“Cricklade alone has two hundred groves,” she said. “That’s why there are so many cuppers. It has to be done entirely in the week before midsummer when the roses are in bloom. Even with every able-bodied person in the county drafted in there’s only just enough to get it finished in time. A team like this takes nearly a day to complete a grove.”

Joshua leant forwards in the saddle, studying the people labouring away. It all seemed so menial, yet every one of them looked intent, devoted almost. Grant Kavanagh had said that a lot of them worked through half of Duchess-night, they would never have got the work finished otherwise. “I’m beginning to see why a bottle of Norfolk Tears costs so much. It’s not just the rarity value, is it?”

“No.” She flicked the reins, and guided the horse along the end of the rows, heading for the gate in the wall. The foreman touched his wide-brimmed hat as she passed. Louise gave a reflex smile.

He rode beside her after they left the grove. Cricklade Manor’s protective ring of cedars was just visible a couple of miles away across the wolds. “Where now?” It was parkland all around, sheep clustering together under the lonely trees for shade. The grass was furry with white flowers. Everywhere he looked there seemed to be blooms of some kind—trees, bushes, ground plants.

“I thought Wardley Wood would be nice, you can see what wild Norfolk looks like.” Louise pointed at a long stretch of dark-green trees a mile away, following the bottom of a small valley. “Genevieve and I often walk there. It’s lovely.” She dropped her head. As if he would be interested in the glades with their multicoloured flowers and sweet scents.

“That sounds good. I’d like to get out of this sunlight. I don’t know how you can stand it.”

“I don’t notice it, really.”

He spurred his horse on, breaking into a canter. Louise rode past him easily, moving effortlessly with her horse’s rhythm. They galloped across the wolds, scattering the somnolent sheep, Louise’s laughter trilling through the heavy air. She beat him easily to the edge of the wood, and sat there smiling as he rode up to her, panting heavily.

“That was quite good,” she said. “You could be a decent rider if you had a bit of practice.” She swung her leg over the saddle and dropped down.

“There are some stables on Tranquillity,” he said, dismounting. “That’s where I learnt, but I’m not there very often.”

A big mithorn tree stood just outside the main body of the wood, its coin-sized dark red flowers sprinkling the end of every twig. Louise wrapped the reins round one of its lower branches, and started off into the wood along one of the little animal tracks she knew. “I’ve heard of Tranquillity. That’s where the Lord of Ruin lives, Ione Saldana. She was on the news last year; she’s so beautiful. I wanted to cut my hair short like hers, but Mother said no. Do you know her?”

“Now that’s the trouble when you really do know someone famous; no one ever believes you when you say yes.”

She turned round, eyes wide with delight. “You do know her!”

“Yes. I knew her before she inherited the title, we grew up together.”

“What’s she like? Tell me.”

An image of a naked sweaty moaning Ione bent over a table while he was screwing her appeared in his mind. “Fun,” he said.

The glade she led him to was on the floor of the valley; a stream ran through it, spilling down a series of five big rock-pools. Knee-high flower stems with tubular yellow and lavender blooms clotted the ground, giving off a scent similar to orange blossom. Water-monarch trees lined the stream below the pools, fifty yards tall, their long, slender branches swaying in the slight breeze, fernlike leaf fronds drooping. Birds flittered about in the upper boughs, uninspiring dun-coloured bat-analogues with long, powerful forelimbs for tunnelling into the ground. Wild weeping roses boiled over the stones along the side of two of the pools; years of dead petrified branches overlaid by a fresh growth of new living shoots to produce hemispherical bushes. Their flowers were crushed together, disfigured as they vied for light.

“You were right,” Joshua told her. “It is lovely.”

“Thank you. Genevieve and I often bathe here in the summer.”

He perked up. “Really?”

“It’s a little place of the world that’s all our own. Even the hax don’t come here.”

“What’s a hax? I heard someone mention the name.”

“Father calls them wolf-analogues. They’re big and vicious, and they’ll even attack humans. The farmers hunt them in the winter, it’s good sport. But we’ve just about cleared them out of Cricklade now.”

“Do the hunters all get dressed up in red jackets and charge around on horses with packs of hounds?”

“Yes. How did you know?”

“Lucky guess.”

“I suppose you’ve seen real monsters on your travels. I’ve seen pictures of the Tyrathca on the holoscreen. They’re horrible. I couldn’t sleep for a week afterwards.”

“Yes, the Tyrathca look pretty ferocious. But I’ve met some breeder pairs; they don’t think of themselves like that. To them we’re the cruel alien ones. It’s a question of perspective.”

