‘What’s your name?’ I said, picking on the girl. She looked at me with sharp black eyes.
‘Clary Dench,’ she said. She would be Dench’s niece, I thought.
‘What’s yours?’ I asked the boy at her side.
‘M-M-Matthew Merry,’ he said, blinking convulsively as he fought against his stammer.
I had to bite back the urge to giggle. The stammer was such a relief, coming from the mouth of such a frighteningly big boy. It made him seem childlike, no threat to me.
‘And yours?’ I said sharply to the only other big boy.
‘Ted Tyacke,’ he said. He looked closely at me, expecting the name to mean something to a Lacey. I had never heard that name before but I felt a shiver down my spine; somehow in the past the Laceys had injured the Tyackes, and hurt them badly. I might not know what we had done, but this lout of a boy knew that we were sworn enemies.
‘I’m Julia Lacey,’ I said as if they had not been making a chant of my name all the way down the track, careful not to give myself the ‘Miss’ which was my right. ‘You’ve been unkind to my cousin,’ I said accusingly. ‘You’ve been bullying my cousin Richard.’
‘And he sent you out to do his fighting for him, I s’pose?’ the girl sneered. I did not flinch back as she pushed her dirty face close to mine.
‘No,’ I said steadily, ‘he went to his schooling today like he always does, and I came down here to see Mrs Green. But you all followed me down so I ask you what you want.’
‘We don’t want nothing from the Laceys!’ said the boy called Ted Tyacke with a sudden explosion of hatred. ‘We don’t want kind words from you. We know your sort.’ The others nodded, and I could feel their mounting anger, and it made me afraid.
‘I’ve said and done nothing to you,’ I protested, and heard my voice sound plaintive. My weakness gave them courage and now they crowded around me, encircled me.
‘We know about the Laceys,’ said Clary spitefully. ‘We all know all about you. You rob the poor of reapers’ rights. You don’t pay your tithes. You set the soldiers on young men. And the Lacey women are witches!’ She hissed out the word and I saw all the children, even the smallest, clench their hands in the sign against witchcraft, the little thumbs held tight between the middle finger and forefinger to make the sign of a cross.
‘That’s none of it true,’ I said steadily. ‘I am not a witch, and neither is Richard. You are talking nonsense. You’ve got no cause against us, and if you say you have, then you are liars.’
Clary sprang forward at that and gave me a push which sent me reeling back. I lost my footing on the slope of the hollow and tumbled down into the bottom. The little children hooted with delight and Clary came scrambling down after me, her dirty face alight with malice.
I bunched myself up like a coiled spring, and leaped on her as soon as she was beside me. With the impetus of my jump from the ground I knocked her down and we rolled over and over, hitting and scratching. I felt her claw-like fingers at my mouth and tasted blood. Then I got hold of the rope of the plait of hair and pulled as hard as I could. She gave a shriek of pain and instinctively leaned back towards the pull. In a minute I had scrambled atop her, and I sat heavily on her bony little chest and felt, for the first time, a rush of pity at how thin and light she was.
‘D’you give up?’ I demanded tersely, using the words Richard so often said to me when he won in our half-playful, half-painful rompings.
‘Aye,’ she said. She spoke without a trace of a sneer, and I got up at once and put out a hand to pull her to her feet. She took it, without thinking, and then stood up, surprised to find herself handfast with me, apparently shaking on a bargain.
‘So you won’t tease Richard any more,’ I said, going directly to my one objective. She smiled a slow grudging smile that showed a couple of blackened teeth.
‘All right,’ she said slowly, the easy Sussex drawl reminding me of Dench and of his kindness to me. ‘We’ll leave him be.’
We dropped hands then, awkwardly, as if we had forgotten how we had come to be standing as close as friends. But she saw my mouth and said, ‘You’re bleeding’ in an indifferent voice. And I was careful to match her tone and say, ‘Am I?’ as if I did not care at all.
