I listened intently. It could have no application to us, nor to our land, for I would never, never make such a contract with London merchants — a practice my father had despised. Wideacre wheat was never sold while it was standing in the field. It always went to the local market where the poor could buy their pennyworths and the merchants could bid for it in a fair auction. Yet I felt a hint of unease, for any attack on property frightens its owners and this pitched assault was unlike anything I had ever heard. I never forgot, I think no member of the Quality ever forgets, that we live off the fat of the land and dress in silks and clean linen and live in warm, beautiful mansions — while all around us the majority of the people are in hunger and dirt. Within a two hundred mile radius there were perhaps only three wealthy families such as ourselves. And there were hundreds and thousands of poor people who worked at our beck and call.

So I felt an entirely reasonable fear at the thought of poor people organizing themselves into a pitched attack on property. But at the same time I felt a sneaking feeling of admiration for the men who stood up against this clever Mr Wooler to keep the corn they had grown in their own county, that they might buy at a fair price. They were against the law, and if they were caught they would be hanged. But they would be secret local heroes if they saved the village from a hungry winter, and if there was such a thing as natural justice, then no one could call them wrong. Celia’s reaction was, predictably, more conventional.

‘Dreadful,’ she said.

Lady Havering read on,’ “As the men hesitated and looked to Mr Wooler for guidance a voice shouted, ‘Are you Wooler? If you move, you are a dead man!’ And then a shot rang out and it knocked Mr Wooler’s hat from his head!’” Lady Havering stopped reading to see if I was properly aghast and was satisfied at my suddenly appalled expression. Shooting with such accuracy takes years of training. I had only ever known one man, just one man, who could shoot so. Lady Havering turned a page.

‘ “Mr Wooler turned in the direction of the shot, seeking the leader of this dreadful assault, and saw a horse, a great black horse with two black dogs and a rider who called out, ‘I have reloaded, Wooler, and the next is for you!’ Mr Wooler could do nothing but obey the order and leave his horse and his whole fortune in the carts and walk back to the village. By the time the Squires had been alerted and the Justices called out the wagons had gone and were only found again four days later, empty.”’

‘Good gracious, how terrible,’ said Celia calmly.

I said nothing. I had a picture very clear in my mind of the darkened wood and the ring of silent men, armed but quite still under orders. The leader on a great horse who could fire with such accuracy and reload so fast, on horseback. If I had not known Ralph I would not have believed such skill was possible. But it could be done; I had seen Ralph do it. Not even Harry with years of practice and the best pistols could do such a thing, but I had seen Ralph shoot and reload with one hand while his horse stood steady, in less time than it takes to count twenty. I found it hard to believe anyone else could have learned the skill, but my mind shied from the logical conclusion.

‘ “A few men were questioned by Mr Wooler and despite the most rigorous inquiries they said nothing. They will be hanged, of course, but they utterly refused to identify their evil band or their leader. Mr Wooler himself says he could not see the man clearly. He had a confused impression of a scarf around the man’s face as a disguise.”’ Lady Havering glanced over the top of the page and broke off.

‘Are you unwell, my dear?’ she asked.

‘No, no,’ I said. I realized my hands were clamped on the window seat like a vice. I released my grip and tried to speak normally.

‘What a terrible tale,’ I said. ‘Like a nightmare. Was there …’ I searched my mind for some way to frame the question. ‘Was there nothing odd about the rider, nothing that would make him easy to identify?’

‘No. Apparently not,’ said Lady Havering. ‘Mr Wooler has offered a huge reward but no one has betrayed this man. It seems he may get off scot-free. I am glad he is in Kent. It would be too dreadful if he were near Havering … or Wideacre,’ she said as an afterthought.

I tried to smile and nod but I could not. I had lost control over the expression of my face and my teeth were chattering as if I had an ague. My hands, which had been gripping the edge of the seat, were clamped on it as if I were holding on to a spar while I was drowning. The legless man on the black horse in Portsmouth and the man on the black horse who could fire and reload with such accuracy in Kent could not be the same. It was foolish of me to feel such terror. It was dangerous to be out of control before Lady Havering and in front of Celia’s concerned eyes. I tried to speak normally but I could only croak, my throat muscles rigidly holding the scream that was struggling to rip out. The Ralph of my nightmares seemed to be taking human shapes — many human faces. In Portsmouth, in Kent, everywhere. Leading men against property, always on a black horse, always coming closer and closer to me. Even as I fell into a faint I could feel myself struggling to keep my eyes open in case the darkness of the swoon let Ralph come for me. Ralph on a great black horse with thirty hungry, angry men at his back and his legs hacked off at the knees.


I don’t remember how I got home. I’m told they sent me back in the Havering carriage with Lady Havering herself supporting me, but I remember nothing. I was not unconscious all the time, but I dropped into a faint twice, and the rest of the time I was in a daze of such fear that I could not speak or move. Whenever I closed my eyes I saw in my panicking imagination Ralph drooping like a broken doll over the sharp jaws of the mantrap and heard again the snap of his knee bones and his hoarse scream. When I opened my eyes in terror to escape this picture, I would catch a glimpse of a horseman from the carriage window and think in my fear that it was Ralph on his great black horse.

They called the new doctor from Chichester as soon as I was home, the clever young Dr MacAndrew whose reputation had survived my jest with old Mrs Hodgett. I barely saw him, I scarcely heard him ask some brief, pointed questions, and then I felt his arm around my shoulder and a glass to my lips, and the laudanum slid down my throat like an elixir of peace.

