I had said I was perfectly well to Uncle John and Mama, but I had lied. I was not; I felt nauseous and tired. One morning, getting to my feet too swiftly from bending over a map in the library, I had stumbled with dizziness and was afraid I would faint. I was not hungry at mealtimes, but found I was tempted to Mrs Gough’s jars of bottled fruits and dried plums in the kitchen. My face was thinner and paler; my eyes, when I looked in the mirror, were hazy and fey. I was headachy and weary too, and for days at a time I made excuses and avoided riding out.

‘Come out for a drive,’ Mama said invitingly to me one morning. ‘It is not half so hot and humid this morning. Take me out in the gig and show me the hayfields. Mr Megson told me that they are nearly ready for cutting.’

I nodded and languidly went for my hat and gloves, but I saw the glance between Mama and Uncle John and his approving nod to her.

Mama was right, the weather had lifted. The feeling of the air being too thick to breathe had gone, and the light on the downs was clear and bright rather than too vivid. I clicked to the horse and we bowled down the road to Acre, the bit jingling with the brisk trot. The shadows of the trees flicked over us and the wind of our brisk passing blew in my face and brought some colour to my cheeks. The hay field I wanted to see was on the far side of Acre, and as we drove through the village, I twirled my whip in greeting to a couple of women working in their front gardens and waved to Ned Smith who was unloading charcoal in his yard.

A hayfield ready for cutting is a sea of palest green, knee-high, studded and scattered with blazes of colour: the scarlet of poppies, the deep blue of cornflowers, the pastel pinks and mauve and white of Lady’s smock, all growing spindly and tall up to the sunlight, pushing their bright faces through the grass. On the borders of the field the banks were bright with flowers: sweet-smelling clumps of cowslips, starry dogroses with their pale-pink faces and mustard-yellow stamens. And breathing over it all was the perfume of the wild bean flowers, sprawling over the hawthorn hedges and twining up the hazel and elder bushes.


‘It’ll be ready in three, four days of this weather,’ Miller Green said cheerily to me as we drew up alongside the lower meadow, where he leaned on the gate and smoked his pipe. I sniffed discreetly at the blue smoke. Tobacco. Miller Green had been smoking hawthorn leaves when he struggled to survive in a silent mill with no corn to grind. Now there were wages coming in, and he could buy his pinch of tobacco again.

‘It looks nearly ready,’ I agreed.

‘It’s the wheat I’m wanting,’ he said with longing. ‘I’ve been to the common field every day to see it. It’s a good crop, tall and strong, and thick as nettles on a dung heap!’

‘Good,’ I said. I got down from the gig so I could stand on the lower bar of the gate and scan the field to see if it was indeed near ready for cutting.

‘Thanks to you, Miss Julia,’ said the old man with a sly smile on his face.

‘Nonsense,’ I said evenly, but without heat. ‘You know that is nonsense, Miller Green. It’s a good crop because it was good-quality seed, thickly sown with the weather to suit it. Anything else is old wives’ nonsense.’

‘Aye,’ he said, accepting the reproof without caring, ‘but widely believed, Miss Julia. They all say in the village that you have the Lacey knack of making the wheat grow. It’s a good crop, and you get the credit.’

I shrugged and turned my gaze back to the rippling sea of green. ‘As you will,’ I said easily. ‘Is Mrs Green well, and your sons?’

‘Aye,’ he said, satisfied. ‘We’re all well. All of Acre is well. I can scarce remember such a spring and a summer.’

I nodded in farewell and went back to the gig where my mama sat under her grey silk parasol.

‘Is it ready?’ she asked. ‘It still looks very green to me.’

‘Three or four days,’ I said. ‘I’ll just drive down to the common to look at the wheatfield, and then we’ll go home.’

‘Certainly,’ she said, and waved her gloved hand at Miller Green, while I clicked to the horse and we turned down the track that leads to the common field.


The field was like a miracle to me. I was Wideacre bred, but I had never seen a wheatfield growing on Wideacre. Yet here it was before me, and the land and the village restored in one season’s work by the combination of Uncle John’s money, Ralph’s authority, my name and the irresistible magic of the Wideacre soil, which I believed would grow orchids and palm trees if one planted them.

The crop was a foot, even eighteen inches high, the kernels of the wheat, green and sweet and small, encased tightly in the blade like tiny peas in a pod. The field was huge; I could still remember how it had been, with the heather and the bracken encroaching on the margins and straggly weeds and tall armies of purple loosestrife and rose-bay willow-herb growing alongside and starving the self-sown crop. Now the drudgery of the weeding had won us a wide sweep of field, properly fenced and clean at the rims and green as green, with all the shrubs and bracken pulled clear. Beside it was the orchard I had planted on that cold grey day, the trees standing tall, and little green berries of apples showing the crop we would have. The wheatfield was a world of waving smoothness, green speckled with flowers and the bright blaze of poppies and misty-blue cornflowers.

Oh, it’s so lovely,’ I exclaimed involuntarily. I handed the reins to Mama in a sort of dream and slid down from the gig and went through the gate to stand amid the wheat in the field in its promise of green. ‘It’s so lovely,’ I said to myself, and lifted my skirts clear of the growing shoots and skirted the field to see the crop from another angle.

In my head I could hear the sweet singing noise which sometimes came to me on Wideacre, or when I was missing it. And the feel of the earth under my shoes was like a guarantee of happiness. In the days since Clary’s death and my own confusion I had lost my joy in the land. I had lost my ears to hear the singing, and I had lost my delight in the smell and feel of the place. Now, like a waterfall tumbling full upon me, it was coming back to me. Careless of my gown, I knelt down in the earth and sniffed at the crop as if it were a bouquet of flowers. It had the lightest aroma, like grass, but a little sweeter. Then I picked a stem and looked at the sound seeds which would grow and grow and ripen until we could cut it and thresh it, and grind it and bake bread with it, so that no one in Acre need ever go hungry again.

