Wideacre
Wideacre
Philippa Gregory
Beatrice Lacey, daughter of Wideacre Hall, will not accept society’s rules that women cannot inherit…The internationally bestselling debut from the author of The Other Boleyn Girl and Three Sisters, Three Queens.Wideacre Hall, set in the heart of the English countryside, is the ancestral home that Beatrice Lacey loves. Built from yellow stone, facing due south and surrounded by the rich woodlands and rolling downs of Sussex, it has been in her family for generations. But as a woman in England in the 1770s she has no right of inheritance; only a loveless arranged marriage lies ahead. Beautiful, sensual and passionate, Beatrice sets out to pursue her own goal: control over Wideacre – at any cost.Yet even as her scheming succeeds, Beatrice is haunted by the one person alive who fully understands her obsession and knows her capacity to let nothing – and no-one – stand in her way.The 30th anniversary edition, with new foreword by the author.
THE 30TH ANNIVERSARY
EDITION
With new foreword by the author.
Copyright (#ulink_a961032c-31ae-5025-b06c-c64cc921a538)
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Harper
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by Viking 1987
This edition published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2017
Copyright © Philippa Gregory Ltd 1987
Map copyright © www.old-maps.co.uk (http://www.old-maps.co.uk) and Ordnance Survey
Cover design by Ward/MacDonald © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 2017
Cover image © Archivist 2015/Alamy
Philippa Gregory asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780008229986
Ebook Edition © APRIL 2017 ISBN: 9780007383368
Version: 2017-04-25
Contents
Cover (#u4af9dab6-b4a0-5c03-9f28-ef6db3a01cde)
Title Page (#ud1db4dff-7670-5b9d-a3ae-eecfa505b752)
Copyright (#u3788d8ed-7dd4-5e88-bc53-0f6a621d1ffc)
Foreword (#u076f0fba-2e4d-521e-b815-935a32265916)
Map (#u82f00346-43a8-5afa-a0e1-c7ac9f5c7a15)
Chapter 1 (#u9d9dea40-699b-5ac6-90d7-aec8ed65cdd5)
Chapter 2 (#udaf26faa-3a27-5818-8305-efb1ee9d1d03)
Chapter 3 (#u9bc1e39e-758a-5775-9acb-9cf82fe88f0f)
Chapter 4 (#u9468c83c-fbdc-5ccf-91d4-c6c609a12be9)
Chapter 5 (#u8b8d62dc-4c54-5786-81ae-eebd48c2f3b9)
Chapter 6 (#u43da8195-fab0-507f-9da3-5eee9b6fc86f)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Philippa Gregory’s Wideacre trilogy continues with The Favoured Child and Meridon (#litres_trial_promo)
Discover More of Philippa Gregory’s Tudor Novels (#litres_trial_promo)
Gardens for the Gambia (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Rivka Galchen (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Foreword (#ulink_296bd672-507c-5077-ad6e-d090226ee462)
I was a young married woman, in my late twenties, living in a small town in the North of England. I had a newborn daughter and I was trying to finish my PhD thesis on the popular fiction of the eighteenth century. To prepare for this study I had read more than 200 novels published between 1740 and 1800 and had painstakingly compared the standard elements like sexual morality, the relationship to agriculture and the countryside, and the wonderfully bizarre: incest, banditti, even aliens. I believed there were identifiable themes in the novels and that they could be read together as a fictional world that sometimes mirrored eighteenth-century England, and sometimes denied and hid it.
Hoping to become an expert in the real and imaginary eighteenth-century world, I accidentally served the ideal author’s apprenticeship. Without intending it – for when I started at Edinburgh University I was 26 and really very scatty – I read myself into the art of the novel, and then started to write my own – longhand in a school exercise-type book. Where it read name I wrote my name, where it read form I wrote IVB (I had enjoyed my fourth year), and where it read subject I wrote with simple ambition: Best Selling Novel.
That was partly a joke for myself: I had been locked in a library for four years, I was ready to be amused by almost anything, but I found that I loved writing and became more and more convinced that it was a successful novel. I sent it to an agent who refused it, and then to another who accepted it. After a worldwide auction I had a three-book contract in the UK and the US, my first career path and the first steady income for the first time in my life.
I rarely tell this story because it is such an extraordinary one, it is not typical and not to be expected; and – worse – it encourages apprentice writers to think of writing as a route to fortune and fame, which it very rarely is. Writing is something so much more: the route to working in the finest and most accessible art form in the world.
It is an honour to work as a novelist, I have been learning my trade and practising my skills (for it is also a craft as well as an art) for thirty years – as this anniversary edition shows. To write a novel is to dedicate yourself to an art form which is universally and frequently enjoyed. The first novels I read were borrowed from the library, I bought my beloved collection of second-hand books for small change, and now I can read almost any published fiction in the world at the touch of a button. No other art form is so widely available, so regularly experienced by its audience, and so easily accessed.
Reading a novel is an exercise that is escapist – I tumble deep into the story, immerse myself in the fiction, and yet it has a powerful relationship to the real world. Even at the end of a story that is wholly imaginary there may be a sense of truth or a sense of powerful authentic emotion. I feel oddly contented when I have read a good novel. Not for the outcome of the story (though I admit to an unrefined preference for happy endings) but because something about the measured unfolding gives me a sense of delight.
This sensation of joy sometimes comes to me when I am writing too. On a very good day I experience what I am describing: I am both here in my study with the view of the North York moors and the wide northern sky above them, and here at the court, in the little room, in the cell, in the garden, on the streets of medieval London.
I love storytelling, which is an archaic art buried deep in human nature. I imagine a tribe, perhaps as old as those who drew massive imaginary beasts in the light of flickering torches, who pressed their own hand prints beneath the delicate hooves, gathering around the fire to tell stories that warn of poisonous berries, of betrayal, of the hidden snake. The stories perform that uniquely human gift – carrying an idea from one mind to another in complexity and with emotion. Stories conquer death – tell a story about someone well and there he is, returned to life, laughing so hard with his arm around his brother that he can hardly stand. Laughing: though the joke is old and he died a hundred years ago. But if I describe him so that you can see him and hear him, in what way is the joke old? In what way is he dead? I love stories for the same reason as I love history, because they have a powerful life in the temporal world – and they transcend it.
This resonates particularly with me because I was brought up by my mother on stories of lost landscapes – the house of her sunny privileged childhood in the years before the First World War. Before I even read the thousands and thousands of novels of gilded regret, before I read the history, I knew of those days of peace. By the time I came to E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf I had already walked in the lilac-scented night, and looked out of the window at the cat on the mown lawn.
An imaginary world does not vanish while someone still conjures it. The beloved are not gone when they are vividly remembered. A time is never forgotten if people write history. I fell in love with history while studying as an undergraduate at the University of Sussex, and I felt that I had discovered the Meaning of Life. No more (for there is no more) and certainly no less. I had been one of those earnest, questing girls who wanted to know the answer to everything; and for me if you know how something has come about, you know what it is. I am especially drawn to mislaid and ignored histories, like the struggle against enclosure, which is the spine of the Wideacre story: the exile of the people from the land they love.
It was natural that my first novel, Wideacre, should be about a young woman who cannot bear the thought of the loss of her family home (my mother’s family’s story), who has nothing but her sexuality to gain her own ends (women’s history), who entraps her brother (such an important trope in the early novel, identified in my reading of the eighteenth-century commercial library stocks), and who is deeply and passionately invested in the Sussex landscape (a childhood love of mine). Beatrice has a wonderful horse, and this is one of the most joyful instances of my fiction foretelling my life. I swear that this occurs from time to time, my family sceptically call it ‘coincidence’. Call it what you will, but ten years after I gave Beatrice Lacey a grey gelding, I was to own my own grey gelding, and ride him over the common land around the village of Heyshott, which was the setting for Wideacre.
My novels after Wideacre developed and changed without conscious decision. I became increasingly interested in real lives and wrote novels based more and more closely on real people and on accurate history. Sometimes we don’t know the history, sometimes historians don’t agree. But when there is an agreed account, I like to illuminate, dramatize and fictionalize it. I never depart from it for the benefit of the story, the history always comes first. I developed a style of writing: first person, so that you are in someone’s shoes, facing their dilemmas, and present tense, so that you have no historians’ hindsight, you are in the then and there, not looking back. These stylistic choices have been enormously helpful and interesting to me, bringing me to a lively understanding of historical events – if you were there, not knowing how they would turn out, what would you do? – and a greater empathy with historical characters. Most of my principal characters are women: as a woman, I think I know sometimes how they feel, I sometimes experience their difficulties myself. As a feminist, I am almost always more interested in the apparently unimportant woman than the man who is standing, talking so loudly, before her. As a feminist historian, I think it is my particular calling to look and see what the women are doing at any moment in time.
This has led me a pretty dance in research as I try to discover the most basic facts, such as where a woman was living, and what she was doing, whereas traditional historians, blind to anything but big public acts, loyally and repeatedly record the sons and husbands, fathers and brothers. It has led me into a deep appreciation of the role that women – often unsung, sometimes deliberately concealed – have played in the forming of our national life. There have been heroines and martyrs, scholars and mothers, daughters and saints, sinners, poisonous domestic villains, angels in the corner and queens regnant, militant or as apparently passive as Sleeping Beauty, all astoundingly ignored. It has been an honour to spend my working life looking for and recording a version of some of them for us: their daughters, their heirs. I know that for my readers – as they tell me in their thousands – these stories are their models and heroines, examples of how far we have come, how far we still have to go. They demonstrate the courage that is part of women’s nature.
Beatrice is not one of these! Nobody exactly like Beatrice ever lived, nobody exactly like her could have lived. She is the exuberant manifestation of the imagination of a young woman, who had spent a long time – far too long – in the library, and who was eager for a rich, colourful, sensual, action-packed life. Beatrice shows ambition, passion and a complete absence of scruples. Above all – her greatest feature – she is not ladylike. Thirty years ago I was thrilled by the thought of a fictional heroine who was not ladylike. I remember both Beatrice, and her young author, with affection and no regrets.
1
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Wideacre Hall faces due south and the sun shines all day on the yellow stone until it is warm and powdery to the touch. The sun travels from gable end to gable end so the front of the house is never in shadow. When I was a small child, collecting petals in the rose garden, or loitering at the back of the house in the stable yard, it seemed that Wideacre was the very centre of the world with the sun defining our boundaries in the east at dawn, until it sank over our hills in the west in the red and pink evening. The great arch it traced in the sky over Wideacre seemed to me a suitable boundary for our vertical influence. Behind the sun was God and the angels; beneath it, and far more significantly, ruled the Squire, my father.
I cannot remember a time before I loved him, the blond, red-faced, loud Englishman. I suppose there must have been a time when I was confined to a white-frilled crib in the nursery; I suppose I must have taken my first steps clinging tight to my mother’s hand. But I have no childish memories of my mother at all. Wideacre filled my consciousness, and the Squire of Wideacre dominated me as he ruled the world.
My first, my earliest childhood memory is of someone lifting me up to my father as he towered above me in the saddle of his chestnut hunter. My little legs dangled helplessly as I rose up the yawning void to the great chestnut shoulder – a hot, red rockface to my surprised eyes – and up to the hard, greasy saddle. Then my father’s arm was tight round my body and his hand tucked me securely before him. He let me grip the reins in one hand and the pommel in the other, and my gaze locked on the coarse russet mane and the shiny leather. Then the monster beneath me moved and I clutched in fright. His pace was erratic and rolling to me, and the long gap between each great stride caught me unawares. But my father’s arm held tight and I gradually raised my eyes from the muscled, steamy shoulder of the mountainous horse, up his long neck to his pointy signalling ears … and then the sweep of Wideacre burst upon me.
The horse was walking down the great avenue of beech and oak that leads to the house. The dappled shadows of the trees lay across the springing grass and the rutted mud tracks. In the banks glowed the pale yellow of spring primroses and the brighter sunshine yellow of celandine. The smell, the dark, damp smell of rain-wet earth filled the arch of the trees like birdsong.
A drainage ditch runs alongside the drive, its yellow stones and white sand rinsed clean by the trickle of water. From my rolling vantage point I could at last see a clear view of its length, even where the black leafmould at the banks carried the tiny, forked hoofprints of nighttime deer.
‘All right, Beatrice?’ My father’s voice behind me was a rumble I could feel in my tense, skinny little body as well as hear. I nodded. To see the trees of Wideacre, to smell the earth of it, to be out among the breath of wind of Wideacre, bonnetless, carriageless and motherless, was beyond words.
‘Like to try a trot?’ he asked.
I nodded again, tightening my small hands on the saddle and reins. At once the giant strides altered and all around me the trees lurched and jigged as the horizon moved in great sickening leaps. I bobbed like a cork in a spring-flood river, sliding painfully to one side, and then, perilously, correcting. Then I heard my father click to the horse and the stride lengthened. Wonderfully, the horizon steadied, but the trees sped past. I regained my balance and, though the ground flashed by under the thudding hoofs, I could breathe and look around again. Your first canter is the fastest speed you will ever go. I clung like a louse to the saddle and felt the spring wind in my face, and saw the shadows of the trees flash light and shade across me as the chestnut mane streamed, and I could feel a great burble of delighted laughter and scream of fear gather in my throat.
On our left the woods were thinning and the steep bank dropped away, so I could see through the trees to the fields beyond, already brightening with the spring growth. In one a hare, large as a hound puppy, stood on its hind legs to watch us go by, its black-tipped ears pointed to hear the thud of the hoofs and the jingle of the bit. In the next field a line of women, drab against the deep black of the ploughed field, bent double over the furrows, picking, picking, picking, like sparrows on the broad back of a black cow, clearing the earth of flints before sowing.
Then the sliding scenery slowed and slowed as the hunter dropped into a teeth-chattering trot again, and then pulled up at the closed gates. A woman erupted from the open back door of the lodge house and scuttled through a scatter of hens to swing open a tall iron gate.
‘A fine young lady you have to ride with you today,’ she said smiling. ‘Are you enjoying your ride, Miss Beatrice?’
My father’s chuckle vibrated down my spine, but I was on my dignity, high on the hunter, and I merely bowed. A perfect copy, had I known it, of my mother’s chill snobbery.
‘Say good day to Mrs Hodgett,’ my father said abruptly.
‘Nay!’ said Mrs Hodgett, chuckling. ‘She’s too grand for me today. I’ll have a smile on baking day though, I know.’
The deep chuckle shook me again, and I relented and beamed down on Mrs Hodgett. Then my father clicked to the hunter and the smooth walk bore me away.
We did not turn left down the lane that leads to Acre village as I had expected, but went straight ahead, up a bridle track where I had never been before. My excursions until now had been in the carriage with Mama or in the pony-cart with Nurse, but never on horseback along the narrow green ways where no wheels could go. This path led us past the open fields where each man of the village could farm his own strip in a ragged, pretty patchwork. My father tutted under his breath at the ill-dug ditch and the thriving thistles in one patch and the horse, eager for a signal to canter, broke forward again. His easy strides took us higher and higher up the winding path, past deep banks dotted with wild flowers and with exciting-looking small holes, crowned with hedges of budding hawthorn and dogroses.
Then the banks fell away, and the fields and hedges with them, and we were riding, silent on thick leafmould, through the beech coppice that crowds the lower slopes of our downs. Tall, straight, grey trunks rose high as a cathedral nave. The nutty, woody smell of beech tickled my nose, and the sunlight at the end of the wood looked like the bright mouth of a cave, miles and miles away. The hunter, blowing now, rushed upon it, and in seconds we were out in the brilliant sunlight at the very tipmost-topmost point, the highest peak in the entire world, the pinnacle of the South Downs.
We turned to look back over the way we had come and the shape and the setting of Wideacre opened up to me, like a magical page in a picture book, seen for the first time.
Closest to us, and extending far below us, were the green, sweet slopes of the downs, steep at the top, but easy as soft shoulders lower down. The gentle wind that always blows steady and strong along the top of the downs brought the smell of new grass and of ploughing. It flattened the grass in patches like seaweed tossing under currents of water, first one way, then another.
Where the ground grew steep and broken, the beech coppices had taken hold and now I could look down on them, like a lark, and see the thick tops of the trees. The leaves were in their first emerald growth and chestnuts showed fat, mouth-watering buds. The silver birches shivered like streams of green light.
To our right lay the dozen cottages of Acre village, white-washed and snug. The vicarage, the church, the village green and the broad, spreading chestnut tree that dominates the heart of the village. Beyond them, in miniature size like crumpled boxes, were the shanties of the cottagers who claimed squatters’ rights on the common land. Their little hovels, sometimes thatched with turf, sometimes only a roofed-in cart, were an eyesore even from here. But to the west of Acre, like a yellow pearl on green velvet, amid tall, proud trees and moist, soft parkland, was Wideacre Hall.
My father slipped the reins from my fingers and the great head of his horse dipped suddenly to crop the short turf.
‘It’s a fine place,’ he said to himself. ‘I shouldn’t think there’s a finer in the whole of Sussex.’
‘There isn’t finer in the whole world,’ I said with the certainty of a four-year-old.
‘Mmm,’ he said softly, smiling at me. ‘You may be right.’
On the way home, he let me ride alone in glorious solitude on top of the swaying mountain. He walked at my side, a restraining hand gripping the frills and flounces of my petticoats. Past the lodge gates and up into the cool quietness of the drive, he loosened his grip and walked before me, looking back to bawl instructions.
‘Sit up! Chin up! Hands down! Heels in! Elbows in! Gentle with his mouth! You want to trot? Well, sit down, tighten the rein, and dig your heels in! Yes! Good!’ And his beaming face dissolved in the heaving blur as I clung with all my small might to the leaping saddle and bit back shrieks of fear.
I rode alone up the last stretch of the drive and triumphantly brought the gentle great animal to a standstill before the terrace. But no applause greeted me. My mama watched me, unimpressed, from the window of her parlour, then came out slowly to the terrace.
‘Get down at once, Beatrice,’ she said, waving Nurse forward. ‘You have been far too long. Nurse, take Miss Beatrice upstairs and change and bath her at once. All her clothes will have to be washed. She smells like a groom.’
They pulled me off my pinnacle and my father’s eyes met mine in rueful regret. Then Nurse paused in her flight towards the house.
‘Madam!’ she said, her voice shocked.
She and my mother peeled back the layers of petticoats and found my lacy flounces stained with blood at the knees. Deftly Nurse stripped them off so she could see my legs. The stitching and the stirrup-leather flaps had rubbed my knees and calves raw and they had bled.
‘Harold!’ said my mother. It was the only sign of reproach she ever permitted herself. Papa came forward and took me into his arms.
‘Why didn’t you tell me you were hurt?’ he asked, his blue eyes narrow with concern. ‘I would have carried you home in my arms, little Beatrice. Why didn’t you tell me?’
My knees burned as if stung by nettles but I managed a smile.
‘I wanted to ride, Papa,’ I said. ‘And I want to go riding again.’
His eyes sparkled and his deep, happy laugh shouted out.
‘That’s my girl!’ he said in delight. ‘Want to go riding again, eh? Well, you shall. Tomorrow I shall go to Chichester and buy you a pony and you shall learn to ride at once. Riding till her knees bled at four years old, eh? That’s my girl!’
Still laughing, he led his horse around to the stable yard at the rear of the house where we could hear him shouting for a stable lad. I was left alone with Mama.
‘Miss Beatrice had better go straight to bed,’ she told Nurse, ignoring my wide-awake face. ‘She will be tired. She has done more than enough for one day. And she will not go riding again.’
Of course I went riding again. My mother was bound by all sorts of beliefs in wifely obedience and deference to the head of the household, and she never stood against my father for more than one self-forgetful second. A few days after my ride on the hunter and, alas, before the little scabs on the inside of my knees had healed, we heard a clatter of hoofs on the gravel and a ‘Holloa!’ from outside the front door.
On the gravel sweep outside the house stood my father’s hunter with Father astride. He was leaning down to lead the tiniest pony I had ever seen. One of the new Dartmoor breed, with a coat as dark and smooth as brown velvet and a sweep of black mane covering her small face. In a second my arms were round her neck and I was whispering into her ear.
Only one day later and Nurse had cobbled together a tiny version of a tailored riding habit for me to wear for my daily lesson with Papa in the paddock. Never having taught anyone to ride, he taught me as he had learned from his father. Round and round the water-meadows so my falls were cushioned by the soft earth. Tumble after tumble I took into the wet grass – and I did not always come up smiling. But Papa, my wonderful, godlike papa, was patient, and Minnie, dear little Minnie, was sweet natured and gentle. And I was a born fighter.
Only two weeks later, and I rode out daily with Papa. Minnie was on a leading rein and beside the hunter she looked like a plump minnow on the end of a very long line.
A few weeks after those first expeditions and Papa released me from the apprenticeship of the leading rein and let me ride alone. ‘I’d trust her anywhere,’ he said briefly to Mama’s murmured expostulations. ‘She can learn embroidery any time. She’d better learn to have a seat on a horse while she’s young.’
So Papa’s great hunter strode ahead and Minnie bobbed behind in a rapid trot to keep up. In the lanes and fields of Wideacre, the Squire and the little Mistress became a familiar sight as our rides lengthened from the original half an hour to the whole of the afternoon. Then it became part of the routine of the day that I should go out morning and afternoon with Papa. In the summer of 1760 – an especially dry hot summer – I was out every day with the Squire, and I was all of five.
These were the golden years of my childhood and even at that age I knew it. My brother Harry’s baby illnesses lingered on; they feared he had inherited Mama’s weak heart. But I was as fit as a flea and never missed a day out with Papa. Harry stayed indoors almost all winter with colds and rheums and fevers, while Mama and Nurse fussed over him. Then when spring was coming and the warm winds brought the evocative smells of warming land, he was convalescent. At haymaking, when I would be out with Papa to watch them scything down the tall rippling grass in great green sweeps, Harry would be indoors with his sneezing malady which started every year at haytime. His miserable ’atchoo, ’atchoo, would go on all through the hot days of summer, so he missed harvesting, too. At the turn of the year, when Papa promised I could go fox-cubbing, Harry would be back in the nursery or, at the best, sitting by the parlour fire with his winter ailments again.
A year older than me he was taller and plumper, but no match for me. If I succeeded in teasing him into a fight, I could easily trip him up and wrestle with him until he called for Mama or Nurse. But there was much good nature in Harry’s sweet placidity and he would never blame me for his bumps and bruises. He never earned me a beating.
But he would not romp with me, or wrestle with me, or even play a gentle game of hide-and-seek with me in the bedrooms and galleries of the Hall. He really enjoyed himself only when he was sitting with Mama in the parlour and reading with her. He liked to play little tunes on the pianoforte there, or read mournful poetry aloud to her. A few hours of Harry’s life made me unaccountably ill and tired all over. One afternoon in the quiet company of Harry and Mama made me feel as weary as a long day in the saddle riding over the downs with Papa.
When the weather was too bad for me to be allowed out, I would beg Harry to play, but we had no games in common. As I moped round the dark library room, cheered only by finding the breeding record of Papa’s hunters, Harry would pile all the cushions he could find into the window seat and make himself a little nest like a plump wood pigeon. Book in one hand, box of comfits in the other, he was immovable. If the wind suddenly ripped a gap in the thunderclouds for the sun to pour through, he would look out at the dripping garden and say: ‘It is too wet to go out, Beatrice. You will get your stockings and shoes soaked and Mama will scold you.’
So Harry stayed indoors sucking sweets, and I ran out alone through the rose garden where every leaf, dark and shiny as holly, extended a drop of rain on its luscious point for me to lick. Every dense, clustered flower had a drop like a diamond nestling among the petals and when you sniffed the sweetness, rainwater got up your nose and made it tickle. If it rained while I was roaming, I could dive for shelter in the little white latticed summerhouse in the centre of the rose garden and watch the rain splashing on the gravel paths. But more often I would take no notice at all and walk on, on and out through the streaming paddock, past the wet ponies, along the footpath through the sheltered beech wood down to the River Fenny which lay like a silver snake in the coppice at the end of the paddock.
So although we were so near in age, we were strangers for all of our childhood. And though a house with two children in it – and one of them a romp – can never be completely still, I think we were a quiet, isolated household. Papa’s marriage to Mama had been arranged with a view to wealth rather than suitability and it was obvious to us, to the servants and even to the village, that they grated on each other. She found Papa loud and vulgar. And Papa would, too often, offend her sense of propriety by donning his Sussex drawl in her parlour, by his loud, easy laugh, and by his back-slapping chumminess with every man on our land from the poorest cottager to the plumpest tenant farmer.
Mama thought her town-bred airs and graces were an example to the county but they were despised in the village. Her disdainful, mincing walk down the aisle of the parish church every Sunday was parodied and mimicked in the taproom of the Bush by every lad who fancied himself a wit.
Our procession down the aisle, with Mama’s disdainful saunter and Harry’s wide-eyed waddle, made me blush with embarrassment for my family. Only inside our high-backed pew could I relax. While Mama and Harry stuck their heads in their hands and fervently prayed, I would sit up by Papa and slip one cold hand in his pocket.
Mama would recite prayers in a toneless murmur, but my little fingers would seek and find the private magic of my papa’s pocket. His clasp knife, his handkerchief, a head of wheat or a special pebble I had given him – more potent than the bread and wine, more real than the catechism.
And after the service, when Papa and I lingered in the churchyard to learn the village news, Mama and Harry would hurry on to the carriage, impatient of the slow, drawling jokes and fearful of infections.
She tried to belong to the village, but she had no knack of free and easy speech with our people. When she asked them how they did, or when a baby was due, she sounded as if she did not really care (which was true) or as if she found their whole lives sordid and tedious (which was also true). So they mumbled like idiots, and the women twisted their aprons in their hands as they spoke, and kept their mob caps dipped low.
‘I really fail to see what you see in them,’ Mama complained languidly after one of these abortive attempts at conversation. ‘They really are positively natural.’
They were natural. Oh, not in the sense she meant: that they were half-witted. They were natural in that they did as they felt and said what they thought. Of course they became tongue-tied and awkward in her chilly presence. What could you say to a lady who sat in a carriage high above you and asked you with every appearance of boredom what you were giving your husband for dinner that night? She might ask, but she did not care. And even more amazing to them, who believed the life of Wideacre was well known throughout the length and breadth of England, was that the Squire’s lady clearly did not know she was speaking to the wife of one of Acre’s most successful poachers, and so a true answer to the question would have been: ‘One of your pheasants, ma’am.’
Papa and I knew, of course. But there are some things that cannot be told, cannot be taught. Mama and Harry lived in a world that dealt in words. They read huge boxfuls of books delivered from London booksellers and libraries. Mama wrote long criss-crossed letters that went all over England: to her sisters and brothers in Cambridge and London, and to her aunt in Bristol. Always words, words, words. Chatter, gossip, books, plays, poetry and even songs with words that had to be memorized.
Papa and I lived in a world where words were very few. We felt our necks prickle when thunder threatened haymaking and it only needed a nod between us for me to ride to one corner of the field and Papa to ride away over to the other acres to tell the men to stack what they could and be ready for the bad weather. We smelled rain on the air at the start of harvesting and, without speaking, would wheel our horses round to stop the sickle gangs from cutting the standing corn with the storm coming. The important things I knew were never taught. The important things I was born knowing, because I was Wideacre born and Wideacre bred.
As for the wider world, it hardly existed. Mama would hold up a letter to Papa and say: ‘Fancy …’ And Papa would merely nod and repeat: ‘Fancy.’ Unless it affected the price of corn or wool, he had no interest.
We visited some county families, of course. Papa and Mama would attend evening parties in winter, and now and then Mama would take Harry and me to visit the children of neighbouring families: the Haverings at Havering Hall, ten miles to the west, and the de Courcey family in Chichester. But the roots of our lives were deep, deep into the Wideacre earth and our lives were lived in isolation behind the Wideacre park walls.
And after a day in the saddle, or a long afternoon watching the labourers ploughing, Papa liked nothing so much as a cigar in the rose garden while the stars came out in the pearly sky and the bats swooped and twittered overhead. Then Mama would turn from the windows of the parlour with a short sigh and write long letters to London. Even my childish eyes saw her unhappiness. But the power of the Squire, and the power of the land, kept her silent.
Her loneliness showed itself only in her continual letters, and in the way her disagreements with Papa were never won nor lost, but dragged on in indecisive pain.
The riding quarrel rumbled on throughout my childhood. My mama was bound to conventional obedience to the Master’s word, but utterly free of any moral standard. Behind her respectability and her worship of the conventions she had the morality of the gutter. Without power, she had spent all her life seeking minuscule advantages in perpetual quest for the satisfaction of getting her own way in something, anything, however small.
Poor woman! She had no control of the housekeeping monies, which were submitted by butler and cook directly to Papa and paid for out of the estate accounts. She had no control over her dress allowance, which was paid direct to the Chichester dressmaker and milliner. Once a quarter she received a few pounds and shillings for spending money: for her church collection, for her charities and for the dizzy indulgence of buying a posy of flowers or a box of sweetmeats. And even that little purse was discreetly regulated by her behaviour. After a moment’s lapse when she had spoken out to Papa shortly after my birth, the allowance had magically stopped – a seven-year-old secret that still rankled enough for Mama to whisper it to me in her enduring resentment.
I listened not at all and cared less. I was for the Squire. I was Papa’s little girl, and I understood well enough that disloyal, resentful whispers like that were part of the same attack on me and my papa as her opposition to my riding. Mama was always in search of family life as it was depicted in her quarterly journals. That was the secret reason for her hatred of my father’s uncompromising loudness, his bawdiness, his untamed joy. That was why she gloried in the quiet prettiness of her fair-haired boy. And that was why she would have done anything to get me off horseback and into the parlour where young girls, all young girls, whatever their talents and dispositions, belonged.
‘Why don’t you stay at home today, Beatrice?’ she asked in her sweet plaintive voice one morning at breakfast. Papa had already eaten and gone, and my mama turned her eyes from his plate with the great knuckle bone of ham chewed clean and the scatter of crumbs from a crusty Wideacre loaf.
‘I am riding with Papa,’ I said, my words muffled by my own hearty portion of bread and ham.
‘I know that is what you planned,’ she corrected me sharply. ‘But I am asking you to stay at home today. To stay at home with me. This morning I should like to pick some flowers and you could help me to arrange them in the blue vases. This afternoon we could go for a drive. We could even visit the Haverings. You would like that. You could chatter with Celia.’
‘I am sorry, Mama,’ I said with all the finality of an indulged seven-year-old, ‘but I promised Papa I would check the sheep on the downs and I will need all day. I shall go to the west side this morning and then ride home for dinner. This afternoon I shall go to the east side and not be back till tea-time.’
Mama compressed her lips and looked down at the table. I barely noticed her rising irritation and her tone of anger and pain was a surprise to me when she burst out: ‘Beatrice, I cannot think what is wrong with you! Time and time again I ask you to spend a day, or half a day with me, and every time you have something else you would rather do. It hurts me; it distresses me to be so rebuffed. You should not even be riding alone. It is outrageous, when I have specifically asked for your company indoors.’
I gazed blankly at her, a fork of ham halfway to my mouth.
‘You look surprised, Beatrice,’ she said crossly, ‘but in any ordinary household you would not even have learned how to ride. It is only because your father is horse-mad and you are Wideacre-mad that you have such licence. But I will not tolerate it in my daughter. I will not permit it!’
That made me afraid. Mama’s overt opposition to my daily rides could mean I was returned to the conventional pursuits of a young lady. A miserable enough fate for anyone, but if I was to be kept inside when the ploughing started, or when the reaping bands were out, or at harvest time, I should be in continual torment. Then I heard my papa’s clatter in the hall and the door banged open. Mama winced at the noise and my head jerked up like a gun dog at the sound of game, to see his bright eyes and merry smile.
‘Still feeding, little piglet?’ he bellowed. ‘Late to breakfast, late to leave and late in the fields. You have to be on the west slope and back in time for dinner, remember. You’ll have to hurry.’
I hesitated and glanced at Mama. She said nothing and her eyes were downcast. I saw the game she was playing in one swift, acute second. She had put me in a position where my defiance of her would be absolute if I went now with my papa. On the other hand, my obedience and devotion could be transferred wholesale to her if I insisted on staying indoors. I was not going to be managed by such paltry parlour games. I swallowed my mouthful and cast Mama’s secrets before my father.
‘Mama says I must stay at home today,’ I said innocently. ‘What am I to do?’
I glanced from one to the other, the picture of childish obedience. I looked as if I sought only guidance, but in my heart I had staked a large gamble on my papa.
‘Beatrice is needed out on the downs today,’ he said baldly. ‘She can stay at home tomorrow. I want her to look at the flocks today before we separate them for market and there is no one else free who can ride up there and whose judgement I can rely on.’
‘Young ladies do not generally spend all day in the saddle. I am afraid for Beatrice’s health,’ Mama said.
Papa grinned. ‘Oh stuff, ma’am,’ he said rousingly. ‘She’s as lean and as fit as a racehorse. She’s never had a day’s illness in her life. Why don’t you say what you mean?’
Mama bridled. Plain speaking is not the natural voice of ladies. ‘It’s not the proper upbringing for a girl,’ she said. ‘Spending all her time talking with such rough men. Knowing all the tenants and cottagers and galloping around the countryside without a chaperone.’ Papa’s blue eyes sparkled with temper. ‘Those rough men earn our bread and butter,’ he said. ‘Those tenants and cottagers pay for Beatrice’s horse, aye and even the dress on her back and the boots on her feet.
A fine little city-miss you would have on your hands if she did not know where the wealth is made and where the work is done.’
Mama, a city-miss in her girlhood, looked up from the table and came perilously close to defying the convention that Ladies Never Raise Their Voices, Never Disagree with Their Husbands, and Keep Their Tempers Under the Tightest of Wraps.
‘Beatrice should be brought up in a manner befitting a young lady,’ she said tremulously. ‘She will not be a farm manager in later life; she will be a lady. She should be learning how a lady behaves.’
Papa was red to the ears – a sure sign of his temper. ‘She is a Lacey of Wideacre,’ he said, his voice firm and unnecessarily loud for the little breakfast parlour. The cups jumped and chinked as he bumped the table.
‘She is a Lacey of Wideacre, and whatever she does, however she behaves, will always be fitting. Whether she checks the sheep or even digs ditches, she will always be a Lacey of Wideacre. On this land her behaviour is the pattern of Quality. And no damned mincing, citified, pretty-pretty gentility could change that. And nothing could improve that.’
Mama was white with fright and temper.
‘Very well,’ she said through her narrowed lips. ‘It shall be as you order.’
She rose from the table and picked up her reticule, her shawl and the letters that lay by her plate. I could see her fingers tremble and her mouth working to hold back resentful, bitter tears. Papa detained her with a hand on her arm at the door and she looked up in his face with an expression of icy dislike.
‘She is a Lacey of Wideacre,’ he said again, trying to convey to this outsider what that meant on this, our land. ‘Bearing that name, on this land she can do no wrong. You need have no fears for her, ma’am.’
Mama tipped her head in cold acquiescence and stood like a statue till he released her. Then she glided, in the short dainty steps of the perfect lady, from the room. Papa turned his attention to me, silent at my breakfast plate.
‘You didn’t want to stay at home, did you, Beatrice?’ he asked, concerned. I beamed at him.
