I smiled.

John caught that smile as he stepped down from the carriage. The sunshine was bright but he shivered as if a cold wind had blown down the nape of his neck. He was looking well. The strained, desperate look had gone from his face and he had put on weight and was lithe and fit again. The hollows under his eyes had gone, and the muscle that used to twitch in his cheek was still. His ordeal had graven two hard lines either side of his unsmiling mouth and two deep frown lines above his eyebrows, but his face was serene, strong. He was dressed immaculately with his usual neatness, in black with the whitest of linen, and a thick black travelling coat. I met his blue eyes and we measured each other in a long hard stare. He might have the look of the man I had loved, but we were sworn enemies. I said no word of greeting but turned on my heel and walked back to the parlour.

I poured myself a cup of tea and my hands were steady. Unbidden, the parlourmaid came in with another cup and a plate, and behind her, as if he had taken tea with me every day for the past five months, came John my husband. He shut the parlour door with a click and I wondered why that little noise should give me such a shudder of dread. I was alone with my husband.

‘Tea?’ I asked courteously. ‘Some cakes? Or some fruit bread?’

‘Let us have some straight talking, if you please,’ he said, and his voice was even and clear. He was cured of his terror of me, and of his need to drink when my shadow fell on him. I had lost my old power over John and I rose to stand by the mantelpiece so that I could casually rest my arm along it, to hide the fact that my knees were shaking with anxiety.

John moved into the centre of the parlour and dominated the pretty room. His driving coat with the great capes seemed too bulky for the small space. His high black polished boots seemed to straddle the carpet. His hat on a chair filled the lady’s room with male power and male threat. I held on tight to the stone of the mantelpiece and kept my face impassive.

‘I have nothing to say to you,’ I said. My voice did not quaver. He would not know I was afraid. I guarded myself too well.

‘No, but I have some things to say to you,’ he said. I glanced towards the door. He would be able to catch me before I reached it. I thought about pulling the bell on the pretext of more hot water, but then I thought better of it. This was as good a time as any to face John. And he would have to be faced some time this day. Now I had him without Celia, without Harry, and tired from the journey. Also, with a warm flicker of relief, I felt my anger growing, and I knew that if he threatened me I would challenge him and beat him down. I was no longer the woman who could not move for grief and horror because children fled at her approach. I was a woman fighting for myself and my child, and my child’s inheritance and my own home. I had not desolated Wideacre, enclosed the fields and murdered the sweetest lads in the village, to collapse in a repentant heap because my husband looked hard at me with his pale blue eyes.

‘I know what you have done,’ he said. ‘Celia told me all she knew, and with the knowledge that I have, I could understand what you have done.’

‘What do you fancy I have done?’ I said, my tone icy.

‘You have had two incestuous bastards sired by your brother,’ said John, his voice as cold as mine. ‘One you passed off on Celia who presented it to Harry as her own. One you tried to fob off on me. Then you had me committed to a lunatic asylum — oh, yes, that is what it was, thank you, my dear — so you could rob me of my fortune to buy your son into the inheritance and to lock your two children in partnership on the land.’

My knuckles gleamed white as I gripped the mantelpiece. But I said not a word.

‘What I shall do is to untangle this thread of sin and deceit and set us all free of you,’ John said. ‘Some of your legal contracts and agreements will be breakable, and I shall break them,’ he said. ‘The children should be cleaned of the taint of you, and of this damnable land. Celia shall be freed of this morass of sin and complicity you have tricked her into. And she may save Harry from you.’

‘You are ready to hang then?’ I asked drily. ‘I promised you I would swear you had killed Mama. The noose would be round your neck the second you speak one word against me. You are tired of life then, John? You are ready for death?’

His eyes met mine without a shadow of dread and with a dawning coldness down my spine, along my shoulders, I realized I had lost that hold on him too.

‘I’ll take my chance,’ he said, and his eyes met mine with a strength that was greater than my own. ‘I’m prepared to stand trial to expose you, Beatrice. No court in the land could try me for manslaughter, or even murder, without hearing why your mama’s heart stood still on that night. Then you would be exposed to the world as an incestuous whore, as the mother of two bastards, and a thief. Are you ready for that, my pretty wife?’

‘You won’t get your money back,’ I said spitefully. ‘You’ve lost that for ever. It’s in Charles Lacey’s hands and if I know him it’s already half spent.’

‘No,’ he acknowledged. And he was not looking at me, but out of the window, towards the green line of the horizon. ‘No, but I can save the children from you … and Celia.’

‘A strange way to free them,’ I said harshly. ‘To free them with your death. I might be shamed, but Celia would have nowhere to live but here. Harry might be disgraced but he would still be Squire. We would all live on here without you. Are you ready for a death that changes nothing?’

‘It is not I who am ready for death, Beatrice,’ he said. He had turned back and was looking at me, hot with hatred, but with a sharp interest. His eyes were those of Dr MacAndrew again, the quickest-witted physician ever to come out of Edinburgh. ‘I see it on you,’ he said acutely. ‘You have lost yourself somewhere down this weary evil road that you have travelled. The life has gone out of you, Beatrice.’

He reached my side in two quick strides and took my chin in his hand. I suffered him to turn my face to the light and my green eyes were scornful, but I was biting the inside of my cheeks to hide my fear.