Dreams — thank God and laudanum — I had none. I slept like a child and no black shadow pursued me. I did not wake until the following day and then found Dr MacAndrew by my bedside. I did not smile or look at him. I spoke to him in a low voice, and said only, ‘Please let me sleep again.’

He said, ‘You’d best take my advice and face whatever it is that’s frightening you. You’ve had your fill of sleep.’

I looked at him then, and at my maid standing by the bed and at my mama at the foot. I wondered if I had said anything in my drugged sleep that would ruin me later, and found that I hardly cared. His eyes met mine with a look of compassion and interest, but not like those of a man who has just heard a hanging secret. I believed he knew nothing.

‘I expect you are right,’ I said. ‘But I know what is best for me. I beg you to give me that medicine again and let me sleep.’

His light blue-grey eyes looked into mine, gently appraising me.

‘Well,’ he said tolerantly, ‘perhaps you know your own business best. You may take this to sleep now, and if you sleep through till tomorrow morning I shall call on you then.’

I drank the draught in silence and made no reply to my mama or my maid. I waited with my eyes shut for the merciful oblivion. Just as my terror started returning and my nervous frantic senses believed they could feel Ralph riding closer and closer to Wideacre, to me, I could feel the deep warm glow of the medicine and the sweet peaceful sleep steal over me. I relaxed, and smiled at the wavering image of the doctor in childlike gratitude. He was not especially handsome, but there was something in his square face, his pale blue eyes and his sandy hair that made me feel safe. Even the sound of his question to Mama — ‘What do you think can have set off this nervous attack?’ — failed to frighten me as I slid into sleep.

By the time I awoke the question had been answered and I had no need to frame some lie about nerves. My mama believed she saw in me her own severe reaction to cats and I had been sitting — bless the animal — on a cushion where Celia’s spoiled Persian usually slept. The explanation was too persuasive to be resisted. Dr MacAndrew could look dubious but Mama and Lady Havering settled it between them and by the time I came downstairs on the third day I had no awkward questions. Harry, Mama and Celia, who was visiting for the day, were all quick to rush around and cosset me but no one thought to look beyond the explanation of the cat. The fateful letter from the gossipy friend of Tunbridge Wells had been forgotten by everyone but me.

Of course I could not forget it, and over the next few days it haunted me. I could remember every word of the description. The shady road in the overgrown wood, the brilliant ambush with the tree crashing down behind the wagons. The men coming slowly to their feet out of the bracken at the signal of the whistle — and most of all the leader’s big black horse and his two circling dogs.

I did not need to hear one word of the story again; it was in my ears as I slept every night, and it was my first thought on waking. As the days went by no detail faded but I grew more and more hopeful that the gang would be caught and the public hangman would finish the job with Ralph that I had botched.

An attack of that size would provoke a huge reaction. The magistrates would search until the leader was found. Great rewards would bribe the loyalty of his followers, lengthy questionings and secret tortures would break the will of those who were captured. It would not be long before the leader was brought to trial, sentenced and hanged. So the gruelling game of waiting started again as I scanned the weekly papers for the news.

Nothing. Once there was a paragraph to say that Mr Wooler had increased the reward and that inquiries were proceeding. Once there was the story that half-a-dozen poor men, suspected of being in the gang, had been transported and three others hanged. The preparations for the wedding day went on, and I remained outwardly calm, but my old fears of the dark, of the noise of horses’ hoofbeats, of the rattle of a chain or the clank of iron were back with me. I had a weapon against my night terrors thanks to that meticulous and careful young Dr MacAndrew. In a dark shelf, pushed well to the back near my bed, I had hidden a little bottle of laudanum and every night before I lay down to sleep, two or three pretty little drops slid down my throat and I lay in a golden haze of contentment.

Clever, keen, sandy-haired, sandy-eyelashed Dr MacAndrew gave me my first bottle — but my need quickly outstripped his meagre allowance. When I asked him for a second he made an anxious and disapproving face.

‘I cannot agree to it, Miss Lacey,’ he said in his soft accent. ‘It may be the fashion for young ladies like yourself to take laudanum every night, but you forget, the young ladies forget, that this is not a bedtime drink of milk, but a medicine, a medicine based on opium. We know it is strong; it may be, for some people, addictive. You would not dream of drinking a bottle of brandy a week, Miss Lacey, and yet you are prepared to drink a bottle of laudanum in the same time.

‘I gave it to you when you were overwrought, as a temporary measure to calm you. You are a strong-minded and upright young lady, Miss Lacey. Now your nerves are restored you must seek the solution to your anxieties and solve them — not escape them with laudanum.’

This was too uncomfortably perceptive of the young doctor and I closed the conversation. But his view of laudanum made no difference to me. It would take a stronger man than John MacAndrew to turn me from a course when my mind was set on it. In my life I had known only two such men and one they brought home on a stretcher with his horse limping behind, and the other I had left for dead in the dark. It was better that no one tried to cross or control me.

But Dr MacAndrew was not one to follow a polite shift in a conversation if he had something to say. He looked at me hard but his eyes were gentle.

‘Miss Lacey,’ he said. ‘I attended you in your illness and you may think me too young or too newly qualified to be an expert but I do beg you to trust in my direction.’