‘I am a Lacey of Wideacre, and my place is on the land!’ I said. He scooped me from my place in a great bear-hug and we went arm in arm to the stables, victors of a righteous battle. Mama watched me go from the parlour window, and when I was on my pony and safe from her detaining hand, I reined in by the terrace to see if she would come out. She opened the glass door and came out languidly, her perfumed skirts brushing the stones of the terrace, her eyes blinking in the bright sunshine. I stretched an apologetic hand out to her.
‘I am sorry to grieve you, Mama,’ I offered. ‘I shall stay at home tomorrow.’
She did not move close to take my hand. She was always afraid of horses and perhaps she disliked being too close to the pony who was pulling against the bit and pawing at the gravel, keen to be off. Mama’s pale eyes looked coldly up at me, sitting high, bright and straight-backed on a glossy pony.
‘I try and try with you, Beatrice,’ she said and her voice was sad, but also flawed with self-righteous complaint. ‘I sometimes think you do not know how to love properly. All you ever care for is the land. I think sometimes you only love your papa so much because he is the master of the land. Your heart is so full of Wideacre there scarcely seems room for anything else.’
The pony fidgeted and I smoothed her neck. There seemed little to say. What Mama said was probably true, and I felt a momentary sentimental sadness that I could not be the daughter she wanted.
‘I am sorry, Mama,’ I said awkwardly.
‘Sorry!’ she said and her voice was scornful. She turned and swept back through the door leaving me holding a restless pony on a tight rein and feeling somehow foolish. Then I loosened the rein and Minnie sprang forward and we clattered off down the gravel to the grassy track of the drive. Once in the shadow of the branches, which cast dappled bars of shade across my track while the early summer sunshine warmed my face, I forgot all about the disappointed woman I had left in her pale parlour and remembered only my freedom on the land and the work I had to do that day.
But Harry, her favourite, was a disappointment to her in another way. The high hills and the rolling chalk valleys and the sweet River Fenny flowing so cool and so green through our fields and woods were never enough for him. He seized at the chance of visits to our aunt in Bristol and said he preferred the rooftops and rows of tall town houses to our wide, empty horizon.
And when Papa broached the idea of a school, Mama turned white and reached a hand for her only son. But Harry’s blue eyes sparkled and he said he wanted to go. Against Papa’s certainty that Harry would need a better education than his own to deal with an encroaching and slippery world, and Harry’s quiet but effective determination to leave, Mama was helpless. All August, while Harry was ill again, Mama, Nurse, the housekeeper and every one of the four upstairs maids dashed around all day in a frenzy of preparation for the eleven-year-old hero’s departure for school.
Papa and I avoided the worst of the fuss. In any case, there were the long days we had to spend on the open downland pastures collecting the sheep to separate lambs from ewes for slaughter. Harry, too, remained secluded in library or parlour choosing books to take to school with him, and scanning his newly purchased Latin and Greek grammars.
‘You cannot want to go, Harry!’ I said incredulously.
‘Whyever not?’ he said, frowning at the breeze that had blown in with me as I flung open the library door.
‘To leave Wideacre!’ I said and then stopped. Once again Harry’s world of words defeated me. If he did not know that nothing outside Wideacre could match the smell of Wideacre’s summer wind, or that a handful of Wideacre earth was worth an acre of any other land, then I had no way to tell him. We did not see the same sights.
We did not speak the same language. We did not share even the similarity of family resemblance. Harry took after my father in colouring, with his bright blond curls and his wide blue, honest eyes. From Mama he had inherited her delicate bone structure and the sweetness of her smile. Her smiles were rare enough, but Harry was a merry-faced golden cherub. All the petting and indulgence he had from Mama had been unable to spoil his sunny nature – and his smiling good looks reflected his sweet and loving spirit.
Beside him I was a throwback to our Norman ancestors and the founders of the line. Foxy-coloured, like those greedy and dangerous men who came in the train of the Norman conqueror and took one look at the lovely land of Wideacre and fought and cheated and lied until they got it. From those ancestors I had my chestnut hair, but my hazel-green eyes were all my own. No portrait in the gallery showed a set of eyes slantingly placed above high cheekbones like mine.
‘She’s a changeling,’ Mama once said in despair.
‘She’s her own pattern,’ my blond papa said consolingly. ‘Maybe she’ll grow into good looks.’
But Harry’s golden curls could not last for ever. His head was cropped for his first wig as part of the preparation for school. Mama wept as the radiant springs fell all around him on the floor, but Harry’s eyes were bright with excitement and pride as Papa’s own wigmaker fitted a little bob-tailed wig on his head – as shorn as a lamb. Mama wept for his curls; she wept as she packed his linen; she wept as she packed a great box of sweetmeats to sustain her baby in the hard outside world. The week before his departure, she was in one continual flood of tears, which even Harry thought wearisome, and Papa and I found pressing business on the far side of the estate from breakfast to dinner.
When he finally departed – like a young lord in the family carriage with his bags strapped on the back, two outriders and Papa himself riding alongside for company for the first stage – Mama shut herself in her parlour for the afternoon. To my credit, I managed a few tears and I took good care to tell no one they were not for Harry’s departure. My father had bought me my first grown-up mount to console me for the loss of my brother. She was an exquisite mare, Bella, with a coat the colour of my own chestnut hair, a black mane and tail and a stripe like starlight down her nose. But I would not be allowed to try her paces till Papa came home, and he would be gone overnight. My tears flowed easily enough, but they were all for me and white-nosed Bella. Once Harry turned the corner of the drive and was out of sight, I scarcely thought of him again.
Not so Mama. She spent long solitary hours in her front parlour fiddling with little pieces of sewing, sorting embroidery silks or tapestry wool into the ranges of shades; arranging flowers picked for her by me or one of the gardeners, or tinkling little tunes on the piano – absorbed by the little time-wasting tedious skills of a lady’s life. But, unconsciously, the little tune would stop and her hands would fall into her lap, and she would gaze out of the window to the gentle shoulder of the green downs, seeing their rippled loveliness, yet all the time seeing the bright face of Harry, her only son. Then she would sigh, very softly, and drop her head to her work, or take up the tune again.
The sunlight, so joyous in the garden and in the woods, seemed to beat cruelly on the pretty pastel colours of the ladies’ parlour. It bleached the pink out of the carpets and the gold out of Mama’s hair, and the lines into her face. While she faded in pale silence indoors, my father and I rode over the length and breadth of Wideacre land, chatting to the tenant farmers, checking the progress of their crops against those we farmed ourselves, watching the flow of the River Fenny over our turning millwheel, until it seemed that the whole world was ours and I might take a proprietary interest in every living thing that – one way or another – belonged to us.
Not a baby was born in our village but I knew of it and generally the child took one of our names: Harold or Harry for my father and brother, Beatrice for my mama and me. When one of our tenants died, we concerned ourselves in the packing and the leaving of their family, if they were going, or the succession of the oldest son and the cooperation of his brothers if they were staying. My father and I knew every blade of grass on our lands, from the weeds on the lazy Dells’ farm (they would be looking for a new tenancy when their lease ran out) to the white-painted fence posts on the spick-and-span Home Farm we farmed ourselves.
Small wonder I was a little empress riding over our land on our horses, with Father – the greatest landlord for a hundred miles around – riding before me and nodding to our people who dropped a curtsy or pulled their forelocks as we passed.
Poor Harry missed all this. Not for him the pleasure of seeing our land under every daily light and in every season. The ploughed fields ringed with white hoarfrost and crunchy as fudge, or the swaying corn in the beating heat of summer. While I rode like a lord at a lord’s side, Harry moped at school and sent sorrowful letters home to his mother, who replied in pale blue ink blotted with tears of sympathy.
His first year was miserable with longing for his mama and her quiet sunny parlour. The boys all belonged to gangs with fierce tribal loyalties, and little Harry was bullied and tormented by every child an inch taller or a month older. Not until his second year brought a new batch of victims into the arena did Harry’s life improve. His third school year meant the dizzy heights of being nearly a big boy, and his cherub-like brightness and his undimmed sweetness brought him petting as well as occasional cruelty. More and more often, when he came home for the holidays, his great trunk was crammed with comfits and cakes given him by older boys.
‘Harry is so popular,’ Mama said proudly.
Each holiday, too, he would tell me tales of the courage and dash of his gang leader. How every term they would plan a campaign in the war against the apprentice lads of the town. How they marched from the school gates to spring upon the lads in glorious, epic battles. And how the hero of the day was always Staveley, Lord Staveley’s youngest son, who gathered around himself the strongest, the meanest and the prettiest of all the boys in the school.
Harry’s new-found zest for school could only widen the gulf between us. He had caught the schoolboy’s tone of arrogance like a galloping infection and, apart from boring me to death about the demigod Staveley, scarcely deigned to speak to me at all. Towards Papa he was always polite, but his unconcealed enthusiasm for his studies made Papa at first proud, and then irritated that Harry should so obviously prefer to spend his days in the library when the windows were open and the cuckoos calling to everyone to take a line and rod and try for some salmon.
Only with Mama was he totally unchanged, and those two spent long, intimate days in easy companionship, reading and writing together in library and parlour while Papa and I, intent on wider, freer pursuits, watched the land under every light, under every season and under every sort of weather. Harry could come and go as he pleased; he was always a visitor in his own home. He never belonged to Wideacre as I belonged. Only Papa, the land and I were the constant elements in my life. Papa, the land and I had been inseparable since the first time I had seen Wideacre in its wonderful wholeness from between the hunter’s ears. Papa, the land and I would be here for ever.
2
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‘I don’t know what I’ll do without you when you leave,’ Papa said casually to me one day as we rode down the lane to Acre village to see the blacksmith.
‘I’ll never go,’ I said, my confidence unshaken. I was only half attending for we were each of us leading one of the heavy plough horses to be shod. That was easy for Papa, high on his hunter, but my dainty mare only came up to the work-horse’s shoulder, so I had to keep her alert and wide awake to follow his great strides.
‘You’ll have to go some day,’ said Papa, looking over the hedges to see the plough using the second team of horses starting to turn over the sluggish winter earth. ‘You will marry and leave with your husband. Perhaps you’ll be a fine lady at Court, not that there’s much of a Court left and all filled with ugly German women, Hanover rats, they call ’em; but you’ll be away and care nothing for Wideacre.’
I laughed. The idea was so ludicrous and adulthood so far away that nothing could shake my belief in the trinity of Papa, and me, and the land.
‘I won’t marry,’ I said. ‘I shall stay here and work with you and look after Wideacre, like you and I do now.’
‘Aye,’ Papa said tenderly. ‘But Harry will be Master here when I’m gone, and I would rather see you in your own home than rubbing against him. Besides, Beatrice, the land is well enough for you now, but in a few years you will want pretty clothes and balls. Then who will watch the winter sowing?’
I laughed again with my childish confidence that good things never change.
‘Harry knows nothing about the land,’ I said dismissively. ‘If you asked him what a short-horn was, he would think it was a musical instrument. He’s not been here for months – why, he hasn’t even seen the new plantation. Those trees were my idea, and you planted them just where I thought they should be. The man said I was a proper little forester – and you said I should have a stool made from the wood of my trees when I was an old lady! Harry cannot be Master here – he is always away.’
I still had not understood. Silly fool that I was. Though I had seen enough older sons inheriting the farms and enough younger sons working as day labourers or going into service before they could marry their patient sweethearts, I had never thought of them as landowners as we were.
I never imagined that the rule that favoured older sons to the exclusion of all others could ever, possibly, apply to us – to me. I had seen village girls of my age working as hard as adult women to earn money for the family coffers. I had seen their sisters, a few years older, on the look-out for older sons – always the eldest – to marry. But I never thought that the rigid, crazy rule that the first boy takes all could apply to us. It was a feature of the lives of the poor, like early death, poor health and starvation in winter. These things were not the same for us.
Oddly, I had never thought of Harry as the son and heir, just as I had never thought of Mama as the Mistress of Wideacre. They were simply private individuals, seldom seen outside the walls of the park. They were the background to the glory of the Squire and me. So my father’s words had not disturbed me – they had passed me by.
I had much to learn, the little girl that I was then. I had never even heard of ‘entail’, the legal process of tying up a great estate so it is always handed to the next male heir – be he ever so distant, even if there are a hundred daughters loving the land before him. With childlike concentration I still had the ability to hear only what interested me – and speculation about the next Master of Wideacre was as remote as the music of the spheres.
While I dismissed the thoughts from my mind, my father had pulled up his hunter to chat with one of our tenants trimming his boundary hedge of blackthorn and dogroses.
‘Good morning, Giles,’ I said, my seat in the saddle, the tip of my head, a perfect copy of my father’s friendly condescension.
‘Mistress.’ Giles touched an arthritic hand to his head. He was years younger than my father but bent double with the burden of poverty. A lifetime of waterlogged ditches, muddy fields and frozen pathways had permeated his bones with agonizing arthritis which no amount of dirty flannel wrapped round his skinny legs seemed to cure. His brown hand permanently ingrained with dirt (our dirt) was as knotted and as gnarled as a holly trunk.
‘A grand little lady she’s becoming,’ he said to my father. ‘’Tis sad to think she’ll have to leave us some day soon.’ I stared at the old man. My father picked a sprig of clipped elder from the hedge with the butt of his whip.
‘Aye,’ he said slowly. ‘But a man must run the land and maids must marry.’ He paused. ‘The young Master will be home soon when he’s finished with his books. Time enough then to learn of country ways. The fields and the downs are good enough for a girl with the teaching her mother gives her, but these are bad times. The next Master of Wideacre will need to know his way in the world.’
I listened, silent. Even my mare seemed to freeze as my father spoke and the great shire-horses dropped their heads as if to listen while my father tore down the secure world of my childhood with his quiet, deadly words.
‘Yes, she’s a good girl and as sharp on the land as a bailiff for all she’s so young. But she’ll be off to marry some lord or other some day, and young Harry will take my place. He’ll be all the better for his learning.’
Giles nodded. There was a silence. A long, country silence punctuated with the springtime birdsong. There was no hurry on that timeless afternoon which marked the end of my childhood. My father had said all he had to say and said nothing. Giles said nothing, thought nothing, gazed into space. And I said not a word for I had no words to deal with this pain. In a series of clicks, like the moving parts of some strange and cruel clock, all my pictures of the adult world were falling into place. The precious elder son always took the land – and the redundant girls could go where they could find a man to take them. My residence at Wideacre was not an exclusive favour, and Harry’s departure an exile – but I was kept at home because I was not worth educating.
Harry’s school was not an interruption of his Wideacre life but an essential preparation for it. While I had been revelling in the land and the freedom of being the only child at home, Harry had been growing stronger and more skilled and would return to expel me from my home. Papa did not love me best. Papa did not love me best. Papa did not love me best.
I took a deep shuddering breath, softly, softly, so that no one could hear. And I looked at my father with a new, strange clarity. He might love me tenderly, but not enough to give me Wideacre. He might wish the best for me, but he could see no further than a good match and permanent exile from the one place in the world that was my home. He might plan ahead for Harry’s future but he had forgotten me. Forgotten me.
So that was the end of my childhood; that warm spring day on the lane to Acre with the two great shire-horses beside my papa and me, and Giles, blank as chalk scree, staring at nothing. The absolute security of owning the land I loved left me, then, in that moment, and I never had it fully back. I left my childhood with my heart aching and my mind full of anger and resentment. I started adulthood with a bitter taste in my mouth and a formless determination that I would not go. I would not leave Wideacre. I would not surrender my place to Harry. If it was the way of the world that girls left home, then the world would have to change. I would never change.
‘You’ll have to hurry and change,’ my mama said in her continual, unconscious contradiction of me. She held the hem of her green silk dress clear of the puddles in the stable yard as we clattered in. Always, she had this way of innocently opposing me, just as she continually opposed my father. From her I learned early that you do not have to argue or to state your beliefs to oppose someone. You can simply turn your head from them; from their ideas, from their loves and their enthusiasms. Without Papa, she might well have been a more direct, a sweeter-natured, woman. With him, her sense of her own purpose had soured into frustration. What should have been directness and honesty had become unspoken opposition.
‘You must hurry and change into your pink silk,’ she repeated with emphasis as I slid from the saddle and tossed the reins to a waiting stable lad. ‘We’ve a special guest for dinner – Harry’s headmaster.’
My father directed a long, silent look at her.
‘Yes,’ she said defensively. ‘I did ask him to visit. I am worried about the boy. I’m sorry, Harold, I should have told you earlier, only it is some time since I wrote and I thought he was not coming at all. I would have mentioned it before …’ She broke off and stopped. I understood my father’s rising irritation. But his reply was checked, as a man all in black except for the white band of a clerical collar appeared at the rose-garden gate.
‘Dr Yately!’ my father said in a tone of convincing delight. ‘How good to see you! And what a surprise! I should have been home to meet you had I known you were coming.’
The tall man nodded and smiled and I gained a quick impression of a cool, astute man of the world. I dipped my curtsy and shot another look at him as I rose. This was no social call. He had come for a purpose and he was anxious to complete his mission. I saw his wary eyes assessing Papa, and I wondered what he wanted of us.
He had come, it was clear, to do Mama’s work for her. She still longed to have Harry home to fill the gap his absence had left in her life. Dr Yately, for reasons I could not yet guess, was ready to take the part of the pale wife against the Squire himself. For some reason, he was as anxious to be rid of Harry as Mama was to have him home.
I attended dinner in the girlish dress of maidenly pink and correctly said not a word except in reply to a direct question – and I had few of them. I sat facing my mother. It was one of my father’s foibles that a male guest should take the foot of the table and he the head. So Mama and I – equally unimportant – sat in silence while the men talked over our heads.
Dr Yately had evidently come to persuade my father to remove Harry from his expensive, exclusive school. But if he succeeded, he stood to lose a pupil who had taken every costly extra, who was likely to need a tutor from the school to attend him to university, and who might well choose to take that tutor with him to Europe on the Grand Tour. With the disappearance of Harry, Dr Yately could say goodbye to thousands of pounds of fees. So why should he want to be rid of him? What could Harry have possibly done that was too gross a secret for a frank explanation to my father, and too shameful for Dr Yately simply to overlook and continue to pocket the money?
The clever man knew his business. He kept off the subject of Harry but praised the roast beef and relished the wine (only our second-best claret I noticed). He clearly knew nothing about farming but he drew my father out to talk about some of the new techniques we might try. My father grew expansive, jovial. He even offered Dr Yately the chance of a few days’ hunting next season if he could take a holiday. Dr Yately was polite, but non-committal.
Once Papa started melting towards the visitor and broached another bottle, Mama was in a hurry to leave the gentlemen together. With the sharp regret of a fourteen-year-old girl who had been on horseback all day, I watched some apple charlotte returning to the kitchen. But Mama rose from the table and Dr Yately and Papa politely bowed us from the room and settled down to their port and talk.
My mother’s pale face was flushed with pleasure as she opened her workbox and handed me my embroidery.
‘Your brother Harry will come home as soon as term ends, and never go to that dreadful place again, if only your papa agrees,’ she said, elated.
‘So early?’ I asked, keenly defensive of my position. ‘Why? What has he done?’
‘Done?’ Her eyes met mine directly, no subterfuge in their pale shadows. ‘Nothing! Whatever could he do? It’s what those brutes of boys have done to him.’ She hesitated and chose a strand of silk.
‘When he was last home for the holidays he needed a chest plaster, do you remember?’ Of course I did not. But I nodded.
‘Both Nurse and I saw marks on his poor body. He had been beaten, Beatrice. He begged me to say and do nothing, but the more I thought of it the more certain I was he should be taken away from that school. I wrote to Dr Yately and he replied that he would see what was happening. Then he arrived here today!’ My mother’s voice was full of pride that she had taken action that had produced results, and dramatic results. ‘He tells me that Harry has been forced to join one of the boys’ gangs, and that in their games they have some shocking rules and punishments. The worst boy – the ringleader – is the son of …’ She paused. ‘Well, never mind who, precisely. But it is someone the Doctor simply must not offend. This boy has established some sort of hold over Harry. He made him sit next to him in class, have his bed next to him in the dormitory and has teased and bullied him all term. Dr Yately says he cannot separate them and he suggests – Oh! I hope your papa agrees – that Harry is of an age when he could pursue his studies at home and learn about the estate at the same time.’
Unseen by Mama, my head low over my embroidery, I raised ironic eyebrows. Harry learn about the estate, indeed! He had lived here all his life and did not even know the exact lie of our borders. He had driven through Wideacre wood every Sunday, and yet he did not know where in the wood there was a nightingale’s nest, or where in the stream you could always find trout. If Harry was going to learn about the estate it was to be hoped he could find it in a book, for he had never even glanced from the library windows when he was last home.
But my confidence was undermined by a shiver of unease. All Harry knew about Wideacre at the moment could be written in a chapbook. But once he was home at the request of Mama, and not because Papa needed him, he might become the son my papa had wanted; had sought in me. He might become, in truth, the heir.
The gentlemen did not come to the drawing room for tea and Mama sent me early to bed. After my maid had twisted my chestnut hair into one fat plait down my back, I sent her away and climbed out of my bed to sit on the window seat. My bedroom was on the second floor, facing east, overlooking the fat sickle of the rose garden, which curves around the front and east of the house and with a glimpse of the peach trees and fruit cages of the kitchen garden. Not for me the larger bedrooms in the front of the house, like Harry’s room, which faces south. Still, from where I sat I could see the garden in the moonlight and the wood pressing up to the garden gates. The cool night air carried countryside smells to me. The promising scent of growing meadows, damp with dew and the occasional warble of a restless blackbird. From the woods I heard the abrupt bark of a dog fox and from downstairs I could hear the rumble of my father’s voice as he talked about horses. I knew then that the quiet man in black had got his way with Papa and Harry would be coming home.
A dark shadow crossing the lawn interrupted my thoughts. I recognized the gamekeeper’s lad, a boy of my age, built like a young ox, with a lurcher dog – a poacher’s dog to catch poachers – at his heels. He saw the candle in my window and came from the garden (where he had no business to be) to stand beneath my window (where he had no business to be), one hand casually on the warm sandstone wall. The silk shawl I had over my nightdress seemed too flimsy when I saw his warm eyes on me, and his smile as he gazed upwards.
We were friends, and yet not friends, Ralph and I. One summer, when Harry had been especially unwell and I had been left to run wild, I had found this unkempt boy in the rose garden and, with the haughtiness of a six-year-old, ordered him out of the gate. He tipped me into a rose bush with one hard shove as his reply, but when he saw my shocked, scratched face, he kindly offered to pull me out again. I took his proffered hand and, as soon as I was on my feet, I bit it as hard as I could and took to my heels – not to the Hall for shelter, but through the lychgate to the wood. This refuge was impenetrable to Mama and Nurse who were ignorant of the little animal pathways among the thickets, and were forced to stand at the gate, calling and calling, until I chose to reappear. But this stocky child wormed along the tracks as fast as I went, and arrived at a little hollow among brambles, roses and bushes on my heels.
His dirty little face was split in a broad grin and I grinned back. It was the start of a friendship that, childlike, lasted the summer and then stopped as quickly and as thoughtlessly as it had begun. Every day during that hot, dry summer I would escape from the busy parlourmaid, who had suddenly found my care added to her duties, and skip down to the woods. Ralph would meet me by the Fenny and all morning we would fish and splash in the stream, go on great expeditions all the way to Acre lane, climb trees, rob birds’ nests, or catch butterflies.
I was free because Harry was watched night and day by Nurse and Mama. Ralph was free from the day he could walk because his mother, Meg, a slattern in a tumbledown cottage in the middle of the woods, had never troubled where he went or what he did. This made him a perfect playmate for me – and he taught me all the paths and trees of Wideacre woods in a great sweep around the Hall as far as my little legs could carry me in a morning.
We played like country children, speaking little and doing a lot. But the summer soon ended; Harry recovered, and Mama returned to her eagle-eyed scrutiny of the whiteness of my pinnies. Mornings were again given over to lessons, and if Ralph waited in the woods while the leaves turned yellow and red, he would not have waited for long. Very soon he had given up playing altogether and trailed around behind the gamekeeper, learning the skills of keeping game and killing vermin. Papa heard Ralph’s name as the handiest lad in the village for pheasant chicks, and by the time he was eight he was paid a penny a day in the season.
By the time he was twelve he was earning half a man’s pay but doing a man’s job in and out of season. His mother had come from nowhere; his father had disappeared, but that meant he was free of the family loyalty that kept poachers safe in Acre village. And his tumbledown house in the woods was an advantage too. They put the pheasant breeding pens all around the dirty little cottage by the Fenny and Ralph’s deepest sleep could always be broken by the crack of a twig near the game birds.
Eight years is a lifetime in childhood, and I had almost forgotten the summer when the dirty little urchin and I had been inseparable. But somehow, when I was mounted on my pretty mare, with my tailored habit and tricorn hat, I felt awkward riding past Ralph. When he pulled his forelock to Papa and nodded to me I did not feel easy and gracious as I said, ‘Good day.’ I did not enjoy stopping and talking with Ralph, especially if I was riding alone. And I did not like now the way he leaned, so self-possessed, against our wall and looked up at me, illuminated by my candle.
‘You’ll take cold,’ he said. His voice was already deep. He had filled out in the past two years and had the solid strength of a young man.
‘Yes,’ I said, shortly. I did not withdraw from the window for that would somehow have been a concession to his advice … and an acknowledgement that I was conscious of his eyes on me.
‘Are you out after poachers?’ I asked, unnecessarily.
‘Well, I’m not going courting with a dog and a gun,’ he said in the slow drawl of the downs. ‘A fine lass I’d get with a gun and a trap, don’t you think, Miss Beatrice?’
‘You’re too young to think of courting,’ I said dictatorially. ‘You’re no older than me.’
‘Oh, but I do think of courting,’ he said. ‘I like to think of a warm, friendly lass when I wait alone in the woods on a cold night. I’m not too young for courting, Miss Beatrice. But you’re right, we are the same age. Are girls of near fifteen too young to think of loving and kisses on warm summer nights?’
His dark eyes never left mine, and they seemed somehow to shine in the moonlight. I was very glad – and yet somehow sorry – that I was safe in the house, high above him.
‘Ladies are,’ I said firmly. ‘And the village girls would know better than to think of you.’
‘Ah.’ He sighed. The country silence filled the pause. His dog yawned and stretched out on the gravel at Ralph’s boots. Contradictorily, I wished with all my heart that he would look at me again in that shining, hot way, and that I had not called myself a lady and reminded him that he was nothing. His head dropped and his eyes no longer stared up at me, but were fixed on the ground. I could think of nothing to say; I felt awkward and foolish and also sorry, deeply sorry, to have been arrogant to one of our people. Then he shifted his weight and hefted his gun over his shoulder. Despite the shadows I could see he was smiling, and that he needed my pity not at all.
‘A lady is the same as a village girl in the cold, or in a quiet hayloft, or in a little hollow of the downs, I reckon,’ he said. ‘And if fifteen is old enough for me, I reckon it’s old enough for you, too.’ He paused. ‘My lady,’ he added, and his voice made it into an endearment.
I choked with shock, and while I said nothing like a fool, Ralph whistled to his dog, a black dog, his shadow, and left me without even a by-your-leave. He walked like a lord across his own acres, a dark shape in the shadowy garden, over our lawn and through the little gate to our woods. I was stunned at his impertinence. Then, with a sudden spurt of rage, I bounced from my window seat to go down to the Squire, who should have him whipped. Dragging on my wrapper, I was halfway to the door before I paused. For some reason, I could not think why, I did not want Ralph whipped – or thrown off Wideacre. He should certainly be punished, but not by my father, nor the gamekeeper either. I, alone, should find some way to wipe that insulting, warm smile from his face. I went to bed planning revenge. But I could not sleep. My heart was thudding so loud. I was surprised it should beat so fast with rage.
In the morning, I had all but forgotten him. It meant nothing, nothing at all, that I chose to ride in the direction of his home. I knew he would have been watching for poachers in the woods all night, and so would be home till noon at least in the horrid, damp cottage near the disused mill on the River Fenny. The flow had never been reliable there, and my father’s father had built a new mill to grind our corn further upstream. The old mill had fallen into disrepair and the tiny worker’s cottage alongside seemed to be sinking into the boggy ground. The woods grew close to the back door of the low-roofed shack, and as Ralph grew taller I believe he must have stooped all the time indoors. It was a two-roomed place, more a hovel than a cottage.
His mother was a dark, large-boned woman with wild, dangerous looks like his. ‘A gypsy of a woman,’ my father called her with relish.
‘Really?’ said my fair-haired mother coldly.
We often rode this way, my father and I. He would stop outside the poor cottage and Meg would come out to him, stooping under the low eaves, her skirt held high above the mud, barefoot, her strong brown ankles splashed and dirty. But she met my father’s eyes with a proud, bright smile like an equal, and brought him home-brewed ale in a rough cup. When he tossed her a coin she caught it as if it were her due, and sometimes I saw the hint of a smile of understanding between them.
There could not be secrets between this wild and lonely woman and the Squire, my father. But once or twice when he had ridden fast from home, full of impatience with my mother and her small, fiddling ways, we had seemed naturally to drift towards the Fenny and the little cottage in the woods where Meg, the gypsy woman, swayed towards us with her barefoot dancing step and her eyes bright with knowledge.
She was supposed to be a widow. Ralph’s father, the black sheep of one of the oldest families in Acre, had been pressed into the Navy and disappeared: dead, or missing, or run away. The other men of the village followed her with their eyes like hungry dogs but she looked neither to right nor left. Only my father, the Squire, brought a smile to her eyes, and those dark eyes to his face. No other man was ever worth a second glance. So, although she had offers, oh, many, she and Ralph never moved from the dark little house by the river.
‘A hundred years ago she would have been burned for a witch,’ said my father.
‘Oh, really?’ said my unbewitching mother.
She did not seem surprised to see me at her garden gate alone, but then nothing surprised her. She nodded and brought me a cup of milk in the way of country hospitality. I drank, still sitting sidesaddle on my mare and, as I drained the cup, Ralph came like a midnight shadow from the woods. He had a pair of dead rabbits hanging from one hand and his dog, as ever, at his heels.
‘Miss Beatrice,’ he said in a slow greeting.
‘Hello, Ralph,’ I said graciously. In the bright daylight his nighttime power had gone. His mother took my cup and we were alone in the sunlight.
‘I knew you would come,’ he said confidently. It was as if the sun had gone out. Like a mesmerized rabbit I gazed straight into his dark black eyes and could see nothing, nothing, but his eyes fixed on mine and the slow smile of his mouth, and the way a small pulse was beating quick under the tanned skin of his throat. The tall youth had all the power of last night. He carried it with him. He stood at my mare’s head and I was glad to be seated above him, at shoulder height in the saddle.
‘Oh, really?’ I said, in unconscious imitation of my mother’s frigid tones. Abruptly, he turned, and walked away from me, through the purple foxgloves to the Fenny. Without thinking what I was doing, I slid from the saddle, hitched my horse’s reins to Meg’s ramshackle fence and followed him. He never glanced behind, he never waited for me. He walked as if he were quite alone, down to the riverbank, and then turned upstream to where the ruins of the mill stood, the deep millpond dark behind it.
The wide, arched door where they used to load the wagons stood open. Ralph never looked back and I followed him without a word inside. A half-floor for storing sacks stretched across the room, a rickety ladder leading up to it. In the warm gloom of the old building I could smell the fusty, safe odour of old straw and feel the thick softness of dusty chaff underfoot.
‘Want to see a swallow’s nest?’ Ralph offered nonchalantly.
I nodded. Swallows are lucky and their little mud and grass cupshaped nests on beams or ledges under the eaves always pleased me. He led the way up the ladder and I followed unhesitatingly. When he reached the top he stretched out a hand to pull me up, and when I stood beside him, he did not let my hand go. His eyes met mine in a long, measuring stare.
‘There they are,’ he said. He pointed to the nest being built on a low beam under the roof. As we watched, a parent bird swooped into the barn with a tiny beakful of mud to add to the growing sides and swooped away. We watched in silence. Ralph let my hand go and slid his hand around my waist, drawing me closer. We stood side by side and his hand smoothed over the velvet of my gown up to the curve of my small breast. Without speaking a word, we turned together and he dipped his head to kiss me. The kiss was as gentle as the flight of the swallow.
His mouth brushed mine with soft, gentle touches. As he repeated them, I felt him tense, and the grip on my waist grew tighter. Swoony with pleasure, I found my knees giving way beneath me and I sank on to the dusty straw-strewn floor with my arms around him.
We were half children, half adult. I knew everything about mating animals, but nothing of kisses and lovemaking. But Ralph was a country lad and had been drawing a man’s wage and drinking with men for two years. My hat fell off as I tipped my head back to meet his kisses, and it was my hands that opened the neck of my gown to his exploring, clumsy fingers, and opened his shirt so I could press my forehead to his chest and rub my burning face against him.
Somewhere in the back of my mind a voice said: ‘Fever. I must have a fever.’ For my legs were too weak to rise and somehow I was trembling, trembling all over. In the core of my body, under my ribcage, was a fluttering, painful feeling. Down my spine was a long, long shiver. Ralph’s smallest move made me shudder. When his forefinger drew a line from under my ear to the base of my neck, he could feel me tremble all over. ‘I must be ill,’ said my drowning consciousness. ‘I must be very, very ill.’
Ralph eased back from me and leaned on an elbow looking down into my face. ‘You should go,’ he said. ‘It’s getting late.’
‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘It can’t be two o’clock yet.’
I fumbled in my pocket for my silver watch, a miniature copy of my father’s, and opened it.
‘Three!’ I exclaimed. ‘I shall be late!’ I jumped to my feet, reaching for my hat and shaking the straw from my skirt. Ralph made no effort to help me, but leaned back against an old stook of straw. I buttoned the front of my gown, watching him covertly under my eyelashes. He pulled a straw from the stook and chewed on it, watching me, impassive. His dark eyes showed nothing. He seemed as content to be left as to be visited, as still as a secret pagan god left neglected in old woods.
I was ready to go and should have been hurrying away, yet the flutter under my ribcage had become some sort of ache. I did not want to leave just yet. I sat down again beside him and laid my head prettily on his shoulder.
‘Say you love me before I go,’ I whispered.
‘Oh, no,’ he said without heat. ‘I’ll have none of that.’
In surprise I jerked my head back to stare at him.
‘You don’t love me?’ I asked, astounded.
‘No,’ said Ralph. ‘You don’t love me, do you?’
I paused, a cry of outrage on my lips. But I could not say I did love him. I liked the kissing very much, oh, so very much, and I would like to meet him again, here in the darkness of the old mill. Perhaps the next time I would slide my dress off and feel his hands and lips all over me. But he was, after all, Meg’s son. And he lived in such a dirty little cottage. And he was only the gamekeeper’s lad and one of our people. And we let him and Meg live in the cottage for practically nothing; it was almost charity.
‘No,’ I said slowly. ‘I don’t suppose I do.’
‘There are those who love and there are those who are loved,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘I’ve seen grown men weep like babies for my mother, and she never look at them. Gentlemen, too. I’ll never be like that for a woman. I’ll never love and pine and fall sick for someone. I shall be the one who is loved, and gets the presents and the loving and the pleasure … and then moves on.’
I thought swiftly of my father, bluff and heart-whole, and of my mother’s stifled sighs and pining for the love of her son. Then I thought of the girls I had seen in the village follow a lad with their eyes and blush scarlet and grow pale. Of the village girl who drowned herself in Fenny pool when her lover went into service in Kent. Of the constant pain there is for a woman in loving, and wedding, and childbirth and the loss of looks and then the loss of love.
