In real life there was my mama. Her face was heart-shaped, pale like a cream rose, her eyes pansy-brown. Her hair was fair when she was young but went grey – long ageing streaks of dullness among the gold, as if her sorrow and her worry had laid fingers on her smooth head. She was widowed when I was only two years old, so I cannot remember her wearing any colour other than purple or sage or black, I cannot remember the hall as anything but a ruin. When we were little children, she would revile the dull colours and swear she would marry a great merchant for his stocks of pink shot silk. But as we grew and no merchant arrived, no geese laid golden eggs and no trees grew diamonds, she laughed no more about her old dark gowns, shiny at the seams and worn at the hems.
And there was Richard. My cousin Richard. My dearest friend, my little tyrant, my best ally, my worst enemy, my fellow conspirator, my betrayer, my playmate, my rival, my betrothed. I cannot remember a time before I loved him. I cannot remember a time before I loved Wideacre. He was as much a part of me, of my childhood, as the downland and common land, as the tall trees of Wideacre woods. I never made a choice about loving him, I never made a choice about loving the land. I loved land and boy because they were at the very heart of me. I could not imagine myself without my love for Richard. I could not imagine myself with any other home than Wideacre, with any other name than Lacey.
I was blessed in my loves. For Richard, my cousin, was the sweetest of boys, as dear to me as a brother, one of those special children who draw in love as easily as green grass growing. People would turn to smile at him in the streets of Chichester, smile at his light-footed stride, his mop of black curls, his startlingly bright blue eyes, and the radiance of his smile. And anyone who heard him sing would have loved him for that alone. He had one of those innocent boyish voices which soar and soar higher than you can imagine anyone can sing, and the clear purity of each note could make me shiver like a breeze sighing out of the sky from heaven itself. I loved so much to hear him sing that I would volunteer for hours of pianoforte practice and for the discomfort of constantly learning new pieces so that I could play while he sang.
He loved duets, but neither threats nor blandishments could make me hold a tune. ‘Listen, Julia! Listen!’ he would cry at me, singing a note as pure as spring water, but I could not copy it. Instead I would strum the accompaniment as well as I was able, and sometimes in the evening Mama would hum the lower part while Richard’s voice soared and filled the whole of the tiny parlour and drifted out of the half-open window to rival the birdsong in the twilit woods.
And then, when Richard was singing and the house was still, I could feel them. The ghosts who were always around us, as palpable as the evening mist filtering through the trees from the River Fenny. They were always near, though only I could feel them, and only at certain times. But I knew they were always near, those two – Richard’s mama, Beatrice, and my papa, the squire, who were partners in the flowering and destruction of the Laceys in the short years when they made and wrecked Wideacre.
And when Richard was singing and my hands were stumbling but picking out the tune and Mama dropped her sewing unnoticed in her lap to listen to that high sweet tone, I knew that they were waiting. Waiting almost like the three of us. For something to happen.
For something to happen on Wideacre again.
I was older by a year; but Richard was always bigger than me. I was the daughter of the squire and the only surviving Lacey; but Richard was a boy and the natural master. We were raised as country children, but we were not allowed into the village. We were isolated in threadbare gentility, hidden in the overgrown woods of the Wideacre parkland like a pair of enchanted children in a fairytale, waiting for the magic to set us free.
Richard was the leader. It was he who ordered the games and devised the rules; it was I who offended against them. Then Richard would be angry with me and set himself up as judge, jury and executioner, and I would go white-faced and tearful to my mama and complain that Richard had been mean to me, gaining us both a reliably even-handed punishment. We were often in trouble with my mama, for we were a bad team of petty sinners. Richard was often naughty – and I could not resist confession.
I once earned us a scolding from Mama, who had spotted my stained pinafore and taxed me with stealing bottled fruit from the larder. Richard would have brazened it out, blue eyes persuasively wide, but I confessed at once, not only to the theft of the bottle of fruit, but also to stealing a pot of jam days before, which had not even been missed.
Richard said nothing as we left Mama’s parlour, our eyes on the carpet, uncomfortably guilty. Richard said nothing all day. But later that afternoon we were playing by the river and he was paddling in midstream when he suddenly said, ‘Hush!’ and urgently beckoned me in beside him. He said there was a kingfisher’s nest, but when I tucked my skirts up and paddled in alongside him, I could not see it.
‘There!’ he said, pointing to the bank. ‘There!’ But I could see nothing. As I turned, he took both my hands in a hard grip and his face changed from smiles to his darkest scowl. He pulled me closer to him and held me tight so I could not escape and hissed, ‘There are water-snakes in this river, Julia, and they are sliding out of their holes to come for you.’
He needed to do no more. The ripples in the river were at once the bow waves from the broad heads of brown water-snakes. The touch of a piece of weed against my ankle was its wet body coiling around my bare foot. The splash of a piece of driftwood in the flow was a venomous dark-eyed snake slithering in the river towards me. Not until I was screaming with terror, my cheeks wet with tears and my wrists red from trying to pull away, would the little tyrant let me go, so that I could scramble for the bank and fling myself out of the water in a frenzy of fear.
And then, as if my tears were a salve for his rage, he forgave me. He took my handkerchief out of my pocket and dried my eyes. He put his arm around me and talked to me in a tender voice, and petted me, and called me sweet little names. And finally, irresistibly, he sang for me my favourite folk-songs about shepherds and farming and the land and crops growing ripely and easily, and I forgot to cry, I forgot my tears, I forgot my terror. I even forgot that Richard had been bullying me at all. I nuzzled my head into his neck and let him stroke my hair with his muddy hand, and I sat on his lap and listened to all the songs he could remember until he was tired of singing.
When we splashed home in the golden sunlight of the summer evening and Mama exclaimed at my dress, my pinafore, my hair all wet and muddy, I told her that I had fallen in the river and bore her reproaches without one murmur. For that I had my reward. Richard came to my bedroom later in the night when Mama was sitting downstairs trying to work by the light of only two candles. He came with his hands full of sweet things begged or stolen from Mrs Gough, the cook. And he sat beside me on my bed and gave me the best, the very best, of his haul.
‘I love you when you are good, Julia,’ he said, holding a cherry to my lips so I turned up my face like a questing lap-dog.
‘No,’ I said sadly, as I spat out the cherry stone into his warm little palm. ‘You love me when I am bad. For lying to Mama is not good, but if I had told her about you and the water-snakes, she would have had you whipped.’
And Richard laughed carelessly, seeming much older than me, not a year younger.
‘Shhh!’ I said suddenly. I had heard a floorboard in the uncarpeted parlour creak and the scrape of her chair.
Richard gathered the remains of our feast in his hands and slid like a ghost in his nightgown towards the bedroom door. Mama came slowly, slowly up each step as if she were very tired, and Richard melted up the stairs to his attic bedroom at the top of the house. I saw the ribbon of light from Mama’s night-time candle widen as she pushed open my bedroom door. I had my eyes shut tight, but I could never deceive her.