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, yet such a baby. And so like Mama in his preference for the easy lie rather than dreadful truths. My smile to him was warm and convincing while the outrageous lies went on.
‘You saved my most precious honour, Harry, and I will never forget that I am under your protection. You are the head of the house now, and the head of the family. I am proud and confident to put myself in your care.’
He stretched out his hand to me and I moved into a chaste and affectionate embrace. A flicker of desire again stirred in me as I felt a man’s arms around me, and half consciously I could feel the muscles in my legs and buttocks tense as Harry’s hands gently spanned my waist. Some tiny demon of childlike mischief made me turn in his fraternal hold so one hand slid accidentally up the smooth warm silk to the swelling curve of my breast.
‘Unreservedly,’ I said.
He left his hand where it chanced to lie.
That night my mind played a strange trick on me in my dreams. I dreamed of Ralph, not the Ralph of my nightmares but the old Ralph of our loving summer. I was drifting through the rose garden, my feet skimming over the gravel paths. The gate opened before me and I made the same ghostly progress down to the river. By the bank stood a figure. I knew it was my lover and we slid together. His body entered mine with piercing sweetness and I moaned with pleasure. The high note of pleasure and pain disturbed my sleep and I awoke, full of regret. The dream faded fast as I opened my eyes, but the face of my lover as he lifted his head from our deep kiss was Harry’s.
I