‘I shan’t be the one who loves either,’ I said firmly.
He laughed aloud.
‘You!’ he said. ‘Oh, you are like all the Quality. All you care for is your own pleasure and owning the land.’
Our pleasure and owning the land. It is true. His kisses had been pleasure; wonderful swoony pleasure. Good food, a taste of wine, hunting on a frosty morning; these things are pleasure. But to own Wideacre is not pleasure; it is the only way to be alive. I smiled at the thought. He smiled kindly in return.
‘Oh,’ he said longingly, ‘you’ll be a proper little heartbreaker when you are ready. With those slanty green eyes of yours and your beechnut hair, you’ll get all the pleasure you want, and all the land, too.’
Something in his voice convinced me he was telling the truth. I would have all the pleasure, and all the land as well. My misfortune of being born a girl would not be my destiny. I could take pleasure, and I would take land, too, just like a man. And the pleasure I would have in courting would be far more than any man would have. Ralph had enjoyed our kissing, I knew, but his pleasure had been nothing to mine. I had been faint with delight at the feelings of my silky skin. My body was a perfect animal, so lithe and slim and sweet. I would get pleasure with any man I wanted. I would get the land, too. I wanted Wideacre with every waking thought, and breath, and dream. And I deserved Wideacre, too. No one cared for it as I did, or loved it as I did, or knew it as well as I.
But I looked at Ralph speculatively. I had heard something else in his voice, and his eyes were no longer impassive; they were warm and sensuous again.
‘You could love me!’ I said. ‘You nearly do already.’
He threw out a hand in the way the lads do when they wrestle and want to surrender.
‘Oh, yes,’ he said, as if it hardly mattered. ‘And perhaps I could make you love me. But there would be no place for us. You belong at the Hall and I belong in Meg’s cottage in the woods. We can meet in secret and take our pleasure in dark and dirty places, but you will marry a lord and I will marry some slut from the village. If you want love, you must find someone else. I will take you only for pleasure.’
‘For pleasure then,’ I agreed, as seriously as swearing to a covenant. I turned my face to him and he kissed me solemnly as a binding pledge. I scrambled to my feet, but then I paused to look at him. Leaning against the stook of straw, he looked like some dangerous harvest deity. I smiled at him, almost shyly, and went back to stand before him. Lazily, he reached up a hand to me and pulled me down to him. I was in his arms once more; we smiled into each other’s eyes like equals, as if there were no Hall and no cottage. Then his hard mouth came down on mine and my hat fell off again.
I did not get any dinner that day.
But I was not hungry.
3
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For three unbearable days, Mama, in a flutter of excitement over Harry’s promised return, had the landau out every day to take us into Chichester to buy new wallpaper for his room. The journal she read was full of the craze for the Chinese style, and Mama and I leafed through prints of dragons until my head spun with weariness and boredom. Three long days, while the early summer sun grew hotter and, somewhere, by the river, Ralph waited. Yet I spent every one of them in the drapers of Chichester choosing a new bedspread for Harry, selecting new brocades for the curtains and hangings in his room.
It was all for Harry, all for Harry’s return. When I asked if I might also have new curtains and hangings for my room, I met with one of Mama’s most hurtful rebuffs.
‘It hardly seems worth it,’ she said vaguely. She said no more. She needed to say no more. It was not worth the expense for the second child, in second place. It was not worth the expense to please a girl. It was not worth the expense to decorate a room for one who was merely passing through on her way to a marriage and another home.
I said nothing; but I begrudged Harry every penny. I said nothing; but I begrudged him every fraction of his unearned status. I said nothing; but I ill-wished him every morning of those three long days.
If I knew my brother at all, he would enjoy his fashionable room for the first week, then forget it. But I knew also his sweetness, and that Mama would be repaid for her trouble in full by one of his tender, gentle smiles. Nothing would repay me for my trouble because I loathed days in Chichester, sitting idly in a shop while Mama played princess and hesitated between one shade of colour and another. Worse than all of this, for some reason I was ill.
I did not tell Mama, for I dreaded her concern, and for some reason I did not want to be touched by anyone. When I stretched out my kid-gloved hands and spread the fingers, I could see they trembled. Worse, my belly gave great, unaccountable leaps in swoops like fear or dread. I was not hungry. Only Mama’s obsession with the redecorating distracted her from the fact that for the past three days I had eaten only at breakfast.
Stroking the pile of some printed velvet in one shop, I thought suddenly of the smoothness of the skin of Ralph’s shoulders and my knees buckled suddenly. I sank into a chair and found my heart racing and I could not catch my breath. ‘I must be ill,’ I thought.
On the evening of the third day we followed the sun home. It was setting over the downs in a gold and rosy glow. Mama was a fulfilled woman. In the bandboxes of the landau we had silks and satins for new cushion covers, quilting and new patterns. Following us tomorrow would be brocades, wallpapers and several pieces of extremely ugly furniture which were to convert Harry’s lovely old English bedroom into something as like a pagoda as the Chichester merchants and Mama could imagine.
Mama was at peace with her purchases all around us, and I was smiling like a madonna to be driving home through the mild evening air of a Wideacre spring. The smells of the roadside flowers blew towards us as the weary horses trotted home, ears pricked for their stable. In the banks I could see the greeny yellow of the last primroses and in the little coppices the bluebells shimmered in a watery haze. Blackbirds singing for their loves trickled out notes so sad and lovely, and as we turned through the tall lodge gates, I could hear the insistent call of the cuckoo.
In the shadow of a great yew tree by the lodge gate stood Ralph. The horses were walking and I was carried slowly past him. His eyes were fixed on mine as if neither of us could see anything else. All around me the wood grew dim as if I were suddenly blinded. My belly gave a great lurch as if in mortal terror and then the terror turned to joy and I smiled at Ralph as if he himself had brought the spring, the bluebells and the cuckoo. He tipped his head at the landau – but he did not tug his forelock in the usual way of our people – and his eyes never left mine. His face warmed and his eyes crinkled in a slow intimate smile. The carriage went past at walking pace, but oh! far too fast. I did not look back, but I felt his eyes, warm, desiring, on the back of my neck all the way up the drive until the sweep around the great copper beech hid me from him.
The next day, God bless them, the carters lost a wheel from the wagons and could not bring the goods. Mama was in a fidget to set me to work hemming curtains but she had to wait. Tomorrow, I might be indoors labouring over Harry’s damned dragons, but today I was free. The day stretched before me like a reprieve from a death sentence. I changed out of my morning dress into my new green riding habit – back from Papa’s tailor only that week – and twisted my hair under the matching green hat with especial care. Then I was off on pretty Bella, down the drive and across the stone bridge over the Fenny. I turned her to the right to let her canter down the track that runs alongside the river.
The Fenny was swollen with the spring rains and was brown and boiling like clear soup. Its swirlings and splashings over new-formed waterfalls matched my mood and I rode at an easy canter beside the river, smiling. The beech trees were in their early haze of green over my head and between the rustling leaves of last autumn new straight shoots were poking through, miraculously slender and strong. Every bird in the world was calling, calling for a mate. The universe of Wideacre was alive with the urgency of love and springtime, and I was dressed in green like life itself.
Ralph was sitting beside the river, a rod in his hands, his back against a fallen pine. He looked up at the sound of my horse’s hoofs and smiled without surprise. He seemed as much part of my beloved Wideacre as the trees themselves. We had not planned this meeting but it was as natural as the birdsong that we should meet whenever we wished. Ralph by the river drew me to him as surely as hidden water draws a forked willow stick to point downwards.
I tied Bella to an elder bush and she drooped her head in recognition that we were here for the afternoon. My steps rustled in the leaves as I walked towards him and stood, waiting, before him.
He smiled up at me, squinting against the brightness of the springtime sky behind me.
‘I’ve missed you,’ he said suddenly and my heart jumped as if I had taken a tumble from one of Papa’s hunters.
‘I could not get away,’ I said. I put my hands behind my back so he should not see them tremble but, absurdly, my eyes seemed to be filling with tears and I could not keep my lips from quivering. I could hide my hands and no one could tell under the smooth skirts of my green gown that my knees were weak, but my face seemed naked as if I had been caught in sleep or in a second of shameful fear. I risked a glance at his face and caught his eyes upon me. I saw in that second his easy confidence had gone. Ralph, too, was as tense as a snare. I could see his breath was as fast as if he had been sprinting. In wonder, I stepped forward and put out a hand to touch his thick, black hair. In a swift, unpredictable movement he snatched my hand and tugged me down beside him. Both his hands on my shoulders he glared into my face as if torn between a desire to murder, and a desire to love me. I had no thoughts. I just gazed back as if I was famished for the look of him.
Then the dangerous, fiery look melted from his eyes and he smiled at me as warm as a summer day.
‘Oh, Beatrice,’ he said, lingeringly. His hands slid from my shoulders down the neat-cut jacket to my waist and he pulled me close and kissed my lips, my eyelids and my throat. Then we sat side by side, with his arm around me and my head on his shoulder, watching the river and the bob of his pine-cone float for a long, long time.
We spoke little, for we were still country children. When the float bobbed and Ralph jumped to pull the line in, I had his cap ready to catch the fish as neatly and surely as in our childhood summer. Dead leaves, bracken and old twigs made a little fire under the trees by the river, and Ralph cleaned the trout and spitted it on a twig while I fed the little flames. I had eaten little for three days and the burned skin of the trout was salty and good. It was part raw, but whoever cares for such things when it is your own trout from your own river cooked on a fire of your own twigs? I washed my fingers and mouth in the rushing water and drank some of the sweet flood. Then I leaned back against the log and Ralph’s arms were around me.
Young ladies, girls of the Quality, are said to have painful childbirths, difficulty monthly seasons, fearful loss of virginity. Without one direct, honest word, Mama had ensured I knew that wifely duties included the making and bearing of an heir, and had convinced me that the task would be disagreeable and painful. Perhaps it is. Perhaps mating the man of your parents’ choice in the great wooden family bed, with the plans of two families on you, and your duty clear before you, is a painful insult to your body. All I know for certain is that to lie with the lad of your choice, like any free maid, under the Wideacre trees and sky is to become part of the old magic of the land, to hear the great heart of Wideacre thud in your ears, to feel the pulse of the earth.
We rolled together as inexpert, yet as graceful, as otter cubs; then the inexplicable, unexpected, unplanned sensations added and added and added up to a sudden crisis of delight that left me gasping and weeping into Ralph’s shoulder while he said, ‘Oh,’ as if he were extraordinarily surprised.
Then we lay in silence, clasped together as close as interlaced hands. And then, like the children we were, we fell asleep.
We woke, cold, cramped and uncomfortable. My back was patchy with the impress of twigs and leaves and Ralph had a red line across his forehead from pitching forward against the bark of the log. We huddled into our clothes and hugged for warmth as the quick springtime twilight lengthened the shadows of the bushes and the trees. Then Ralph cupped his hands for my foot and tossed me into the saddle. There was one wordless, warm look between us and then I turned my horse’s head and trotted for home. I felt badly in need of a hot bath and a huge meal. I felt like a goddess.
Those first wordless meetings set a pattern of pleasure that grew and grew all spring and early summer as the days warmed and the crops greened the dark fields. The lambs, the cows in calf and the sowing kept me out of Mama’s way with an excuse for absence almost every day. Once I had looked over the animals, or helped move the flocks up to the sweet grass of the spring downs, I could do as I pleased. Ralph knew some hidey-holes in the woods further afield than where we had played as six-year-olds, and on the few wet days we met at the old mill again. Above our shifting bodies, the little swallows hatched and were fed. I knew we had been lovers for weeks when the little hungry squeaks from the nest of mud grew louder and louder, and then one day they had flown. It was the only sign I noticed of passing time.
The transition from spring to high summer seemed to stand still that year to allow Ralph and me endless warm secret afternoons. The land itself conspired to hide us as the bracken on the common grew taller, and the undergrowth in the woods thicker and more lush. The weather of that wonderful spring smiled and smiled until Papa said he had never known such a season – that it must be magic to make the hay so early.
Of course it was magic. Through every warm day and through every dream at night, Ralph strode like a dark god of the earth making all of Wideacre glow with growth while our passion and our loving made the days sunny and long and the night skies full of the clearest stars.
We grew more skilled at pleasing each other but we never lost some sense of awe at each other’s mere presence. Just being there, under the swooping tall beech trees or curled up under the bracken, seemed a continual wonder to me. Anything we could imagine, any refinement of pleasure we could dream, we did with tenderness, with laughter, with breathless excitement. We would lie naked for hours touching each other all over, taking turns.
‘Is it nice if I touch you like this? Like this? Like this?’ I would ask while my fingers, face and tongue explored Ralph’s outstretched body.
‘Oh, yes. Oh, yes.’
We loved the excitement of near discovery as well. We met unplanned one afternoon when Ralph had come to the Hall with a hare and I was picking roses for Mama in the garden. He came from the kitchen at the back of the house and the gate clanged as he entered the garden. I turned, saw him and the basketful of roses dropped, instantly forgotten. Reckless of the windows of the house, which overlooked the garden, Ralph simply strode towards me, took my hand and led me to the summerhouse. He stood, back arched to carry my weight, and lifted me on to him, my silk dress creased and bunched between us, his head pressing down to kiss my breasts. We gasped in hasty incredulous pleasure, and Ralph set me down on my feet again. Then we laughed, and could not stop laughing at the sheer comic audacity of lovemaking in the garden in broad daylight before Mama’s parlour, before every window in the front of the house.
On my birthday morning in May, when I woke early with excitement to hear the birds singing and singing at the rosy dawn, my first thought was not of the expensive presents I could expect from Papa and Mama, but what Ralph might bring me.
I did not have long to wonder. While I splashed water on my face I heard a low, long whistle under my window and, wearing only my shift, I swung open the casement window to lean out and see Ralph, smiling with joy at seeing me.
‘Happy birthday,’ he called in a hoarse whisper. ‘I have brought you a present.’
I jumped down from the window seat and went to my dressing-table drawers for a ball of yarn. Like a fairy-tale princess, I dropped it from my window and Ralph tied a little withy basket carefully on the threads. I pulled it in as gently as if I were landing a salmon, and laid it on the window seat beside me.
‘Is it alive?’ I said in surprise when I heard a rustle of leaves inside the meshes.
‘Alive and scratching,’ said Ralph and held up a hand to show me a long red scratch along the back.
‘A kitten?’ I guessed.
‘Not for you,’ Ralph said dismissively. ‘Something more exciting.’
‘A lion cub,’ I said promptly and smiled to hear Ralph’s slow country chuckle.
‘Open it and see,’ he advised. ‘But open it carefully.’
I unfastened the little catch on the lid and peeped inside. A deep blue gaze met mine, a glimpse of ruffled, fluffed-out, angry feathers – a baby owl, rolled on his back with his sharp taloned feet pointing up at me in defence, a hoarse, cross squeaking coming from his open, buttercup-yellow beak.
‘Oh, Ralph!’ I said, entranced. I glanced down; Ralph’s face was beaming with love and triumph.
‘I climbed the pine tree right up to the top for that one,’ he said proudly. ‘I wanted to give you something no one else could give you. And something from Wideacre.’
‘I shall call it Canny,’ I said, ‘because owls are wise.’
‘Not very wise,’ he said, teasing. ‘We nearly fell out of the tree when it scratched me.’
‘And I shall love it for ever because you gave it to me,’ I said, gazing at its mad, deep blue eyes.
‘Wisdom and love then,’ said Ralph, ‘and all earned by one little owl.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, with my heart in the words.
‘Coming out later?’ he asked casually.
‘I might,’ I said and beamed down at him. ‘I’ll be down at the mill straight after breakfast,’ I promised. Then I turned my head to listen for the noise of a maid stoking the kitchen fire. ‘I must go,’ I said. ‘See you at the mill, and thank you for my present.’
There was a small, disused store room among our outbuildings and there we decided to keep Canny. Ralph taught me how to feed the baby bird with raw meat wrapped in fur or feathers, and how to gently stroke its breast feathers so it hooded its blue eyes to doze.
That summer, Ralph would have climbed any tree, dared any risk for me. And I would have done anything for him. Or almost anything. One thing I would never do for him, and if he had been wiser, or less in love, he would have been warned by it. I would never take him into my papa’s bed. Ralph had a longing to lie with me there, in the great master bed, under the dark, curved wooden roof upheld by the four pillars as thick as pine trunks. But I would not. However much I loved the gamekeeper’s lad, he would never lie with me in the bed of the Squires of Wideacre. I evaded the question, but one day, when Papa and Mama were visiting in Chichester and the servants were on a half-day holiday, Ralph asked me directly to lie with him there, and was met with a direct refusal. His eyes went black with anger, but he said nothing and went alone to set snares in the woods instead. He soon forgot that one isolated refusal. A wiser man would have remembered and carried that reservation of mine through every day of that golden, timeless summer.
It was no timeless summer for Mama, who counted the days until the return of her golden boy from his school. She even made a little calendar, which she hung on the parlour wall, marked with the days of his term. Indifferently, I saw one day ticked off every evening. With little enthusiasm, and even less skill, I hemmed curtains and helped embroider the dragon counterpane for Harry’s new-style bedroom. And despite my ham-fisted efforts with the curly tail of the stupid beast, it was completed in time and spread on Harry’s bed to await the arrival of the emperor himself.
The first day of July, too good a day to waste at the parlour window listening for Harry’s carriage, saw us waiting for him. As soon as I heard hoofs on the drive I obeyed my instructions and called to Mama. She summoned Papa from his gun room and we stood on the steps as the carriage swept around the bend in the drive and drew up before the front door. Papa greeted Harry, who jumped boyishly from the carriage, without waiting for the steps to be let down. Mama surged forward. I held back, resentment, jealousy and some sort of fear in my heart.
Harry had changed in this last term. He had lost his rounded, puppy-fat face and looked like a clear, lean youth rather than a golden baby. He was taller. He greeted Papa with a frank smile of affection and beamed at Papa’s great bear-hug. He kissed Mama’s hand and cheeks with tenderness, but he did not cling to her. Then, and this was the greatest surprise of all, he looked around for me and his bright blue eyes lit up when he saw me.
‘Beatrice!’ he said, and jumped up the front steps in two long-legged strides. ‘How pretty you have grown! How grown up you are! Do we still kiss?’
I lifted my face to him with an easy smile in reply, but I felt my colour rise at the touch of his lips on my cheek and the soft prickle of the little growing hairs of his upper lip.
Then Mama swept upon him and took him into the house, and Papa talked loudly over her fluttering inquiries about the roads and the inns and when he had last dined, and they all left me alone on the sunny front door steps as if I had left the house and belonged nowhere at all.
But it was Harry who paused at the parlour door and looked back through the open front door and called to me. ‘Come in, Beatrice!’ he said. ‘I have a present for you in my bags.’
And my heart suddenly lightened to see his smile and the hand he held out to me. And I went with quick steps into the house and felt that perhaps Harry might not displace me, but could make my home a happier place for me.
However, as the days went on Harry’s charm wore a little thin. Every housemaid, every tenant’s daughter, had a smile for the good-looking young Master. His new confidence and awareness of himself won him friends everywhere he chose to ride. He was charming, and he knew it. He was handsome, and he knew it. We laughed that now I had to look up to him, for he was a head taller than me.
‘You will not bully me any more, Beatrice,’ he said.
He was still bookish: two of his trunks from school were filled with nothing but writings on philosophy, poems, plays and stories. But he had outgrown his childish illnesses and was no longer forced to spend all days indoors reading. He even made me feel ashamed that I had read so little. I might know more about the land than Harry ever could know, for I had spent years out on Wideacre and my heart was in it, as his never was. But that counted for little when Harry would toss off a reference to a book and say, ‘Oh, Beatrice! You must have read it! Why it’s in our library. I found it when I was about six.’ Some of his books were about farming, too, and not all of them were foolish.
This new Harry was the product of the natural growth of a boy nearing manhood. The ill health of his childhood was forgotten. Only Mama still worried about his heart. Everyone else saw his slimmer body, the strength in his arms, the brightness of his blue eyes and his conscious, sly charm with the pretty housemaids. But the principal influence was still Staveley. Staveley’s name was once more heard daily in Mama’s parlour and at the dinner table. Mama had her own opinions about Staveley and his gang. But she kept her head down, her tongue still and let her adored son talk and talk. He boasted about his role as Staveley’s right-hand man. The gang had grown more and more daring and its discipline more and more strict. Harry was second in command, but that had saved him no beatings from the demigod Staveley. Staveley’s swift rages, his harsh punishments, his tender forgiveness, were retailed to me in many confidences.
Harry missed his hero terribly, of course. Throughout his first weeks at home he wrote every day, asking for news of the school and Staveley’s gang. Staveley himself replied once or twice in an ill-formed and misspelled scrawl Harry treasured. And another boy wrote once or twice. His last letter told Harry he was now Staveley’s second in command. On that day Harry looked gloomy, took his horse out in the morning, and was late for dinner.
Yet however pleasant Harry could now be as a companion, with him at my side I was no longer free to slip away to meet Ralph by the river, on the common land or on the downs. As the days went on, I grew more and more impatient with Harry always at my side. I could not get rid of him. Mama wanted him to sing to her; Papa needed him to ride to Chichester, but Harry chose to go with me, while Ralph waited and waited and I burned up with desire.
‘Every time I order my horse from the stables, he has to go riding, too,’ I complained to Ralph in a snatched moment as we met by accident on the drive. ‘Every time I go into a room in the house he trails around after me.’
Ralph’s bright dark eyes shone with interest.
‘Why does he follow you so close? I thought he was tied to your mother’s apron strings?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘He’s never paid much heed to me before. Now I can’t shake him off.’
‘Maybe he wants you,’ said Ralph outrageously.
‘Don’t be silly,’ I said. ‘He’s my brother.’
‘Maybe he’s learned something at that school of his,’ Ralph persisted. ‘Perhaps he’s had a wench at school and learned to look at a girl. Maybe he sees, like I saw, that you are young and burning and ready for pleasure. Maybe he’s been away from home so long he’s forgotten he should think of you as a sister and just knows he’s in the same house as a girl who is warmer and lovelier every day and looks just about ready for all that a man could offer.’
‘Nonsense,’ I said. ‘I just wish he would leave me alone.’
‘Is this him?’ Ralph asked, nodding to an approaching horseman. My brother, in a riding coat of warm brown, which set off his broadening shoulders, was trotting towards us. He looked, surprisingly, like a young copy of my father, mounted on one of the high Wideacre hunters. He had my father’s proud, easy way and his ready smile. But Harry’s sweetness was all his own and his lithe slimness showed no sign of Papa’s broad solidity.
‘It’s him,’ I confirmed. ‘Be careful.’
Ralph stood a little back from my horse’s head, and pulled his forelock respectfully to my brother.
‘Sir,’ he said.
Harry nodded at him with a sweet smile.
‘I thought I’d ride with you, Beatrice,’ he said. ‘We could go up on the downs for a gallop.’
‘Certainly,’ I said. ‘This is Ralph, Meg’s son, the gamekeeper’s lad.’ Some devil prompted me to make them face each other, but my brother barely glanced at him. Ralph said nothing, but watched my brother intently. Harry simply did not realize Ralph was there.
‘Shall we go?’ he said, smiling. With a sudden shock I remembered the gulf between Ralph and me, which I had forgotten in the days of sensuality under the equal sky. Harry, of my blood and my Quality, ignored Ralph because Ralph was a servant. People like us, my brother and me, were surrounded by hundreds and thousands of our people who meant nothing; whose opinions, loves, fears and hopes never could mean anything to us. We might take an interest in their lives, or we might ignore them completely. It depended wholly on ourselves. They had no choice in the matter. For the first time, seeing Ralph beside my graceful, princely, high-riding brother, I blushed in shame, and the dreams of those spring days seemed a nightmare.
We turned our horses and moved off. I felt Ralph’s eyes on us as he watched us ride away, but this time they did not fill me with joy but with dread. I rode stiff-backed, and my mare felt my unease and pricked her ears and was wary.
I was proud, but I was young and sensual and it had been many days since I had been alone with Ralph. The track up to the downs was where I had ridden with my father on the first day I had seen the sweep of Wideacre from horseback, and it was a favourite meeting place for Ralph and me. As we rode through the beech coppice I could remember a long lazy afternoon of teasing each other’s desire in a deep shady hollow, and as the horses climbed to the highest point of the downs they passed one of our little nests of ferns. My shame faded in the memory of pleasure.
In that spot, only a few yards from the hoofs of my brother’s horse, I had insisted that Ralph lie as still as a statue while I undressed him and ran my tongue and the long tresses of my hair all over his body. He had groaned with desire and with the conflicting pain of the struggle to lie still. In sweet revenge, he had laid me on the grass and kissed me lingeringly all over, in every unexplored sensitive crevice of my naked body. Only when I was actually weeping with longing did he slide into me.
Remembering that pleasure made me burn with a wet heat and I glanced sideways at my brother in sudden dislike that he should interrupt my summer with Ralph now the bracken stood high to hide us, and only a soaring peregrine falcon could see with his sharp black eyes our secret nakedness.
I said suddenly, ‘I have to go, Harry. I am not well. It is one of my headaches.’
He looked at me with quick concern. I felt a passing pity at his tender gullibility.
‘Beatrice! Let me take you home.’
‘No, no,’ I said, maintaining the pretence. ‘You enjoy your ride. I shall go to Meg’s house and have some of her feverfew tea. That always cures them.’
I cut short his protests and anxiety by turning my horse back down the way we had come. I felt his eyes upon me and drooped in the saddle as if every step jolted my aching head. But once I was under the shelter of the beech trees, and out of sight, I sat up and swung along at a good pace back down the track. I took the short cut to Meg’s cottage – not up the drive but a neat little jump over the park wall – and then a brisk canter alongside the Fenny to where the little heap of a house slumbered in the sunshine. Ralph was sitting outside, his dog outstretched beside him, knotting a cord into a snare. At the very sight of him my heart twisted inside me. He heard the horse’s hoofbeats and laid his work aside. His smile as he walked to the gate to meet me was warm and easy.
‘Shaken off your high and mighty brother then?’ he asked. ‘I felt I was dirt on the road compared to him.’
I had no answering smile. The contrast between the two of them was too painful.
‘We rode on the downs,’ I said. ‘Near our places. I missed you too much. Let’s go to the mill.’
He nodded as if accepting an order and the smile had gone from his eyes. I tied the mare to the gate and followed him along the little path. As soon as he was inside the door he turned, took me in his arms and started to say something, but I dragged him down to the straw and said urgently, ‘Just do it, Ralph.’
Then my anger and my sadness melted as I felt the familiar, ever new pleasure starting to warm me. He kissed me hard with an anger and sorrow of his own, and then opened the front of my gown at the neck. With shaking fingers I untied the leather thongs at the front lap of his breeches while he fumbled among the layers of petticoats under my riding habit. I said impatiently, ‘Let me!’ and swept the habit and petticoats off over my head.
Naked, I spread myself under him and shivered with pleasure as his weight came down on me. We were panting like hounds, hard-pressed. My hands gripped his buttocks forcing him into me, and in some distant recess in my head I could hear my sobbing whimper of pleasure settle into a rhythm of sighs that matched the rocking of our loving bodies. Then the great half-door swung wide open and a white wall of brilliant sunshine fell on us like a physical blow. For a second we were frozen with shock and terror, Ralph twisting round and me peeping white-faced over his shoulder.
In the sunlit archway stood my brother, his eyes blinking in the gloom, peering at the sight of his naked sister impaled by lust on a dirty threshing floor. For a split second nothing moved, like an obscene tableau, then Ralph leaped off me. I rolled to one side, crouching for my clothes and Ralph hitched his leather breeches over his hard nakedness. Still no one spoke. The silence lasted a lifetime. I stood, my new riding habit clutched to my naked breasts, staring at my brother in a sort of terror.
Then Harry gave a choking cry and rushed at Ralph with his riding whip upraised. Ralph was heavier and taller, and had been fighting village lads since he could walk. He fended Harry off and Harry’s wild blows with the whip fell only on his arms and shoulders. But then a cut across his cheek slashed him into anger and he jerked the whip from Harry, thumped him hard in the belly and tripped him roughly to the floor. Harry thudded down on his back and a sharp kick from Ralph’s foot into the crutch made him scissor together in a ball. He cried out, I thought in pain, and I called urgently, ‘Ralph. No!’
But then my brother’s face lifted from the dusty straw and I saw his angelic smile and the haze of his blue eyes. My blood ran cold as I recognized Harry’s blissful expression of happiness as he lay in the dirt at Ralph’s feet and gazed slavishly up the length of his tall body and at the whip in his hand. He shifted his body in the dust and crawled towards Ralph’s bare feet.
‘Beat me,’ he said in a begging, childish voice. ‘Oh please, beat me.’
As Ralph’s incredulous eyes met mine in the dawning realization that we would escape scot-free, I knew at last why my brother had been expelled and the mark Dr Yately’s school had left on him for life.
Ralph’s light flicks of the whip slapped Harry’s well-cut jacket and breeches and Harry tightened his grip on Ralph’s naked foot and gave a sharp cry then a shuddering sigh of pleasure. The future Master of Wideacre sobbed like a baby with his face buried in dirty straw, his hands cupping a labourer’s foot. Ralph and I looked at each other in utter silence.
That silence lasted, it seemed, all summer. My brother no longer dogged my footsteps, walked in my shadow, hung around the stables while I watched my horse being groomed, trailed behind me when I walked in the garden, sat at my side in the parlour in the evening. Now he followed Ralph. My father was pleased that Harry should be out on our land and not wandering around the house or sitting indoors. Slowly Harry learned the fields, the woods and the River Fenny as he followed in Ralph’s footsteps as faithfully as Ralph’s new black spaniel puppy. As Ralph checked the coverts, scattered grain for the game birds, set wire-noose traps and noted the fox holes and the badgers’ dens Harry shadowed him, learning, in the course of his faithful pursuits, the secrets of Wideacre I had learned as a child.
I was free of him at last, but Ralph and I were impossibly awkward when we met in my brother’s silent, sharp-eyed presence. Even on the few days when I rode out early to see Ralph before Harry was up, we did not embrace with the old passion. I felt chilly and tense and Ralph was stoical and silent. I felt as if at any moment my brother might come upon us and might again crawl to Ralph’s feet for a beating. I could not even ask Ralph if he and my brother …? If on their long wanderings around the estate they, too, paused in sheltered hollows and …? Whether when Ralph’s untrained puppy rolled on its back after a beating, Ralph turned to Harry with the whip still raised and …? I could not. I could not picture the two of them together; I could not find words for the questions I longed to ask, but did not dare.
Perhaps I should have felt jealous, but I felt nothing. The magical summer of Ralph, the dark god, seemed to be over. It had ended like the magic it was, as soon as it had begun. It ended for me on the drive on that hot day when Ralph pulled his forelock to my brother and my brother had not even noticed. Ralph had taught me about pleasure, and to keep my heart well guarded, but there could be no future for us. He was one of our people, a servant, and I was a lady of Wideacre. When I rode to hounds on a hunter of my own, or took the carriage to church, or walked over our fields, I should not want to see Ralph slouching beside a hedge smiling at me with his secret, knowing smile. It was not jealousy but a sharp sense of caste that made me hate that smile when I saw it directed at my brother; when I saw the gamekeeper’s lad with the next Master at his beck and call.
So I saw little of Ralph in the following weeks and he did not seek me. He smiled that secret smile at me once when I was driving down the lane to Acre beside Mama in the carriage, and I thought I saw behind his velvety black eyes some message. It was as if he were waiting for something. For a chance to speak freely with me, for an opportunity to turn a long-considered idea into words. But he was a country boy and believed in waiting for the right season.
In any case, his time was taken up with a sudden increase in poaching. The price of mutton had soared sky high after an epidemic of foot rot in the spring, and even our own tenants were not respecting our coverts. Pheasant after pheasant went missing and at every meal Harry spoke of Ralph’s plans to catch the poachers and praised Ralph’s determination and daring.
It was a dangerous job. The penalty for poaching is death by hanging and the men driven to it are desperate men. Many a poacher has added murder to his crimes – clubbing down a gamekeeper who had recognized him. Ralph kept his guns constantly primed and carried a heavy stick. His two dogs – the black lurcher and the black spaniel puppy – scouted before and behind him, as much to protect their master as the pheasants.
At breakfast, dinner and tea we had enthusiastic accounts from Harry as to how the war against the poachers was going, and how Ralph’s assistance to the gamekeeper was making all the difference. Then when Bellings, the keeper, fell sick with the flux, Harry was urgent that Ralph be paid an extra two shillings a week and given the job until the older man was well again.
‘He’s very young,’ said my papa cautiously. ‘I think it might be wiser to bring in an older man until Bellings is well.’
‘No one knows the estate better than Ralph, Papa,’ said Harry confidently. ‘And although he is young he is fully grown and as strong as an ox. You should see how easily he throws me when we wrestle! I don’t think any other person could do the job better.’
‘Well,’ said my papa tolerantly, his eyes on Harry’s bright face, ‘you’ll be the Master here when I am gone. Appoint a young keeper like Ralph and you will work with him for all your lives probably. I’m happy to take your advice on this.’
My eyes flickered to Papa’s face and then back to my plate. Only a few weeks ago Papa would have asked me what I thought. Then I would have praised Ralph to the skies, for I adored him. Now I was not so sure. He had my brother in utter thrall, and my ears had pricked up at the mention of their wrestling bouts. It sounded like Staveley all over again. And for some reason, I could not have said why, I feared the idea of Ralph having such a hold on Harry’s impulsive heart.
‘I need someone to check the sheep today,’ said Papa, looking down the table with his eyes equally on Harry and me.
‘I’ll go,’ said Harry, ‘but I must be done by dinner. Ralph has found a kestrel’s nest and I am going after it this afternoon before the hen lays a second brood.’
‘I’ll go,’ I said. ‘They’ll need to be checked for foot rot and you will not recognize the signs, Harry.’
Papa beamed, unconscious of the latent jealousy in my voice.
‘It seems I have two bailiffs then!’ he said, pleased. ‘What d’you say, ma’am?’
Mama smiled, too. At last everything was falling into what she saw as its proper place. Only I was still intractable.
‘Harry should go,’ she said sweetly. ‘I need Beatrice to cut some flowers this morning, and this afternoon she may come with me and pay some calls.’
My eyes flew to Papa’s face in an instinctive, silent appeal. But he was not looking at me. Now his son was home our easy, loving comradeship had taken second place. He was watching Harry learning his way around the land with as much love and interest as he had shown when he had been teaching me. There was pride as well as love in his eyes when he looked at his tall, golden son. He saw Harry growing, broadening and developing from the milksop mother’s boy into a young man. And he saw in him the future Master of Wideacre.
‘Harry can go then,’ he said with careless cruelty. ‘I’ll ride out with you, Harry, and show you what foot rot looks like. If Beatrice is right and you do not know, then it’s high time you learned. Wideacre is not all play, you know!’
‘I wanted to ride today,’ I said, my voice small and my face mutinous.
Papa looked at me and he laughed as if my disappointment and pain were funny.
