Richard, sunny-tempered Richard, smiled his angelic smile at his papa and said, ‘I am sorry, sir. I dare say I should have worked harder. My cousin puts me to shame, I know. She has always been quick-witted.’
His words were a reprieve for me, for I had feared he would be offended by the comparison. Uncle John smiled at Richard’s generosity as he got in the coach and waved goodbye to us all and left for London.
But Richard’s sunny humour lasted only until the coach was out of sight. As soon as it had gone, he announced he was going to do some studying in the parlour. At once I turned back to go into the house with him.
‘Not with you,’ he said roughly. ‘You will chatter and distract me. Go and sit with your mama. You heard what Papa said, he wants me to work harder. I will never get on if you are always wanting to talk to me or for me to come out for a walk with you.’
‘Richard!’ I said amazed. ‘I was only coming to help you with your work.’
‘I don’t need your help,’ he said untruthfully. ? fine pickle I should be in if I depended on your understanding. Go and sit in the parlour with your mama, Julia. I am working hard to please my papa.’
I went without another word, but I thought him unjust. And I knew that it would take him twice as long without me to look up the words for him. I said nothing to Mama about that low-voiced exchange, but after I had finished some darning for her, I asked if I might go to the kitchen and make some of Richard’s favourite bon-bons as a reward for him for his sudden application to his studies. At dinner I had a little dish of creams for him, and then I had his thanks in one of his sunny smiles and a careless hug outside the door of my room at bedtime. I went to bed warmed by that smile and happy to be restored to his good graces. And I felt I had learned once again that a lady’s way is to return hard words with a smile, until everything is at peace again. It always works. Provided you can smile for long enough.
We heard nothing from John for three long days, but on Friday morning, looming out of a miserable unseasonal mist, his carriage came quietly up the drive. Mama and I dropped our sewing to the floor in the parlour and tumbled out down the garden path to greet him. Uncle John swung down from the carriage and caught my mama up to him for a great hug and a smacking kiss which could have been heard on the coast.
‘Celia!’ he said, and they beamed at each other as if nothing more needed saying.
Uncle John gave me a smile and a quick wink over my mama’s head. ‘And Miss Julia too!’ he said with pleasure. ‘But let’s get in! You two will freeze out here in this beastly weather. It has been foggy all morning. I stopped at Petersfield last night-simply could not see my way further forward! Otherwise I should have been with you yesterday!’
Mama ushered him into the parlour and rang the bell for more logs for the fire and hot coffee. Uncle John held his thin hands to the blaze and shivered a little.
‘I thought I was home for summer!’ he complained. ‘This is as damp as an Indian monsoon.’
‘Julia, go and fetch your uncle’s quilted jacket,’ Mama asked me. ‘And perhaps a glass of brandy, John?’
I ran to his bedroom at the top of the house for his jacket, then to the kitchen to tell Stride about the brandy and when I came back, Mama had him settled in a chair drawn up to the blaze and the colour was back in his cheeks.
‘Where’s Richard?’ he asked as Mama poured coffee and Stride heaped more logs on the fire.
‘At his lessons,’ Mama said. ‘He has been studying like a scholarship boy ever since you left! Do remember to praise him, John. He took your reproof to heart.’
‘Shall I go and fetch him?’ I asked. ‘Sometimes he stays late, but I know he would want to come home if he knew Uncle John was back.’
‘Yes,’ said John. ‘Do! For I have some rough drawings for the rebuilding of the hall with me and I can hardly wait to show them to you all. And that’s not all!’ he said, turning to my mama. ‘We have an estate manager! I dropped him off at the village before coming here. You may meet him as you walk through, Julia. His name is Mr Megson, Ralph Megson.’
There was a noise in my head like a crystal glass splitting, and then I heard a sweet high humming, which seemed to come from the very trees of Wideacre Park as they leaned towards the house. The mist seemed to be singing to me, the hills hidden in the greyness seemed to be calling. I shook my head to clear my ears, but I could still hear the sound. A sweet high singing like a thousand leaves budding.
‘That’s very quick!’ said my mama, impressed. ‘However have you managed so well?’
