‘And I’ll warn the village that everything – all our hopes and plans for the future, all the promises made by the Laceys – everything is all over for us.’

He turned and walked away from the stream. Sea and I looked after him. His waterlogged boots squelched at every step. His shoulders were bowed. I tried to laugh at the picture he presented, but I could not laugh. I sat very still on Sea’s back and watched him walk away from me. I let him go. Then I turned Sea’s head and rode back to Havering Hall.


I did as I had said I would, and everything followed on from that almost without my choosing. I wrote and told Mr Fortescue of my decision and I waited and read his reply without emotion. He was concerned and unhappy but there was nothing that he could do. His honest, anxious, stumbling reply made me feel that I was running very fast in the wrong direction, but Lady Clara insisted on seeing it, and read passages aloud, and rocked with laughter.

She composed for me a cold-hearted rejoinder which thanked him for his advice but said that my mind was made up. It referred him to the Havering lawyers if he had any queries.

‘You had best remind him that he is a little late in the day breaking his heart over your happiness. He never made much effort to find you in all the sixteen years when you were lost, by all accounts. Too busy re-creating Eden at Wideacre, I daresay.’

That made me angry and resentful, and the letter I sent to Mr Fortescue was cold and ungenerous. I did not hear from him again.

I heard no more from Will, either. I often seemed to see his face looking at me with that especial sharp anger. Once I dreamed of him trudging away from me, heavy-footed with wet boots. In my dream I called out to him and when he turned around he was smiling in a way I had never seen him look. But when I woke I knew that I had not called out to him, that I never would call out to him. That a gulf had opened between us which was too deep for mere liking and sympathy to bridge.

Perry and I grew closer, he was my only comfort in the late summer days while Lady Clara taught me how to pour tea and how to deal cards like a lady and not like a card-sharper. Perry would sit with me now during my lessons and when his mama praised me for doing well he would beam at me like a generous incapable student watching some bright friend do better.

‘You will be the toast of the Season,’ he said to me idly, as he watched his mama and me take a hand of picquet.