‘Ah, Beatrice!’ he said with casual, worthless affection. ‘You must learn to be a young lady now. I have taught you all I know on the land. Your mama must teach you all you need to know in the house. Then you can rule your husband in and out of doors!’ He laughed again and Mama’s little tinkling laugh told me I had been beaten.
Harry learned to spot foot rot from Papa and he also used the time to persuade Papa that Ralph and Meg should be rehoused. When I heard him mention it at tea, I could not keep a still tongue in my head.
‘Nonsense,’ I exclaimed. ‘Ralph and Meg do very well in their little cottage. It’s practically rent-free as it is, and Meg is a sluttish housekeeper. The straw roof is blowing away because Ralph is too lazy to glean straw to rethatch it and Meg is too idle to care. They’ve no call to be rehoused. Meg would not know what to do with a good house.’ My father nodded his agreement, but he looked to Harry. The way his eyes strayed from me cut me to the bone. He was looking at his successor, his heir, measuring his judgement. My opinion as the daughter of the house might be right or wrong, it hardly mattered.
But Harry’s judgement mattered very much, for on him the future would depend. He was the male heir.
Papa had not ceased to love me. I knew that. But I had lost his attention. He had broken the thread of our constant companionship that had held me ever since he first took my pony on a leading rein and that had kept my mare to his horse’s shoulder ever after. Now there was another horse riding beside my papa: the future Squire’s.
I might ride my mare, or practise the piano, or paint little pictures, it hardly mattered. I was the daughter of the house. I was just passing through. My future lay elsewhere.
And while Harry had Papa’s ear, Ralph had Harry’s. And if I knew Ralph he would use that influence for his own ends. Only I could see clearly into Ralph’s mind. Only I knew the longing for the land. Only I knew how it felt to be an outsider in your own home, on your own land. Forever longing to belong and to be secure. Forever denied.
‘Ralph’s a first-rate man,’ Harry said firmly. He had lost most of his quiet diffidence but still had his gentle voice and manners. He was openly disagreeing with me, without a thought in the world that I might be irritated or angry. ‘It would be a shame to lose him and there are many landlords who would pay him more and house him better, too. I think he should have the Tyacke cottage when the old man dies. It’s a handy cottage and near to the coverts.’
I nearly exploded with anger at my brother’s stupidity. ‘Nonsense! Tyacke’s cottage is worth £150 a year and the entry fee to a new tenant is £100. We can’t throw money like that away on Ralph’s convenience. We could repair his old cottage or move him into a small cottage in the village, but the Tyacke cottage is out of the question. Why, it’s practically a house! What would Ralph or Meg want with a front parlour – they’d only use it to keep the pheasant chicks in.’
My mother, stone-deaf to the discussion, heard only the tone of my voice and it roused her from her habitual indifference.
‘Beatrice, decorum,’ she said automatically. ‘And don’t interfere with business, dear.’
I ignored the caution, but my father nodded at me to be silent.
‘I’ll consider it, Harry,’ he said. ‘Ralph is a good man, you’re right. I’ll look into it. He’s reliable with pheasants and foxes and we need to keep him on the estate. Beatrice is right that the Tyacke property is a handsome cottage, but Ralph does need something more than that shack by the stream. Full of ideas Ralph is. Why, he’s even got one of those mantraps for the woods. He knows his job and he works hard. I’ll consider it.’
My brother nodded and smiled at me. There was no malice or triumph in his smile. His friendship with Ralph had brought him a new confidence but no arrogance. His smile was still that of a cherubic schoolboy, his eyes still the clear blue of a happy child.
‘He will be pleased,’ he said serenely.
I realized then that this was Ralph’s idea, Ralph’s arguments, Ralph’s very words. He had given me pleasure and possessed me, but he held my brother in the palm of his hand. Through my brother he could influence my father and I knew, because I knew Ralph, that he was after more than the pretty little Tyacke cottage to rent. He was after land, and then more land. More to the point, he was after our land. Few people ever move more than five miles from the village where they are born. Ralph was born on Wideacre land; he would die here. If he wanted land, it was our land he was after. The cottage was just a first step for him and I could not imagine where his hunger would end. I understood it as clearly as I understood myself. I would have done anything, committed any crime, any sin, to own our fields and woods. With a growing fear I wondered if Ralph also had the same desire, and how my besotted brother would ever stand against him.
I excused myself from the table and slipped out to the stables, ignoring my mother’s murmured instructions. I needed to see Ralph, no longer as a lover needs to see the man she loves, but to see if I could feel in him the passion for the land that he had seen in me. If he wanted Wideacre as much as I wanted it – the serene and lovely house, the warm gardens, the folds of the hills and the rich, peaty earth with the silver traces of sand – then my family was lost. Harry’s enthusiasm would admit a cuckoo that would throw us mercilessly to one side and claim the golden kingdom for himself. My mare trotted swiftly down the track to the cottage that was suddenly not good enough for Ralph, and then shied, nearly unseating me, as a bush near the path swayed and rustled.
‘Ralph!’ I said. ‘You nearly had me off!’
He grinned. ‘You should ride on a tighter rein, Beatrice.’
I turned the head of my horse and urged her forward so I could see what Ralph was doing. He was pegging out the jaws of a huge mantrap, a vicious weapon, on to the ground. It yawned like a great clam, custom-made in a London workshop for the protection of the gentry’s sport. Nearly four feet wide, made of sharpened, spiky iron with a spring as quick as the crack of a whip.
‘What a horrid thing,’ I said. ‘Why aren’t you putting it on the path?’
‘I can see the path from the cottage,’ said Ralph. ‘They know that. Just here, before the path bends, they creep through the bushes to get to the pheasants roosting. I’ve seen the prints of their boots. I reckon this will give them a welcome they weren’t expecting.’
‘Does it kill a man?’ I asked, visualizing the jaws snapping shut.
‘Can do,’ said Ralph, unconcerned. ‘Depends on his luck. In the great estates in the north they stake them out round the walls and check them once a week. If a man is caught, he may bleed to death before the keeper comes round. Your father wouldn’t allow such a thing here. If the man is lucky, he has two broken legs; if he is unlucky and it has cut a vital path of blood, he bleeds to death.’
‘Won’t you be there quick enough to save him?’ I asked, repelled by the weapon spread like a deadly invitation in the leaves.
‘Nay,’ Ralph drawled, unconcerned. ‘You’ve seen me cut a deer’s throat. You know how quick an animal dies when the blood is gushing. It’s the same with a man. But chances are they’ll just walk a little slowly for the rest of their days.’
‘You’d better warn your mother,’ I cautioned.
Ralph laughed. ‘She was away as soon as she saw it,’ he said. ‘She’s fey, you know. Said it smelled of death. Begged me to have nothing to do with it.’ He glanced at me sideways. ‘I sleep alone here during the afternoons and I watch at night.’
I ignored the unspoken invitation, though a prickling on my skin reminded me of what a long afternoon in Ralph’s cottage would have meant in the time that had gone.
‘You’re very thick with Master Harry,’ I said.
He nodded. ‘He’s learning his way round the woods,’ he said. ‘He’s got no feeling for the land like you, but he’ll make a good enough Squire in time with the right bailiff.’
‘We’ve never had a bailiff,’ I said swiftly. ‘We don’t have bailiffs at Wideacre.’
Ralph, still kneeling, gave me a long, cool look. His eyes were as bright and sharp as the teeth of the trap.
‘Maybe the next Squire will have a bailiff,’ he said slowly. ‘Maybe that bailiff will know the land well, better than the Master even. Maybe that bailiff will love the land and be a good Master to it, better than the Squire himself. Isn’t that the Master the land should have? Isn’t that the sort of man you’d like to see here, at your side?’
I slid off my mare and hitched the reins to a low branch, carefully away from the trap.
‘Let’s walk to the river,’ I said. ‘Leave that.’
Ralph kicked a few more concealing leaves over the trap and turned to follow me. I swayed towards him as we walked and my cheek brushed his shoulder. We walked in silence. The River Fenny, our river, is a sweet clean trout stream you can drink in safety over every inch of our land. The salmon reach this far in summer, and you can always have a trout or a bowlful of eels for half an hour’s netting. The pebbles here are golden and the river is a streak of silver in the sunlight with mysterious amber pools under the shades of the trees. We watched the endless flow of water over the stones and said in unison, ‘Look! A trout!’ and smiled that we should speak together. Our eyes met in a shared love of the trout, the river and the sweet Sussex earth. The days of absence slid away from us, and we smiled.
‘I was born and bred here,’ Ralph said suddenly. ‘My father and his parents and their parents have been working this land for as long as we can trace back. That gives me some rights.’
The river babbled quietly.
A fallen tree trunk spanned the river. I stepped on to it and sat, my legs dangling over the water. Ralph balanced down the trunk and leaned against one of the branches looking at me.
‘I can see my way clear now,’ he said quietly. ‘I can see my way clear through to the land and the pleasure. D’you remember, Beatrice, when we spoke that first time? The land and the pleasure for both of us.’
A trout plopped in the river behind him, but he didn’t turn his head. He watched me as close as my owl watched me at night, as if to read my thoughts. I looked up, a slanting, sliding glance out of the corner of my tilted eyes.
‘The same land and the same pleasure. We share them both?’
He nodded. ‘You’d do anything to be Mistress of Wideacre, wouldn’t you, Beatrice? You’d give anything you owned, make any sacrifice there was, to be the Mistress in the Hall and be able to ride over the land every day of your life and say, “This is mine.”’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘But you’ll be sent away,’ he said. ‘You’re not a child any more. You can tell what your future will be – sent to London and married to a stranger who will take you far away, perhaps to a different county. The land, the weather and the farming will be all different. The hay won’t smell the same; the earth won’t be the same colour. The milk and cheese will taste different. Harry will marry some high-bred girl who will come and queen it here and take your mother’s place. You’ll be lucky if you’re allowed a visit once a year at Christmas.’
I said nothing. The picture was too clear, all too likely. Ralph had been planning while I had been dreaming. Everything he said was right. I would be sent away. Harry would marry. Wideacre would not be my home for ever; I would be far away in some unknown part of the country. Perhaps, even worse, I would have to live with some fashionable husband in London and never smell new-mown hay again. I said nothing, but I hurt inside and I was afraid.
The bedroom my mama would not redecorate for me, the warning my papa had given me, the love they both showed for Harry all told me, as clear as a tolling bell, where I was going. I was on my way to exile, and all my will and all my passion could not save me.
Ralph turned his head from my shocked face and watched the stream. The slim, silver trout was finning gently, nose pointing upstream as the sweet water flowed all over him.
‘There is a way to stay here and be the Lady of Wideacre,’ he said slowly. ‘It is a long and crooked way, but we win the land and the pleasure.’
‘How?’ I said. The ache of loneliness in my belly made my voice as quiet and as low as his. He turned back to me and sat beside me, our heads together like conspirators.
‘When Harry inherits you stay beside him. He trusts you and he trusts me,’ Ralph said. ‘We cheat him, you and I. As his bailiff, I can cheat him on his rents, on his land, on his harvests. I tell him we have to pay more taxes and I bank the difference. I tell him we need special seed corn, special animals, and I bank the difference. You cheat him on his accounting. In his wages for the house servants, the house management, the home farm, the stables, the dairy, the brewery. You know how it could be done better than I.’ He waited and I nodded. I knew. I had been involved in the running of the estate since my earliest years when Harry was away at school or staying with relatives. I knew I could cheat him of a fortune in the household accounts alone. With Ralph acting with me I calculated that Harry would be bankrupt inside three years.
‘We ruin him.’ Ralph’s voice was a whisper, mingling with the clatter of the stream. ‘You’ll have a jointure protected, or probably a dower house protected, or funds. Your income is safe, but we make him bankrupt. With the money we’ve saved I buy the estate from him. And then I’m the Master here and you’re what you deserve to be, the Mistress of the finest estate and house in England, the Squire’s Lady, the Mistress of Wideacre.’
‘And Harry?’ I asked, my voice cold.
Ralph spat contemptuously to the riverbank. ‘He’s clay to anyone’s moulding,’ he said. ‘He’ll fall in love with a pretty girl, or maybe a pretty boy. He could hang himself or become a poet. He could live in London or go to Paris. He’ll have some money from the sale; he won’t starve.’ He smiled. ‘He can visit us if you like. I don’t think of Harry.’
I smiled in return, but my heart was beating faster with mingled hope and anger.
‘It could work,’ I said, neutrally.
‘It would,’ he said. ‘I have been many nights planning.’
I thought of him, hidden among the ferns in the woods, his dark eyes staring brightly into the darkness, watching for poachers and yet looking beyond the shadows to the future when there would be no cold, uncomfortable nights. When other men, paid men, would do his watching for him, and he could drink and dine and stand before a roaring fire and speak of the slackness of servants and the problems with rent rolls, and the state of the crops, and the incompetence of the government; and gentlemen would listen to him and agree.
‘It would work, except for one thing,’ I said.
Ralph waited.
‘My father’s healthy, strong as an ox. He could sire another son tomorrow and provide the child with trustees and guardians. Apart from that possibility, Harry may be fascinated with you now, but I doubt you’ll hold him for twenty years. My father’s forty-nine. He could live another forty years. By the time he’s dead, I’ll have been married thirty-five years to some fat old Scottish nobleman with a pack of barefoot children, maybe future dukes and duchesses, and probably grandchildren on the way too. Harry’s wife, whoever she may be, will have settled in nicely, growing fat and comfortable with two new heirs out of short clothes. The most you can hope for is Tyacke’s cottage. And the most I can hope for’, my voice quavered on a sob, ‘is exile.’
Ralph nodded. ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘That’s the difficulty. It would work, but it would only work now, this summer. If it’s to happen it’s got to be done while Harry’s at a loose end, trailing around after me, or mooning around after you. In love with both of us and afraid of both of us. It has to be now while we are land-hungry and love-hungry. I don’t want to wait, Beatrice.’
His eyes on my face were bright. He was in love with me and with my land, a heady mixture for a labourer, the son of a labouring man. But the bleak reality of my life away from Wideacre as it must be, as it was bound to be, was a stark contrast to this dream future that Ralph saw, that Ralph thought we could win: as Lady of Wideacre.
‘My father looks well,’ I said drily.
There was a long pause as our eyes met in clear mutual knowledge of how far we were prepared to go to achieve Ralph’s dream, my dream.
‘There are accidents.’ Ralph’s words fell into a silence as ominous and deep as the still millpond. Like a stone tossed in deep water the idea spread widening ripples in my mind. I measured the appalling loss of my beloved, my delightful, papa against the certainty of my loss of Wideacre.
The precious, essential presence of my vital, noisy papa against the certain loneliness and coldness of my exile, which would come as surely as my sixteenth birthday would come, and at much the same time. I looked at Ralph unsmiling.
‘Accidents,’ I said flatly.
‘It could happen tomorrow,’ he said, as cold as me.
I nodded. My mind searched like a skilled spinner over a tangled skein of wool to find the ideas and threads of ideas that would lead me through a maze of sin and crime, and out of the maze into the broad sunshine of my home. I measured in silence how much I needed my papa against how much I needed that security; considered Harry’s infatuation with Ralph and how far it would lead him. Thought of my mama and how the loss of my father would make me more vulnerable to her, but ever and again came back to that picture of me in a comfortless northern castle far away from the land where I belonged, pining my heart out for the sound of a Wideacre morning. Always seeing my papa’s profile as he turned his face from me to watch his son. He had betrayed me before I ever dreamed of betraying him. I sighed. There could only ever have been one answer.
‘It could work,’ I said again.
‘It would work now,’ Ralph corrected me. ‘Harry could change in a year, in a couple of months. If he is sent away to prepare for university we will both lose our hold on him. It would work only this summer. It would work tomorrow.’
‘Tomorrow?’ I said with a flash of irritation. ‘You say tomorrow. Do you really mean tomorrow?’
Ralph’s dark eyes were black with the knowledge of what we were saying.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I do.’
I gave a gasp. ‘Why so soon?’ I said in instinctive fear. Yet my heart had leapt at the thought of moving quickly, of securing my future in an instant; of making something happen at once.
‘Why wait?’ said Ralph with cruel logic. ‘Nothing will change for me. I trust your mettle, Beatrice. If you are for Wideacre, if you wish to live there, if you are as determined as I think you are – why wait?’ His eyes were narrowed, measuring me, and I knew that together we were an explosive combination of elements. Without me this plan would never have been in his mind. Without me it could not have worked. Without his urgent pressure I could not have gone ahead. We led each other on like a pair of falling angels spinning down into hell. I breathed a deep sigh to slow the pace of my heart. The river bubbled neutrally beneath us.
4
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I woke with a jolt in the pearl-grey light of a summer dawn and knew that today I had to do something – that I had woken myself early because I had something to do. But for a few dozy, sleep-drenched moments I could not for the life of me recall what it was. Then I gave a little gasp as yesterday came back to me – bright as an enamelled picture – Ralph and me sitting with the Fenny flowing beneath us, talking madness, talking death, talking treason.
Ralph had caught me while I was off balance; he had touched me on the raw of my jealous, exclusive heart, which says – which always said – ‘Love me. Love me only.’ The sight of my papa loving someone else, choosing another to ride with him, to chat with him, to run the land with him, had thrown me into such churning rage that I simply wanted to lash out – to hurt everyone as much as I was hurt. If I could have dropped Harry dead to the ground with a wish, I would have done so, for usurping my place with Papa. But the deep core of my resentful grief was directed against the father who had turned against me, the fickle and worthless man, after I had loved him without fail and without faltering for all of my life. It was his lack of fidelity to me that laid me open to any alliance. It was his failure to honour the love and trust between us that sent me spinning, rootless, amoral, into the world where any chance thought or vengeful plan could catch and hold me. It was as if I had sworn him fealty and he had broken his oath as liege lord. Disappointment and grief were the least of it – I had been betrayed.
And Ralph had made my counter-attack sound so easy. Ralph had made it sound so gentle. Ralph had made it sound so sensible. A well-schemed, cool-headed plan anyone would be wise to undertake. So logical that I could not fault it. It would work. It would give me what I needed – Wideacre – and it would revenge me for the pain my papa had caused me.
I shook my head on the pillow in the grey light of my white-washed bedroom. I had been mad for a few seconds there, back on the tree trunk with Ralph’s persuasive voice gentle in my ear. I had been mad to listen and doubly mad to appear to consent. The thought of my papa in pain and realizing at last that he needed me was a sweet picture. The thought of him magically gone, and Harry magically gone, leaving me alone, in sole control, was another fine picture. But I was not fool enough to think such things could happen because I willed them. They were the dreams of a hurt child. I had been dangerously close to believing them.
To set such a course in motion was madness, and yesterday I had been mad with my jealousy and fear of the future. But today, with the dew falling and the sun not yet hot and the birds not yet singing, was another day. As soon as the servants were up and had unbolted the kitchen doors I should slip down to Meg’s cottage in the woods and tap on Ralph’s window and tell him I did not mean it. I would not have long to wait for they work long hours in the kitchen and the youngest maid would be stoking the kitchen fire and bringing in the logs in less than an hour. Until she opened the back door I could not get out without leaving an unbolted door behind me, and that would lead to questions that might take some answering. I had only to wait a few minutes, slip on some clothes, tiptoe downstairs and slide out while her back was turned. If Ralph had been out for poachers last night I might even meet him on his way home.
I snuggled a little lower under the covers, relishing the warmth in the knowledge that in a few moments I would have to leave the cosy softness of my bed and get dressed in a cold room and washed in cold water. I would set things right with Ralph and we would think of some other way. Perhaps things would come right of their own accord. If Harry left early for university, or even went to stay with some of Mama’s family for a few weeks, I would have the time to win back Papa’s attention. He might turn from me now, but I knew in his heart he loved me. He would tire of Harry; he would tire of teaching him. He would want the wordless instinctive companionship he and I had developed over years of riding the land together. Then he would look for me, and I would be at his side, and Harry would be the one who was left out and unwanted. Comforted by the thought I dozed and woke to check the brightness of the window. I listened for the kitchen maid but there was no sound. It was too early. If I fell asleep I would wake the moment I heard the back door open or the girl bring the logs in. I dozed, then I slid into a deeper sleep.
I awoke with a jump to see my window bright with early morning sunshine and my bedroom door opening as my maid brought in hot water for me to wash and an early morning cup of chocolate.
‘You slept late, Miss Beatrice,’ she said cheerily and clattered the cup at my bedside table. I threw back the covers and ran to the window. It was full day.
‘What time is it, Lucy?’ I asked urgently, splashing water on my face and throwing off my shift.
‘Eight o’clock,’ she said, as if it did not matter. As if it did not matter at all.
I gasped. Pointless to reproach myself for oversleeping on this one vital morning. ‘Help me,’ I said peremptorily. ‘I’m in a dreadful hurry.’
She moved like a dolt but I was dressed in minutes and racing down the stairs to the hall. No need for the kitchen door; the front door stood wide open. I caught sight of my papa eating his breakfast as I dashed past. He called good morning to me and I called back but did not stop. There still might be time to catch Ralph.
There still might be time, I thought as I ran, through the rose garden, through the little gate, across the paddock, the burrs catching at my long skirt, which I held bunched up in one hand. Then I was in the wood and settled down to a steady pace along the riverbank. A hundred things could delay Ralph at home and make him late setting out today. If he had been out late last night he might oversleep as I had. If he had stayed out all night he might now be having breakfast before going out again. He might still be out and on his way home. Or – and I had some faith in this – he might know, as lovers and young people often do know, that I was desperate and anxious; he might be waiting for me because he could somehow sense my urgency to see him, to tell him I had changed my mind, that I had been mad for a few moments – for an afternoon and a night only! – and that I knew now, as I had always known really, that of course my papa was sacred. On his own land he was the Squire and could not be touched. As my papa he was my dearest love – dearer to me than my own life I thought. What I said against him was spoken out of grief and hurt. I had never meant it for more than one foolish afternoon and one night.
My breath was coming in gasps and my tight-fitted dress was soaked with sweat under my arms and down my back but I did not dare stop. I thought I was as fit as a hunter in training but I was hampered by my skirts and by the rough ground under my boots. And it is a long way. But I did not dare stop. At this very moment Ralph might be pulling a jacket on, reaching for his cap and going out into the woods where I could not find him.
I had not asked him for a plan so I did not know, had no idea where he would then go. How he planned to meet my father, how he planned to do the act to which I consented – but did not mean. So I gasped at the burning pain under my ribs and panted for breath but ran on. It was like one of those nightmares when you run faster and faster but can get no purchase on the earth. My beloved Wideacre earth seemed to be turning to clay underneath my boots and though my legs were running I could feel that I was slowing, slowing; that my strides were not so long, that they were not so quick. I was losing time because I could not run, because I could not fly, and every second that passed might make the difference between seeing Ralph at the edge of the wood at the back of his cottage – or not seeing him at all.
I burst into the sunlight by the little cottage, speechless with lack of breath, banged through the garden gate and staggered, half drunkenly, up to the front door. I thumped on it with both clenched fists, then doubled up on the threshold whooping for breath, near sick with the strain of running so hard and so far. I heard footsteps inside and I felt dizzy with relief that I was in time. It would be all right. I had caught him, and the madness of yesterday’s conversation would be something we would both laugh about in a few moments. When he would say, ‘You did not think I really would have?’ and I would be able to laugh and laugh and say, ‘No, of course not.’ The door opened, and there was Meg.
‘Meg!’ I said, my face aghast, peering past her into the gloom. ‘Where’s Ralph?’
‘Gone out,’ she said, her dark eyes blank to conceal her curiosity, her face impassive at the sight of the Squire’s daughter, wet with sweat, hair down her back, gasping on the doorstep.
I gaped at her as if she had signed my death warrant. Death indeed. Death I thought it was.
‘Where?’ I asked. I was still panting and could say only one or two words.
She shrugged, still carefully incurious. ‘Into the woods,’ she said. ‘Towards the common, I think.’
I put my face in my hands. I could not think. I had been so sure that if I had run without pausing, had punished myself with such a merciless pace, I would certainly catch him. Or that he would somehow know. That, in any case, the dream of a vengeful child does not become reality. That I could count on the world’s not being such that if I wished something it would happen.
Meg left me abruptly and came back with an earthenware beaker filled with water in her hand. I took it and drank it without seeing or tasting. I had overslept. I had run as fast as I could. But Ralph had gone.
The sun was hot on the side of my face; I could feel sweat on my scalp and my face was wet with it. I sat numb and unmoving and cold with horror.
‘Did he take his gun?’ I asked, my voice bleak.
‘No, nor the dogs,’ Meg replied, nodding towards the two of them tied up by a shack that was their kennel.
No gun. My mind seized on that like a hopeful omen. Perhaps it meant he had known when he woke this morning, as I had known, that it was all madness, all folly. That we had been talking, as children will talk, about what they would like to do. Or what they would do if they could. He had not taken his gun. Perhaps he had just gone out to check the traps. Perhaps my father was safe.
My father.
I suddenly realized that my father could be perfectly safe. Ralph was somewhere out there, but inside the house my papa was utterly secure. With me, he was absolutely safe. Indeed, if he was with anyone Ralph would not touch him, but leave the execution of the plan for another day. Ralph would certainly come home this afternoon or evening. I could see him then and tell him that I had changed my mind. All I had to do was to ensure that my papa did not ride alone today. And I could do it by merely asking if I might ride with him. He was safe. And I could save him.
‘Tell Ralph I want to see him urgently,’ I said peremptorily to Meg. I got to my feet and found I swayed a little with dizziness. I ignored it and went through the garden and back to the path along the riverbank where I had dashed in such terror only a few minutes before. My breathing was back to normal and I walked briskly, the sun shining in my face. I walked a little faster. Worry snapped at my heels like a black dog. I had left my papa at breakfast and he had the morning papers; the post had not yet come. I could be fairly sure he would not have finished his meal by the time I got back to the Hall. Or could I? I quickened my pace a little, my heart thudding faster again, not at the speed but at the dawning of fear.
He would almost certainly wait for his letters. He might even be waiting for me to return. With a little luck I should walk up the path through the rose garden and see him standing on the terrace, sniffing at the air and smoking a cigar with the morning paper under his arm. The thought of him there was so clear in my mind I could almost smell the blue cigar smoke drifting on the air. I dropped into a trot. He was there, I had a certainty he was there. Looking at the roses, wondering what took me out of the house in such a tearing hurry, and waiting for the boy to come back with the mail from the early coach from London. The trot speeded into a run. I knew he was there, but I had been so frightened today that I wanted to see him. I wanted to race up to him, even hot and dishevelled and sweaty as I was, and feel his strong heavy arm around me in a hard hug, so I could know for certain, know for sure, he was safe. That I could not possibly harm him. Even if I had wanted to. I had a sharp pain under one of my ribs that made every breath a little gasp as a red-hot needle pricked me with each step. And I could feel an ominous tightening in my calf muscle. Although I knew, I knew, he was safe, it seemed some sort of magic that I should run as fast as I could. I was not in terror for him, but I would not feel easy until I saw him, until I could take his arm and say, ‘Today, I shall ride with you all day.’ Or even say to stupid Harry, ‘If you are riding with Papa today you must be with him all the time, and you must promise that.’ Harry would promise, and Harry would keep his word. So my papa was safe. I just needed to see him.
I was running as fast as I could again, and the bushes were tearing at my skirt and the noise from the Fenny, rippling beside the path, was as loud as the thudding of my heart, and the thundering of my boots on the soft earth. I raced over the fallen tree that made a bridge to the paddock gate, tore it open and banged it behind me. With sweat in my eyes I could not see the terrace clearly and the run had given me dancing flecks before my eyes as if I was looking through a veil. Papa was on the terrace, I was sure of it. I could not see him, but I felt he was there. There safe. And Ralph might wait in the woods all day and it would not matter.
At the gate to the rose garden I blinked to clear my eyes and scanned the front of the house. I could not see him, but the front door stood wide open; he might that moment have gone back inside for another cigar or another cup of chocolate. I trotted along the flagged path, looking towards the front door, expecting to see him at any moment, strolling out into the sunshine unfolding the paper and heading for one of the stone seats. I was up the steps and into the hall so quickly I was blinded by the darkness after the brightness of the sun outside.
‘Where’s Papa?’ I asked one of the maids, a tray in her hands, coming from the breakfast parlour.
‘Gone, Miss Beatrice,’ she said, dipping a curtsy. ‘Gone out riding.’
I stared at her disbelievingly. This could not be happening. All there had been was one little rolling pebble of an idea and it was growing and growing into what threatened to become an avalanche.
‘Gone riding?’ I said incredulously.
She looked at me a little oddly. Since Papa rode every morning of his life my tone of horror must have sounded strange.
‘Yes, Miss Beatrice,’ she said. ‘He left about a quarter of an hour ago.’
I turned on my heel then and went to the front door. I could have called for a horse from the stables and ridden desperately down the drive, or spent the day chasing round the estate looking for Ralph or for my papa, or for both of them. But I felt like a sailor must when he has been throwing ballast over the side, and pumping out water, and yet still the ship is sinking. The luck was all against me today. It might be the luck was all against my papa also. He had ridden out this sunny morning on to his land where a murderer might be waiting for him. And there was nothing I could do. Nothing. Nothing. Except protect myself. I slipped up the stairs to my room like a shadow. I wanted to wash and change before I met Mama or Harry. What was happening out there in the woods was beyond my control, beyond my responsibility. I had helped in the germination of a deadly seed. But it might not grow. It might not grow.
That afternoon they brought my father home. Four men shuffled slowly and stiffly at the four corners of one of the withy fences we use for penning sheep. It was bowed in the middle under his weight, and the weave was splitting. He lay on his back. His face was crumpled like a ball of parchment. The real person, my beloved, vigorous, spirited papa was gone. All they brought home to Wideacre was a heavy bundle.
They carried him through the front door and across the hall, their dirty boots marking the polished floorboards and the rich carpet. The door to the kitchens banged and half-a-dozen white faces peered. I stood motionless, holding the door as they carried him past me. There was a great crater of a wound on the side of his skull. The father I had adored was gone.
I stood like a tree frozen in mid-winter as they shuffled past me so slowly. They crept past as if it were a dream and they were wading thigh-deep in thick water. They dragged their feet as if we were locked in a nightmare and they wanted me to see the dreadful wound in my papa’s head. The great, deep gash half into his skull, and inside the great hole some grainy mess of bones and blood.
And his face! His face was not like my lovely papa at all! His face was a mask of horror. His brave, bright, laughing face had gone. He had died with his teeth, yellowish, bared on a scream, and his blue eyes popping at the sight of his murderer. The colour had gone from him and he was as yellow as the sandstone of the Hall. He was a statue of horror in Wideacre stone, and the withy fence bowed under him as if the very wood could not bear the burden of this death.
The slow, clumsy march of the men passed me at last and my father’s unseeing, staring blue eyes passed by me and were gone, no longer meeting my blank gaze of terror. Every step of the great staircase creaked as they humped their burden up to the master bedroom, and somewhere in the house I could hear the nagging noise of someone crying. I wished I might cry. I stood unmoving in the brightness, still holding the door, staring unseeingly at the shaft of sunlight shining on the polished floor where the mud from their boots was drying. Outside, waiting, were half-a-dozen of our tenants, the men bareheaded, the women with their aprons to their eyes.
They said his horse must have thrown him. He was found dead beside the little wall separating the park from the farmland on the northern boundary. The horse, unhurt, was grazing near by and the saddle was pulled round as if the girth had been too loose. He had set the horse at the wall and then tumbled off on the Wideacre side. The unwanted, inescapable picture of Ralph hiding in the lee of the wall and then reaching up to grab the horse’s reins and to club my father with one of the stones from the wall came to my mind unbidden. The only comfort I could find was the idea that my father had died on the park side of the wall, under the trees he loved, on the land he loved. But there was no other comfort for me.
Ralph had done this. Ralph had committed this assault. This filthy attack. This dark wicked sin. While my mama wept and wept easy tears that cost her little, and Harry wandered round the house in a haze of shock, I found my mind clearing and sharpening to a point of utter hatred. Ralph had done this thing. He alone was responsible.
Aye, I had been there, on the tree trunk spanning the river. My lips had met his. I had said, ‘Accident’, and ‘It would work’, but I had not known it would be like this. I had agreed. But I had not known what I was setting in train. Ralph had known. Ralph had knifed deer, skinned hares, hand-chopped rabbits. Ralph knew all about death and he invited my consent to his dark plots while I was a mere child. I had not known. I had not understood. And when I did, it was too late. It was not my fault.
I did not wish my father dead! I wanted him to turn to me again with his blue eyes bright with love. I wanted him to insist once more on my company when he was rounding up sheep. I wanted him to call for me as easily and naturally as whistling his dogs. I wanted him to forget Harry and Harry’s claims to the land. I wanted Harry to slip from his mind again, as Harry had gone once before. I wanted to be first in his heart again and first on Wideacre, and safe in his love and safe in the land.
Now Ralph had killed him and my papa would never love me again.
But Ralph had done worse. He had forgotten the divide. There was a gulf between Ralph and me he had forgotten. I never took him to my papa’s bed; I never took him inside the Hall. He was not Quality; he was not fit to wear linen. Homespun, Ralph was, and his mother wore rags. And this lad had dared, he had dared to lie in wait for my bright-brave Squire papa and leap on him like a thief and bring him down. And my papa had died in pain and terror at the hands of his false servant.
Ralph should pay.
While Harry’s grief and sense of loss grew, and he daily came to me for instructions and advice, and while Mama’s slight tears dried and she busied herself with ordering gloves, mourning favours, mourning clothes, and funeral plans, I stayed dry-eyed and burning with hatred.
Ralph should pay.
No man touches a Lacey of Wideacre and escapes. No Lacey of Wideacre ever fell without a sword to defend him. If I could have had Ralph arrested and hanged I would have done so. But he might have accused me and I could not bear to have such horrors spoken aloud. The death of my papa was not my plan. The murder was not my act. I did not order it. Ralph carried me along towards it because I did not know what it meant. Now every day the memory of my father’s silently screaming face would come before my eyes and the only way I could blot out that horror was to say silently, reassuringly, to myself, ‘Ralph will pay.’
At the funeral service my eyes behind my dark veil were black with hatred for the murderer and I said not one prayer. No Christian God could play any part in this blood that called for revenge. The Furies were after Ralph, and I was coming for him as deadly as any vengeful, thirsty goddess, hot with hatred, riding a wave of dark will.
My hatred made me sharp and cunning and nothing of my thoughts showed in my face. When the earth thudded on the lid of the coffin I drooped against Harry as if I were not rigid with anger and strong with hatred. We held hands in the coach on the way home and my grip was gentle and tender. I would be saving Harry too when I wiped out this killer, this deadly parasite on our land.
Mama was weeping again and I took her hand in mine. She was cold and she did not return the squeeze I gave her. She had been withdrawn ever since the slow shuffle of feet of four men bringing Papa home, and now and then I would feel her eyes fixed on me as if she did not see me, or as if she was looking through me to some speculation of her own. Now, through the black mesh of her veil, her eyes met mine with an unusual sharpness.
‘You know your papa’s hunter, Beatrice,’ she said suddenly in a clear voice, quite unlike her usual tentative murmur. ‘How could it have thrown him so? He never fell in year after year of riding. How could he have fallen, and fallen so badly, at such a little jump?’
My hatred of Ralph kept my own conscience clear, and I met her eyes directly.