‘Come to the Fenny,’ she offered, and all of us walked deeper into the wood to the bank of the River Fenny for a drink and a splash of cold water on our hurts. And this time I walked neither alone in the front, nor encircled, but side by side with different children who came up to me and told me their names. I realized that I had not only won Richard’s safety, I had found some friends.
There were three Smith children: Henry, a stocky eight-year-old, his sister Jilly, and their little brother, who came with them, trotting to keep up with the pace of the older children. He was four. They called him Little ‘Un. He had not been expected to live and had been christened Henry like his brother. But his survival, thus far, meant there were two Henrys in the house, so the little boy had lost his name.
It did not matter, Clary told me, her voice dry. They did not expect him to survive the next winter. He coughed blood all the time like his mother had done. She had died after his birth and they had delayed her funeral a week so he could be put in her coffin and they could bury two for the cost of one. But Little ‘Un had clung on.
I stared at him. His skin was as pale as skimmed milk, a bluish pallor. When he felt my eyes on him, he gave me a smile of such sweetness that it was like a little candle in a dark corner.
‘You can call me Little ‘Un,’ he said, his breath rapid and light.
‘You can call me Julia,’ I said, looking at his thin face and huge eyes with a sense of hopelessness so intense that it felt like pain.
‘I’m Jane Carter,’ said another girl, pushing forward. ‘And this is my sister Em’ly. We’ve got another sister, but she’s at home with Baby. And we’ve got two brothers. And one of them is simple.’
I nodded, trying to take in the rush of information.
‘They’re out snaring rabbits,’ she said defiantly. I noticed the quick exchange of looks among the others to see how I would react to the news of poaching.
‘I hope they’re lucky,’ I said and I told the truth. ‘With six of you to feed you’ll need the meat.’
Jane nodded at the self-evident fact. ‘We poach pheasants too,’ she said. ‘And hare, and grouse.’
It was an open challenge.
‘Good,’ I said. ‘I wish you luck with it.’
They nodded at that, as though I had passed some crucial test, and two cobbler’s children, fair-headed twins, came either side of me and put their little cold hands in mine.
Clary and I glanced at the sun coming higher over the woods, and started on a jog-trot for home without a word exchanged between us. She set a quick pace for a scrawny girl, and the other children trailed away behind us; only Matthew Merry and Ted Tyacke kept up. I tried to control my breath so she would not hear me pant. But then I could tell by the way she was slackening that she was tiring too.
The track to Acre ran uphill. It was stony and bad going for a child with holes in her boots like mine, but worse for barefoot children like the three of them. I pounded on determinedly, my tight coat squeezing me mercilessly across my chest and under my arms. When I reached the top, I was panting for breath, but I got there first.
‘W-W-Well done,’ said Matthew, his stammer worse with no breath left in his skinny frame to say the words. ‘You’re a f-f-fast runner.’
‘My cousin Richard is faster than me,’ I said, dropping to the ground while we waited for Clary and Ted and then the string of little children.
Matthew spat on the ground like a rude grown-up. ‘We d-d-don’t care for him,’ he said dismissively.
I was about to fire up in defence of Richard, but something told me he might be better served by me keeping my peace. ‘He’s nice,’ I said, keeping my voice light. ‘He’s my best friend.’
Matthew nodded, unimpressed. ‘We don’t have bes
t friends in Acre any more,’ he said.
‘Why not?’ I asked.
Clary slumped down beside me, and Ted beside her. She lay on her back on the damp ground and squinted up at the bright sky with the sharp winter sun blazing coldly down on us.
‘They die,’ she said coolly. ‘Last winter my best friend Rachel died. She had got ill.’
‘And my friend Michael,’ offered Ted.
‘And my friend, I’ve f-f-forgotten her name,’ Matthew said.
‘Sally,’ Clary volunteered.
I sat in silence, taking this in.
‘Sally died away from Acre,’ Clary said with a hint of extra resentment. ‘The parish overseer took all the children he could get from their parents to work in the workshops. That’s why we’re the oldest in the village.’
I nodded. ‘I heard about it,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t understand what had happened. Who took the children?’