Louise blushed and ducked her head, turning away from him. “I’m sorry. You must think me a frightful bigot.”

“No. You’re just not used to xenocs, that’s all.” He stood right behind her and put his hands on her shoulders. “But I would like to take you away from here some time and show you the rest of the Confederation. Some of it is quite spectacular. And I’d love to take you to Tranquillity.” He looked round the glade, thoughtful. “It’s a bit like this, only much much bigger. I think you’d like it a lot.”

Louise wanted to squirm away from his grip, men simply shouldn’t act in such a familiar fashion. But his customs were surely different, and he was massaging her shoulder muscles gently. It felt nice. “I always wanted to fly on a starship.”

“You will, one day. When Cricklade is yours you can do anything you want.” Joshua was enjoying the touch of her. Naпvety, a voluptuous body, and the knowledge that he should never, ever be even thinking about screwing her were combining to form a potent aphrodisiac.

“I never thought of that,” she said brightly. “Can I charter the Lady Macbeth ? Oh, but it will be simply ages yet. I don’t want Father to die, that would be an absolutely awful thing to think. Will you still be coming to Norfolk in fifty years’ time?”

“Of course I will. I have two things tying me here now. Business, and you.”

“Me?” It came out as a frightened squeak.

He turned her round to face him, and kissed her.

“Joshua!”

He put two fingers over her lips. “Shush. No words, only us. Always us.”

Louise stood rigidly still as he unbuttoned her blouse, all kinds of strange emotions battling in her head. I ought to run. I ought to stop him.

Sunlight fell onto her bare shoulders and back. It was a peculiar sensation, a tingling warmth. And the expression on his face as he gazed at her was scary, he looked so hungry, but anxious at the same time.

“Joshua,” she murmured, half nervous, half amused. Her shoulders had hunched up of their own accord.

He pulled his T-shirt off over his head. They kissed again, his arms going around her. He seemed very strong. His skin pressing against her had started a trembling in her stomach that nothing was able to stop. Then she realized her jodhpurs were being peeled down.

“Oh God.”

His finger lifted her chin up. “It’s all right. I’ll show you how.” And his smile was at least as warm as the sun.

She took her black leather riding boots off herself, then helped him with the jodhpurs. Her brassiere and knickers were plain white cotton. Joshua removed them slowly, savouring the drawn-out exposure.

He spread their clothes out and laid her down. She was terribly tense to start with, her lower lip clamped between her teeth, narrow eyes peeking down fearfully at the length of her body. It took a long, pleasant time of soft caresses, kisses, stealthy whispers, and tickles before she began to respond. He coaxed a giggle from her, then another, then it was a squeal, a groan. She touched his body, curious and suddenly bold, a hand sliding down his belly to cup his balls. He shuddered and repaid her by massaging her thighs. There was another long interval while their hands and mouths explored each other. Then he slid above her, looking down at dishevelled hair, drowsy eyes, dark nipples standing proud, legs parted. He moved into her carefully, the damp warmth enveloping and squeezing his cock an erotic splendour. Louise writhed tempestuously below him, and he began a slow, provocative stroke. He used neural nanonic overrides to restrain his own body’s responses, sustaining his erection as long as he wanted it, determined that she should reach a climax, that it should be as perfect for her as he could possibly make it.

After an age he was rewarded by her complete loss of control. Louise threw away every last inhibition as her orgasm built, shouting at the top of her voice, her body arching desperately below him, lifting his knees from the ground. Only then did he allow himself any release, joining her in absolute bliss.

Post-coital languor was a sweet time, one of tiny kisses, stroking individual strands of sticky hair from her face, single compassionate words. And he had been quite right all along, forbidden fruit tasted the best.

“I love you, Joshua,” she whispered into his ear.

“And I love you.”

“Don’t leave.”

“That’s unfair. You know I’m coming back.”

“I’m sorry.” She tightened her grip around him.

He moved his hand up to her left breast and squeezed, hearing a soft hiss of indrawn breath. “Are you sore?”

“A bit. Not much.”

“I’m glad.”

“Me too.”

“Do you want to have that swim now? Water can be a lot of fun.”

She grinned cautiously. “Again?”

“If you want.”

“I do.”

Marjorie Kavanagh came to his bedroom again that Duchess-night. The prospect of Louise sneaking through the red-shaded manor to be with him and discovering him with her mother added a spice to his lovemaking that left her exhausted and delighted.