‘I do not know, Mama,’ I said. ‘I suppose it may have been his saddle slipping. I have thought of nothing else, and of the pain he suffered. If it were the horse at fault I should order it to be shot. I would not suffer an animal to live which had injured my papa. But it was just a tragic accident.’
She nodded, her eyes still on my face.
‘There will be many changes now,’ she said. The carriage rocked as we turned right up the drive. ‘The estate is entailed on Harry, of course. He will have to get a bailiff to run it for a while. Or do you propose to help Harry?’
‘Of course I will help all I can,’ I said delicately. ‘We never have had a bailiff and Papa thought they were not a good idea. I would prefer if we could manage without. But that is a decision for you, Mama … and Harry.’
She nodded. There was a pause. The horses’ hoofs were muffled where the drive was carpeted with autumn leaves.
‘The only thing Beatrice loved more than her father was his land,’ said Mama, musingly, gazing out of the window. Harry and I exchanged a startled glance. This vague, seer-like voice was so unlike Mama. ‘There never was a girl who loved her father as much as Beatrice, but she loved the land, Wideacre, even more. If she had been forced to choose between them I think she would have chosen the land. It will be a great consolation to Beatrice to think that although she has lost her papa she still has Wideacre.’
Harry’s shocked blue eyes met mine.
‘There, there,’ he said feebly, patting Mama’s black-gloved hand. ‘You are upset, Mama. We all loved Papa and we all love Wideacre.’
Mama turned her gaze from the tall trunks of the trees and the fields and stared at me as if she would read the very depths of my soul. I met her eyes look for look. It was not my crime. I need take no blame for it.
‘I shall help Harry as much as I can,’ I repeated steadily. ‘My papa will not seem so very far away. I shall do what he would wish. I shall be the daughter he deserved.’
‘There, there,’ said Harry, deaf to all meaning, but catching the tone of my voice. He reached out his hand to me and his other to Mama. Handfast we arrived outside the Hall and sat for a moment in silence. I swore once more, before I let their hands go, that Ralph would pay for the injury he had done us all. He would pay at once. He would pay that night.
My papa’s will was read that afternoon. It was the straightforward work of an honest man. My mama had the dower house and a fair income from the estate for her life. I had a substantial dowry in money invested in the City, a home on Wideacre until my brother married, and then with my mother wherever she might choose to live. I kept my eyes on the table at this easy disposition of me and my love for the land, but my colour rose.
Harry inherited, by unquestioned right, all the fertile fields, the rich woodland and rolling downs. And if he died before providing an heir, the whole lovely land would go intact to the nearest male relation, as if I had never been born. My entire family, Papa, Mama and Harry, could all die in pain and horror and still I would be no nearer to the ownership of the land. There was a barrier against me no skill of mine could overleap. Generations of men had built defences against women like me, against all women. They had ensured we would never know the power and the pleasure of owning the earth beneath our feet and growing the food that went on our tables. They had built a great chain of male control, of male power and beastly male violence between me and my need for the land. And there was no way, enforced by male-dominated laws and male-established tradition, that I could overthrow them.
His father had served him well. Harry took the land, the produce of the land and the joy of ownership. His to enjoy, to use, to exploit or to abuse as the whim took him. There were no surprises in such an inheritance, and no sense in any heart (except mine) that what seemed so fair on the surface was part of a conspiracy to defraud me of my beloved home and to exile me from the one place on earth to which I could ever belong. My home was given away to the male newcomer, to the male stranger; he neither knew the land nor loved it, and yet it was his.
I heard the will read in a haze of hatred. Not towards Harry, who benefited despite his doltish silliness, but towards Ralph who had cost me my papa in return for this pittance of a dowry and this treasure for Harry. Harry had everything. I had lost the love of my papa, who would never have let me go, unhappy, into exile. And Ralph’s foul scheming had benefited only Harry.
After the petty bequests and little gifts, there was a personal message from Papa to Harry, exhorting him to care for the poor of the parish: standard rhetoric that no one would take seriously. But then Papa had written, ‘And I commend you, Harry, to take care of your mother, and my beloved daughter Beatrice – most dear to my heart.’
Most dear to his heart. Most dear. The tears, the first since his death, stung in my eyes and I choked on a great sob of grief that seemed to be tearing its way out of my chest.
‘Excuse me,’ I whispered to Mama and rose from the table and hurried from the room. In the open air on the front steps my sobs were stilled. He had called me ‘beloved’; he had told them all I was ‘most dear’. I breathed the smells of a late summer twilight and felt an ache like an illness, which was my longing for him. Then I walked bare-headed through the rose garden, through the little gate into the paddock and towards the wood down to the Fenny. My papa had loved me. He had died in pain. And the man who had killed him still lived on our land.
Ralph was waiting for me at the old mill. He lacked his mother’s gypsy second sight and he did not see his death when it walked towards him, smiling. He held out his arms to me and I went into his embrace and let him hold me and kiss me in the dark shadows of the barn.
‘I have been longing for you,’ he whispered in my ear as his hands moved quickly over my body, opening the front of my dress. I sighed as he smoothed my breasts and he bent his head and kissed me. His stubbled chin scratched my cheek and then my throat as his head dropped down the open gown. I shivered as I felt his warm breath on my neck.
Above us the last late swallows lined up on the old beam. I saw and heard nothing but the dark outline of his head and the steady, rapid sound of his breath.
‘Oh, it is so good to touch you,’ Ralph said earnestly, he pressed me backwards to a heap of straw and lifted my skirts and petticoats.
‘When we have each other and Wideacre, that will be a pleasure, eh, Beatrice? When we make love as man and wife in the great master bedroom at Wideacre? When I come to you like this, in the great carved bed under embroidered quilted covers and between fresh linen sheets like I was gentry born and bred?’
We closed together, and his words went unanswered as I clung to him, begging him to move faster and faster, harder and harder. I groaned like a dying man as easy passion overwhelmed our destiny and the world grew dark and still as if a great wave had washed over me and drowned me. Alone, I was yet enveloped and held by Ralph as he thrashed, and he groaned too and lay still. Then the feelings drained from me, and left me weak but clear-headed and cold as ice. I had a sense of deep, sudden sorrow for the pleasure that had gone so fast and left me so empty. And because that moment, that precise moment, would never come again.
‘That’s a good, dutiful wife,’ Ralph said, teasingly. ‘That is how it will be in the master bedroom. I shall sleep between linen sheets every night of my life, and you may bring me coffee in bed every morning.’
I smiled at him under my half-closed eyelids.
‘Shall we spend all our time here?’ I asked. ‘Or shall we go to London for the season?’
Ralph sighed luxuriously and lay back beside me, hands behind his head, his breeches still around his ankles.
‘I’m not sure,’ he said deliberately. ‘I’ll have to decide. Winter in town would be nice, but there’s the fox hunting and shooting here. I wouldn’t want to miss that.’
My lips curled in a smile, but no trace of sarcasm crept into my voice.
‘Do you think you can take my father’s place?’ I asked. ‘D’you think the county gentry will accept you when they’ve known you as Ralph, the gamekeeper’s lad, the son of Meg the gypsy and a runaway father?’
Ralph was unmoved. Nothing could penetrate his contentment. ‘I don’t see why not,’ he said. ‘I’m no worse than they were a dozen generations ago. I’ll have earned my place at Wideacre, which is more than they have done to gain theirs.’
‘Earned it!’ I could scarcely keep the disdain from my voice, but I kept my tone sweet. ‘Odd work you have done this day, Ralph! Murder and unchastity!’
‘Ah, hard words,’ Ralph said negligently. ‘A sin is a sin. I’ll take my chance at the Day of Judgement with this on my conscience. Any man in the country would have done the same. I’m prepared to stand alone. I don’t share the blame with you, Beatrice. I planned it. I’ll take the guilt and the consequences. I did the act – I did it partly for you and partly for our future together – but I’ll take the blame alone in this world or the next.’
The tension sloughed off me like a snake’s skin. It was his crime. I was innocent.
‘You did it quite alone?’ I questioned. ‘You had no one to help you at all? You spoke of it with no one but me?’
He tightened his grip on me and touched my face in a gentle caress. He had no idea his life hung on a thread. He had no idea when he had snapped that thread in two.
‘I work alone,’ he said proudly. ‘There’ll be no gossip in the village, no tongues wagging, no fingers pointing. I would not risk that for myself, and I would especially not risk it for you, Beatrice. I did it alone. No one but you and I know.’
He touched my face with his fingertips in one of his rare, precious caresses. I saw in his eyes and in his gentle smile his tenderness for me, and the slow and steady growth of a love that would last as long as our two hearts were beating in time with Wideacre. Despite my anger, I felt tears prickle behind my eyes and my mouth quivered when I tried to smile back at his loving face. How could I help but love him – whatever he was? He was my first love and had risked everything to give me the greatest gift any man would ever be able to give me: Wideacre.
I lost my childhood on the road on that damp spring day when my papa spoke of my banishment. I lost my contented, easy childhood in the moment when I realized he would take Wideacre from me, would take it to favour Harry, with no thought of me and my pain at all. But that hurt was healed when I lay in Ralph’s arms and knew he had gambled everything to have me and Wideacre. And my tears rose at the thought of the reckless, gallant gamble he had so utterly lost.
Ralph had a dream, a hopeless, impossible dream, that only a very young lover could have. The two of us, married despite the conventions, as if the world were some paradise where people may marry the love of their hearts and live where they wish. As if all that truly matters is love and passion and loyalty to the land.
It was a dream of the future that could never have been, and the only stupid mistake I ever saw Ralph make was to forget that however often we tumbled in straw, grass or bracken, or whatever I called out in my fainting pleasure at the strength and skill of his hard force, he was just a servant, the son of a slattern. And I was a Lacey of Wideacre. If it had been any other land I swear I would have sacrificed it for Ralph. If it had been any other house I believe I would have schemed to put him into it. Any other house in the land and Ralph should have slept in the master bed and sat at the head of the table. Any other land in the country could not have hoped for a better master than Ralph.
But it was not any land or any house. It was my beloved Wideacre. And no damned gypsy’s brat would ever rule there.
The gulf between Ralph and me was as wide as the Fenny in flood, and as deep as the green millpond. I might take Ralph for pleasure, but I would never be his woman, his wife. The moment Ralph thought to rule me, he made our end certain.
Besides – how could he have forgotten? – he was of gypsy stock; he understood he was my father’s assassin. And I would never, ever forgive him.
In my mind was a vivid, angry picture of my father, the brave, bright Squire, being pulled down and clubbed to death like a brawling common man in a back-street fight. The man with Lacey blood on his hand would never live on Wideacre. The poor man who attacked the gentry would never hide here. The upstart who planned to climb the ladder to the master bedroom through lust and bedding and blood should be destroyed, like any vermin on the land, at once.
When one says at once at fifteen one means at once. That meant my father died the day after Ralph’s ugly egg of a plan hatched its nightmare brood. That meant Ralph must die with my father’s blood still wet on his hands.
‘It is our secret then,’ I said. ‘And it dies when we die. And now, I must be going.’ He helped me to my feet and dusted my black mourning dress. The straws clung to it and he knelt and with meticulous care picked off every incriminating speck.
‘It will be better when I have Tyacke’s cottage,’ he said impatiently. ‘See to it that your brother expels the Tyackes first thing in the morning. I can’t wait for the old man to die. He can die in the poorhouse if he wishes. I’d like to move in there this quarter day, and there’s no cause to wait now. See to it in the morning, Beatrice.’
‘Of course,’ I said submissively. ‘Is there anything else while I’m speaking with Harry?’
‘Well, I’ll need a horse soon,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Perhaps one of your father’s hunters? I suppose brother Harry won’t be riding out for a while, and your mother can hardly want to keep your father’s favourite in the stables after the accident? He’s a good animal. I made sure he wasn’t hurt. You could tell Harry he should be given to me.’
The thought of Ralph riding one of my father’s high-bred horses made me flush with anger and an icy cold rage was steady behind my eyes, but my smile did not flicker. It was only words and plans.
‘Of course, Ralph,’ I said gently. ‘There will be many changes you will want to make.’
‘Aye,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘And when I’m master here, even more.’
The word ‘master’ on his lips made my skin crawl, but my eyes stayed fixed on his face and their green hazel gaze never wavered.
‘I must go,’ I said again and he held out his arms to me in farewell. We kissed goodbye, a long sweet kiss, and I broke from it with a sob to turn my face into his shoulder. His rough fustian jacket smelled so good – of woodsmoke and clean sweat and the inimitable heart-wrenching smell of his skin. The familiar pain of first love mounted inexorably and ached at my heart. My arms tightened around his waist in a fierce hard hug of farewell to the strong, lovely body I had known so well and loved so much.
With my head against his chest I heard his quickened breath, and his heart speeding, as his desire for me rose again at my closeness. He kissed the top of my head hard, and turned my face up with a pinch on my chin.
‘What’s this?’ he said tenderly. ‘Tears?’ He dropped his head and, gently as a mother cat, licked each wet eyelid in turn. ‘There’s no need for tears now, my bonny Beatrice. No need for your tears ever again. Everything is going to be different from now on.’
‘I know,’ I said, speaking from a heart so full of pain I could believe it might break. ‘I know everything will be different. That’s what made me sad. My love, my darling Ralph. Nothing will ever be the same again.’
‘But it will be better, Beatrice!’ He looked questioningly at me. ‘You surely regret nothing?’
I smiled then. ‘I regret nothing,’ I confirmed. ‘Now or later. What has been done you did for me and for Wideacre. What is going to happen is also going to happen for Wideacre. I have no regrets.’ But my voice quavered as I spoke and Ralph’s grip on me tightened.
‘Wait, Beatrice,’ he said. ‘Don’t go while you are so sad. Tell me what is wrong.’
I smiled again to reassure him, but the ache under my ribs was growing into such a pain of grief I was afraid I might weep.
‘Nothing is wrong. Everything is as it should be, as it has to be,’ I said. ‘Now goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye, my darling.’
I really thought I should never find the courage to leave as he looked at me so tenderly, so concerned and so trusting in my love for him. I kissed him once more – a gentle, final kiss on the lips – and then I pulled myself from his arms. I felt as if I had left half my soul with him. I walked away and then turned to see him. He raised a hand to me and I whispered, ‘Goodbye, my love, my only love,’ so low he could not hear me.
Then I saw him turn into his cottage and stoop his dark head under the low door. I drew into the thick bushes at the side of the track and counted a slow and careful three hundred. Three hundred in counted seconds. Then I waited. My love and my anger were one mesh of pain and rage in my head. I was half blind with the conflict. It was as if the Furies were in my head – not after Ralph at all – but tearing me apart with two loyalties, two loves, two hatreds. I gave a little silent groan of physical pain and then saw on my closed eyelids once again the stare of my murdered papa carried past me into the darkness of the Hall. Then I took two deep shuddering breaths, opened my mouth and screamed as loud, as shrill, as panic-stricken as I could:
‘Ralph! Ralph! Help me! Ralph!’
The door of the cottage exploded open and I heard the noise of his sprinting feet up the track. I screamed again and heard him swerve from the track towards my guiding voice. I heard his feet pounding through the deep leaves and then the deep and dreadful twang of the mantrap’s forged steel spring, and simultaneously the sound of his legs breaking – a clear and unmistakable snap! snap! like chopping wood – and Ralph’s hoarse, incredulous scream of pain. I dropped to the ground as my knees buckled under me and waited for another scream. My head against a tree trunk I waited and waited. None came. My own legs were useless, but I had to see him. I had to know I had done it. I clawed my way up the beech tree’s comforting grey trunk, clinging to it for support and so that its rough bark pressed against my face would keep me from fainting before I had seen – because I had to see.
There was still no sound.
For long minutes I clung to the tree, feeling, but not aware of, the reassuring sun-warmed bark under my fingers, and the familiar, safe smell of dry leaves. The silence seemed as if the world that had been cracked apart by Ralph’s shriek was quietly rebuilding itself.
Somewhere, a blackbird started to sing.
Then I ceased to take comfort from Ralph’s long quietness and was filled with a horrid senseless fear. What was happening only yards away from me, hidden in the bushes? My legs moved as stiff as a cripple. As I left the beech tree I staggered and nearly fell, but I had to see him.
I parted the bushes and gave a whimper of horror as I saw my lover caught like a rat in the trap I had baited with love. He was slumped over the upright jaws. He had fainted from the pain of his crushed knee bones, and the teeth of the trap held his legs as stiff as a marionette’s, while the top half of his body slumped like a doll’s. One of the sharpened teeth of the trap seemed to have severed a vein and the steady flow of blood darkened his breeches and soaked down his leg into the black earth.
Faced with the wreck of my lover, my knees buckled again and I put out my hands to save myself as I collapsed before him. My hands clenched on the dark peaty earth as if I was hanging to a rope to pull me from a crevasse of horror. Gritting my teeth, I got to my feet again, and then, as quietly and as carefully as I had come, as if I feared to wake a beloved, weary husband, I walked backwards, one stiff, courtly step at a time, with my eyes never moving from his crumpled body while his lifeblood drained into the earth; left to die like vermin.
I crept home like a criminal and slipped in by the open kitchen door. Then, remembering, I went back to the little store room and fetched the owl, Canny. I met no one. I glanced out of the window at the rising moon, a sad thin sickle of a waning moon with a little teardrop of a star beside it. Ten lifetimes ago I had sat at the window and felt Ralph’s eyes shining on me, laughing at me. Now I could not face starlight. I wondered with one sharp corner of my mind if he was dead yet, or if he was lingering, like a rat in a gintrap, in unrelieved pain. If he had recovered consciousness and was crying my name, hoping I would come and help him, or if he guessed it was my trap and was facing his death, staring grim-faced into the darkness.
Canny was perched, wide-eyed, alert on the top of the wardrobe. He was fully fledged, nearly ready to fly. Ralph had promised to hack him back to a wild life in the woods, to feed him little by little until he had learned to hunt. Now he would have to fend for himself. In this new harsh world lit by the sickly yellow moon, we all had to learn how to survive, and there was no help. Trust I had felt for my papa in the golden summer of my childhood, or Ralph had in my smiles, for my lying direct eyes, trust and keeping faith had gone. So I lifted him down, his talons gentle and feathery on my bare hand, and untied the jesses on his bony legs. His foot, which had been up inside his fluffed-out feathers, was endearingly hot. I opened the window and held him out. The night breeze ruffled his feathers.
‘Go then, Canny,’ I said. ‘For I do not know love and wisdom any more.’
His grip tightened as the wind rocked him, and his head bobbed as his body moved, but he stayed quiet, looking around him.
‘Go!’ I said, and I cruelly tossed him, aiming him direct at the moon as if he could fly away and take all the pain and sorrow with him. Instead he fell, tumbling like a feather duster over and over down from the second-floor window and I gasped to see him fall. But even as I gripped the sill I hardened myself. I had learned one thing in this painful struggle into adulthood: that everything you do, and everything you say, everything has a consequence. That if I threw a newly fledged bird into the night he might fall and break his neck. If I nodded to a killer then bloody murder would follow. If I called my lover into a trap he would be caught by his legs and bleed and bleed.
The owl tumbled over and over but spread his wings before he hit the ground. He glided down towards the kitchen garden and clattered into a currant bush. His feathers were pale in the moonlight and I watched him as he sat still, perhaps surprised to find himself free. Slowly I relaxed the hand that was gripping on to the window sill. But my other hand held something. I could not think what it was. The cramped fingers unfolded and showed me a handful of earth and leaves. I had clenched my hand on it when I had gripped the forest floor in my mindless vigil waiting for a second cry from Ralph. Now I still held tight to it as Canny spread his wings and flew low over the kitchen garden towards the waiting wood like a message of my loss of wisdom, of my loss of love.
I slept with that handful of leaves and earth under my pillow, still gripped in my cold hand, soiling the clean Irish linen Ralph had coveted so. I slept easily, like a good child, and dreamed no dreams. In the morning, I wrapped it in curl-paper and put it in my jewel box. An odd thing to do. But that morning I felt odd: light-headed and unreal as if the previous night and all the days of the summer had been a strange dream I was still dreaming. At first it seemed to me like a talisman, to ward off the fear that followed me home like a black dog. It is all I have left of Ralph; the only thing I have from him now his owl has flown. A handful of earth from the place of his death. A handful of our land, Wideacre.
The next day I waited for the news of Ralph’s death. I was certain it would be brought to the Hall by some gossip from the village and waited for my mother or for Harry to repeat the story of the dreadful accident at breakfast. I waited for the story at dinner. I waited for the story at tea. I waited for the story as we sat in Mama’s parlour in the evening … Nothing.
‘You’ve not eaten a thing all day, Beatrice,’ my mother said gently. ‘You must try, my dear. And you seem so overwrought.’
Harry looked up, his attention now drawn to my evident paleness and strain.
‘She is grieving, Mama,’ he said. He got up from his chair on the other side of the parlour fire to cross to me and sit beside me on the sofa. He took my hand gently in his own. ‘Poor Beatrice, you must try not to be so sad. Papa would not wish it.’
I smiled, but my heart was cold. Then the thought flashed through my head that Harry knew Ralph was dead, and was keeping the news from me, to protect me.
‘I just have this feeling that something awful is going to happen,’ I said. I shrugged. ‘I don’t know why. I think I should feel better if an accident did happen, and then I could believe the bad luck had passed.’
‘Like happenings in threes.’ My mother spoke foolishly, but her eyes were sharp. ‘But nothing has happened, has it, Harry.’
Harry patted my hand; his sympathy and gentleness could not reach my cold isolation. ‘No, Mama. No, Beatrice. What could happen? Beatrice is just overtired, and you, Mama, are full of fairy tales. We shall all feel better in the morning.’
I did not feel better in the morning. Nor the next morning, nor the morning after. Surely someone had found him by now? His mother, Meg, must have come home and found the cottage empty, the front door banging. She would call his name and then follow the track along and then back. Surely she would call someone to help her search for her boy, and surely they would find him soon, doubled up over his trapped legs. Dead? I sat in the window seat of my room looking out over the garden unconsciously kneading my hands until my wrists showed red marks. What could they be doing, so slow and so lazy that they had not found him now? How could Meg pretend to be a loving mother with her fey fears for her son if she had not yet sensed that something was wrong and found him?
Over and over my mind pictured the scene: the message to the village, and the village carpenter making the coffin. The gossip brought to the Hall by a friend or relation of one of the servants. Told to my brother, or even my mother, or perhaps whispered to me by Lucy, my maid. Surely the story even now was the talk of the kitchen and one of the servants would tell one of us soon. I had to be patient. And I had to watch myself with every care so that not a flicker of this turmoil showed. But surely they had found him by now!
I rose to leave my bedroom and join Harry and Mama for breakfast. Another day – the fifth day – and still no news. It had to be today. I had to be ready. My hand on the door of my room, I turned and looked at myself in the glass. My eyes were an opaque green that showed nothing of my distress. My skin was pale, pale cream against the blackness of my dress. I was a beautiful daughter grieving for her dearly loved papa, no trace of the vengeful goddess showed in my face. No trace of the secret strain showed, although my skin felt too tight on my head and around my eyes. I missed my papa; I missed him so badly that tears rolled down my cheeks when I was alone. And I missed Ralph, too, with a feeling of physical sickness. Always, beneath my ribs, I carried this deep gulf of longing and desire, and always my heart ached for the two men who had made that golden summer perfect. That easy summer world when my papa had loved and protected me, and when Ralph had loved me, and teased me, and lay beside me every long lazy afternoon.
So what if a few years had brought me exile and misery? If I could have wakened this morning and had breakfast with my beloved papa, and ridden out in the afternoon to hide in the woods with my dark and clever lover, I should have wakened happy. And I should have been free of this pain of emptiness and longing and grieving and lost love.
I smoothed the skin of my forehead in the unconscious gesture of an older, tired woman; then I turned and went downstairs. Even my light steps on the wooden stairtreads sounded lonely, and there was no laughter floating up the stairs from the breakfast room.
There was no news. We sat in silence while Harry ate a hearty breakfast at the top of the table and Mama crunched toast at the foot. I drank tea and said nothing. We were a picture of domestic peace. When Harry had finished eating and my mother had left the room, Harry looked at me tentatively and said, ‘I have some odd news for you, Beatrice, that I hope will not upset you.’
I had half risen and I sank back on my chair. My face was calm but my head was dizzy with fright.
‘Ralph, the gamekeeper’s lad, seems to have gone missing,’ my brother said uncertainly.
‘Missing!’ I exclaimed. My head jerked up to stare disbelievingly at Harry. ‘He can’t be missing!’ The picture of Ralph anchored so securely by his broken legs in the mantrap was so bright that I feared Harry would see two little reflections of it in my staring eyes. ‘How could he get away?’ I said, betraying myself.
‘What do you mean, Beatrice?’ Harry asked gently, shocked at my outburst. ‘Here,’ he said and handed me my cup of tea. I found my hands were shaking so badly I could not hold it and when I put it down on the saucer there was a click and the delicate porcelain had cracked. I must control myself; I must not break down. Aware of Harry’s eyes upon me I took a deep breath and tried to force myself to appear calm. This could be Harry’s way of breaking the news to me gently, but to hear that Ralph was missing rather than dead was like a flowering of the nightmare of the past four nights when I dreamed Ralph was crawling behind me, as fast as I could run, with the mantrap clanking at his bloody knees. I gave a gasp of fear and Harry turned with an exclamation and fetched the brandy from the dining room.
‘Drink this,’ he said. ‘Go on, Beatrice.’ I swallowed and felt the warmth spreading through me. I cleared my throat. ‘I am sorry, Harry. My wretched nerves. Were you saying something about Ralph?’
‘Another time, Beatrice, it doesn’t matter.’ Harry was patting my hand again. ‘I had no idea you were so distressed still, my poor sister.’
I stilled his hand and tried to keep my voice steady. ‘I’m not really distressed, Harry dear,’ I said gently. ‘My nerves are bad, as you know. And I have had a premonition that Ralph is dead. I don’t know why. But please tell me if that is so?’
‘No, my dear, no,’ said Harry soothingly. ‘It’s not as bad as all that. He just seems to have gone missing. A loss for the estate, and for me especially because he was as good as a manager for me. But we will survive without him.’
‘Harry, I must know,’ I said. ‘How did he leave? Why did he leave?’
‘Well, that’s the mystery,’ said Harry, seating himself beside me and still holding my hand. ‘My man tells me that someone from the village called at Meg’s cottage and found their few things strewn around, their clothes gone and Ralph’s two dogs missing. No message, no word. They just seem to have vanished.’
The nightmare was slowly becoming real. Somewhere, beyond the walls of the Hall, Ralph was alive and free. He would know, as no one else would, that I had planned his death, that I had left him in his agony to die. He would know that I had let him kill my father and then tried to destroy him. And now, outside the walls of the house, Ralph would be waiting for me. Waiting and waiting and never, for a second in all my life, would I be free from fear again.
‘What sort of state did they leave the cottage in?’ I asked. I could scarcely believe the coolness of my voice. It was as if I were thinking of re-letting the miserable heap.
‘Well, we’ll never get a local tenant for it again,’ said Harry. ‘There’s all sorts of nonsense about blood sacrifice and Meg’s witchcraft. Gossip I won’t repeat to you, my dear.’
My mind shrank in fright, but I had to know. ‘Oh, I’m all right now, Harry,’ I said reassuringly. ‘Please tell me what people are saying. I would rather hear it from you than from my maid or someone in the village.’
Harry needed little encouragement: the schoolboy in him was bursting with the news.
‘Well, it is odd,’ he said with ill-concealed relish. ‘Mrs Tyacke called to see what furniture Ralph wanted in her cottage. Ralph had told her he would be taking the place over. First she noticed the door open, and then she saw bloodstains on the step.’ Every fraction of my body froze rock still. ‘There were marks on the floor as if someone had dragged a kill into the kitchen. But what is equally odd is that there were bowls and buckets of bloodstained water all around, and Meg’s only sheet was all torn and bloody.’
I could see the scene too well in my mind. Meg, warned by her second sight, coming home early, hunting for her son, perhaps guided by his cries of pain. Finding some lever and using all her strength to prise the jaws of the dreadful trap apart. Ralph tumbling to the ground and Meg picking him up and dragging him with all the strength of a passionate mother into the cottage, blood draining across the floor. Then her desperate attempts to staunch the flow, ripping up the one sheet and pressing cold cloths into the wound, and then … and then … and then …? Was Ralph dead? Had Meg hidden the body? She would not know it was not an accident. Perhaps even now she was mourning him in some quiet part of the wood and I was safe. I clung to that hope and turned an untroubled face to my brother.
‘Is that all?’ I asked.
‘Well, I should think it was enough!’ he said with the gossip’s relish for bad news. ‘But there is more actually. Although they left their furniture, they took an old handcart. Old Betty swears she saw someone who looked like Meg pushing the handcart with a body in it and two black dogs following up the London road three mornings ago. She never said anything before because she thought she was mistaken. But with the handcart missing and all, the village has put two and two together.’
I nodded and kept my eyes and face down so my brother should not see my despair and my fear. It had all gone wrong. It sounded very, very likely that Meg had managed to save Ralph’s life, though he was too weak to walk. Ralph must have been able to tell her who set the trap, and who had baited it. If he had not told her, she would have instantly brought him to the Hall. But she did not! She had taken him away, far away from the Hall and out of my reach; away to her people, to her unknown gypsy family. Away to heal him so that he could get fit and strong and able to come back and confront me. Away from our lands and our influence, so he could move and plot and scheme and forever threaten my life and my future. Every waking moment from now on I would half expect to see him as I already did in every night’s dreams. Limping, or horribly mutilated, coming after me for revenge. The picture in my mind was so bright, so vivid, so inescapable, that it seemed to me Ralph was at that second heaving his legless body up the steps to the door of the Hall. I could control myself no longer.
‘I am ill, Harry. Call my maid,’ I said, and I dropped my head on the breakfast table in a swoon of terror.
My mourning now looked real enough and I smiled no more at my mirror. I could not eat my food for fear that Ralph had been in the kitchen with one of Meg’s brews to poison me. I dared not even walk as far as the rose garden in case he was waiting for me in the summerhouse, or at the gate to the wood. Even in the house I was on the precipice of a collapse every second of the day, but especially when the early winter darkness came and the curtains were drawn, and there were dark shadows on the stairs and in the hall where he could hide unseen, and wait for me to pass. I slept little at night and awoke with screams of terror. My mother called the local apothecary and then a London surgeon and they gave me draughts to make me sleep. But the deeper the sleep, the worse the dreams, and for three, nearly four, months of cold, hard, iron season I endured, like a captured wild animal, inescapable days and nights of terror.
But slowly, mercifully, it dawned on my panic-stricken imagination that nothing had happened. In my terror, in my anticipation of fear, 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.
5
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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 suppose I should have been shocked, but instead I merely smiled and sat up in bed. To dream of Harry while the spring was stirring seemed natural and right. We were constantly in each other’s company and I gained more and more pleasure from our comradeship. It was pleasant to walk in the gardens with him. We were planning a shrubbery, and we would take a stake and map out the shape of the paths on the newly turned earth. Then, when the carter came loaded high with swaying trees and shrubs, we spent a glorious couple of days ordering their planting by the three gardeners, and even treading them in, tying and staking out the branches ourselves.
Sometimes we drove up to the downs together. Although I was still forbidden to ride outside the grounds, I had hunted out an old governess cart and broke my mare to driving so I could range all around the estate and drive as far as the foothills of the downs with Harry riding alongside. I thought sometimes how pleased Papa would have been to see us in such unity on the land he loved.
‘Are you not tired, Beatrice?’ Harry would ask solicitously.
And I would smile without replying and we would stroll together to the top of the downs to look down on the surrounding greening fields and woods; or turn our backs and look southwards to where the sea gleamed like a blue slab in the distance.
I started to lose my fear of Harry’s superior education, especially when I saw how little he still knew about the land. And I started to enjoy hearing about his books and the ideas that interested him. I could never see what actual difference it made whether one had an agreement called a Social Contract or not, but when Harry spoke of the struggle for the ownership of land, and whether land could be owned by an elite of a people, I found my interest suddenly sharpened.
He would laugh at me then and say, ‘Oh, Beatrice, you care for nothing at all unless it relates to Wideacre. What a little heathen you are! What a little peasant!’
And I would laugh back and accuse him of being so full of ideas that he could not recognize wild oats in a wheat crop – which was shockingly true.
If there had been more young people in the neighbourhood we would have spent far less time together. Or if Harry had known more about the land he would not have needed my company daily. If we had not been in heavy mourning, Harry would probably have spent the previous winter in London for the season, and even I might have been taken to town for a few days. But as things were, we were very much on our own. My returning spirits showed themselves in my better health and I became once more buoyantly fit, restrained only by Mama who tried to keep me eternally stitching embroidery by her side in the pale parlour. There was no Papa to come banging in from the stables and rescue me from the tyranny of conventional behaviour now, but I could generally rely on Harry to need my advice for some work on the land.
The land missed Papa. Harry was inexperienced and slow to learn how to control the tenants who poached and thieved outrageously. Nor could he organize the villagers’ sowing and weeding of our crops. But beside his ignorance my status grew, and it was very pleasant to be able to order this thing or that thing to be done without confirming an order with the Master. I kept thinking how good it would have been if I could have had the land wholly to myself, but it was only ever a passing thought. It was also good to drive down the lanes to the fields with Harry riding alongside, and to look up in the evening and find his eyes smiling upon me.
He was no longer the schoolboy home early. He was a man in the first broadening and strengthening of his youth. As for me, every day made me a shade more golden, my eyes brighter hazel, my hair a tinge redder from the sun. Every day as I bloomed in the warmth of that especially fine spring, I felt a greater longing for a lover. I pressed my lips together remembering Ralph’s rough biting kisses, and my body warmed and tingled under the black silk of my mourning dress when I remembered his intimate, shameless probing. Harry once caught my eye in one of these erotic daydreams as we sat alone beside the library fire one evening, supposedly doing accounts. I blushed at once to the roots of my hair.
Harry, oddly, said nothing, but he looked at me as if he were somehow bemused and blushed too.
We were so delightfully strange to each other. My pleasure with Ralph had been in confirming the person I was, the things that were important. With Ralph I hardly needed to speak. We both knew if the day would be fair or if it would rain. We both knew that the villagers would be planting the fields on the bottom slopes of the downs so we would have to hide in the woods that day. We both knew that passion and the land are the most important things in anyone’s life, and that any other interests are secondary and slight.
But Harry knew none of these things, and while I could not help despising his ignorance, I felt also a great curiosity about the things he did know, and the things he did care for. Harry was a great intriguing mystery to me, and as the warm spring days became reassuringly hot summer ones I found my interest in him growing and growing while the corn turned silver-green. The only distraction from this growing affection and intimacy was Mama, who would intermittently insist that I behave as a normal young lady and not as a farm manager. But even she could not ignore Harry’s real need for me on the land. One day when she insisted that I stay at home to receive a call from the ladies from Havering Hall, we lost something like fifty pounds on one day’s work! Harry could not control the reaping gang and their families following behind to glean robbed us of one stook in every three.
The ladies – Lady Havering and little mousey Celia – had chatted politely with Mama as I watched the sun stream through the window, and knew in impotent rage that Harry would not be watching the reapers. When he came in for afternoon tea my fears were confirmed. He reported with great pride that they had finished the Manor Farm fields already. Properly cut they should not have been finished until the following day. Harry sat beside Celia Havering and nibbled seed cake like a sun-kissed cupid without a care in the world, while I could hardly sit still for anxiety.