Ted looked at me as if I were ignorant indeed. ‘In the north,’ he said, his voice hard. ‘Even further away than London. They need children to work there in great barns, with great engines. They order paupers from all the parishes in the country and the parish overseer takes the children whose parents are on poor relief. They took all the big children they could the last time they came. None of them have come back, but we heard that Sal died. She was always sickly.’
I hesitated. I had nearly said again, ‘I am sorry.’ But the stealing of Acre’s children was too great a grief for an easily spoken apology.
‘Th-Th-They didn’t take me!’ Matthew said with pride.
Clary smiled at him, as tender as a mother. ‘They thought he was simple,’ she said to me with a smile. ‘He gets worse when he is frightened and they asked him questions in loud voices and he lost his speech altogether. They thought he was simple and they left him here.’
‘To b-b-be with you,’ Matthew said with a look of utter adoration at his muddy little heroine.
‘Aye,’ she said with quiet pride. ‘I look after him, and I look after all the little ’uns.’
‘You’re like a squire then,’ I said with a smile.
Ted spat on the ground, as rude as Matthew. ‘No squire we’ve ever had,’ he said. ‘No Lacey has ever cared for the village. Squires don’t look after people.’
I shook my head, puzzled. ‘What d’you mean?’ I said. ‘Acre was well cared for when the Laceys had their wealth. When my papa was alive, and Beatrice. It’s only since they died, and since the fire, that things have been bad on the land.’
There was a hiss, like a wind blowing before a storm, at my mention of the name Beatrice, and I saw all the grimy hands clench suddenly into an odd fist with the thumb between the second and third finger. I caught Clary’s hand.
‘Why are you doing that?’ I asked.
She looked at me, her dark eyes puzzled. ‘Don’t you know?’ she demanded.
‘Know what?’ I said. ‘No, I don’t know.’
‘Not about the Lacey magic? And about Beatrice?’ She said the name oddly, as if she were whispering the name of a spell, not the name of my long-dead aunt.
‘What magic?’ I said, scoffing, but then I looked around the circle of intent young faces and I felt myself shiver as though a cold breeze had blown down my spine.
‘Beatrice was a witch,’ Clary said very softly. ‘She knew how to make the land grow, she knew how to make the weather fair. She could call up storms. She could fell trees by casting a spell on them. She took a young man to husband every spring, and every autumn she destroyed him.’
‘That’s not so…’ I stammered. The singsong tone was weaving a spell of its own around me.
‘It was so,’ Clary insisted. ‘One of the men she took from the village was John Tyacke.’
‘My uncle,’ Ted supplemented.
‘Where’s he now?’ Clary continued. ‘Gone!’
‘Or Sam Frosterly, or Ned Hunter! Ask for them in Acre and see what they tell you! Beatrice took them. Took them all.’
I said nothing. I was too bemused to speak.
‘But one she took, the first one she took when she was a girl, was from the Old People too,’ Clary said. ‘His mother was Meg, a gypsy woman, and his father was one of the old gods. No one ever saw him in human shape. She took him, but she could not destroy him. He went into the dark world, into the silence, and he waited until she knew for sure he was coming. And then he came against her.’
‘How?’ I said. My mouth was dry. I knew this was a fairy story made up by ignorant people on long dark nights, but I had to hear the ending.
‘He came in his rightful shape, half-man, half-horse,’ Clary’s voice was a low mesmerizing whisper. ‘And at every hoofprint there was a circle of fire. He rode up the wooden stairs of the great hall, of Wideacre Hall, and everywhere he went the flames took hold. He threw her across his shoulders and rode away with her to the dark world where they both live. And the house burned down behind them. And the fields never grew again.’
The children were utterly silent, though they knew the story well. I stared blankly at Clary, my head whirling with the picture of a black horse and a man riding away with Beatrice to the dark world where she would live with him for ever.
‘Is that the end of the story?’ I asked.