The next day Louise, eyes possessively agleam, announced at breakfast that she would show Joshua round the county roseyard, so he could see the casks being prepared for the new Tears. Grant declared this a stupendous idea, chuckling to himself that his little cherub was having her first schoolgirl crush.

Joshua smiled neutrally, and thanked her for being so considerate. There were another three days to go until midsummer.

At Cricklade, and all across Norfolk, they marked the onset of Midsummer’s Day with a simple ceremony. The Kavanaghs, Colsterworth’s vicar, Cricklade Manor’s staff, the senior estate workers, and representatives from each of the cupper teams gathered at the nearest grove to the manor towards the end of Duke-day. Joshua and Dahybi were invited, and stood at the front of the group that assembled just inside the shabby stone wall.

The rows of weeping roses stretched out ahead of them; blooms and cups alike upturned to a fading azure sky, perfectly still in the breathless evening air. Time seemed to be suspended.

Duke was falling below the western horizon, a sliver of pyrexic tangerine, pulling the world’s illumination down with it. The vicar, wearing a simple cassock, held his arms up for silence. He turned to face the east. On cue, a watery pink light expanded across the horizon.

A sigh went up from the group.

Even Joshua was impressed. There had been about two minutes of darkness the previous evening. Now there would be no night for a sidereal day, Duchess-night flowing seamlessly into Duke-day. It wouldn’t be until the end of the following Duchess-night that the stars would come out again for a brief minute. After that it would be the evenings when the two suns overlapped, and the morning darkness would grow longer and longer, extending back into Duchess-night until Norfolk reached inferior conjunction and only Duke was visible: midwinter.

The vicar led his flock in a brief Harvest Thanksgiving service. Everybody knew the words to the prayers and psalms, and quiet, murmuring voices banded together to be heard right across the grove. Joshua felt quite left out. They finished by singing “All Creatures Great and Small”. At least his neural nanonics had that in a memory file; he joined in heartily, surprised by just how good he felt.

After the service, Grant Kavanagh led his family and friends on a rambling walk along the aisles between the rows. He touched various roses, feeling their weight, rubbing petals between his thumb and forefinger, testing the texture.

“Smell that,” he told Joshua as he handed over a petal he had just picked. “It’s going to be a good crop. Not as good as five seasons ago. But well above average.”

Joshua sniffed. The scent was very weak, but recognizable, similar to the smell which clung to a cork after a bottle of Tears had been opened. “You can tell from this?” he asked.

Grant put his arm around Louise as they sauntered along the aisle. “I can. Mr Butterworth can. Half of the estate workers can. It just takes experience. You need to be here for a lot of summers.” He grinned broadly. “Perhaps you will be, Joshua. I’m sure Louise will ask you back if no one else does.”

Genevieve shrieked with laughter.

Louise blushed furiously. “Daddy!” She slapped his arm.

Joshua raised a weak smile and turned to examine one of the rose plants. He found himself facing Marjorie Kavanagh. She gave him a languid wink. His neural nanonics sent out a volley of overrides to try and stop the rush of blood to his own cheeks.

After the inspection walk the manor staff served up an outdoor buffet. Grant Kavanagh stood behind one of the trestle tables, carving from a huge joint of rare beef, playing the part of jovial host, with a word and a laugh for all his people.

As Duchess-night progressed the rose flowers began to droop. It happened so slowly that the eye could detect no motion, but hour by hour the thick stems lost their stiffness, and the weight of the large petals and their central carpel pod made gravity’s triumph inevitable.

By Duke-morning most of the flowers had reached the horizontal. The petals were drying out and shrivelling.

Joshua and Louise rode out to one of the groves close to Wardley Wood, and wandered along the sagging plants. There were only a few cuppers left tending the long rows, straightening the occasional collection cup. They nodded nervously to Louise and scurried on about their business.

“Most people have gone home to sleep,” Louise said. “The real work will begin again tomorrow.”

They stood aside as a man pulled a wooden trolley past them. A big glass ewer, webbed with rope, was resting on it. Joshua watched as he stopped the trolley at the end of a row and lifted the ewer off. About a third of the rows had a similar ewer waiting at the end.

“What’s that for?” he asked.

“They empty the collection cups into those,” Louise said. “Then the ewers are taken to the county roseyard where the Tears are casked.”

“And they stay in the cask for a year.”

“That’s right.”

“Why?”

“So that they spend a winter on Norfolk. They’re not proper Tears until they’ve felt our frost. It sharpens the taste, so they say.”

And adds to the cost, he thought.

