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 soon 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.
He was a man of about forty years of age, his hair black, but greying at the temples, cropped short with just a little plait at the back like sailors wear. He looked like a sailor – no, truly, he looked like a pirate. His skin was as brown as a gypsy’s, and the pale lines around his eyes suggested he had been watching in bright sunlight for many years.
His clothes were plain but well made in brown homespun; and his linen was as fine as a gentleman’s, with a very plain low cravat at his throat. He stood on the cart, legs planted firmly astride, and he was like a maypole with