He chatted away like a caged songbird to Celia, who actually spoke back in a voice a fraction clearer than her habitual whisper. Half an hour he spent talking of the lovely weather and the latest novel, before a hard look from me reminded him that he had workers in the field who were, I knew, taking an equally lengthy break. He took himself off with much flowery bowing and kissing of hands and seemed almost sorry to leave. The mysterious tastes of my beautiful brother were not always a delight.
‘You seem very anxious about the harvest, Miss Lacey,’ said Celia softly. I looked sharply at her to see if she was being impertinent, but the soft brown eyes were guileless and her face pale and quite without a spark of malice.
‘It is the first harvest Harry has had to supervise,’ I replied absentmindedly. ‘He had been away from home and does not know our country ways. I am afraid I am needed out in the fields.’
‘If you would like –’ she paused delicately. ‘If you would enjoy a drive –’ She broke off again. ‘We came in Mama’s carriage and you and I could … I am sure …’ Her flutter of words came to a total standstill but her meaning finally penetrated my ears. I had been watching some rain clouds on the horizon that would have ruined everything if they had come to anything, but they seemed to be breaking up.
‘A drive?’ I said. ‘I should love it!’
‘Mama’s carriage’ turned out to be a large old-fashioned open landau, and after much fussing with parasols to protect our delicate complexions, we drove towards the fields. Celia tilted her sunshade precisely at the sky to cast a shadow over her face. She was milk compared with honey sitting beside me. Her skin looked as if she had been reared in a cellar she was so beautifully pale, while I was a clear gold on face, hands and throat, and had even a disastrous dusting of freckles on my nose. Even in my dark mourning clothes I was bright beside Celia, with flushed cheeks from the warmth of my heavy dress in the sun. She was pale and cool, her shy brown eyes scarcely daring to look over the hedges as we drove. She had a little trembly face and a quivering rosebud mouth. She seemed so young beside me. Five years older but such a sweet baby.
She showed no signs of anxiety at the plight of being ill-loved and unmarried at twenty-one. Her pale prettiness had not taken in London during her one cut-price season. Lord Havering had opened Havering House for her coming-out ball and had stood her the price of a court gown. But all of Lady Havering’s fortune at marriage had been squandered on betting and gambling, and there was little to spare for her daughter. Celia’s own substantial fortune, secure from her step-papa by sensible settlements, had guaranteed her one or two proposals. But Celia had demurred, and Lady Havering had not insisted, and she had come home to her restricted and hard-working life at the Hall with little idea that life for a young girl could include pleasure, or liveliness or joy.
She had little enough in her life. When her mama accepted Lord Havering and moved into the Hall little Celia went too, more like an extra bandbox than a person whose wants might be consulted. Aged eleven, she had been put in charge of the jolly, noisy Havering children for day after long crowded day, while Lord Havering recouped his gambling debts by dismissing housekeeper, governess and nurse, leaving his new wife and stepdaughter to share the work of running house and nursery between them.
The nobly born, ill-bred Havering children cared not a rap for their quiet-voiced, subdued new sister, and Celia, in silent mourning for her papa and their quiet, invalid’s routine, lived a life of loneliness and solitude in the very heart of one of the biggest houses in the county.
Enough in that situation to make any girl nervous. Celia was fortunate only in that her dowry, which was a handsome parcel of land adjoining ours, a good half-dozen farms tied up by her mother’s lawyers, was safe from her spendthrift stepfather as part of the marriage settlement. I knew her from childhood when our mamas would call on each other and I would be taken to the nursery to romp with the small Haverings and attend Celia’s solemn dolls’ tea parties. But when I grew old enough to ride with my father, I saw little of her. We sometimes took our hounds over to Havering Hall, and I would wave to her as I rode beside my father in my smart dark green or navy riding habit, and see her watching, a fragile flower in white satin, from an upstairs window. She never rode, of course; she never even came to greet us from the front door. I think the major expeditions in her week were the two church services on a Sunday, and the occasional social visit like this one. What can have prompted the idea of a drive, the Lord only knew. I would have driven with the devil himself to see the fields; what Celia hoped to gain I neither knew nor cared.
As soon as we came in sight of the field I saw that I had been right. A dozen men were cutting in the line with their wives and children coming behind to collect the corn and set it in stooks. By rights, when the corn had been cut, the women and children and the men could then glean, picking up the broken straw for bedding or fodder for their animals, and picking up the dropped heads of corn for themselves. Harry had been letting them cut so carelessly that whole patches of the crop would be left standing for the convenience of the gleaners, and they were trying the old cheat of slicing the corn so short it would not bind into a stook and would be dropped for the families to collect.
Instead of supervising this shambles, Harry was stripped down to shirtsleeves himself and playing around with a sickle at the end of the line. Even in my temper I could not ignore his dazzling looks. Wig off, his own hair shone like pure gold in the bright sunshine and his loose white shirt billowed around him. He was taller than the men around him and slim. His dark breeches were cut close to his strong legs and back. I swear a saint would have felt desire on seeing him. Celia’s eyes, like mine, were glued to him, and he glanced up and saw her and waved and came to the gate.
‘It’s to be hoped you don’t cut your feet off,’ I said acidly. I was hot and irritable draped in my heavy black mourning clothes. Celia beside me was the picture of cool perfection in white silk under a cherry parasol.
Harry laughed in delight. ‘I dare say I will!’ he said happily. ‘It’s splendid fun! When I think of all the harvests I’ve missed! Do you know this is my first-ever harvest at Wideacre?’
Celia widened her brown eyes sympathetically. She could not drag her gaze from him. His open shirt revealed the glint of a few hairs at the top of his chest, and his skin was as pale as creamy milk with a pink tinge where he was catching the sun.
‘They should be closer together,’ I said. ‘They’re missing more than a yard every time they move forward.’
Harry smiled at Celia. ‘I’m such a beginner,’ he said helplessly.
‘I know nothing of such things,’ Celia said in her soft voice. ‘But I do love to see the men working.’
‘Working!’ I said impatiently. ‘That lot are on holiday! Help me down, Harry.’ I left the two of them admiring the beauty of the scene and stalked across the stubble (or rather through it, because it was a good foot high) to sort the men out.
‘Watch out,’ said one, loud enough for me to hear. ‘Here comes the Master.’ The slow chuckle of country humour spread among them and I grinned too.
‘Enough of this,’ I said, loud enough for the whole reaper gang to hear. ‘You close up, all of you. John Simon, I don’t plan to keep your family in corn for free all winter! Move closer to William there. You, Thomas, you cut nearer to the hedge. Don’t think I don’t know what game you’re all playing! Any more of this nonsense I’ll have you all out at Michaelmas!’
Grumbling and chuckling, they closed the ranks and started the process again, scything their way in a line up the field, this time leaving no part of the swathe uncut. I smiled in pleasure at the sight of our corn rippling and falling in great pale golden heaps in our fields, and turned and made my way back to the landau.
Celia’s laugh trilled out, as happy as a mistle-thrush, and I saw my brother smiling warmly at her. I paid no attention at all.
‘D’you see now, Harry, how they’re closer together and there’s less waste?’ I asked.
‘Yes, I do,’ said Harry. ‘I did tell them but they just seemed to straggle apart again.’
‘They’re hoodwinking you,’ I said severely. ‘You must show them that you’re the Master.’
Harry grinned at Celia and I saw her smile shyly in reply.
‘I’m a worthless fellow,’ he said to Celia, begging for a contradiction.
‘You are indeed,’ I said before she could disagree. ‘Now get back to the men and don’t let them stop for more than ten minutes for tea, and they’re not to go home till sunset.’
He stuck to his job and the labourers did not trudge home to their cottages until long after sunset. Harry rode home whistling under a round golden harvest moon. I heard him as I dressed for dinner, and for some silly reason I felt my heart lift as his horse clattered up the drive and around to the stables. I paused in twisting my hair into a knot on the top of my head, and looked more carefully at myself in the glass. I wondered how I looked beside Celia. I was beautiful, there was no doubt, thank God, about that, but I wondered how my clear, bright looks compared to Celia’s sweet loveliness. And when I remembered the scene at the field it struck me, for the first time, that Harry might not relish being reprimanded by his sister in front of the men. Perhaps his heart did not lift at the sight of me, and certainly I knew he did not watch my body and my movements as I had watched his when he bent and stretched in the cornfield.
I slipped down to Mama’s room where she had a long pier glass so I could see my full-length reflection. The sight reassured me. Black suited me – better than the pale pinks and blues I had been forced to wear before. The gown was tight-waisted with black stomacher and square neck, showing me as slim as a whip. The shorter hair around my face twisted into natural curls (with a little help from the tongs) and my eyes in the candle-light were as inscrutable as a cat’s.
Behind the image of my dark figure the room was reflected in shades of shadow. The deep green curtains of the old four-poster bed were dark as pine needles in the light from my single candle and, as I moved, my shadow leaped, huge as a giant’s, on the dim wall behind me. Some trick of light, some nervous fancy, made me suddenly certain I was not alone in the room. I did not turn to look quickly behind me as normally I would have done. I stayed facing the mirror with my unprotected back to the room, my eyes trying to pierce the shadowy corners of the dark room reflected in the darker glass to see who was there.
It was Ralph.
He lay, where he had longed to be, on the master bed. His face was warmed with that familiar, that beloved smile that always lighted him when he turned to me. A look part confident, part male pride, part tenderness, and the anticipation of rough as well as gentle pleasure.
I froze. I could not see his legs.
I neither moved nor breathed.
I could not see his legs.
If they were whole, then the last months had been a nightmare and this was sweet reality. If they were gone, then the nightmare was with me and I was in its grip, but a million times worse than I had dreamed in my bed. The curtains of the bed cast deep slabs of shadow across the counterpane. I could not see his legs.
I knew I must turn and face him.
My face in the glass was the only bright thing in the dark room and it glowed like a ghost. I bit the inside of my cheeks for courage, and like a doomed man turned slowly, slowly, around.
There was nothing there.
The bed was empty.
I croaked, ‘Ralph?’ out of my tightening throat and only the candle flame moved. I took three stiff steps and held the candle high to see every inch of the bed. There was no one there. The pillows and the embroidered silk counterpane were smooth and undented. I put a shaking hand out to touch the pillows and they were cool.
No one had been there.
I staggered to Mama’s dressing table, set the candlestick carefully down, and crumpled on to the stool, my head in my hands.
‘Oh, God,’ I said miserably. ‘Don’t let me go mad. Don’t send me mad now. Oh, don’t let it end in madness when I am so nearly at peace at last.’
Long minutes passed in utter silence except for the steady ticking of the grandfather clock in the corridor. I took a deep breath and took my hands from my face. My face was as serene and lovely as ever and I gazed at it in the glass as if it belonged to someone else, a stranger’s beauty. Even I could not penetrate its calm looks or imagine what terrors were hidden behind that green cat-like gaze.
Then a floorboard outside the door creaked and the door opened. I jumped with a scream in my throat, but only Mama stood there. For a second she did not move and I read her concern for me, and some hint of a darker thought in her expression.
‘It’s not like you to be preening in front of a mirror, Beatrice,’ she said gently. ‘Did I startle you? What were you thinking of, I wonder, that you should be so pale?’
I smiled a strained smile and turned away from the glass. She said nothing but crossed the room and opened her top drawer and took out a handkerchief. The silence lengthened and I felt a familiar drumming of blood in my head as I became anxious, wondering what would come next.
‘You must have missed your pretty dresses when you saw Miss Havering this afternoon,’ my mother said, wrong as usual. ‘How lovely she looked, didn’t she? I thought Harry was most struck.’
‘Harry?’ I said mechanically.
‘There could scarcely be a better match,’ my mother said, spraying eau-de-cologne on the lace handkerchief. ‘Her dowry lands lie so convenient for our own – your papa always had his eye on them – and she is such a dear, charming girl. I understand she is accustomed to very difficult circumstances at home, and the poor thing is well used to adapting herself. Lady Havering assured me that, should there be a match of it, you and I would stay here as long as we wished. Celia would expect no alteration. I do not think that one could plan better.’
I felt a growing chill inside me. Mama could not be talking about a match for Harry. Harry was my friend, my companion. We farmed Wideacre together. We belonged together, alone on Wideacre.
‘A match for Harry?’ I asked incredulously.
‘Of course,’ Mama said, not meeting my eyes. ‘Naturally. Did you think he would stay a bachelor all his life? Did you think Harry would forget his duty to his name and die childless?’
I gaped at her. I had never thought of the matter at all. I never thought beyond this easy summer of my growing intimacy with Harry. Of the happiness I felt when he was so sweet to me. Of the warmth of his smile. Of the tenderness in his voice when he spoke to me.
‘I never thought of the future at all,’ I said, speaking truly of my youthful, feckless half-planning.
‘I have,’ said Mama, and I realized that she was watching me intently and that my face was unguarded before her. I had thought of her for so long as an unimportant pawn on the great chessboard of our fields that it came as a shock to recall that she had been watching me for all my life, watching me closely even now. She knew me as no other person could. She had given birth to me and watched me walk away from her, watched my growing passion for the land and my growing pleasure in running it. If she knew …! But I could take that thought no further. It was impossible to consider what she might think if she had dared to go beyond the barriers I had placed on my own mind.
But she had been uneasy about me for years. Her little plaintive, nagging contradictions added up to a great suspicion that I was not a child of proper feelings. While my father had insisted that a Lacey of Wideacre could do no wrong, she had been forced to acquiesce and had assumed, as he had insisted, that her complaints about me stemmed merely from her town-bred conventionality. But now no rowdy, careless Papa was there to overbear her judgement and she could see me ever more clearly. She did not merely object that I did not behave in a conventional way – that would have been easily mended. She objected, she suspected, that I did not feel in my private heart as a young girl should do.
‘Mama …’ I said, and it was a half-conscious appeal to her to protect me, as a parent should, from my fear. Even though what I most feared were the thoughts behind her suddenly sharp eyes.
She ceased her fiddly tidying of her chest of drawers and turned towards me, leaning back against the chest, her blue eyes scanning my face with anxiety.
‘What is it, Beatrice?’ she said. ‘I cannot guess what is in your mind. You are my own child, and yet sometimes I cannot even approach a guess at what you are thinking.’
I stammered. I had no words to hand. My heart was still hammering from my foolish vision of Ralph. It was too much to have to deal with Mama, to have to face her only minutes later.
‘There is something wrong,’ she said with certainty. ‘I have been treated as a fool in this house, but I am not a fool. I know when there is something wrong, and there is something wrong now.’
I put my hands out, half to stretch towards her, half to ward off the words and the thoughts I feared she had in her mind. She did not take my hands. She made no move towards me. She was not grateful for a caress; she stayed cold and questioning, and her eyes drained me of courage.
‘You loved your papa not as an ordinary child loves its father,’ she said definitely. ‘I have watched you all your life. You loved him because he was the Squire and because he owned Wideacre. I know that. No one cared what I knew, nor what I thought. But I knew that your sort of love is, somehow … dangerous.’
My breath hissed in a gasp as she searched and then found that dreadful, illuminating word.
My hands were loosely clasped to hide their trembling. My face upturned to my mama felt as white as a sheet. If I had been a murderer on trial in the dock I could not have seemed more aghast, more guilty.
‘Mama …’ I half whispered. It was a plea to her to stop this remorseless progress of ideas which could lead her all the way into the deep secret maze of the truth.
She moved from the chest of drawers and came towards me. I nearly shrank away, but something, some pride, some strength, kept me rock-still. I looked into her face with my brave, lying eyes, and matched her gaze.
‘Beatrice, I am preparing for Harry’s marriage to Celia,’ she said, and I saw her eyes glisten with a hint of tears. ‘No woman welcomes the arrival of another into her home. No woman looks forward to seeing her son turn away from her to his bride. But I am doing this for Harry.’ She paused. ‘I am doing this for you,’ she said deliberately. ‘You must, you shall be freed from your fascination with this land and with its master,’ she said urgently. ‘With another girl a little older than you in the house, you will go out more. You can visit the Haverings, perhaps go to London with them. And Harry will be absorbed in Celia and he will have less time for you.’
‘You wish to come between Harry and me?’ I said in impulsive resentment.
‘Yes,’ said my mother baldly. ‘There is something in this house. What it is I cannot say, but I can feel it. Some hint of danger. I feel as if I can smell it in every room where you and Harry are working together. You are both my children. I love you both. I should guard you both. I will save you both from whatever danger it is that threatens us all.’
I found, in the deepest reserves of my courage, a confident smile, and I held it on my face.
‘Mama, you are sad and still grieving for Papa. We are all of us still mourning. There is no danger, no threat. There is only a brother and sister trying to get the work done that only their papa knew and understood. It is just work, Mama. And Celia will help us and soon Wideacre will be straight again.’
She sighed at that and her shoulders trembled in a nervous shudder, and then straightened.
‘I wish I could be sure,’ she said. ‘I sometimes think I must be mad to think of danger, danger everywhere. I suppose you are right, Beatrice. It is only grief letting in foolish thoughts. Forgive me, my dear, if I alarmed you with my silliness. And yet, remember what I said. Now your papa has gone you are in my charge and you will have to lead a more normal life. While Harry needs your help you may indeed aid him, but when he has a wife you will be less important on Wideacre, Beatrice. And I expect you to accept that change with good grace.’
I bowed my head, my eyes smiling under the lowered eyelids. ‘Yes, indeed, Mama,’ I said submissively. And at the same time I thought, ‘You won’t keep me stitching in the drawing room when the sun is hot and the reapers need watching in the fields.’ And I knew she could not.
But the betrothal exposed once more my vulnerability. I had no plan. Ralph had been the planner and Ralph had paid for his upstart wickedness. I had only let the sunshiny days slip by me, resting like a child in the pleasure of the day. I was not even the principal person on the land that summer. I still knew more than Harry could ever learn. I still knew the needs of the lands, the needs of our people and the additional, slightly special Wideacre ways. But that summer Harry’s star was in the ascendant and while I might give orders, the sun came out when he came into a cornfield.
He could never control a reaper gang as I could. He was both too friendly – with his eccentric insistence on using a scythe very badly himself – and too distant – leaving them at dinner break to come back to the Hall. They preferred to have me overseeing, knowing that I would do my job well – watching the line, checking the yield and planning the work – and leave them to do theirs. Then when the girls came through the stubble with great flasks of cider and home-brewed beer and huge crusty loaves of yellow bread, they knew I would sit in the prickly field beside them and eat as hungrily as any of them.
But that year they were not my people. They were Harry’s.
I could not hate Harry for it. I hated with every fibre in my spiteful, resentful body the old men, the male lawyers, the male Parliament, the male judiciary and the male landowners who had constructed a system of laws expressly designed to ensure that their mothers, their wives and even their own little daughters should forever be excluded from everything that makes life worth living: the ownership of land. But I could not hate Harry. No one could. His ready smile, his sweetness of temper, his quick humour and his dazzling good looks earned him favour wherever he went. The men of the reaper gang might prefer working in the field where I was watching, but their women blushed as red as cherries if Harry so much as rode down the lane. He was the harvest deity that summer. All I could be was priestess at the shrine.
No one was immune to the high summer appeal of the new young Master of Wideacre. I think I was the only person on Wideacre who remembered the previous Master with continual regret. For everyone else, Harry was the rising sun; and his good looks – enhanced by hard work and radiant health – and his joyous energy clearly identified him as the summertime prince of Wideacre. Only I, dark in my black mourning, sour in my temper, worked in that golden summer with relentess efficiency but with little joy.
The cream of the year at Wideacre is the harvest supper when the last of the wheat is in. No one on the estate escapes the drudgery of the final days of the harvest when every man, woman and child is racing against the weather and the coming of the autumn rain to get the golden corn under cover before the dark clouds build up and demolish the year’s profit in one wicked night.
You work half consciously to that end from the first winter ploughing and spring sowing of seed. All the long year you watch the earth and the sky. Not too cold for the new seeds at the end of spring. Not too dry for the little shoots. Plenty of sun to ripen the grain but enough rain to make it green and lush. Then no rain – oh, you pray – no rain when the corn is standing proud and high but so vulnerable to storm and disease. Then the sense of triumph when the reaper gang go swish, swish, into the first field, which is as ripply as a vast, golden inland sea. Then the race starts between people and the wanton and unpredictable gods of the weather. And this year, the year of the harvest god Harry, the weather held and held and held until the people said they had never known such a summer, and everyone forgot the hot summer Ralph and I had made last year, a lifetime ago.
On the last day of harvesting, I watched the work in the morning and Harry rode out to the last field in the afternoon. When I judged they would be nearly finished, I rode down to the great granary and barn behind the new mill to watch the carts come in. Only the miller – Bill Green – and his wife were at home. Their two labourers and three sons had all gone off to bring the harvest home. Mrs Green herself was in a flurry of preparation for the evening harvest supper and her kitchen was crowded with the staff from the Hall, unpacking great hampers and flagons from our kitchens.
I sat alone in the courtyard, listening to the tumble of the water into the millpond and the rhythmic slap, slap, of the millwheel, and watching the flock of doves leaving and returning to the dovecote built into the point of the roof.
A solitary cat stretched out in the sun, too hot and too lazy to wash her crackling, dusty fur. When I moved, her eyes, as green and inscrutable as my own, snapped open and gave me gaze for gaze. By the river, the tallest beech trees rustled in the breeze but the lower branches never stirred. The wood birds were silent in the heat; only the doves cooed in a continual purr of courtship. Courtyard, cat, doves and I were all motionless in the heat of the afternoon, baked into silence by the August sun.
Unbidden, into my dozy, daydreaming mind, came thoughts of my brother. Not Harry my brother the schoolboy, nor Harry the incompetent farmer. But Harry the harvest demigod at whose bidding and on whose land the corn stood tall. At the Harry that Celia saw when she found the courage to order out her mama’s landau to drive down the lanes under the pretext of obliging me, but really to see him stripped down to shirtsleeves and riding breeches. Of the Harry that I saw growing in authority and power. Of the Harry who was daily becoming a true Master of Wideacre, whom I could never shift.
And then I thought, with dawning clarity, that I did not want to shift Harry. That I liked seeing him learning about the land, that I liked seeing the earth growing to his bidding. That I liked seeing him at the head of the table smiling down the length of it to me. That every second of this hot summer I had spent with Harry had been delight and pleasure. And the long periods of dull time without him had been spent in thinking of him, and remembering his smile, his special tone of laughter, or just hearing again in my mind snatches of our conversation.
In the distance I heard the rumble of the carts and the sound of people singing. I hardly knew what to do, I had been so enwrapped in this revelation of the rightness of Harry at Wideacre. I crossed the yard and entered the barn as Mr and Mrs Green exploded from the house and ran to open the yard gate. I could clearly hear the harvest songs as they rounded the track to the mill – even distinguish different voices and Harry’s clear tenor ringing out.
The beam across the great curved barn door was heavy and I had to go to the furthest end to lever it up. Then it jerked and tilted away from me and I could drag it from its mountings. As the carts rumbled into the yard in a great triumphant procession of proven fertility, I swung the great double doors open and faced the Wideacre harvest.
The first cart was a swaying wall of golden stooks with Harry perched high up to the sky on top of them all. The heavy shire-horses halted before me at the door and the load rocked as the wheels stilled. Harry leaped to his feet and stood framed against the hot, blue sky looking down at me. My head tipped back to see him; I gazed up at him on his mountain of wheat. He was in his gentry clothes stripped for work, an outfit both impractical and indecent. A fine linen shirt, already torn on one shoulder and opened wide at the throat, showed the brown column of his neck and a glimpse of hard smooth collarbone. His riding breeches fitted snugly to his body and emphasized the muscles of his thighs. His knee-high leather riding boots were scratched beyond repair by his walking through the stubble. He looked exactly what he was: Quality playing peasant, the worst sort of landlord one could have. And I looked at him with naked delight on my face.
His spring down to the carter’s seat and to the ground was stopped short by the look on my face. He paused and his eyes suddenly darted to mine. The careless, hedonistic, laughing look vanished and he looked deeply shocked as if someone had suddenly slapped his smiling face. His eyes never left mine, as if he were about to ask me some question of enormous importance – but had never guessed before that I would know the answer. I stared back at him, my lips half open as if to answer, but able only to take shallow fast breaths. Harry’s gaze slowly ranged from the top of my glinting chestnut hair to the black hem of my skirt and returned again to my face. All he said, very low, was, ‘Beatrice’, as if he had never known my name before.
The carter waited for me to step to one side, then clicked to the team who ambled past me into the barn. Other carts drew into line behind and the men sprang up beside Harry to help throw the stooks down, while others below caught and stacked them in a great spreading and growing mountain of Wideacre wealth. I don’t think Harry even saw them. He stood in the middle of the flying stooks, his eyes on mine, and his look had the intensity and the disbelief of a man drowning.
We exchanged not one word all the rest of that long hard-working day, though we worked near each other until every stook of corn was piled in the barn and every scrap of straw either in the barn or lashed under covered stacks. When the great trestle tables were laid in the yard in the twilight, Harry took the head and I the foot and we smiled when they drank our healths and cheered us. We even danced a little jig, first with each other in a breathless, dreamlike circle, and then with the handful of the wealthiest tenants who had turned out to work on the harvest that day.
As it grew darker and the moon rose, the respectable villagers said their goodnights and rode the carts homeward. The young men and girls stayed behind to dance and to court, and the wilder, single men and bad husbands started to circulate little flasks of the powerful gin they had bought from the London carters. Harry fetched my mare from the mill stables and his own hunter, and we rode home under a harvest moon as round and as golden as a guinea. I was so weak with desire that I could scarcely hold the reins or keep straight in the saddle. The merest glance from Harry set me trembling, and when our horses brushed together and our shoulders touched, I jumped as if I had been scorched.
In the stable yard luck favoured me for there was no groom to lift me from the saddle. I kept my seat until Harry came towards me and then I put out both hands on his shoulders. He lifted me down and I swear he held me close to him. I shuddered as I slid down every inch of his hot, weary body, and smelled the open-air smell and the warm maleness of him. As his gripping hands gently set me on my feet I swayed slightly towards him and lifted my face. In the magical moonlight his clear hard-boned face was an invitation to swift, gentle kisses all over his eyes, forehead and scratchy cheeks. His eyes were hazy as he looked down at my face.
‘Goodnight, Beatrice,’ he said with an undertone of huskiness in his voice. His face came down to mine in a gentle, dry, chaste kiss on my cheek. I hardly stirred. I let him kiss me as he would and I let him release me. I let him step back and take his hands from my waist. Then I slid away, consciously graceful, towards the stable door and up the back stairs to my bedroom. The golden moon lit my way like a promise of paradise.
It was a painful paradise, that autumn and winter. Harry’s courtship of Celia and his growing maturity meant he was away from home often, dining or drinking with new friends, or visiting Celia at Havering Hall. While my power on the land grew in his absence, my power over myself diminished, and I longed for him every second of every dull day that he was away.
I watched him secretly at breakfast, watched him read the paper and comment with assured knowledge on political developments and the news of London society. I watched his quick stride out of the room and listened for the bang of the front door as he went out. At dinner I was by the window to see him ride home, his head full of ideas about his agricultural books. I sat at his right hand and made him laugh with gossip about Mama’s afternoon callers. At tea in the evening I poured his cup and my hand trembled as I gave it to him. I was hopelessly, desperately in love, and I rejoiced in every painful, delightful moment of it.
When he spoke of Celia I cared not at all. Her pretty manners, the fresh flowers of her parlour, her marvellous needlework and her tasteful sketches meant nothing to me. My brother’s genteel courtship of the angelic Celia was not what I wanted. The little songs and pretty presents, the odd bouquet and the weekly visit – she could keep them. I wanted my brother to feel for me the passion I felt for him, which Ralph and I had shared. Instead of shying away from the memory of Harry burying his face against Ralph’s foot and his groans of pleasure at the feel of Ralph using the riding whip on his back, I recalled it with hope. He could feel abject desire; he could be fascinated and overwhelmed. I had seen him with Ralph; I had seen him infatuated and helpless with love. I longed for him to be infatuated again – this time with me.
I knew also – a woman always knows though she may conceal her knowledge even from herself – that Harry desired me in return. When he knew I was in the room his face was schooled and his voice neutral, but if he came upon me unexpectedly, or if I walked into the library when he had thought I was out, his eyes would light up and his hands would tremble. The long discussions we shared over the planting of next year’s crops and Harry’s new theories on crop rotation were spiced and lightened by this unspoken exchange of excitement, and when my hair brushed his cheek as we both leaned over a column of figures, I felt him stiffen. Disappointingly, he did not move forward, but nor did he draw away.
All the long autumn and winter I hardly noticed the chill and the dreary rain, I burned so inside. In the early months, when the chrysanthemums and the thick Michaelmas daisies bloomed, I carried them in to fill the house with their peppery smell and shuddered at the flaring colours. The hunting season came and I had to trail around in my heavy black dress on mornings when the sun rose like a red ball over the hoar-frosted fields and I could hear the hysterical yelp of hounds rushing like mad things in the first runs of the year. By some erratic social ruling, Harry was allowed to attend the meet, dressed in dark colours, and follow the hounds over the first few fields, but was not allowed to be in at the kill. The same inflexible social code ruled that I could not ride in company, and was thus banned from hunting for the whole of the frosty bright season. Only my secret rides about the estate were allowed, as long as none of the gentry saw me.
So there were no wild gallops for me to burn off the energy I felt. There was little work to do on the land, so I was much indoors. As the damp and the rain lifted, and the frost took hold, I longed for Harry with sharper and sharper need. My desire grew so strong that the pleasure curdled into pain on some days. Once, waiting for his return in the stable yard, I broke the ice on the drinking trough and crushed the splinters in my hand to still my impatience. But then, when he came riding in like a warrior high on a steed, and his face lit up to see me, every icy bit of pain melted into joy.
Christmas and New Year passed quietly for we were in second mourning. When a sudden frost made the roads usable, Harry took the coach to town for a week to transact some business. He came home full of the new fashions and plays of the season.
His absence gave me an opportunity to note, with ironic self-knowledge, that although I missed him, I relished the absolute power over the land that was mine when he was away. Our tenants, our labourers and the Acre craftsmen knew well enough who was the master, and would always consult me first before taking a plan or request to Harry. But merchants or dealers who did not know the county well sometimes made the mistake, that first year, of asking to see the Squire. I was always piqued when they entertained me with social gossip but then paused, waiting for me to leave the room before they started business talk. And Harry, with one half of my knowledge and experience, would always be flattered and would sometimes say, with a smile to me, ‘Don’t let us detain you, Beatrice, if you have something to do elsewhere. I am sure I can manage this alone and I will discuss it with you later.’ At which I was supposed to take my leave. Sometimes I went. But sometimes I committed the social solecism of smiling back and saying, ‘I have no business elsewhere, Harry. I would rather stay.’
Then the merchant and Harry would exchange the rueful grin of two men with a recalcitrant female, and discuss the deal for wool or wheat or meat. Wideacre always had the best of it when I was there, but I was unfailingly offended at the assumption that my business could be elsewhere when wealth was on the table.
While Harry was away, however, the merchants, the traders, the lawyers and the bankers had perforce to recognize my ability to give and honour my word. The law, the eternal male law, did not recognize my signature, any more than if I were a bankrupt, a criminal, or a lunatic. But a business man generally needed only one hard look from me before he realized that if he wanted a contract with Wideacre he had better not suggest awaiting Harry’s return. In Harry’s absence my power on the land shed its concealment and everyone, from the poorest tinker or shanty dweller to the leaders of county society, could see that I ruled the land.
We had a week of cold, clammy fogs after Christmas but in mid-January the hills shed their grey and became clear and frosty and bright. Every morning I awoke from a night of confused hot dreams and got up from my bed to throw my window open and breathe in the sharp freezing air. A few hard gasps would send me shivering back into the room to wash and dress before my log fire.
The weather took its toll in Acre. Bill Green, the miller, slipped on some ice in his mill yard and broke a leg and I had to send for the Chichester surgeon to come and set it for him. Mrs Hodgett, the lodge-keeper’s mother, took to her bed when the snow started falling and complained of pains in her chest. They could not root her out. After a week of this nonsense, Hodgett held the gate for me one morning and confessed that he was sure she was in bed only out of pure spite, and that his wife, Sarah, was exhausted with the extra cooking and washing and tired by two walks a day to Acre village to take the old crone her meals.
I nodded and gave him a smile and the next day took my roan hunter down to Acre village and tied him to old Mrs Hodgett’s wooden gate. I could see no face at the window of the little cottage but I knew the old witch would have been peeping. By the time I had swept up her snowy garden and burst into her house, stamping the snow off my boots and pulling my gauntlets off, she had skipped back into her sick bed, covers up to her chin, her bright healthy eyes shifty with deceit.
‘Good day, Mrs Hodgett,’ I sang out. ‘I am sorry to see you abed.’
‘Good day, Miss Beatrice,’ she quavered. ‘It is kind of you to visit a poor old lady.’
‘I can do better than a visit,’ I said encouragingly. ‘I have come to tell you that I am sending for the new Scottish physician, Dr MacAndrew, to come and see you. I hear he is wonderful with chest complaints.’
Her eyes were bright with eagerness.
‘That would be grand,’ she said. ‘I’ve heard tell on him. They speak well of him indeed.’
‘But have you heard of his special treatment?’ I asked. ‘He has a wonderful reducing diet which they say never fails.’
‘No. What is that?’ she asked, walking unsuspecting into the trap.
‘He calls it starving out the infection,’ I said, lying through my teeth with a candid gaze. ‘The first day you take nothing but hot water, and the second day you have hot water with one spoonful, no more, of gruel. The third day you have plain hot water again and the fourth you have a spoonful of gruel. That goes on until you are cured. They say it never fails.’
I smiled encouragingly at her and inwardly apologized to the young doctor whose reputation I was traducing so wilfully. I had not yet met him, but I heard he was excellent. His practice was mainly with the Quality families, of course, but he had a growing name for caring for the poor, and in some very hard cases he gave his services for free. He would survive this taradiddle. No one but a very foolish old lady would believe such nonsense. But Mrs Hodgett was aghast. She stared incredulously at my face and plucked at the bedding with her plump fingers.
‘I don’t know, Miss Beatrice, I’m sure,’ she said hesitantly. ‘It can’t be right to eat so little when you’re poorly.’
‘Oh, yes,’ I said blithely, and turned as the door opened. It was Sarah Hodgett, who had walked from the gatehouse with an earthenware bowl of stew in her hands and a crusty new-baked loaf of bread wrapped in a spotless towel balancing on the lid. The smell of rich rabbit stew filled the frowsy little room and I saw the old lady’s eyes gleam.
‘Miss Beatrice!’ said Sarah with a courteous half-bob and a warm smile for me, her favourite. ‘It’s good of you to call on Mother while she’s poorly.’
‘She’ll be better soon,’ I said with certainty. ‘She’s going on Dr MacAndrew’s special reducing diet. You might as well start now, had you not, Mrs Hodgett? So you can take your rabbit stew home again, Sarah. I dare say that it won’t go to waste there!’
‘I could start the treatment tomorrow!’ Mrs Hodgett intervened despairingly, fearing the disappearance of Sarah’s hot dinner.