I put the seed in my mouth and nibbled at it like a ravenous harvest mouse. It was hard, not sweet yet. But when I bit on the stalk, I could taste the sap inside the stem, and I turned back to the gig with it in my mouth.

Oh, Julia,’ Mama sighed with a faint smile. ‘Do take that bit of grass out of your mouth. You look like an absolute natural.’

I whipped it out with a little jump. ‘I am sorry, Mama, I was in an utter daydream. The field is so wonderful.’

She smiled ruefully. ‘When Beatrice was a girl, she was just the same,’ she said. ‘She loved the land rather like you do, I think. And they used to say all sorts of things about her ability to make the land grow.’

I climbed back into the gig. ‘They say it about me too,’ I said, rather pleased. ‘I know it is nonsense, Mama, but it is a rather nice idea that the land grows well for the Laceys.’

She gave a little sigh. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I know you like that thought. I suppose I am not country born and bred, and so the passion for a field is never one that I feel. But your papa loved his land very well too.’

I gave one last lingering look at the common field and turned the gig for home. ‘It should be ready for harvesting by August,’ I said.

Oh, good,’ Mama said, ‘for Richard is hoping to come home in time to see it.’ She paused. ‘What has gone wrong between you and James, my darling?’ she asked tentatively. ‘I have been waiting and waiting for you to take me into your confidence. You have not had a letter from James for nearly three weeks, and yet he should have come home to England by now. I did not want to press you, especially with you seeming unwell, but you should tell me.’

My face fell at once, and the easy magic of the land deserted me. Mama saw the change. I searched my mind to find a lie I could offer her, to delay the announcement which I would have to make – that James and I would never marry.

‘I cannot say, Mama,’ I said softly. ‘It is private.’ I could feel the familiar easy tears coming and the choking feeling in my throat.

She nodded, her eyes on my face. ‘His mama wrote to me,’ she said. ‘She wrote that James had decided suddenly to go abroad again, and that he had told her that the betrothal would not be made. That the two of you had agreed that you would not suit. That it was a mutually agreed decision.’

I nodded. ‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Yet you are not happy,’ she suggested.

‘No, Mama,’ I said quietly.

She said nothing for a moment and I set the pony to walk forward. We climbed the little slope away from the common field and went slowly down the lane, the sunshine dappling the track ahead of us and the shadows sliding up and over her parasol.

She took a breath, and I saw her hands tighten on the handle of the parasol. ‘Julia,’ she said firmly, ‘I am your mama and it is my duty to know these things. You must tell me why you and James are no longer planning marriage.’

I touched the reins and the pony stopped. I knew I would have to betray James, just as my fear of the sight had made me betray Clary and Matthew and my cowardice had made me betray my duty to the whole of Acre. ‘I discovered that he was unchaste,’ I said softly. ‘He has been with a woman.’

Mama drew in her breath sharply. ‘I see,’ she said. She put out her hand and touched mine. ‘I think you are right,’ she said. ‘But the world we live in is a hard one, Julia. I believe most young men have a woman friend before they are married. As long as they are true to their wives after marriage, there are few people who think badly of them.’

I knew I would have to betray James’s private conversation with me and smirch his character. I could feel the tears gathering behind my eyes. ‘It was not one woman friend, Mama,’ I said, and my voice was a thread as thin as the rope which hanged Judas. ‘He consorts with common women, he visits their houses. I could not be sure he would cease to do so.’

‘James Fortescue?’ Mama said in utter incredulity. And I loved her so dearly then, for disbelieving me, even though I had to convince her.

‘One of the Acre children,’ I said awkwardly. ‘You never heard about her. She was called Julie – named after me, I suppose. She had become a…a fallen woman. She called it street-trading.’ I took a little breath. ‘She recognized him, Mama. He did not deny it.’

My mama gasped. She was a lady who had lived a sheltered life, a childhood in the best part of Bath, a womanhood on the isolated estate of Wideacre. She had never been to a place like Fish Quay Lane. She had never seen a woman like Julie. And she would never have understood, as I did, that someone can be driven one way by their desires, and another way by their duty. For my mama, duty and desire took one path. For the rest of us true-bred Laceys, life was hopelessly contradictory.

‘I see,’ she said inadequately. ‘I am very sorry, my darling. But do remember that you are young, and there are many young men who you will meet, and one of them you will love. I shall not trouble you now to tell me more, my darling.’

I nodded. ‘I would rather not,’ I said.

She touched my hand again, and I clicked to the pony and we moved forward.

As soon as we were home, Mama sent me to lie down and rest, and she went herself to find John. He was in the library working, and Mama went in, leaving the door open behind her. With a heaviness in my heart I crept downstairs so that I could listen to their conversation. I was a liar, and now I had become an eavesdropper too.

John’s tone was reasonable. ‘I can’t agree with you, Celia,’ he said firmly. ‘This is an excuse of delicacy. All young men seek experience, and the general belief is that they are better husbands for it.’


This is not “experience”,’ my mama replied. Her voice was a little higher than usual. She was distressed. ‘I do not know exactly what you mean by that, John, nor do I wish to know. Julia tells me that Mr Fortescue has consorted with prostitutes, and that she cannot be certain that this would cease on marriage. That seems to me ample reason for breaking the friendship.’