The flowers were wilting rapidly now, the stems curving down into a U-shape. Their sunlight-fired coronal cloak had faded away as the petals darkened, and with it had gone a lot of the mystique. They were just ordinary dying flowers now.

“How do the cuppers know where to wire the cups?” he asked. “Look at them. Every flower is bending over above a cup.” He glanced up and down the aisle. “Every one of them.”

Louise gave him a superior smile. “If you are born on Norfolk, you know how to place a cup.”

It wasn’t just the weeping roses which were reaching fruition. As they trotted the horses over to Wardley Wood Joshua saw flowers on the trees and bushes closing up, some varieties leaning over in the same fashion as the roses.

In their peaceful glade the wild rose bushes along the rock pools seemed flaccid, as if their shape was deflating. Flowers lolled against each other, petals agglutinating into a quilt of pulp.

Louise let Joshua undress her as he always did. Then they spread a blanket down on the rocks below the weeping roses and embraced. Joshua had got to the point where Louise was shuddering in delighted anticipation as his hands roved across her lower belly and down the inside of her thighs when he felt a splash on his back. He ignored the first one and kissed Louise’s navel. Another splash broke his concentration. It couldn’t be raining, there wasn’t a cloud in the barren blue sky. He twisted over. “What—?”

Norfolk’s roses had begun to weep. Out of the centre of the carpel pod a clear fluid was exuded in a steady monotonous drip. It was destined to last for ten to fifteen hours, well into the next Duchess-night. Only when the pod was drained would it split open and release the seeds it contained. Nature had intended the fluid to soften the soil made arid by weeks without rain, allowing the seeds to fall into mud so they would have a greater chance of germination. But then in 2209 a woman called Carys Thomas, who was a junior botanist in the ecological assessment mission, acting against all regulations (and common sense), put her finger under a weeping pod, then touched the single pearl of glistening fluid to her tongue. Norfolk’s natural order came to an immediate end.

Joshua wiped up the dewy bead from his skin and licked his finger. It tasted coarser than the Norfolk Tears he’d so relished back in Tranquillity, but the ancestry was beyond doubt. A roguish light filled his eyes. “Hey, not bad.”

A snickering Louise was moved round until she was directly underneath the lax hanging flowers. They made love under a shower of sparkling droplets prized higher than a king’s ransom.

The cuppers returned to the groves as the next Duchess-night ended. They cut away the collection cups, now heavy with Tears, and poured their precious contents into the ewers. It was a task that would take another five days of intensive round-the-clock labour to complete.

Grant Kavanagh himself drove Joshua and Dahybi down to the county roseyard in a four-wheel-drive farm ranger, a powerful boxy vehicle with tyres deep enough to plough through a shallow marsh. The yard was on the outskirts of Colsterworth, a large collection of ivy-clad stone buildings with few windows. Beneath the ground was an extensive warren of brick-lined cellars where the casks were stored throughout their year of maturation.

When he drove through the wide entrance gates the yard workers were already rolling out the casks of last year’s Tears.

“A year to the day,” he said proudly as the heavy ironbound oak cylinders rattled and skipped over the cobbles. “This is your cargo, young Joshua. We’ll have it ready for you in two days.” He braked the farm ranger to a halt outside the bottling plant where the casks were being rolled inside. The plant supervisor rushed out to meet them, sweating. “Don’t you worry about us,” Grant told him blithely. “I’m just showing our major customer around. We won’t get in the way.” And with that he marched imperiously through the broad doorway.

The bottling plant was the most sophisticated mechanical set-up Joshua had seen on the planet, even though it lacked any real cybernetic systems (the conveyor belts actually used rubber pulleys!). It was a long hall with a single-span roof, full of gleaming belts, pipes, and vats. Thousands of the ubiquitous pear-shaped bottles trundled along the narrow belts, looping overhead, winding round filling nozzles, the racket of their combined clinking making conversation difficult.

Grant walked them along the hall. The casks were all blended together in big stainless-steel vats, he explained. Stoke County’s bouquet was a homogenized product. No groves had individual labels, not even his.

Joshua watched the bottles filling up below the big vats, then moving on to be corked and labelled. Each stage added to the cost. And the weight of the glass bottles reduced the amount of actual Tears each starship could carry.

Jesus, what a sweet operation. I couldn’t do it better myself. And the beauty of it is we’re the ones most eager to cooperate, to inflate the cost.

At the end of the line, the yard manager was waiting with the first bottle to come off the conveyor. He looked expectantly at Grant, who told him to proceed. The bottle was uncorked, and its contents poured into four cut-crystal glasses.

