‘When times improve,’ Dr Pearce repeated. He got to his feet.
Mama looked up at him. Her face was stony, but her eyes were filled with tears. ‘When times improve,’ she said.
He took her hand and bowed over it as though she were a great lady receiving a courtier. ‘I’ll go back, then,’ he said. ‘The mood in the village is going to be very ugly. But I’ll do what I can.’
‘Will they listen to you?’ Mama asked.
Dr Pearce pulled his gloves on, and for the first time that day he smiled his sweet helpless smile. ‘I doubt it,’ he said wryly. ‘They have never done so before. But I will do what I can.’
He was right in thinking there was little he could do. The quicker parents had hidden their children as soon as the carriage had come into the village. In the end only six children were taken, taken away to work in the mills in the north. The roundsman said that they would serve a proper apprenticeship and be able to send home good wages. They would have an education and a religious upbringing. They would probably be home in a few years, a credit to their parents and to their employers. Acre heard that out in silence, and let the children go.
My grandmother took us to Chichester Cathedral in her carriage every Sunday for a month. Mama did not want to go to Acre church. But then Dr Pearce wrote her a note to say that there was no cause for concern in Acre, we could come and go quite safely. It was as it had been before.
Only I noticed that it was not as it had been before.
The children who sometimes used to come and peep through our front gate came no more. The girls who would bob a curtsy to Mama as we went down the aisle from church no longer looked at her or grinned impertinently at me. The whole village became as quiet as if every child had been stolen away by some malevolent Pied Piper. And every child learned to run like the wind up to the common and hide if they saw a strange coach come down the lane.
There were only six children lost, but it was not as it had been before.
It stayed hot all that summer. Hot, and quiet. Mama was ill with headaches and weariness; she trusted us to go no further than the common and the Wideacre estate and let us roam. Not for the first time I asked her where the money had gone, and why the hall had been burned, and why she – who was all powerful in my little world – could do nothing in the wider world of Acre and Chichester. And not for the first time her face took on that frozen look which both Richard and I had learned to dread, and she said softly, ‘Not now, darling. I will explain it all to you when you are old enough to understand it. But I will not tell you now.’
And with that Richard and I were content. We had only the casual curiosity of children. Having seen the hall in ruins and the land idle all our lives, we could hardly imagine a time when it had been whole any more than we could imagine a time when we were not there. Left to ourselves for that hot summer, we walked, and lazed, and dreamed, and played, and talked.
‘I wish I were a Lacey,’ Richard said to me, as we lay sprawled in the bracken of the common, looking up at the blue sky rippled with white clouds.
‘Why?’ I asked, as idle as he. I had a grass stalk between my thumbs and I was blowing and blowing, producing the most painful shrieks from it.
‘To be a Lacey of Wideacre,’ he said. ‘To be known as the owner of Wideacre. To have been landowners for so many years that no one could ever challenge you…’
I dropped my grass stalk and rolled over beside him, my head butting companionably against his skinny chest. ‘When we are married, you can take my name,’ I offered. ‘Then you’ll be a Lacey, if you like.’
‘Yes,’ he said, pleased. ‘And we can rebuild the hall and make it all just as it was. And I shall be the squire as my mama wanted me to be.’
I nodded. ‘Let’s go to the hall on our way home,’ I said.
I pulled Richard to his feet and we went in single file down the narrow sandy path that leads to the back of Wideacre woods from the common. There were gaps all around the smooth perimeter of the park wall, and rabbits, deer and foxes and the two of us could pass freely from common land to parkland, as if there were no ownership of land or game at all.
The poachers from Acre could go where they wished. Bellings, the man who used to be gamekeeper, was as bad as any of them. But they avoided the ruined hall. It was a place still owned exclusively by the Laceys. I went there with Richard, but apart from us the roofless half-walls echoed only to the sound of the Lacey ghosts.
‘Let’s be Saracens,’ said Richard with the abruptness of a child, and we both broke stick swords from the hazel bushes and held them before us. Richard made a quick gesture and we dropped to our bellies in a well-practised dive as we sighted the house. Wriggling like worms we came through the overgrown kitchen garden – meadowsweet and gypsy’s lace as tall as a jungle and brambles everywhere – and then Richard gave the order to charge and we thundered around the back of the stable block and tumbled into the yard with a triumphant shout.
The grass was thick between the cobbles, the pump rusted with its handle up, the water stagnant in the trough beneath the spout.
‘Lacey squires,’ Richard said, changing the game and offering me his arm with a courtly bow. I swept him a curtsy, holding my mud-stained muslin dress wide, and came up with a simper to take his arm. We processed, heads high, around to the front of the house, play-acting the people we should have been.
‘Damned good run with that fox!’ Richard said.
‘Damned good,’ I echoed, as daring as he.
And then we faced the house and ceased the play to look up at it. The house stared blankly at us, its honey-yellow sandstone colour streaked and black with the smoke of that long-ago fire, a buddleia plant, like a plume on a hat, growing from the crumbling wall near the top of the house. When the wooden floors and beams were burned, they crashed down, and the east wall, over the rose garden, collapsed. The facade of the house was still holding, but people came in secret and quarried away at it for the stone. It stared like a sightless giant over the nettles and rose-bay willow-herb in the rose garden and over the paddock, all dry and self-seeded. The great front door was gone, either burned out or stolen for the wood. The terrace, where Mama had taught me to walk, was chipped; and the cracks between the stones sprouted groundsel and dandelions.
That was our legacy. The ruin, a ledgerful of debts and a handful of fields which we could neither rent nor farm. The Wideacre woods were still ours, but Uncle John would not sell the timber yet. We still owned a few farms. But the tenants were dilatory with the rent and Mama could not force them to pay. All we owned, all that we were certain of, was the smoke-smudged ruin and the ground beneath our feet where we stood in the weed-strewn garden.
And it gave me such joy!
From babyhood, I think, I loved this place. Whatever else might happen in my life, I knew I must wake every morning to see that high forehead of the downs and to smell the heather and the bracken on the common. When my feet were on Wideacre earth, I knew who I was. When my face was turned to that sweet salt-stained wind from the south, I feared nothing. And when I put my hand to one of our great grey-barked beech trees or put my cheek to the turf, I could feel the pulse of Wideacre, feel the great secret heart of the land beating in time with mine.
Then I looked at the sun dipping down towards the common and realized we were late for dinner again. We trotted side by side down the drive at the steady pace we had learned almost in infancy. Richard might be skinny as a poor boy and I might be tall ‘and narrer as a broom handle’ as Mrs Gough would say disapprovingly, but we could run like poachers’ dogs; and we loped for home without needing to stop once to catch our breaths. With a wary eye on the parlour window, we ran around to the back of the house to the garden and tumbled in the back door to find the kitchen scorching from the heat of the oven and Mrs Gough hot and cross.