could move and plot and scheme and forever threaten my life and my future. Every waking moment from now on I would half expect to see him as I already did in every night’s dreams. Limping, or horribly mutilated, coming after me for revenge. The picture in my mind was so bright, so vivid, so inescapable, that it seemed to me Ralph was at that second heaving his legless body up the steps to the door of the Hall. I could control myself no longer.
‘I am ill, Harry. Call my maid,’ I said, and I dropped my head on the breakfast table in a swoon of terror.
My mourning now looked real enough and I smiled no more at my mirror. I could not eat my food for fear that Ralph had been in the kitchen with one of Meg’s gypsy brews to poison me. I dared not even walk as far as the rose garden in case he was waiting for me in the summerhouse, or at the gate to the wood. Even in the house I was on the precipice of a collapse every second of the day, but especially when the early winter darkness came and the curtains were drawn, and there were dark shadows on the stairs and in the hall where he could hide unseen, and wait for me to pass. I slept little at night and awoke with screams of terror. My mother called the local apothecary and then a London surgeon and they gave me draughts to make me sleep. But the deeper the sleep, the worse the dreams, and for three, nearly four, months of cold, hard, iron season I endured, like a captured wild animal, inescapable days and nights of terror.
But slowly, mercifully, it dawned on my panic-stricken imagination that nothing had happened. In my terror, in my anticipation of fear, I had missed that saving point: nothing had happened. No one knew that my father had been torn from his horse and clubbed like a dying rabbit. No one knew that the blood from Ralph’s sweet, hard thighs had poured into our dark earth in a trap baited with betrayal. Those two events had happened at the freezing of the year, and since then everything had iced up. All through the dark winter months everything, except my dashing brain and thudding heart, had been still.
The winter softened and one morning I woke, not to the song of the one solitary robin, but to a burble of birdsong and to the distant sound of the ice on the Fenny giving way to a rush of melt-water. I threw a thick shawl on over my dark woollen dress and walked in the garden. The pane of glass that had been between me and the land seemed to be dissolving like the ice in the chalk of the frozen downs. Everywhere I looked there were little green shoots, brave slight spikes pressing through the earth. And no Ralph. Thank God, no Ralph.
When I looked towards the wood where his home had been all I could see was the innocent haze of the first buds of leaves which made a halo of green around every black-branched tree. The wood was not blighted by his blood or by my treacherous death-kiss. Our love and his blood had been absorbed into the earth – the good neutral earth – as easily as the death of a rabbit or the spitting of a snake. The land had not hardened for ever into a season of revenge; it was growing moist and warm and full of the promise of spring like any other year. And whoever won the land, and whatever sins they crawled through to claim it for their own, the snowdrops would still flower in an icy carpet under the bare trees where the sap was secretly rising.
Whatever had happened had happened in the past. And it had happened in autumn when it is natural for things to die and blood to be spilled. Autumn is a time of challenge and killing; winter a time of rest and recovery, and spring means new plans, new movement and new life.
I walked faster, down to the end of the rose garden, with my old swinging stride. I went through the gate where the new lichen was growing, wet and smeary to the touch, into the wood and under the dripping trees without a second thought. I put one hand on the damp bark and felt the thudding heartbeat of my beloved Wideacre in the sweet urgency of the new season. The spring had come with the speed of a damp wind blowing, and the wet earth was warming to a new, a yellow, sun. I sniffed the wind like a pointing dog and smelled the promise of more rain, the scent of the growing earth, and even the tang of the salt sea from southerly over the downs. And I had a sudden real, glad delight in the fact that although Papa and Ralph might be dead, I had survived, and my body was stronger and more curved and lovelier than ever. I came home humming a tune and realized that for the first time in months I was sharply hungry for dinner.
Harry cantered up the drive and waved to me. I strolled through the rose garden and noticed the weeds growing through the gravel. I should speak to Riley. Harry dismounted and waited for me at the gate and I realized with an inner smile as I glanced at his strong, lithe body – broadened and stronger with his riding and maturity – that there was even a little flicker of desire somewhere deep inside me. I was alive, I was young, and I could once more see myself as lovely – the Wideacre goddess renewed by the spring, leaping up from the deaths of old pains and old sorrows.
So I smiled sweetly at my brother, and put my fingertips lightly on his arm and let him lead me into the hallway of our house.
It was a measure of my recovery that Harry raised the question of Ralph again, and I did not flinch at the mention of his name. We had stayed up late to finish reading a novel together, which Mama had declared too silly to cost her sleep. But I had begged Harry to read to the end. We were alone in Mama’s parlour in front of the dying embers of the log fire.
‘I suppose we need a new gamekeeper’s lad,’ Harry said tentatively, watching my reaction.
‘Good heavens, haven’t you found one yet!’ I exclaimed, naturally horrified. ‘Bellings can’t do it all, and if you don’t get someone young and fit the villagers will be all over the coverts. You won’t hope to hunt this autumn unless you stop them shooting foxes now. As for venison, you must get another keeper for the young deer, Harry, or there will be no sport and no meat.’
‘No hunting anyway,’ he reminded me. ‘We’ll still be in mourning at the start of the season. But I’ll get a young keeper. I miss Ralph rather.’ His eyes were bright with curiosity, and something deeper, some anxiety. ‘He was very able, very agreeable. He helped me with the estate.’ He paused. I understood in a flash what Harry wanted to know. ‘I quite liked him,’ he said, denying with an easy lie his infatuation with Ralph. ‘I think you did too?’
The incongruous picture of Ralph and me naked while Harry crawled towards us, his face in the dusty straw, laying his cheek against Ralph’s bare foot, flashed into my mind, but I still said nothing until I was certain what Harry was thinking.
‘He had a very strong, not to say forceful, personality,’ Harry continued, picking his words with care. I took my cue and raised my tear-filled eyes to his open and anxious young face.
‘Oh, Harry,’ I said, my voice breaking on a sob. ‘He made me do such dreadful things. I was so afraid of him. He said he would lie in wait for me and tell, oh, such dreadful lies about me if I didn’t obey him. He terrified me and if you hadn’t come in that one time, I don’t know what would have happened.’
‘I … saved you?’ asked Harry hopefully.
‘He would have dishonoured me and our family name,’ I said firmly. ‘Thank God you came in time, and since that day he was too afraid of you to pursue me any more.’
The truth of the scene was fading from Harry’s malleable mind to be replaced with a rosier picture of his heroic rescue of his virtuous sister.
‘My dearest sister,’ he said tenderly. ‘I have been so worried, but I scarcely liked to ask … He did not complete his dreadful act? I came in time?’
My cheeks flushed pink with maidenly embarrassment, but my sincerity and honesty gave me courage to speak.
‘I am a virgin, Harry,’ I said demurely. ‘You saved me. And the man who threatened me has gone for ever; exiled, no doubt, by the hand of God. My honour is yours.’
Darling Harry, such a growing, broadening man,