‘Skill and efficiency,’ Uncle John said promptly; and Mama laughed. ‘Pure luck, actually,’ he confessed. ‘I had placed an advertisement and I had two replies, but the bad reputation of Wideacre is still very much alive, I am afraid, and no suitable agent seemed likely to appear. I had just decided on the one who seemed the least likely to cause difficulties when a message was sent up to my room that another man had come for the job.
‘In he came,’ Uncle John said, smiling, ‘and proceeded to interview me as to my plans for Wideacre. When I had passed what seemed to be a series of tests by assuring him that I was not looking for a swift sale and profit and that, on the contrary, I was interested in farming it as a model estate with a profit-sharing scheme, he was gracious enough to tell me he would take the post. When I said that I was not sure if he was the man for me, he gave a little chuckle and said, “Dr MacAndrew, I am the only man for you.’”
‘How odd!’ said Mama, diverted. ‘Whatever did he mean?’
‘It emerged that he is of old Acre stock, though he left the village when he was a lad,’ John explained. ‘He seems to think he has friends in Acre still and he claims – I must say I believe him – that he can talk the village round to working for the Laceys again. But he prides himself on being a man of some principles, and that was why I suffered the inquisition. He would not get them back to work if there were any chance of us becoming absentee landlords, or selling the estate to a profiteer.’
Mama nodded, but she hesitated. ‘When did he leave?’ she asked diffidently.
Uncle John heard the uneasiness in her voice and smiled. ‘I asked him that, my dear,’ he said gently. ‘He is about our age, and he left when he was but a lad. He was gone before the old squire was killed in his riding accident. He was not working in Acre when Beatrice was running the estate. He was far away when the riot took place.
‘Besides,’ he added, ‘he’s certainly a radical, but not a hell-raiser by any means. He has strong ideas against property and against landlords, but they are nothing more than sensible people have been thinking for some time. He’s not a firebrand. He’s travelled. He’s a man of experience. I get the feeling he is anxious to come home to his roots and live in a prosperous village. We have much in common.’
‘Where will he live?’ I asked, visualizing Acre in my mind.
‘Is there a family called the Tyackes?’ John asked.
‘Yes!’ I replied.
‘He asked most particularly after their cottage,’ Uncle John said. ‘I think, when he was a lad, it may have been the best cottage in the village, and he has had his heart on it all these years. Julia, do you know them? Would they move?’
I nodded. ‘There’s only Ted Tyacke and his mother now,’ I said. ‘The cottage is too big for them. Ted’s father was hurt in an accident, felling trees, and he died last year. Since then they’ve been struggling. If we could offer them a smaller property-perhaps that little cottage by the church which is empty – and a little present of some money, they’d be glad enough to go, I think.’
Uncle John nodded, and he looked at me, somehow measuring me. ‘Whose cottage is it by the church?’ he asked as if he were testing Richard in Greek grammar.
‘It was the Lewes family’s,’ I said. ‘But a year ago they went back to Petworth where his brother has a shop.’
‘All the Acre history,’ John said to Mama, raising his eyebrows.
‘Julia knows the village better tha
n all of us,’ she confirmed.
‘Well, if you see Mr Megson, you may tell him what you have told me about the Tyackes,’ John said. ‘And if he can arrange it to everyone’s satisfaction, he may have their cottage.’
‘May I go now, Mama?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But wear your cloak with the hood up against the mist, my dear. Who would believe we were in spring with this weather!’
I fetched my hat and my winter coat and went outside into the greyness. It had seemed dark and forbidding from the parlour window, but to walk in the mist was a strange pleasure. I could not hear my footsteps, they were so muffled by the fog. The beech leaves which had been so rustling and noisy only yesterday were now damp and silent. In the distance I could just hear the Fenny as it slithered over grey stones, but the loudest sound in the sheltered overhung lane was the steady drip, drip, drip as the beech trees collected mist on their clinging fresh leaves and distilled it into drops which fell with cold explosions on the hood of my cloak. I could not see the old fields on either side of the track. I could only sense the grey space of them and see the mist rolling off their damp sides to coil through the roots of the hawthorn hedge. I could not see the outline of the downs at all. There was not even a trace of the darker forehead of the land against the sky. It was all a universal greyness like a pale blanket held up before my eyes. There was nothing in the whole world but me, and the dripping trees, and the paler sticky streak of the chalk lane leading me towards Acre, taking me, so confidently and surely, to where I wanted to go on my homeland.