‘No, today is best,’ I said firmly. ‘Unless you are already feeling better?’
She seized on the way out with an audible gasp of relief.
‘I am a bit stouter,’ she said. ‘I think I might well be on the mend.’
‘Exercise then,’ I said, firmly putting out an imperious hand and hauling the old lady out of her bed. ‘Sarah can pop home and lay an extra place, and you can walk up to the lodge for your dinner today.’
‘Out in the snow?’ she squawked, as if its touch would poison her. I glanced to the door and saw the pair of stout leather boots and the warm shawl and bonnet hanging on a peg.
‘Yes,’ I said inexorably. ‘It’s either exercise or the special diet for you, Mrs Hodgett. You are too important to us all for us to take any chances with your health.’
She smiled at the compliment but scowled at the options and then, grudgingly, complied. I left Sarah bundling up the old devil in layers of flannel for her outing and went to untie Sorrel, well satisfied. I had done the Hodgetts a favour that they would not forget, and I had given the village a joke that would last them until spring. My swinging stride into the cottage and my starvation diet would be mimicked and laughed over in every taproom in a hundred miles’ radius. And the toast, when the long country guffaws had died down, would be the joking tribute: ‘The Master of Wideacre – Miss Beatrice!’
I called to one of the Tyacke boys, who was making snowballs in the lane, to come and hold Sorrel while I climbed awkwardly on the wall to reach the saddle, and then tossed him a penny for his help, and then another one because I liked his gap-toothed smile of hero worship as he looked up at me.
‘Gaffer Cooper is poorly, too,’ he volunteered, turning the coins in his hand and planning a feast of buns and toffee.
‘Bad?’ I asked, and the lad nodded. I could call on my way home. He was one of the cottagers who patched together a living on the fringe of the village where it merges with the common. In summer he had the odd day’s work harvesting or reaping in the Wideacre gang, in winter he would help someone kill a pig and be paid with a good measure of bacon. He had a couple of scrawny hens that sometimes laid an egg or two. He had a thin old cow that gave him a little milk. His cottage was built from wood scrounged and stolen from our woods, and from branches legitimately cut on common land. His roof was made of branches and sods of turf. His wood fire burned turves and wood from the common and filled the little room with smoke. He sat on a three-legged stool carved years ago, and he ate from a wooden bowl with a tin spoon. He cooked in a three-legged pot set in the embers of his fire, which burned on a stone in the middle of the room and smoked the room as well as the bacon hung from the rafters.
It was not a life I would choose to lead, but Gaffer Cooper had never had different and never settled to regular work and called no one master. In his dirty little shanty, sleeping on a bed of bracken, rolled up in rags, Gaffer Cooper called himself a free man; Papa, who had a sensitive eye for other men’s pride, always called him Gaffer Cooper and never John. And so did I.
Sorrel was tired of standing still, and chilled, so I gave him a brief canter down the snowy lane and back before turning right down the track that leads towards the cottages. The wood was silent, magical in the snow. The deep green pine trees and firs each held a thick line of snow along their branches and pointy fingers. Even the tiniest pine needles were capped with a sliver of ice. The silver birches looked grey instead of white against the icy brightness, and the beech trees’ grey trunks were pewter-coloured. As I rode I could hear the Fenny clattering louder around the ice-floes and I went closer to see the green water sliding secretly under little silver skins of ice to make silent pools under the white ceiling.
The snow in the woods was pockmarked with animal tracks. I saw the two round two long prints of a rabbit and the little dots of a weasel or stoat following close behind it. There were fox tracks, like a little dog’s, and even the scuffed trail of a badger whose low belly brushed the thicker drifts.
Looking up through the tracery of snow-laden branches, I could see from the sky that we would have more snow later in the day and I put Sorrel into a canter to get home before dinner. Someone had been down the track before me. A stout pair of boots and a pair of wooden clogs, so Gaffer must be ill indeed if he was being visited.
As we rounded the bend to his cottage I guessed I was too late. The door of his cottage stood wide open, something that happened generally only on the most scorching of summer days, and coming out was Mrs Merry, midwife and layer-out in Acre parish – and owner, as befitted her rank, of a good pair of boots.
‘Good day, Miss Beatrice. Gaffer’s gone.’ She greeted me matter-of-factly.
I drew rein beside the fence of hazel sticks.
‘Old age?’ I asked.
‘Aye,’ she said. ‘And the winter takes them.’
‘He had enough to eat, and enough clothes?’ I asked. Gaffer was not one of our people. He was neither tenant, labourer nor pensioner, but he had scraped his living on our land and I should feel to blame if he had died in want.
‘He ate one of his hens only last night,’ said Mrs Merry. ‘And he had survived many winters in those clothes and in that bed. You need have no fears, Miss Beatrice. Gaffer’s time was come and he went peacefully. Would you care to see him?’
I shook my head. There was no family in Acre who would be offended by my refusal. I could please myself.
‘Did he leave any savings?’ I asked. ‘Enough for a funeral?’
‘Nay,’ she said. ‘It’ll be a pauper’s grave for him. We have found nothing.’
I nodded. ‘I’ll stand the coffin and the service,’ I said briefly. ‘Set it in hand, Mrs Merry. I won’t have Wideacre folk buried in shame.’
Mrs Merry measured me with her eyes and smiled.
‘Eh, but you’re so like your papa!’ she said, and I smiled in return at the compliment: the best that could be paid me.
‘I hope so,’ I said and nodded my farewell.
In a day or two the plain whitewood coffin would take Gaffer’s remains to the churchyard and he would be buried in the far corner where the water pump is and the tools are kept. I would pay for a plain wooden cross with his name on it. The service would be read by the curate to whoever was there, idling from work, for Gaffer had few friends. A couple of the other cottagers might attend to pay their respects to one of their own from the village within a village, but Acre itself would be little touched. I would pay the extra penny necessary to toll the funeral bell for him, and at the sound the men ploughing in the fields, or trimming the hedges and digging ditches, would stop their work and pull off their caps to be bare-headed for the passing of the old man who never earned such a mark of respect in his life.
Then the bell would cease and the caps would go back on to the quickly chilled heads. The men digging would spit on their cold hands, grasp the spades again and curse the life that forced them to stand knee-deep in icy water in mid-January with no break until dinner, and no chance of being warm and dry until dusk.
The freezing weather was hard enough on the labourers but this winter it was a nightmare for the shepherds. It was especially hard because the snow fell so thick and so early that the sheep had not been gathered off the downs in time for them to lamb on the lower, more accessible hills. Day after grey snowy day we toiled up that blocked track to the top of the downs to poke about with long sticks in the snow to try to find the firm white lump that meant a buried sheep, and then set to the miserable job of digging the thing out.
We lost remarkably few because I made sure the men were out from dawn to dusk and they cursed me with language that should have dropped me faint with horror from the saddle, but that instead made me laugh.
They learned a great, if grudging, respect for me that winter. Unlike the labourers and tenants who saw me almost daily, the shepherds worked alone. Only at a time of crisis like this one when most of the flock was buried under six-foot drifts did they work in a gang commanded by me. They noted the advantage the horse gave me and cursed me roundly when I trotted past them up the track, or when they slipped and fell into great deceiving hills of snow while I rode dry-shod. But they knew also that not even the oldest, wisest one of them could match me for sensing where a sheep was buried or guessing where a little flock would have huddled. Then, when they were digging, more often than not I would be side by side with them in the snow, probing for the buried animal, and feeling for its head.
And when it came to rounding up the chilled and silly things to move them downhill, the shepherds knew that although I was tired and cold I would ride behind the stragglers and bawl at the dogs until we had them all safe in a lower meadow.
Only then, when the gate was pulled shut and hay thrown on the snow, would our ways diverge. The men would go home to their little cottages to dig out potatoes, or swedes, or turnips for their dinner, or reluctantly go to work their tract on the common fields. Or they would go out to set a snare for a rabbit or mend a leaking roof. Working, even in the dark, working, working, working, until they fell into their beds and slept, sometimes still in their wet clothes.
But I would trot home and toss the reins to a stable lad, climb the stairs to my room and sink into a tub before the fire while Lucy poured ewer after ewer of hot water over me and said, ‘Miss Beatrice! You will scald! You are all pink!’
Only when my skin was stinging with the heat would I heave myself out and wrap up in a linen towel while Lucy brushed my hair and piled it up and powdered it ready for the evening.
I found I could chat to Mama at dinner, and she showed some interest in my day, although the weight of her disapproval curbed my tongue. She disliked what I was doing, but even she could see that when a fortune of wool and meat lay buried in the snow one could not leave it to paid labourers to dig out, when and how they fancied.
But once the covers were removed I became quiet, and by the time the tea tray came into the parlour I was weak with sleepiness.
‘Really, Beatrice, you are good for nothing these days,’ Mama said, looking pointedly at a spoiled piece of embroidery which had been in and out of the work basket every night for a sennight. ‘It is hardly like having a daughter at all,’ she said.
‘I am sorry, Mama,’ I said in sudden sympathy. ‘I know it seems odd. But we have had such bad luck with the sheep. Another couple of days and they will all be in, and then Harry will be home in time for lambing.’
‘In my girlhood I did not even know the word lambing,’ said Mama, her tone plaintive.
I smiled. I was simply too tired to try to restore her to good humour.
‘Well, as Papa used to say, I am a Lacey of Wideacre,’ I said lightly. ‘And while I am the only one, I have to be Squire and daughter, all at once.’
I tossed the stitchery back into the workbox and rose to my feet.
‘Forgive me, Mama. I know it is early and I am no company for you, but I am too tired to stay awake.’
I bent down for her goodnight kiss, a cool resentful one, and left her.
Every night was the same. As I climbed each stair my tiredness fell away and my thoughts turned to Harry. His smile, the sweetness and tenderness of his expression, his blue eyes and the set of his coat became more and more vivid with every step I took up to my room. By the time I was undressed and lying on my back in bed, I could almost feel his body on mine and his arms around me. With a moan I would roll on my side and try to put the insane, senseless picture from my mind. I was sure that I longed for the touch, for the pleasure of Ralph. But the thought of Ralph was a nightmare to me, so my mind had played this trick on me and made me dream of Harry. Once he was home, and we were working side by side again, I might enjoy his company and this strange, fevered dreaminess would be gone. I tossed and turned, and dozed and woke with a jump until midnight. Then I sank into sleep and dreamed only of golden curls and a sweet, honest smile … and acres and acres of snow hiding precious sheep.
Harry came home the second week of February, later than he had promised. His lateness meant I had the first week of lambing to manage alone. The shepherds and I spent each long dark evening, after every long cold morning, finding sheep in lamb, checking the lambs and moving the sickly ones indoors to barns where they could be watched. Some of the flock, the less hardy ones, were to lamb indoors anyway.
I loved going into the barn when it was full of sheep. They rippled like a woolly river away from me as I walked through them. Outside the wind howled and the beams of the barn creaked like a ship at sea; but inside it was snug and sweet-smelling. The oil lantern cast a yellow glow when I checked the newborn lambs early in the morning, or last thing at night, and the smell of the oil on their fleeces lingered on my greasy hands when I rode home.
I was tired and chilled and smelling of lanolin one night riding home, when I noticed fresh hoof marks in the snow of the drive and, absurdly, my heart sprang up like a winter robin. ‘Perhaps Harry is home,’ I said to myself and spurred Sorrel on to a faster canter, sliding on the icy snow.
His horse was standing at the front door and Harry, gross in a caped cloak, was in the doorway, hugging Mama and answering her babble of questions with a laugh. The sound of Sorrel’s hoofs on the icy gravel made him turn and come back out to me, though I saw Mama’s detaining hand on his cape.
‘Beatrice!’ he said and his voice was full of joy.
‘Oh, Harry!’ I said and blushed as scarlet as a holly berry.
He reached his arms up to me and I slid from the saddle towards him. The capes of his riding cloak billowed round and half drowned me in the smell of wet wool, of cigar smoke and horse sweat. He held me in a hard hug before he released me and I sensed, with the sureness of my leaping heart, that his heart was pounding too, as he held my slim body in his arms.
‘Come along, you two,’ called Mama from the doorway. ‘You will both catch your deaths of cold out there in the snow.’
Then Harry’s arm was round my waist and he swept me indoors like some buffeting winter wind, so we arrived in the parlour breathless and laughing.
Harry was full of town gossip – the snippets of political news he had heard from old friends of Papa’s, the family news of our cousins and a bundle of little presents. He had the playbill of the theatre he had visited and the programme from a concert.
‘Wonderful music,’ he said enthusiastically.
He had visited the sights of London, too; Astley’s amphitheatre and the Tower of London. He had not been to Court but he had been to several private parties and met so many people he could not remember half their names.
‘But it’s fine to be home,’ he said. ‘My word, I thought I should never get here at all. The roads were shocking. I planned to come post but I left my baggage at Petworth and rode the rest of the way. If I had waited for the road to be cleared for carriages, I think I should have been there for Easter! What a winter it has been! You must have been busy with the sheep, Beatrice!’
‘Oh! Do not ask her!’ Mama threw her hands up with sudden vivacity at the return of her lovely boy. ‘Beatrice has become a full-time shepherdess and she smells of sheep, and talks sheep and thinks sheep until she can barely speak at all but only bleat.’
Harry roared. ‘I can see it’s high time I came home,’ he said. ‘You two would have been pulling caps in another week. Poor Beatrice, you will have had hard work to do in this weather! And poor Mama, with no company!’
Then I saw the clock and hurried to my room to change. My bath was even more scalding than usual that night and my scrubbing with the perfumed soap even more meticulous. I chose a deep blue gown of velvet with wide swaying loops of material over the paniers at the side. My maid powdered my hair with extra care and placed among the white curls deep blue bows that echoed the colour of the gown. Against the powder, my skin was clear, pale honey, my eyes hazel rather than green. I doubted if there were lovelier girls even in London, and after Lucy left me I stayed seated before my mirror gazing blankly at my reflection.
The gong roused me from my daze and I hurried downstairs in a rustle of silk petticoats and rich velvet.
‘Very nice, dear,’ Mama said approvingly, noting my unusually thorough powdering and the new gown.
Harry frankly gaped at me and I stared back at him.
In half-mourning, like Mama and me, he had to wear dark clothes, but his waistcoat was a deep, deep blue embroidered with intricate black thread. His long coat with the dandified wide cuffs and lapels was deep blue also – a sheeny satin that caught the light when he moved. His hair was tied back with a bow of matching blue material, and his satin evening breeches were blue also.
‘You match,’ Mama said unnecessarily. ‘How very fine you both look.’
Harry smiled, but his eyes had a confused, transfixed expression in them. With jesting ceremony he bowed to Mama and me, and offered us both an arm, but behind the smile and the ready courtesy I knew him to be keenly aware of my every move. I smiled back as if I was at ease, too, but the hand I put on his arm trembled, and when I sat in my chair the table swam before my eyes as if I was going to faint.
Harry and Mama exchanged family news over the dinner table and I concentrated on schooling my voice to make normal, laughing replies when one or other of them turned to me. After dinner Harry refused port and said he preferred to come at once with us to the parlour.
‘For I have brought home the family jewels from the bank, Mama,’ he said. ‘And I am longing to see them. Such a great weight! I had them tucked under my arm on the horse for I feared to leave them with the rest of my baggage. I was certain I should be robbed!’
‘There was no need to carry them,’ Mama said apologetically. ‘You could have left them with your valet. But you shall certainly see them.’
She went to her room for the key and then opened up the little chest and lifted out the three fitting trays.
‘Celia shall have these on her wedding day,’ she said, picking out the family heirloom, the Lacey diamonds: a set of gold and diamond rings, bracelets, a collar of diamonds, eardrops and a tiara.
‘I should think they would bring her to her knees,’ said Harry laughing. ‘They must weigh a ton. Have you ever worn them all, Mama?’
‘Good heavens, no!’ she said. ‘We only had one season in town after our marriage and I looked behind the times enough without being draped in old-fashioned jewels. These were given to me on my wedding day, as is the custom, and then stored at the bank. But Celia should at least see them in October.’
‘October?’ I said. The eternal piece of embroidery slipped in my hands and the needle jabbed into my thumb.
‘Oh, poor Beatrice!’ said Harry. ‘I must have this embroidered kerchief when it’s done. There are more blood spots on it than thread. What tortures you put her through, Mama!’
‘The torture is in trying to teach her,’ Mama said, laughing with her beloved son. ‘After a day out with your sheep she can barely see to put a stitch in its place. And she was always clumsy with a needle.’
She packed the jewels back into the box and took them up to her room. Harry took my hand in his and inspected the welling spot of blood on the ball of the left thumb.
‘Poor Beatrice!’ he said again and kissed the thumb. His lips opened and he sucked the little spot of blood. In my nervous, passionate state I trembled like a high-bred mare. The ball of my thumb was pressed against his teeth, and I could feel his tongue, wet and warm, sliding over the ridges of the thumbprint. His mouth was hot, and fascinatingly wet. I held my hand up to his face and scarcely breathed.
‘Poor Beatrice,’ he repeated. He raised his eyes and looked at me. I hardly dared move. There was such pleasure in having him touch me, such delight in a tiny gesture. I could not have taken my hand away had my life depended on it. But somewhere in the back of my mind was a growing awareness that he had kept hold of my hand for some time. The casual gesture was turning into a caress. There was silence.
He took the thumb from his mouth and inspected it with playful seriousness.
‘Do you think you will survive this wound?’ he asked.
‘I’m scarred from a thousand similar battles,’ I said, trying to keep my voice light, but I could not help it quivering. I noticed that he was breathing slightly faster and his eyes had that absorbed, incredulous look again.
‘Poor Beatrice,’ he said, as if he had forgotten any other words. He still held my hand and I rose from my seat to stand beside him. We were nearly the same height and if I had moved half a step closer my breasts would have rubbed his chest and our bellies brushed.
‘I hope you will always care for my wounds and sorrows so tenderly, Harry,’ I said.
‘My dear sister,’ he said sweetly. ‘I will always care for you. You must promise to tell me if ever you are unhappy or unwell. I am sorry I left you with so much work to do, and I was sorry to see you so pale.’
‘My heart flutters so, Harry,’ I whispered. It was hammering like a drum at the closeness of him. He put his hand against my ribs as if to feel for the pulse and I covered it with my own, pressing his palm against me. Scarcely knowing what I was doing, I slid it towards the curve of my breasts, very soft under the blue velvet.
Harry gave a gasp and his other hand came around my waist to draw me towards him. We stood like two statues scarce believing that our hearts were hammering hot blood round our bodies and that we were moving closer and closer together. I felt his leg press forward, then closed my eyes at the blissful moment of contact as our bodies touched down the quivering length. With my eyes still closed I blindly lifted my face and felt the warmth of his breath as his head bent down to me.
His lips touched mine as gently and as chastely as any brother’s could. Instinctively I opened my mouth in pleasure and felt his whole body flinch in surprise. He would have pulled away but my hand was behind his neck and held his face to me. Then my tongue slid into his virginal mouth and I licked him in a thoughtless fit of passion.
He jerked back, and I came to my senses and let him go.
‘That was a brotherly kiss,’ he said gently. ‘I am so glad to be home and to see you again that I wanted to give you a hug and a brotherly kiss.’ Then with cruel suddenness he turned on his heel and left me. Left me with a sweet smile and a sweet unconvincing lie.
He had lied to spare us both the knowledge of our mutual desire. He had lied because he knew nothing of passion between a man and a woman. He lied because he had two irreconcilable pictures of me in his mind. One his dear pretty sister, and the other the irresistible beauty who greeted the wheat carts with her head tipped back and the glory of a goddess of the harvest in her eyes.
So he left me with a lie and I stood, one hand on the mantelpiece of my mama’s parlour and my feet on the hearthstone of my home, and shuddered with longing for him. And looked that longing, at last, in the face.
Nothing could stop us or divert us from the road down which we were travelling, Harry and I. No word of mine or act of will could have kept us from each other. We were both like driftwood on the Fenny’s springtime floods, and our passion and our love grew as remorselessly as the buds on the trees and the spring flowers in the hedgerows.
If I had wanted to escape this destiny I do not know where I could have gone. I was as driven to Harry as the birds were driven to build nests and lay eggs; my heart and my body called to him as wilfully as the cuckoos called in the greening woods. He was the Master of Wideacre; of course I wanted him for my own.
The first days of the warm spring weather passed for me in a haze of sensual daydreaming. The lambs were fit and we transferred the flock back to the spring grass on the downs and I was suddenly at leisure. I rode around the woods; I even made myself a little line and spent one morning fishing in the high fast river. I took myself up to the downs and lay on damp grass gazing up into the blue sky where a few early larks were climbing. The spring sun warmed my cheeks, my closed eyelids, but inside I was scorching. And there was nothing I could do to stop it.
My nonchalant dismissal of the courtship Celia enjoyed was now past history. When Harry and Mama spoke of the October wedding, I felt nauseous with envy. Harry’s every other sentence was of Celia and her likes and dislikes and I could scarcely school my face to remain smiling and serene when I heard her name. She was no longer something off Wideacre, as distant and unimportant as the London scene; she was a threat to me that was coming ever closer. She held my brother’s heart in her little hands. She would be coming into my home; she would sit at the foot of the great Wideacre table and Harry would smile down the length of it to her. Worse, most nightmarish picture of all, every night of our lives she and Harry would climb the stairs together and shut the bedroom door, and he would hold her and possess her while I lay in my single bed and trembled with longing.
I did not dream now; I started to think. In the back of my mind a plan was forming to give me the land, and to give me Harry. To forge out of these demented, unlikely elements some stability, some basis for my future. But I could not be certain that it could be done. It depended so much on Celia, and I knew her only slightly. Next time she was due for a visit my eyes were sharp upon her.
Harry met the Havering landau at the steps of the Hall with Mama at his side and me in polite and reticent attendance a few steps behind. I had a perfect view of Celia’s face as Harry greeted them, and I saw with amazement that she was nervous with him. Her pale pink parasol trembled over her little head as Harry brushed the footman aside to open the carriage door. He handed Lady Havering out, then turned to Celia. He bowed low and took her gloved hand. The colour flowed from her face and then rushed back as he kissed her hand, but I knew – with the keen insight of a woman in love – that it was not the nervous heat of passion I felt for Harry. What was the silly thing blushing for? Why was she trembling?
I had to understand what went on behind those soft brown eyes, so this time it was I who suggested a drive while our mamas gossiped over the teacups.
We went through the lanes to see Harry’s new turnip field. Harry rode politely behind, at a distance to avoid the white chalky dust of the high lanes. So I had her to myself. It was a warm spring day, almost as hot as last summer when we had gone to see the harvest, when I had cared nothing for either of them. Now I knew they could either wreck or make my life.
‘Celia,’ I said sweetly, ‘I am so glad that we shall be sisters. I have been so lonely with just Mama and Harry and I always wanted you as a friend.’
The colour mounted to her face in one of her easy blushes. ‘Oh, Beatrice,’ she said, ‘I should be so glad if you and I were to become special friends. There is so much that will be new to me and strange. And I feel so awkward coming into your mama’s house.’
I smiled and pressed her little hand.
‘You always seem so grown up and confident,’ she said shyly. ‘I used to watch you and your papa setting off hunting, and wished so much that I could know you better. And the great horses you rode! When I think now of living in Wideacre Hall, I feel’ – she gave a little gasp – ‘quite frightened.’
I smiled gently at her. Although she had lived all of her adult life in Havering Hall, as the unwanted stepdaughter and stepsister, she had seen little of country society, and had played no great part in the life of the Hall. She was nervous, of course, and it occurred to me that she might want Harry merely as the lesser of two evils.
‘Harry will be beside you,’ I said comfortingly.
‘Oh, yes,’ she agreed. ‘But gentlemen can be so …’ She paused. ‘Marriage is so …’ and she stopped again.
‘It’s a big step for a girl,’ I said helpfully.
‘Oh, yes!’ she said with such emphasis in her soft voice that I racked my brains to think what was behind all this flutter.
‘There is the new position – as the Lady of Wideacre,’ I said, biting my tongue on the pain that the title would go to this baby.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That is rather frightening, but …’ There was something more, something else.
‘Harry seldom drinks to excess,’ I said at random thinking of her stepfather.
‘Oh, no!’ she said quickly, and I had drawn a blank there, too.
‘I am sure he loves you very, very much,’ I said. Envy made me faint as if I had an illness. But it was true. I was sure he did, damn her.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That’s the trouble really.’
I recovered rapidly. The trouble? What trouble? ‘The trouble?’ I repeated.
Her head with the pretty little bonnet bowed low. I saw a tear drop on her figured satin and one gloved finger covered the spot.
‘He’s so …’ She couldn’t find the word and Lord help me I couldn’t think what could be wrong.
‘He’s so …’ She tried again, and I was dumb.
‘He’s so … unrestrained …’ she got out. ‘I suppose it is because he is interested in farming … but really …’
I nearly gasped aloud at this revelation. While I had been aching and longing for Harry and trembling at his touch, this little ice maiden had been refusing his kisses and shrinking from an arm around her waist. Envy made me physically queasy, but my face must not show it.
‘I expect men always are,’ I said, imitating her awed whisper. ‘Is he always like that?’
‘Oh, no!’ she said. The deep brown eyes flickered to my face. ‘The last two Sundays, he changed. He tried to kiss me …’ – her voice dropped even lower – ‘on the mouth! Oh, it was horrid.’ She broke off again. ‘Something else, too.’
I remembered with every cell of my sensuous body the warmth of Harry’s body against mine, my lips opening beneath his and my tongue seeking his mouth. His hand tightening and pressing my breast. That had caused the change.
‘He forgot himself,’ said Celia with some little determination. ‘He forgot who I am. Young ladies do not …’ She paused. ‘And certainly they do not let gentlemen touch them … in that way.’
I caught my breath in a hissing sigh. It had to have been the evening in Mama’s parlour that had made the difference. I had pressed his hand to my breast. I had opened my mouth to him. He had gone from me to Celia hot with desire and tingling with the touch of his first woman – and cold, unloving little Celia had rebuffed him.
‘Did you tell him so?’ I asked.
‘Of course,’ she said. The brown eyes opened wider and she stole another glance at me. ‘He seemed angry,’ she said. Her lower lip trembled. ‘It made me rather afraid … for later.’
‘Don’t you want him to kiss you?’ I burst out.
‘Not like that! I don’t like kisses like that! I don’t think I ever will! I don’t see how I can learn to bear them. Mama and Step-Papa don’t behave like that; they … they have an arrangement.’
The whole world knew that Lord Havering’s arrangement was a ballet dancer in one of the London theatres when Lady Havering put her foot down after two children and four miscarriages.
‘You would like that with Harry?’ I asked. I couldn’t believe my ears.
‘Oh, no,’ she said miserably. ‘I know one cannot, until there is an heir. I know there is nothing to be done. I shall just have to … I shall just have to …’ She gave a piteous little sob. ‘I shall just have to endure it, I suppose.’
I took her hand in my firm clasp.
‘Celia, listen to me,’ I said. ‘I will be a sister to you in October, and I will be a friend to you now. Harry and I are very, very close – you know how we run the estate together – he will always listen to me because he knows I have his interests at heart. I will be a friend to you, too. I shall help you with Harry. I can talk to Harry and no one but you and I need ever know what you have told me. I can make it all right between the two of you.’
Celia raised her eyes to my face.
‘Oh, if you would!’ she said. ‘But won’t Harry mind?’
‘Leave it to me,’ I said. ‘I make only one condition.’ I paused and the cherries on her little bonnet trembled. I realized that to escape Harry’s embraces she would promise me anything.
‘The condition is that you always tell me everything about you and Harry, everything.’
The cherries bobbed as she nodded vigorously.
‘Should you change in your feelings to him, or should he change to you, you will tell me at once.’
The cherries bobbed again and she held out her hand.
‘Oh, yes, Beatrice. Let’s shake hands on the bargain. I promise you shall always be my best and closest of friends. I will always confide in you and you shall have thousands of favours from me. Anything you want that I can give shall be yours.’
I smiled and kissed her cheek to seal the agreement. She had only one thing that I wanted – that I would ever want – and she was far along the road to giving it me, my heart’s desire, my brother Harry.
6
(#ulink_e3061d15-bb4a-5f12-9f14-3060a0453e9f)
I came home from that drive my head full of anything but turnips. Celia’s inarticulate murmurs about Harry’s courting had made my head throb with jealousy and longing. She might be happy to hand over to me the control of her married life, but it was still her downcast eyes that Harry watched, even when I was near by. And when we stood side by side looking at the turnip field, he had bent his head low to see her pale prettiness under her parasol.
I left her in the parlour and went to my room to take off my bonnet. I looked at myself in the little mirror but my reflection gave me scant joy. If Harry preferred sugar and cream then my clear strong beauty would help me little. My green eyes looked blankly back at me, dark with desire. I could not believe, I could not make my mind believe, that any man would refuse me if I set my heart on him. I sighed and pressed my forehead against the cool glass and longed and longed for Harry.
My skirts hissed as I turned from my room and went downstairs. Celia might not want his love, but she had it. And while I flinched at the sight of his courtesy to her and his gentle words to her as she sat sipping tea, it was worse to be in my room alone, knowing that downstairs he was beside her on the sofa. I might spend more hours with him but never, never could I sit, my eyes downcast, and feel his gaze scanning my face. Never could I look up in the delicious certainty that my eyes would meet his. We were much together, but our magical moments were few. We were always interrupted; Mama was always coming in and out and her eyes were sharp on her beloved son.
At the turn of the stairs I paused. Some careless maid must have left the back-stair door open and one of the stable cats had sauntered in and was sitting, proud as punch, in the first-floor corridor. Mama was ill whenever she was in a room with a cat and it was a house rule that all the stable cats were locked firmly out. I should have to rush this one back to the yard and then air the corridor, or she would have one of her painful gasping attacks when she could not breathe and her face went from white to yellow. Her heart was delicate and last time she had suffered an attack the London specialist had warned her most strongly against risking another. So the rule against cats was rigidly enforced and I should save someone a dismissal if I got the animal away before Mama came up to change.
But as I went towards it something made me pause. And then I stopped stock-still. I had no idea in my head, nor the shadow of a plan. But my passion for Harry moved me as if I had no will of my own. I was in the grip of such a longing to be alone with him that my aching sensuous body moved as if of its own volition. I feared Mama’s sharp eyes, her instinctive knowledge of me. The way she could almost smell my warm sighs. The cat’s eyes met mine, green to green, with a key to Mama’s absence as clear as a spoken word between us. Then my hand was on the latch of her bedroom door and the door yielded to my half-conscious touch. Like some obedient familiar the cat stretched and walked, tail proudly high, into the master bedroom and I shut the door behind it. I still could not be sure what I had done. I still could not have said whether I had let the cat in, or if the cat had let itself in with my hand only opening the door. Cat, Mama, Harry and I seemed caught in a web of someone else’s spinning. I was as unthinking as the cat itself. I went down to the parlour with my face as clear and calm as the Fenny on a summer’s day, and my gaze as opaque as the cat’s green eyes in my delicate mama’s bedroom.
I sat beside Celia and even accompanied her on the piano and sang a little duet with her, her thin warble keeping my richer voice more or less in key. Then Harry and she sang a folk song and I took the moment to excuse myself from the parlour and go back upstairs.
The blessed thing had made puddles all over the floor which I had to wipe up. But it had curled up on Mama’s bed and sunned itself on the pillow where her head would lie that night. I picked it up by the scruff of its neck and swept down the back stairs with it and set it on its feet outside the stable door. It gazed at me unwinkingly as if it knew we shared a secret – a discreet conspirator.
We retired early that night but I was disturbed around midnight by the sound of a door banging and running feet. Mama’s maid was probably carrying her a hot posset from the kitchen and a warming pan for her chilled feet. I half thought about getting up to see if I could help her, but my bed was too warm and I was too sleepy to move. Even as I thought I really should go to her, I fell asleep.
When I visited her in the morning the blinds were down and the room reeked of camphor and lavender water. She lay absolutely still on the great bed, her face white on the pillows where the cat had slept and licked its matted dirty fur.
‘I am so sorry, dear, but I cannot speak. I feel so ill, so very ill,’ said Mama in a thread of a voice. ‘Please tell Harry not to be concerned. I shall be better soon.’
I gave a small murmur of sympathy and bent over and kissed her. Her face was strained with pain and she was as white as her sheets. My own head ached in sympathy when I saw the skin drawn tight across her forehead, and my own heart thudded in fear when I heard how her breath rasped and saw her lips tremble. But my eyes gave away nothing, like the cat’s. I had planned nothing. I was guilty of no premeditated crime. The deceiving, unreliable old gods of the land had set magic at work on Wideacre and all I could do was to follow blindly wherever they were leading me. The insistent pull of my longing for Harry had brought the cat to wait for me outside my mother’s bedroom. Now she struggled for breath in a darkened room. Her pain made me ill. Ill with sympathy for her, and ill with anxiety on my own account.
‘Mama,’ I said weakly. I needed a smile from her to reassure me that this was only a passing illness. That although she looked as white as death she was still breathing, her fluttering heart was still working. She would be recovered in a few days, she would still have time to love me. She might still turn from her adoration of Harry and learn to value me. I might still become her beloved, her perfect child.
She opened her eyes wearily and saw my anxious face.
‘It is all right, Beatrice,’ she said with a hint of impatience. ‘Go to your breakfast and go out if you wish. I only need rest.’
I heard her tone of dismissal and it hurt me, as she was still able to hurt me. She turned her face away from me without the smile that I was waiting for. There was no need for me to stay. I closed her bedroom door behind me with the slightest of clicks and turned my thoughts from her all that day.
In her absence that afternoon, Harry led me into dinner and for the first time in our lives we faced each other at the head and foot of the candle-lit dinner table and dined alone. We spoke in hushed voices. Although Mama’s room was too far away to be disturbed by our talk, the murmur emphasized our privacy in the quiet house, the glow of the room a little island of peace and contentment in the darkened house on the dark land. I sat with Harry as he drank his port, and when he had finished we went to the parlour together. We played cards until Stride brought the tea table in. When I passed Harry his teacup our fingers touched, and I smiled at his touch but I did not tremble. Then we sat in companionable silence before the fire. When he glanced up from watching the burning logs in the grate, he smiled at me and I smiled back without a shadow of need.
It was an evening like an island of peace in a fast-flowing river of desire. We were tired and quiet like two children at the end of a happy, busy day. With no other person calling Harry’s attention from me, with no other person frightening me with the prospect of a loss of love, I was able to sit and smile and dream. And I was free at last from need. I went to bed with a chaste, fraternal kiss on my forehead and wanted nothing more. I slept soundly that night with no ache of desire and no confusing dreams of longing. I was secure at last in his affection and undivided attention and that seemed to me then so much. It even, for that one magic, easy night, seemed enough.
The next day was so lovely we decided to make a holiday of it and we rode out together up to the downs. My mourning was at last reduced and I had ordered a pale grey riding habit which suited me well. The underskirt was a soft grey worsted and the smart little jacket was grey velvet. With a matching grey velvet cap on my head, I felt I could stay in second mourning for years. Nothing in bright colours could set off my figure better.
On the top of the downs the wind was stronger and bowled my cap away so Harry and I rode a race for it. He won. In truth I reined in and let him win, and he leaned low in his saddle and scooped it up on his riding crop. He cantered back to me and presented it with a flourish. I smiled with all my heart in my eyes.