Grant sniffed, then took a small sip. He cocked his head to one side and looked thoughtful. “Yes,” he said. “This will do. Stoke can put its name to this.”

Joshua tried his own glass. It chilled every nerve in his throat, and burst into flames in his stomach.

“Good enough for you, Joshua?” Grant clapped him on the back.

Dahybi was holding his glass up to the light, staring at it with greedy enchantment.

“Yes,” Joshua declared staunchly. “Good enough.”

Joshua and Dahybi took it in turns to oversee the cases the roseyard put together for them. For space travel the bottles were hermetically sealed in composite cube containers one metre square, with a thick lining of nultherm foam to protect them (more weight); the roseyard had its own loading and sealing machinery (more cost). There was a railway line leading directly from the yard to the town’s station, which meant they were able to dispatch several batches to Boston every day.

All this activity severely reduced the amount of time Joshua spent at Cricklade Manor, much to Louise’s chagrin. Nor was there any believable reason why she should take him riding over the estate again.

He arranged the shifts with Dahybi so that he worked most of Duchess-night at the roseyard, which meant his tussles with Marjorie were curtailed.

The morning of the day he was leaving, however, Louise did manage to trap him in the stables. So he had to spend two hours in a dark, dusty hay loft satisfying an increasingly bold and adventurous teenager who seemed to have developed a bottomless reserve of physical stamina. She clung to him for a long time after her third climax, while he whispered assurances of how quickly he would come back.

“Just for business with Daddy?” she asked, almost as an accusation.

“No. For you. Business is an excuse, it would be difficult otherwise on this planet. Everything’s so bloody formal here.”

“I don’t care any more. I don’t care who knows.”

He shifted round, brushing straw from his ribs. “Well, I do care; because I don’t want you to be treated like a pariah. So show a little discretion, Louise.”

She ran her fingertips over his cheeks, marvelling. “You really care about me, don’t you?”

“Of course I do.”

“Daddy likes you,” she said uncertainly. Now probably wasn’t the best time to press him on their future after he returned. He must have a lot on his mind with the awesome responsibility of the starflight ahead of him. But it did seem as though her father’s plaudit was like an omen. So few people ever met with Daddy’s approval. And Joshua had said how much he adored Stoke County. The kind of land I’d like to settle in: his exact words.

“I’m rather fond of the old boy myself. But God he’s got a temper.”

Louise giggled in the dark. Down below the horses were shuffling about. She straddled his abdomen, her mane of hair falling around the two of them. His hands found her breasts, fingers tightening until she moaned with desire. In a low, throaty voice he told her what he wanted her to do. She strained her body to accommodate him, trembling at her own daring. He was solid against her, wonderfully there , encouraging and praising.

“Tell me again,” she murmured. “Please, Joshua.”

“I love you,” he said, breath teasingly hot on her neck. Even his neural nanonics couldn’t banish the dawning guilt he felt at the words. Have I really been reduced to lying to trusting, hopelessly unsophisticated teenagers? Perhaps it’s because she is so magnificent, what we all want girls to be like even though we know it’s wrong. I can’t help myself. “I love you, and I’m coming back for you.”

She groaned in delirium as he entered her. Ecstasy brought its own special light, banishing the darkness of the loft.

Joshua only just managed to reach the manor’s hall in time to kiss or shake hands with members of the large group of staff and family (William Elphinstone was absent) who had come to wish him and Dahybi farewell. The horse-drawn carriage carried the two of them back to Colsterworth Station, where they boarded the train back to Boston along with the last batch of their cargo.

Melvyn Ducharme met them when they arrived back in the capital, and told them that over half of the cases were already up in the Lady Macbeth . Kenneth Kavanagh had used his influence with captains whose spaceplanes were being under-used for their own smaller cargos. It hadn’t generated much goodwill, but the loading was well ahead of schedule. Using Lady Mac ’s small spaceplane alone would have meant taking eleven days to boost all the cases into orbit.

They returned up to the starship straight away. When Joshua floated into his cabin, Sarha was waiting with the free-fall sex cage expanded, and a hungry smile in place. “No bloody chance,” he told her, and curled up into a ball to sleep for a solid ten hours.

Even if he had been awake he had no reason to focus the Lady Macbeth ’s sensors on departing starships. So he would never have seen that out of the twenty-seven thousand eight hundred and forty-six starships which had come to Norfolk, twenty-two of them experienced an alarming variety of severe mechanical and electrical malfunctions as they departed for their home planets.