The walk was like a little excursion into dreamland, into the loneliness which everyone dreads. A world in which you are the only living thing and a cry would not be heard. But it was not a fearful walk for me. I am never afraid alone on Wideacre. However much of a silly girl I sometimes seem to my mama, however much I irritate Richard, when I am alone on Wideacre I am sure-footed.
It is not a place for words, and I am so clumsy with words. It is a place for sensing whether or not the land is easy. And self-seeded and running wild though Wideacre is, it is an easy land for the Laceys. When I am alone on Wideacre, I am a Lacey through and through.
I was almost sorry when the mist thinned, broken up by the little shanties at the start of the village. Then a shape came at me out of the fog and made me gasp with fright.
‘’Sme,’ said Clary Dench. Her speech was muffled by a great square of oatmeal cake which she was cramming into her mouth. ‘Hello, Julia.’ Her eyes were shining with excitement over her fist. ‘’Ve you come to see him?’ she demanded. ‘He’s gone to Midhurst to buy some things at the market.’
‘See who?’ I asked, but I had already guessed the answer.
‘Ralph,’ she said. ‘Ralph’s back, and he brought a great box of food with him, but he says we can’t eat it all at once or we’ll be sick. He gave everyone oatmeal cakes, and then he went to Midhurst to buy milk and bacon and cheese, and ale, and all sorts. We’re going to have a party when the food is ready. My pa says it’s all going to be different now Ralph’s back.’
‘He came home with Uncle John,’ I volunteered. ‘He’s going to be the Wideacre estate manager. But who is he, Clary? Has he been gone long?’
Clary’s eyes were alight with mischief. ‘Don’t you know who he is? Nor what he did?’ she demanded. ‘Oh! Oh!’ and she gave a little wriggle of pure delight. ‘Julia! There’s no use looking at me like that, I can’t tell you. You’ll have to ask him yourself.’
‘Was it something in the old days?’ I asked intuitively. ‘Did he know Beatrice and Harry? Did he work here before?’
Clary snorted on a laugh and crammed the last morsel of oatcake in. ‘Can’t tell you,’ she said.
I curbed my impatience as Clary tucked her cold hand into my pocket and fell into pace beside me. ‘Where has he been all this time?’ I asked. ‘Uncle John said he was an Acre man.’
‘He’s been a smuggler,’ she said in an awed undertone. ‘And he’s led a bread riot. He lived with the gypsies for years, and he can do magic and tell fortunes. He used to send money to the village when times started getting hard. And it was him…’ she broke off and bit her lip. ‘I can’t tell you any more,’ she said again. ‘You’ll have to ask him yourself.’
‘I will, then,’ I said. ‘I am sick to death of all these mysteries.’
We had reached the vicarage gate and Clary stood on the bottom rung as I swung it open.
‘Wait for me,’ I invited. ‘And you can walk home with me and Richard.’
‘Nay,’ she said with the slow drawl which is the voice of Acre insolence. ‘Richard has no time for a village girl. I’ll see you when you next come to Acre.’
I nodded. I could not defend Richard against a charge of arrogance. I had tried to make him friends with the Acre village children when we had all been young together. But Richard had prickled up and become lordly; and they had become surly and rude, and then riotous and cheeky. It was odd to me that Richard’s manners – so flawless in my grandmama’s drawing-room, and so popular even in the kitchen of the Dower House, should desert him so utterly when he was faced with Clary or Ted or any of the Acre children. I think he did not care enough for them to try to charm them. All he expected from them was a minimum of civility, and all he offered them was one of his calculating looks as if he were wondering what they might do for him.
‘Anyway,’ Clary said conclusively, ‘I want to help get Ralph Megson’s party ready.’