Clary shook her head. ‘They left an heir,’ she said. ‘A child who will have their magic. A child who will be able to make things grow by setting foot to the earth, hand to the ploughshare. The favoured child.’
‘And who is it?’ I asked. I had truly forgotten I had any part in this story. Clary smiled, a wise old smile.
‘We have to wait and see,’ she said. ‘All of us in Acre are waiting for the sign. It could be you, or it could be your cousin Richard. He is her son. But you have the looks of her, and you’re a Lacey. And Ned Smith said the horse knew you were her.’
I shook my head. The air was cold, and I noticed for the first time that the ground was damp and I was chilled. ‘All that is nonsense,’ I said stoutly.
I expected a childish squabble with Clary, but she smiled at me with her eyelashes veiling her eyes. ‘You know it is not,’ she said. And she said no more.
I got to my feet. ‘I must go,’ I said.
‘Home to dinner?’ asked Clary, accepting a return to the prosaic world.
‘Yes,’ I said, thinking of the two or three dishes for the main course and then the pudding, and then the cheese.
‘W-W-What are you having?’ Matthew asked with longing. ‘Nothing much,’ I said resolutely.
‘Do you have tea?’ Little ‘Un asked. There was real longing in his voice.
‘Yes,’ I said, not understanding. ‘Don’t you?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘We just gets water.’
‘D’you have meat?’ one of the Carter girls asked me.
‘Yes,’ I said, and I felt ashamed that I should have been eating so well while less than two miles down our own lane they had been going hungry. I had known that Acre was poor, but I had not understood that they had been hungry for years. I had not understood that these children would never have felt a full belly, that since infancy they had hungered and thought of little else but food. And while I had my dreams of gardens and horse-riding, of balls and parties and gowns, all they dreamed of in reveries, and even in their sleep, was food.
I turned and walked towards Acre, and I heard them scramble to their feet and come after me. Clary caught me up and we walked side by side into Acre like old friends.
‘Goodbye,’ I said as we reached the dirty little lane which is Acre’s main street.
Clary halted. ‘He has apples in his garden, Dr Pearce,’ she said.
I nodded. ‘I know,’ I said.
Clary looked at me speculatively. ‘Still on the tree,’ she said. ‘He hasn’t picked them all.’
I nodded again. They were apples on old trees, part blighted and not very good eating.
Little ‘Un came up and slipped a thin hand in mine. ‘I can just see them,’ he said in his breathy
voice. ‘I’d love ’em.’
I looked at Clary.
‘If we bunked you up…’ she started. Over the side wall into the garden. You could throw them over to us, and then go round to the front and go in the front door, like usual.’
‘Why don’t you go?’ I asked.
“Cause if they catch me stealing, I could be hanged,’ she said with brutal frankness. ‘If they catch you, it’s not even stealing when gentry does the taking.’
I hesitated.
‘She won’t do it,’ Ted said. The dislike towards me, towards all squires, made his young voice hard. ‘She came out to make it all right for her cousin, not to be with us.’
‘I will do it,’ I said, rising to the challenge.
‘Go over the wall and steal the parson’s apples?’ he sneered.
‘Yes,’ I said. All at once we all got the giggles. Even Ted’s harsh young face crumpled at the thought of setting me to stealing. We skittered around to the vicar’s high back wall, the little children sluggish with merriment, and Ted Tyacke and Matthew Merry linked hands together, and Clary helped me up to stand on them. They staggered at my weight and Clary said, ‘Go on! Throw her!’
I snorted with laughter at that, and grabbed the top of the wall as the two lads staggered with my weight and with the giggles.
‘One…two…three…and up!’ counted Clary, and the insecure footing underneath my boots suddenly heaved me upwards and against the top of the wall. It was topped with sharp flints, and I heard a seam rip. I looked down into the garden, swung my legs over and was readying myself to slide down and jump when I froze.
There was Dr Pearce, almost immediately below me, looking upward, his face a mask of surprise. ‘Miss Lacey?’ he said as if he could not believe his eyes. ‘Miss Lacey? What on earth are you doing?’