‘Yes, you are as lovely as ever,’ he said dismissively. ‘But you have lost a sparkle from your eyes, and there are lines around your mouth that were never there before. What is it, my dear? Have your dirty steps in filth bogged you down so deep you cannot get free? Has the land turned against you? Can you no longer magic the yields you need? Or is it that the people spit on the ground when you pass and curse your very name for the damage and the death that you have brought to Wideacre?’

I broke free of his grip and turned to the door. My hand was on the latch when he called my name.

‘Beatrice!’

I turned, as if I had hoped he might say something gentle to me. Or at least something that would give me a clue to hold him in my grip again.

‘Death is coming for you, and you are ready for it,’ he said quietly. ‘As I drove home with Celia I thought I should come home and kill you, to free us all from the horror that is you. But I will not need to make my hands stink with your blood. For Death is coming for you, and you know you are fit to die. Don’t you, my pretty Beatrice?’

I turned without a word and left the room. I walked with my head high, my steps long, my skirt shushing round me with every dancing stride. I walked like a lord on his land all the way down the corridor to my office, and then I shut the door behind me and leaned against the panels. At once my knees buckled and I slid down the door into a heap on the floor. I rested my face against the panels. The wood was cold and ungentle to the aching cheekbones where the skin felt too tight.

Death was coming for me, John had said so; he had seen it in my face. And I knew how Death was coming. He was coming on a great black horse with two black dogs, one running before, one following behind. He was coming on horseback, for he had no legs to creep along behind me. He would ride up to me, Death, and I would see his face before I died. Death was coming for me. The rich people, the gentry who feared for their lives and their property called him Death; the poor people who followed him called him the Culler. But I would look in his face and call him ‘Ralph’.

* * *

I sat with my back to the door, unmoving, until twilight darkened the room and I saw the first little star, low on the horizon with the thin moon beside it. Then I clasped both hands around the doorknob and hauled myself to my feet. I was bone-weary, but I did not dare miss dinner. I had to be there.

John had changed. He was free of me. He was free of his love and his dream of love for me that had driven him to drink so he could forget the bitter reality. He was free of his horror of me. He could touch my face with hands that did not tremble. He could turn my head to the light so that he could see with his cruel surgeon’s eyes the new tiny maze of lines in my skin. He had lost his love for me, his fear of me. To him now, I was, as Dr Rose had assured me, an ordinary mortal.

And John was confident with ordinary mortals. I was no longer the woman he loved above life itself. I was no longer the woman he feared because she seemed the embodiment of evil and death. Now I was an ordinary mortal with a body that would die, with a mind that could make mistakes.

From now until the day of my death John would be watching for that: for my lovely young body to walk towards death, and for my clever, obsessed mind to make mistakes. And I could do little to mislead him. He had loved me, and he had watched every shadow across my face in the days of our happiness. He knew me, as no other man, save one, had known me. And he had knowledge too. He had learned how to see the truth about people; he had dedicated his life and his wisdom to understanding what makes people as they are, the infections in their bodies, the illnesses in their hearts, the madness in their minds. To John now I was neither love-goddess nor devil; I was instead the most fascinating specimen he had ever studied at close quarters.

And also an enemy to be defeated.

It was not a role that I could face very easily.

I rang for Lucy and she exclaimed when she saw me.

‘I’ll ask for your dinner to be sent to your room. I’ll tell them you are unwell,’ she said, as she helped me up the stairs to brush my hair.

‘No,’ I said. I was so tired it was an effort even to talk. I could scarcely impose my will on my own maid. However could I manage Harry and Celia and John? ‘No,’ I said again. ‘I will go to dinner. But hurry, Lucy, or I will be late.’

They had not waited for me in the parlour but had gone in to the dining room. The footman opened the door for me as I rustled down the hall, my steps smooth again, my face pale and drawn, but a serene smile on my mouth. I stopped stock-still in the doorway and stared.

Celia was seated in my chair.

She sat where she should be, where she had a right to be.

In the chair of the Squire’s Lady at the foot of the great dining table where she could see the servants standing in readiness against the walls of the room, keep an eye on the blaze in the hearth, see that the plates of all her guests were tilled, and their glasses charged, and meet the eyes of her husband with a warm, loving smile.

Harry glanced up as I entered and his face was half apologetic. ‘I hope you don’t mind, Beatrice?’ he said to me in a low voice, as he rose to meet me at the door and conducted me to a seat opposite John, the seat that used to be Celia’s. ‘I understood from John that you would not be coming to dinner tonight and so Celia naturally took the foot of the table.’

I smiled neutrally and paused by the chair, looking at Celia, waiting for her to leap to her feet and to move to her place to make the chair of the Squire’s Lady free for me. She did not move. She simply smiled at me with her pansy-brown eyes wide and said, ‘I am sure you would rather sit opposite John, would you not, Beatrice? It is just like your courting days when your mama was alive.’

‘I would rather have Beatrice opposite me,’ John said to clinch the decision. ‘I like to have her where I can see her!’

They laughed at that, the fools. As if John had never drunk himself into a stupor at this very table. As if my place could be challenged with impunity. As if I should take a seat down the board and give way to Harry’s child-bride. I smiled, a sour smile, and sat where they all wished me to be. And I noted with an inward promise of vengeance the quick exchange of looks between the youngest footman and a new lad. They would be looking for work after next pay day.