She nodded towards the church and I saw the porch door open and men coming out carrying the trestle-table which is stored there. Then I saw, for the first time ever, smoking chimneys in Acre. The women had lit the fires and were getting ready to cook food and boil water; and for once there was food for the pot and fuel for the fire.
I lingered and Clary grinned at me. ‘Go on,’ she said, and gave me a push towards the chilly gentility of the vicar’s house. ‘You’re gentry! Go away!’
I made a face at her to express my disappointment at missing the bustle of preparation, and to register my protest at being called gentry. Then I went up the path to the vicar’s front door.
It opened at my knock and the housekeeper let me in. Richard was still at his studies and I waited in the parlour and drank coffee and ate sweet biscuits until he should be ready. It seemed so odd: to be here in the warm with a little fire in the grate and some arrowroot biscuits on the table when only yards from the garden gate there were families who had been hungry for years. I thought I understood why Dr Pearce’s hair was so very white and why he seldom smiled. Every death in the village he noted in the parish register. Every little child’s coffin was lowered into the open grave at his feet. And there were more mothers with naked grief in their faces than there were answers in his theology.
In the Dower House we were at a small remove from Acre; but here in the heart of the village the cruelty of the Laceys – the cruelty of a nation divided into the wearily, and the weak – was inescapable.
The parlour door opened and Richard came in, tightening a strap around his books. ‘Julia!’ he said, pleased. ‘I didn’t expect to see you here.’
‘I thought I’d walk to meet you,’ I said. ‘Uncle John has come home, and I knew you would want to know. He’s brought some drawings for Wideacre Hall with him, and a new manager for the estate!’
‘Did you see the man?’ Richard asked. ‘What’s he like?’
‘He didn’t come to the house; Uncle John dropped him off in Acre,’ I said. ‘He lived here some years ago. I met Clary Dench on my way in, and she says they’re all set to have a party to welcome him home. He has gone to Midhurst to buy some food, and he has given oatcakes to all the young people. Everyone seems to like him.’
‘I should think they would if he’s handing out free food,’ said Richard disdainfully. ‘That’s not the way to manage Acre! I hope my papa has not chosen the wrong man for the work.’
‘We may see him,’ I said. ‘Clary said he went into Midhurst as soo
n as he arrived. He may be back by now.’
Richard nodded and held open the gate for me. We turned out on to Acre’s only street, the chalk-mud lane I had tracked through the fog this morning, keeping our eyes open for signs of the stranger.
We need not have been alert. You could tell a difference had come over Acre by one glance down the little street. It had been a deserted lane flanked with blank-windowed hovels, but now it was a village alive with bustle and excitement. I thought of the kiss of the prince in the fairytale of Sleeping Beauty and decided Ralph Megson must be a magician that Acre should come alive again at his touch.
They had set up the trestle-table outside Mrs Merry’s cottage and the carter’s wagon was beside it. He had a horse between the shafts again, and his swarthy face was set in hard lines to restrain a grin of delight. Men and women were gathered around, unloading and laying the table. It was the first time in years that Acre had worked for a common aim, and I suddenly saw the familiar individuals anew: as a skilled working unit. It was the first time I had ever heard laughter in Acre other than the bitter ring of savage humour at another misfortune.
Cottage doors were banging as people ran into their homes to bring out a pair of knives or a wooden platter. A travelling trunk, which I guessed belonged to Ralph Megson, had been tossed down in Mrs Merry’s unplanted vegetable patch and gaped open, a hessian bag of tea and one of sugar, a great round cheese and a massive haunch of ham on the top. It was an open invitation to thievery, but I somehow knew that Acre was a village of thieves no more. Mrs Merry’s cottage chimney blew a plume of smoke at the sky like a flying flag to say, ‘Ralph Megson is come home’ to the billowing roof of clouds which had watched over Acre’s ruin. And amid it all, sending children scurrying for spring flowers and buds to decorate the table, hammering the carter on the back, hugging Mrs Merry and – I gaped – actually snatching up sad-faced Mrs Green for a great smacking kiss, amid it all was the new estate manager like a dark god dropped out of a stormy sky to set Acre to rights.
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