Ralph drooping like a broken doll over the sharp jaws of the mantrap and heard again the snap of his knee bones and his hoarse scream. When I opened my eyes in terror to escape this picture, I would catch a glimpse of a horseman from the carriage window and think in my fear that it was Ralph on his great black horse.
They called the new doctor from Chichester as soon as I was home, the clever young Dr MacAndrew whose reputation had survived my jest with old Mrs Hodgett. I barely saw him, I scarcely heard him ask some brief, pointed questions, and then I felt his arm around my shoulder and a glass to my lips, and the laudanum slid down my throat like an elixir of peace.
Dreams – thank God and laudanum – I had none. I slept like a child and no black shadow pursued me. I did not wake until the following day and then found Dr MacAndrew by my bedside. I did not smile or look at him. I spoke to him in a low voice, and said only, ‘Please let me sleep again.’
He said, ‘You’d best take my advice and face whatever it is that’s frightening you. You’ve had your fill of sleep.’
I looked at him then, and at my maid standing by the bed and at my mama at the foot. I wondered if I had said anything in my drugged sleep that would ruin me later, and found that I hardly cared. His eyes met mine with a look of compassion and interest, but not like those of a man who has just heard a hanging secret. I believed he knew nothing.
‘I expect you are right,’ I said. ‘But I know what is best for me. I beg you to give me that medicine again and let me sleep.’
His light blue-grey eyes looked into mine, gently appraising me.
‘Well,’ he said tolerantly, ‘perhaps you know your own business best. You may take this to sleep now, and if you sleep through till tomorrow morning I shall call on you then.’
I drank the draught in silence and made no reply to my mama or my maid. I waited with my eyes shut for the merciful oblivion. Just as my terror started returning and my nervous frantic senses believed they could feel Ralph riding closer and closer to Wideacre, to me, I could feel the deep warm glow of the medicine and the sweet peaceful sleep steal over me. I relaxed, and smiled at the wavering image of the doctor in childlike gratitude. He was not especially handsome, but there was something in his square face, his pale blue eyes and his sandy hair that made me feel safe. Even the sound of his question to Mama – ‘What do you think can have set off this nervous attack?’ – failed to frighten me as I slid into sleep.
By the time I awoke the question had been answered and I had no need to frame some lie about nerves. My mama believed she saw in me her own severe reaction to cats and I had been sitting – bless the animal – on a cushion where Celia’s spoiled Persian usually slept. The explanation was too persuasive to be resisted. Dr MacAndrew could look dubious but Mama and Lady Havering settled it between them and by the time I came downstairs on the third day I had no awkward questions. Harry, Mama and Celia, who was visiting for the day, were all quick to rush around and cosset me but no one thought to look beyond the explanation of the cat. The fateful letter from the gossipy friend of Tunbridge Wells had been forgotten by everyone but me.
Of course I could not forget it, and over the next few days it haunted me. I could remember every word of the description. The shady road in the overgrown wood, the brilliant ambush with the tree crashing down behind the wagons. The men coming slowly to their feet out of the bracken at the signal of the whistle – and most of all the leader’s big black horse and his two circling dogs.
I did not need to hear one word of the story again; it was in my ears as I slept every night, and it was my first thought on waking. As the days went by no detail faded but I grew more and more hopeful that the gang would be caught and the public hangman would finish the job with Ralph that I had botched.
An attack of that size would provoke a huge reaction. The magistrates would search until the leader was found. Great rewards would bribe the loyalty of his followers, lengthy questionings and secret tortures would break the will of those who were captured. It would not be long before the leader was brought to trial, sentenced and hanged. So the gruelling game of waiting started again as I scanned the weekly papers for the news.
Nothing. Once there was a paragraph to say that Mr Wooler had increased the reward and that inquiries were proceeding. Once there was the story that half-a-dozen poor men, suspected of being in the gang, had been transported and three others hanged. The preparations for the wedding day went on, and I remained outwardly calm, but my old fears of the dark, of the noise of horses’ hoofbeats, of the rattle of a chain or the clank of iron were back with me. I had a weapon against my night terrors thanks to that meticulous and careful young Dr MacAndrew. In a dark shelf, pushed well to the back near my bed, I had hidden a little bottle of laudanum and every night before I lay down to sleep, two or three pretty little drops slid down my throat and I lay in a golden haze of contentment.
Clever, keen, sandy-haired, sandy-eyelashed Dr MacAndrew gave me my first bottle – but my need quickly outstripped his meagre allowance. When I asked him for a second he made an anxious and disapproving face.
‘I cannot agree to it, Miss Lacey,’ he said in his soft accent. ‘It may be the fashion for young ladies like yourself to take laudanum every night, but you forget, the young ladies forget, that this is not a bedtime drink of milk, but a medicine, a medicine based on opium. We know it is strong; it may be, for some people, addictive. You would not dream of drinking a bottle of brandy a week, Miss Lacey, and yet you are prepared to drink a bottle of laudanum in the same time.
‘I gave it to you when you were overwrought, as a temporary measure to calm you. You are a strong-minded and upright young lady, Miss Lacey. Now your nerves are restored you must seek the solution to your anxieties and solve them – not escape them with laudanum.’
This was too uncomfortably perceptive of the young doctor and I closed the conversation. But his view of laudanum made no difference to me. It would take a stronger man than John MacAndrew to turn me from a course when my mind was set on it. In my life I had known only two such men and one they brought home on a stretcher with his horse limping behind, and the other I had left for dead in the dark. It was better that no one tried to cross or control me.
But Dr MacAndrew was not one to follow a polite shift in a conversation if he had something to say. He looked at me hard but his eyes were gentle.
‘Miss Lacey,’ he said. ‘I attended you in your illness and you may think me too young or too newly qualified to be an expert but I do beg you to trust in my direction.’
I shot him a hard look. His pale northern complexion was flushed, even his ears were pink with embarrassment but his pale blue, honest eyes were steady.
‘You are suffering under some anxiety,’ he said steadily. ‘Something you have imagined, or something real. I urge you to face it and overcome it. Whatever is threatening you, you have a loving family and, I am sure, many friends. You need not be afraid alone. Tell me if I am wrong, and rebuke me if I am impertinent, but I believe I am right in both diagnosis and cure. I think you are afraid of something and you will never escape this fear until you face it.’
Although the day was warm and the sun streamed into the parlour I shivered and drew my shawl around my shoulders. To face the fear would be to face the picture of Ralph sitting on his great black horse. To face the fear would be to imagine the changes in his expression from the smiling sensual confident face of my young, upstart lover, to the twisted grimace of a beggar, an outcast, a cripple unfit for any work. My imagination shied away from the idea, as it always would.
‘You are mistaken,’ I said, my voice low and my slanty eyelids down so he could not see my eyes dark with fear. ‘I thank you for your kindness but I fear nothing. I am not yet fully out
