‘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 than 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