The horses walked shoulder to shoulder on a long rein along the old drovers’ way across the top of the downs and we looked south to glimpse the sea. Larks struggled up and up and up, singing out their achievement, then closed their tiny wings and plummeted to the earth. In the woods a pair of cuckoos called amorously, irresponsibly, to each other, and everywhere there was the lazy rasp-rasp of grasshoppers and the whirring drone of bees.
I was alone on my land with the man I needed, and he had eyes only for me. Today Harry was nobody’s son and nobody’s fiancé. He was alone with me and my jealous, hungry heart could be still, knowing that all day and all evening we should see no one else. No one would come into the rooms when I was longing to be alone with him. His head would lift and his eyes would smile for no one but me.
The horses rubbed shoulders as they walked, and we talked together of Harry’s latest book about farming and my comments on what might work and what would not. We spoke of the house and of the changes that would come in October. Then, without prompting, Harry spoke of Celia.
‘She is so pure, Beatrice, so innocent. I respect her so much,’ he began. ‘A man would be a brute indeed to try to force her in any way. She is like a beautiful piece of Dresden china. Don’t you think so?’
‘Oh, yes,’ I said with ready sympathy. ‘She’s as beautiful as an angel and so sweet. A little shy perhaps?’ I let my voice make a gentle question of the statement.
‘And nervous,’ Harry agreed. ‘With that brute of a stepfather she can have no idea of what a loving marriage can be.’
‘Such a shame,’ I said carefully. ‘Such a shame that such a lovely girl, that your future wife, should be so cool.’
Harry looked quickly at me, his blue eyes piercing.
‘It’s what I fear,’ he said frankly. The horses ambled into a sheltered little dell and stopped to crop the springy downs turf. At our backs the ground rose steeply and below us a hazel coppice shielded us from the north. Sitting there we were screened from everyone and yet could see half of England looking west. Harry jumped down from the saddle and tied his horse. I made no move, but sat idly in the saddle and let my horse graze on a loosened rein.
There was a singing in my ears as sweet and insistent as the lark, and I knew it was the magic of Wideacre and the hum of the spinning wheel spinning the thread of our lives together.
‘You are a man of strong passions,’ I said.
Harry’s profile, as he stood at my horse’s head and looked away from me over our land, was as clear and as strong as a Greek statue. My body ached for him, but I kept my voice steady and low.
‘I can’t help it,’ he said and his cheeks flushed red under the golden colour of his skin.
‘I understand,’ I said. ‘It is the same for me. It is in our blood, I think.’
Harry turned quickly to look at me. I was sweating with nervousness like a mare put to the stallion. I could feel the grey gown damp under my arms. But my face was calm and clear.
‘A lady can be a perfect lady,’ I said. ‘Her public behaviour can be meticulous, and yet she can feel desire when she loves and when she has chosen well.’
Harry was staring at me. I could find no words to go on. I merely looked back at him with my passion and longing written all over my face certain that he would see the truth of what was between us.
‘You have a fiancé?’ he asked in amazement.
‘No!’ I exploded. ‘And I never wish to have one!’
I sprang from the saddle and reached out my arms to him. He caught me as I slid down and I grasped the lapels of his coat and nearly wept in anger and frustration.
‘Oh, Harry!’ I said, and my voice broke on a sob and then I could not stop crying. The ache in my heart was too strong, the singing in my ears was deafening. ‘Oh, Harry! Oh, Harry, my love!’
He froze as if my words had turned him to stone. But I could not stop weeping. I was ruined and he would never love me, but I could not contain myself. I had watched and waited for his touch so long that now his arms were around me I could not play the pretty maiden like Celia. I could not stop myself from clinging to his jacket as if I were drowning. I banged my forehead against the muscled strength of his chest and moaned aloud. He still did not move, but his arms around my waist were as tight as a vice. My sobs quietened and I bit my cheeks to force myself to silence. Slowly, painfully, I pulled a little away from him and raised my eyes to see his face.
Harry’s eyes were dark with desire and his heart under my hands was thudding. His mouth was trembling, just slightly, and he gazed into my face as if he would eat me alive.
‘It is a sin,’ he said in a low voice.
The world was spinning around me. I could hardly hear him; I could hardly find words to reply to him.
‘It is not,’ I said immediately. ‘It is not, Harry. It is right. You can feel it is right. It is no sin. It is no sin. It is not.’
His head came down to me and my eyes half shut in expectation of his kiss. He was so close I could feel his breath on my face and I opened my mouth and breathed in the air from his mouth in a little shudder of longing. But still he would not kiss me.
‘It is a sin,’ he said softly.
‘Worse sin to be married for ever to a woman who is as cold as ice,’ I murmured. ‘Worse to live with a wife who cannot love you, who does not know how to love, while I wear out my days in yearning for you. Oh, pity me, Harry! If you cannot love me, then pity me.’
‘I can love you,’ he contradicted me, his voice a husky rumble. ‘Oh, Beatrice, if you knew! But it is a sin.’
He was holding on to those four words as a talisman to keep his lovely head from coming down that fraction lower to crush his mouth on mine. I could feel his body was taut with desire and yet he had himself under control. He loved me, he desired me, and yet he would not touch me. I could bear his closeness and the half-inch between our mouths no more. I lunged up to him and bit him, as hard as I could, on his teasing, tormenting mouth. My riding whip was still looped on my wrist and I slid my hand from his chest and caught it dagger-like and stabbed it into his thigh.
‘Harry, I will kill you,’ I said and I meant it.
His mouth was bleeding and he took one hand from my waist to put the back of his fingers to his lips. He brought his hand away and saw it was stained with blood. Then he gave a great groan and flung his full weight on top of me. He ripped at my riding habit and as the buttons at the neck parted he moaned and buried his face in my breasts, kissing hard, and biting without mercy. I dragged his breeches down to his knees and he pushed up my skirts and petticoats.
Still half dressed and too desperate to care we rolled together on the grass as Harry thrust with impatient, unskilled stabs at my body, thumping his hardness into my thighs, at my back, against my wet softness until there was that one second of terrifying pleasure as frightening as falling from a tree, as painful as a knife blow and he found the sweet hidden secret place and pushed in, like a fist through curtains. For a split second we both froze still, stunned by the sensation, then he shook my body like a terrier holding a rat, and in seconds I was screaming. My legs and arms grabbed him to me and we writhed like frantic adders. With a great bellow Harry collapsed and lay still and I, hungry, greedy, insatiable, arched my back on the soft downs turf and rubbed and rubbed against him till I gave a great sigh of release and lay still.
Slowly I opened my eyes and saw Harry’s head against our blue sky and our larks singing up and up and up. The Squire of Wideacre lay heavily on me. His seed was in my body, his land beneath our coupled bodies; our grass was in one of my clenched hands, and the little meadow flowers and herbs drenched with my wetness beneath me. At last, at last, I had Wideacre and the Master. Our land beneath me, the Squire inside me. I gave a shuddering sob. The ache of longing I had carried with me all my life was gone, and my jealous anxiety had finally released me.
Harry tensed at the sound of my sob and rolled off me, his face a picture of guilt and misery.
‘My God, Beatrice, what can I say?’ he said helplessly. He sat up and buried his face in his hands. His shoulders sagged, his head bowed. I sat beside him and pulled my gown together at the neck, but not too close. I put a gentle hand on his shoulder. My body was still trembling with the shock of Harry’s rough loving; my mind was too dazed with delight to be able to think what was wrong with him.
Harry lifted his sad face at the touch of my hand and looked at me in abject misery.
‘My God, Beatrice! I must have hurt you so badly! And I love you so! What can I say? I am so ashamed!’
For a moment I gazed at him blankly, and then his words penetrated my dazed mind and I realized he was full of guilt at what seemed to him some kind of rape.
‘It is my fault,’ he said. ‘I have longed for you ever since the day when I rescued you from that brute. But God forgive me, Beatrice, I have kept seeing you in my mind as I saw you then, naked on the floor. Oh, that I should have saved you from him to ruin you myself!’ He dropped his head into his hands again in despair. ‘Beatrice, before heaven I never meant to,’ he said muffled. ‘I am a villain, but God knows not such a villain as to plan this thing. I did not dream such a thing could happen between brother and sister. I am totally to blame and I do not shirk my guilt. But, Beatrice, I did not know such a thing was possible.’
I put my hand tenderly on his silly head.
‘You are not totally to blame,’ I said gently. ‘And there is no blame. You have been dreaming of me, and I have been dreaming of you. There is no need for guilt.’
Harry raised his tear-filled eyes to my face with a glimmer of hope.
‘It is a sin though,’ he said uncertainly.
I shrugged, and at the movement my dress parted and one silky shoulder and the curve of my breast caught Harry’s gaze.
‘I cannot feel it is a sin,’ I said. ‘I know when I am doing wrong and this does not seem to me wrong. It seems to me where I should be, where I have been going towards all my life. I cannot see this as something wrong.’
‘It is wrong though,’ said Harry. He could not take his eyes from the gap in my gown. ‘It is wrong,’ he repeated. ‘And one cannot say something is not a sin just because it feels right …’
His voice, the voice of the authoritative know-all male tailed off as I lay back and shut my eyes. Harry leaned beside me, supported on one elbow. ‘You are not thinking logically, Beatrice …’ he said, and he said no more. He leaned forward and kissed my eyelids as gently as a downland butterfly alighting on a flower.
I made not a move; I barely sighed. I lay as still as a leaf as he traced a line of gentle kisses down my cheek, down my throat, and down the smooth flatness between my breasts. He pushed at the gown with his forehead and rubbed his face, as gentle now as he had been rough before, along the swell of my breasts and then took the crowning nipple in his mouth.
‘It is a sin,’ he said muffled.
His eyes were shut so he could not see me smile.
I lay still with the sun on my eyelids and felt Harry’s weight shift over to come on me again, and felt his insistent hardness. He might have all the resources of education in rhetoric but I had the high singing magic of Wideacre, and the easy pull of two young bodies. We moved together and there was a spark of pleasure like lightning before a storm as we touched, but came no closer. We rubbed like courting otters; face to face, body to body, legs entwined, biding our time.
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Philippa Gregory
Beatrice Lacey, daughter of Wideacre Hall, will not accept society’s rules that women cannot inherit…The internationally bestselling debut from the author of The Other Boleyn Girl and Three Sisters, Three Queens.Wideacre Hall, set in the heart of the English countryside, is the ancestral home that Beatrice Lacey loves. Built from yellow stone, facing due south and surrounded by the rich woodlands and rolling downs of Sussex, it has been in her family for generations. But as a woman in England in the 1770s she has no right of inheritance; only a loveless arranged marriage lies ahead. Beautiful, sensual and passionate, Beatrice sets out to pursue her own goal: control over Wideacre – at any cost.Yet even as her scheming succeeds, Beatrice is haunted by the one person alive who fully understands her obsession and knows her capacity to let nothing – and no-one – stand in her way.The 30th anniversary edition, with new foreword by the author.
THE 30TH ANNIVERSARY
EDITION
With new foreword by the author.
Copyright (#ulink_a961032c-31ae-5025-b06c-c64cc921a538)
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Harper
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by Viking 1987
This edition published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2017
Copyright © Philippa Gregory Ltd 1987
Map copyright © www.old-maps.co.uk (http://www.old-maps.co.uk) and Ordnance Survey
Cover design by Ward/MacDonald © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 2017
Cover image © Archivist 2015/Alamy
Philippa Gregory asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operationa at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9780008229986
Ebook Edition © APRIL 2017 ISBN: 9780007383368
Version: 2017-04-25
Contents
Cover (#u4af9dab6-b4a0-5c03-9f28-ef6db3a01cde)
Title Page (#ud1db4dff-7670-5b9d-a3ae-eecfa505b752)
Copyright (#u3788d8ed-7dd4-5e88-bc53-0f6a621d1ffc)
Foreword (#u076f0fba-2e4d-521e-b815-935a32265916)
Map (#u82f00346-43a8-5afa-a0e1-c7ac9f5c7a15)
Chapter 1 (#u9d9dea40-699b-5ac6-90d7-aec8ed65cdd5)
Chapter 2 (#udaf26faa-3a27-5818-8305-efb1ee9d1d03)
Chapter 3 (#u9bc1e39e-758a-5775-9acb-9cf82fe88f0f)
Chapter 4 (#u9468c83c-fbdc-5ccf-91d4-c6c609a12be9)
Chapter 5 (#u8b8d62dc-4c54-5786-81ae-eebd48c2f3b9)
Chapter 6 (#u43da8195-fab0-507f-9da3-5eee9b6fc86f)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Philippa Gregory’s Wideacre trilogy continues with The Favoured Child and Meridon (#litres_trial_promo)
Discover More of Philippa Gregory’s Tudor Novels (#litres_trial_promo)
Gardens for the Gambia (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Rivka Galchen (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Foreword (#ulink_296bd672-507c-5077-ad6e-d090226ee462)
I was a young married woman, in my late twenties, living in a small town in the North of England. I had a newborn daughter and I was trying to finish my PhD thesis on the popular fiction of the eighteenth century. To prepare for this study I had read more than 200 novels published between 1740 and 1800 and had painstakingly compared the standard elements like sexual morality, the relationship to agriculture and the countryside, and the wonderfully bizarre: incest, banditti, even aliens. I believed there were identifiable themes in the novels and that they could be read together as a fictional world that sometimes mirrored eighteenth-century England, and sometimes denied and hid it.
Hoping to become an expert in the real and imaginary eighteenth-century world, I accidentally served the ideal author’s apprenticeship. Without intending it – for when I started at Edinburgh University I was 26 and really very scatty – I read myself into the art of the novel, and then started to write my own – longhand in a school exercise-type book. Where it read name I wrote my name, where it read form I wrote IVB (I had enjoyed my fourth year), and where it read subject I wrote with simple ambition: Best Selling Novel.
That was partly a joke for myself: I had been locked in a library for four years, I was ready to be amused by almost anything, but I found that I loved writing and became more and more convinced that it was a successful novel. I sent it to an agent who refused it, and then to another who accepted it. After a worldwide auction I had a three-book contract in the UK and the US, my first career path and the first steady income for the first time in my life.
I rarely tell this story because it is such an extraordinary one, it is not typical and not to be expected; and – worse – it encourages apprentice writers to think of writing as a route to fortune and fame, which it very rarely is. Writing is something so much more: the route to working in the finest and most accessible art form in the world.
It is an honour to work as a novelist, I have been learning my trade and practising my skills (for it is also a craft as well as an art) for thirty years – as this anniversary edition shows. To write a novel is to dedicate yourself to an art form which is universally and frequently enjoyed. The first novels I read were borrowed from the library, I bought my beloved collection of second-hand books for small change, and now I can read almost any published fiction in the world at the touch of a button. No other art form is so widely available, so regularly experienced by its audience, and so easily accessed.
Reading a novel is an exercise that is escapist – I tumble deep into the story, immerse myself in the fiction, and yet it has a powerful relationship to the real world. Even at the end of a story that is wholly imaginary there may be a sense of truth or a sense of powerful authentic emotion. I feel oddly contented when I have read a good novel. Not for the outcome of the story (though I admit to an unrefined preference for happy endings) but because something about the measured unfolding gives me a sense of delight.
This sensation of joy sometimes comes to me when I am writing too. On a very good day I experience what I am describing: I am both here in my study with the view of the North York moors and the wide northern sky above them, and here at the court, in the little room, in the cell, in the garden, on the streets of medieval London.
I love storytelling, which is an archaic art buried deep in human nature. I imagine a tribe, perhaps as old as those who drew massive imaginary beasts in the light of flickering torches, who pressed their own hand prints beneath the delicate hooves, gathering around the fire to tell stories that warn of poisonous berries, of betrayal, of the hidden snake. The stories perform that uniquely human gift – carrying an idea from one mind to another in complexity and with emotion. Stories conquer death – tell a story about someone well and there he is, returned to life, laughing so hard with his arm around his brother that he can hardly stand. Laughing: though the joke is old and he died a hundred years ago. But if I describe him so that you can see him and hear him, in what way is the joke old? In what way is he dead? I love stories for the same reason as I love history, because they have a powerful life in the temporal world – and they transcend it.
This resonates particularly with me because I was brought up by my mother on stories of lost landscapes – the house of her sunny privileged childhood in the years before the First World War. Before I even read the thousands and thousands of novels of gilded regret, before I read the history, I knew of those days of peace. By the time I came to E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf I had already walked in the lilac-scented night, and looked out of the window at the cat on the mown lawn.
An imaginary world does not vanish while someone still conjures it. The beloved are not gone when they are vividly remembered. A time is never forgotten if people write history. I fell in love with history while studying as an undergraduate at the University of Sussex, and I felt that I had discovered the Meaning of Life. No more (for there is no more) and certainly no less. I had been one of those earnest, questing girls who wanted to know the answer to everything; and for me if you know how something has come about, you know what it is. I am especially drawn to mislaid and ignored histories, like the struggle against enclosure, which is the spine of the Wideacre story: the exile of the people from the land they love.
It was natural that my first novel, Wideacre, should be about a young woman who cannot bear the thought of the loss of her family home (my mother’s family’s story), who has nothing but her sexuality to gain her own ends (women’s history), who entraps her brother (such an important trope in the early novel, identified in my reading of the eighteenth-century commercial library stocks), and who is deeply and passionately invested in the Sussex landscape (a childhood love of mine). Beatrice has a wonderful horse, and this is one of the most joyful instances of my fiction foretelling my life. I swear that this occurs from time to time, my family sceptically call it ‘coincidence’. Call it what you will, but ten years after I gave Beatrice Lacey a grey gelding, I was to own my own grey gelding, and ride him over the common land around the village of Heyshott, which was the setting for Wideacre.
My novels after Wideacre developed and changed without conscious decision. I became increasingly interested in real lives and wrote novels based more and more closely on real people and on accurate history. Sometimes we don’t know the history, sometimes historians don’t agree. But when there is an agreed account, I like to illuminate, dramatize and fictionalize it. I never depart from it for the benefit of the story, the history always comes first. I developed a style of writing: first person, so that you are in someone’s shoes, facing their dilemmas, and present tense, so that you have no historians’ hindsight, you are in the then and there, not looking back. These stylistic choices have been enormously helpful and interesting to me, bringing me to a lively understanding of historical events – if you were there, not knowing how they would turn out, what would you do? – and a greater empathy with historical characters. Most of my principal characters are women: as a woman, I think I know sometimes how they feel, I sometimes experience their difficulties myself. As a feminist, I am almost always more interested in the apparently unimportant woman than the man who is standing, talking so loudly, before her. As a feminist historian, I think it is my particular calling to look and see what the women are doing at any moment in time.
This has led me a pretty dance in research as I try to discover the most basic facts, such as where a woman was living, and what she was doing, whereas traditional historians, blind to anything but big public acts, loyally and repeatedly record the sons and husbands, fathers and brothers. It has led me into a deep appreciation of the role that women – often unsung, sometimes deliberately concealed – have played in the forming of our national life. There have been heroines and martyrs, scholars and mothers, daughters and saints, sinners, poisonous domestic villains, angels in the corner and queens regnant, militant or as apparently passive as Sleeping Beauty, all astoundingly ignored. It has been an honour to spend my working life looking for and recording a version of some of them for us: their daughters, their heirs. I know that for my readers – as they tell me in their thousands – these stories are their models and heroines, examples of how far we have come, how far we still have to go. They demonstrate the courage that is part of women’s nature.
Beatrice is not one of these! Nobody exactly like Beatrice ever lived, nobody exactly like her could have lived. She is the exuberant manifestation of the imagination of a young woman, who had spent a long time – far too long – in the library, and who was eager for a rich, colourful, sensual, action-packed life. Beatrice shows ambition, passion and a complete absence of scruples. Above all – her greatest feature – she is not ladylike. Thirty years ago I was thrilled by the thought of a fictional heroine who was not ladylike. I remember both Beatrice, and her young author, with affection and no regrets.
1
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Wideacre Hall faces due south and the sun shines all day on the yellow stone until it is warm and powdery to the touch. The sun travels from gable end to gable end so the front of the house is never in shadow. When I was a small child, collecting petals in the rose garden, or loitering at the back of the house in the stable yard, it seemed that Wideacre was the very centre of the world with the sun defining our boundaries in the east at dawn, until it sank over our hills in the west in the red and pink evening. The great arch it traced in the sky over Wideacre seemed to me a suitable boundary for our vertical influence. Behind the sun was God and the angels; beneath it, and far more significantly, ruled the Squire, my father.
I cannot remember a time before I loved him, the blond, red-faced, loud Englishman. I suppose there must have been a time when I was confined to a white-frilled crib in the nursery; I suppose I must have taken my first steps clinging tight to my mother’s hand. But I have no childish memories of my mother at all. Wideacre filled my consciousness, and the Squire of Wideacre dominated me as he ruled the world.
My first, my earliest childhood memory is of someone lifting me up to my father as he towered above me in the saddle of his chestnut hunter. My little legs dangled helplessly as I rose up the yawning void to the great chestnut shoulder – a hot, red rockface to my surprised eyes – and up to the hard, greasy saddle. Then my father’s arm was tight round my body and his hand tucked me securely before him. He let me grip the reins in one hand and the pommel in the other, and my gaze locked on the coarse russet mane and the shiny leather. Then the monster beneath me moved and I clutched in fright. His pace was erratic and rolling to me, and the long gap between each great stride caught me unawares. But my father’s arm held tight and I gradually raised my eyes from the muscled, steamy shoulder of the mountainous horse, up his long neck to his pointy signalling ears … and then the sweep of Wideacre burst upon me.
The horse was walking down the great avenue of beech and oak that leads to the house. The dappled shadows of the trees lay across the springing grass and the rutted mud tracks. In the banks glowed the pale yellow of spring primroses and the brighter sunshine yellow of celandine. The smell, the dark, damp smell of rain-wet earth filled the arch of the trees like birdsong.
A drainage ditch runs alongside the drive, its yellow stones and white sand rinsed clean by the trickle of water. From my rolling vantage point I could at last see a clear view of its length, even where the black leafmould at the banks carried the tiny, forked hoofprints of nighttime deer.
‘All right, Beatrice?’ My father’s voice behind me was a rumble I could feel in my tense, skinny little body as well as hear. I nodded. To see the trees of Wideacre, to smell the earth of it, to be out among the breath of wind of Wideacre, bonnetless, carriageless and motherless, was beyond words.
‘Like to try a trot?’ he asked.
I nodded again, tightening my small hands on the saddle and reins. At once the giant strides altered and all around me the trees lurched and jigged as the horizon moved in great sickening leaps. I bobbed like a cork in a spring-flood river, sliding painfully to one side, and then, perilously, correcting. Then I heard my father click to the horse and the stride lengthened. Wonderfully, the horizon steadied, but the trees sped past. I regained my balance and, though the ground flashed by under the thudding hoofs, I could breathe and look around again. Your first canter is the fastest speed you will ever go. I clung like a louse to the saddle and felt the spring wind in my face, and saw the shadows of the trees flash light and shade across me as the chestnut mane streamed, and I could feel a great burble of delighted laughter and scream of fear gather in my throat.
On our left the woods were thinning and the steep bank dropped away, so I could see through the trees to the fields beyond, already brightening with the spring growth. In one a hare, large as a hound puppy, stood on its hind legs to watch us go by, its black-tipped ears pointed to hear the thud of the hoofs and the jingle of the bit. In the next field a line of women, drab against the deep black of the ploughed field, bent double over the furrows, picking, picking, picking, like sparrows on the broad back of a black cow, clearing the earth of flints before sowing.
Then the sliding scenery slowed and slowed as the hunter dropped into a teeth-chattering trot again, and then pulled up at the closed gates. A woman erupted from the open back door of the lodge house and scuttled through a scatter of hens to swing open a tall iron gate.
‘A fine young lady you have to ride with you today,’ she said smiling. ‘Are you enjoying your ride, Miss Beatrice?’
My father’s chuckle vibrated down my spine, but I was on my dignity, high on the hunter, and I merely bowed. A perfect copy, had I known it, of my mother’s chill snobbery.
‘Say good day to Mrs Hodgett,’ my father said abruptly.
‘Nay!’ said Mrs Hodgett, chuckling. ‘She’s too grand for me today. I’ll have a smile on baking day though, I know.’
The deep chuckle shook me again, and I relented and beamed down on Mrs Hodgett. Then my father clicked to the hunter and the smooth walk bore me away.
We did not turn left down the lane that leads to Acre village as I had expected, but went straight ahead, up a bridle track where I had never been before. My excursions until now had been in the carriage with Mama or in the pony-cart with Nurse, but never on horseback along the narrow green ways where no wheels could go. This path led us past the open fields where each man of the village could farm his own strip in a ragged, pretty patchwork. My father tutted under his breath at the ill-dug ditch and the thriving thistles in one patch and the horse, eager for a signal to canter, broke forward again. His easy strides took us higher and higher up the winding path, past deep banks dotted with wild flowers and with exciting-looking small holes, crowned with hedges of budding hawthorn and dogroses.
Then the banks fell away, and the fields and hedges with them, and we were riding, silent on thick leafmould, through the beech coppice that crowds the lower slopes of our downs. Tall, straight, grey trunks rose high as a cathedral nave. The nutty, woody smell of beech tickled my nose, and the sunlight at the end of the wood looked like the bright mouth of a cave, miles and miles away. The hunter, blowing now, rushed upon it, and in seconds we were out in the brilliant sunlight at the very tipmost-topmost point, the highest peak in the entire world, the pinnacle of the South Downs.
We turned to look back over the way we had come and the shape and the setting of Wideacre opened up to me, like a magical page in a picture book, seen for the first time.
Closest to us, and extending far below us, were the green, sweet slopes of the downs, steep at the top, but easy as soft shoulders lower down. The gentle wind that always blows steady and strong along the top of the downs brought the smell of new grass and of ploughing. It flattened the grass in patches like seaweed tossing under currents of water, first one way, then another.
Where the ground grew steep and broken, the beech coppices had taken hold and now I could look down on them, like a lark, and see the thick tops of the trees. The leaves were in their first emerald growth and chestnuts showed fat, mouth-watering buds. The silver birches shivered like streams of green light.
To our right lay the dozen cottages of Acre village, white-washed and snug. The vicarage, the church, the village green and the broad, spreading chestnut tree that dominates the heart of the village. Beyond them, in miniature size like crumpled boxes, were the shanties of the cottagers who claimed squatters’ rights on the common land. Their little hovels, sometimes thatched with turf, sometimes only a roofed-in cart, were an eyesore even from here. But to the west of Acre, like a yellow pearl on green velvet, amid tall, proud trees and moist, soft parkland, was Wideacre Hall.
My father slipped the reins from my fingers and the great head of his horse dipped suddenly to crop the short turf.
‘It’s a fine place,’ he said to himself. ‘I shouldn’t think there’s a finer in the whole of Sussex.’
‘There isn’t finer in the whole world,’ I said with the certainty of a four-year-old.
‘Mmm,’ he said softly, smiling at me. ‘You may be right.’
On the way home, he let me ride alone in glorious solitude on top of the swaying mountain. He walked at my side, a restraining hand gripping the frills and flounces of my petticoats. Past the lodge gates and up into the cool quietness of the drive, he loosened his grip and walked before me, looking back to bawl instructions.
‘Sit up! Chin up! Hands down! Heels in! Elbows in! Gentle with his mouth! You want to trot? Well, sit down, tighten the rein, and dig your heels in! Yes! Good!’ And his beaming face dissolved in the heaving blur as I clung with all my small might to the leaping saddle and bit back shrieks of fear.
I rode alone up the last stretch of the drive and triumphantly brought the gentle great animal to a standstill before the terrace. But no applause greeted me. My mama watched me, unimpressed, from the window of her parlour, then came out slowly to the terrace.
‘Get down at once, Beatrice,’ she said, waving Nurse forward. ‘You have been far too long. Nurse, take Miss Beatrice upstairs and change and bath her at once. All her clothes will have to be washed. She smells like a groom.’
They pulled me off my pinnacle and my father’s eyes met mine in rueful regret. Then Nurse paused in her flight towards the house.
‘Madam!’ she said, her voice shocked.
She and my mother peeled back the layers of petticoats and found my lacy flounces stained with blood at the knees. Deftly Nurse stripped them off so she could see my legs. The stitching and the stirrup-leather flaps had rubbed my knees and calves raw and they had bled.
‘Harold!’ said my mother. It was the only sign of reproach she ever permitted herself. Papa came forward and took me into his arms.
‘Why didn’t you tell me you were hurt?’ he asked, his blue eyes narrow with concern. ‘I would have carried you home in my arms, little Beatrice. Why didn’t you tell me?’
My knees burned as if stung by nettles but I managed a smile.
‘I wanted to ride, Papa,’ I said. ‘And I want to go riding again.’
His eyes sparkled and his deep, happy laugh shouted out.
‘That’s my girl!’ he said in delight. ‘Want to go riding again, eh? Well, you shall. Tomorrow I shall go to Chichester and buy you a pony and you shall learn to ride at once. Riding till her knees bled at four years old, eh? That’s my girl!’
Still laughing, he led his horse around to the stable yard at the rear of the house where we could hear him shouting for a stable lad. I was left alone with Mama.
‘Miss Beatrice had better go straight to bed,’ she told Nurse, ignoring my wide-awake face. ‘She will be tired. She has done more than enough for one day. And she will not go riding again.’
Of course I went riding again. My mother was bound by all sorts of beliefs in wifely obedience and deference to the head of the household, and she never stood against my father for more than one self-forgetful second. A few days after my ride on the hunter and, alas, before the little scabs on the inside of my knees had healed, we heard a clatter of hoofs on the gravel and a ‘Holloa!’ from outside the front door.
On the gravel sweep outside the house stood my father’s hunter with Father astride. He was leaning down to lead the tiniest pony I had ever seen. One of the new Dartmoor breed, with a coat as dark and smooth as brown velvet and a sweep of black mane covering her small face. In a second my arms were round her neck and I was whispering into her ear.
Only one day later and Nurse had cobbled together a tiny version of a tailored riding habit for me to wear for my daily lesson with Papa in the paddock. Never having taught anyone to ride, he taught me as he had learned from his father. Round and round the water-meadows so my falls were cushioned by the soft earth. Tumble after tumble I took into the wet grass – and I did not always come up smiling. But Papa, my wonderful, godlike papa, was patient, and Minnie, dear little Minnie, was sweet natured and gentle. And I was a born fighter.
Only two weeks later, and I rode out daily with Papa. Minnie was on a leading rein and beside the hunter she looked like a plump minnow on the end of a very long line.
A few weeks after those first expeditions and Papa released me from the apprenticeship of the leading rein and let me ride alone. ‘I’d trust her anywhere,’ he said briefly to Mama’s murmured expostulations. ‘She can learn embroidery any time. She’d better learn to have a seat on a horse while she’s young.’
So Papa’s great hunter strode ahead and Minnie bobbed behind in a rapid trot to keep up. In the lanes and fields of Wideacre, the Squire and the little Mistress became a familiar sight as our rides lengthened from the original half an hour to the whole of the afternoon. Then it became part of the routine of the day that I should go out morning and afternoon with Papa. In the summer of 1760 – an especially dry hot summer – I was out every day with the Squire, and I was all of five.
These were the golden years of my childhood and even at that age I knew it. My brother Harry’s baby illnesses lingered on; they feared he had inherited Mama’s weak heart. But I was as fit as a flea and never missed a day out with Papa. Harry stayed indoors almost all winter with colds and rheums and fevers, while Mama and Nurse fussed over him. Then when spring was coming and the warm winds brought the evocative smells of warming land, he was convalescent. At haymaking, when I would be out with Papa to watch them scything down the tall rippling grass in great green sweeps, Harry would be indoors with his sneezing malady which started every year at haytime. His miserable ’atchoo, ’atchoo, would go on all through the hot days of summer, so he missed harvesting, too. At the turn of the year, when Papa promised I could go fox-cubbing, Harry would be back in the nursery or, at the best, sitting by the parlour fire with his winter ailments again.
A year older than me he was taller and plumper, but no match for me. If I succeeded in teasing him into a fight, I could easily trip him up and wrestle with him until he called for Mama or Nurse. But there was much good nature in Harry’s sweet placidity and he would never blame me for his bumps and bruises. He never earned me a beating.
But he would not romp with me, or wrestle with me, or even play a gentle game of hide-and-seek with me in the bedrooms and galleries of the Hall. He really enjoyed himself only when he was sitting with Mama in the parlour and reading with her. He liked to play little tunes on the pianoforte there, or read mournful poetry aloud to her. A few hours of Harry’s life made me unaccountably ill and tired all over. One afternoon in the quiet company of Harry and Mama made me feel as weary as a long day in the saddle riding over the downs with Papa.
When the weather was too bad for me to be allowed out, I would beg Harry to play, but we had no games in common. As I moped round the dark library room, cheered only by finding the breeding record of Papa’s hunters, Harry would pile all the cushions he could find into the window seat and make himself a little nest like a plump wood pigeon. Book in one hand, box of comfits in the other, he was immovable. If the wind suddenly ripped a gap in the thunderclouds for the sun to pour through, he would look out at the dripping garden and say: ‘It is too wet to go out, Beatrice. You will get your stockings and shoes soaked and Mama will scold you.’
So Harry stayed indoors sucking sweets, and I ran out alone through the rose garden where every leaf, dark and shiny as holly, extended a drop of rain on its luscious point for me to lick. Every dense, clustered flower had a drop like a diamond nestling among the petals and when you sniffed the sweetness, rainwater got up your nose and made it tickle. If it rained while I was roaming, I could dive for shelter in the little white latticed summerhouse in the centre of the rose garden and watch the rain splashing on the gravel paths. But more often I would take no notice at all and walk on, on and out through the streaming paddock, past the wet ponies, along the footpath through the sheltered beech wood down to the River Fenny which lay like a silver snake in the coppice at the end of the paddock.
So although we were so near in age, we were strangers for all of our childhood. And though a house with two children in it – and one of them a romp – can never be completely still, I think we were a quiet, isolated household. Papa’s marriage to Mama had been arranged with a view to wealth rather than suitability and it was obvious to us, to the servants and even to the village, that they grated on each other. She found Papa loud and vulgar. And Papa would, too often, offend her sense of propriety by donning his Sussex drawl in her parlour, by his loud, easy laugh, and by his back-slapping chumminess with every man on our land from the poorest cottager to the plumpest tenant farmer.
Mama thought her town-bred airs and graces were an example to the county but they were despised in the village. Her disdainful, mincing walk down the aisle of the parish church every Sunday was parodied and mimicked in the taproom of the Bush by every lad who fancied himself a wit.
Our procession down the aisle, with Mama’s disdainful saunter and Harry’s wide-eyed waddle, made me blush with embarrassment for my family. Only inside our high-backed pew could I relax. While Mama and Harry stuck their heads in their hands and fervently prayed, I would sit up by Papa and slip one cold hand in his pocket.
Mama would recite prayers in a toneless murmur, but my little fingers would seek and find the private magic of my papa’s pocket. His clasp knife, his handkerchief, a head of wheat or a special pebble I had given him – more potent than the bread and wine, more real than the catechism.
And after the service, when Papa and I lingered in the churchyard to learn the village news, Mama and Harry would hurry on to the carriage, impatient of the slow, drawling jokes and fearful of infections.
She tried to belong to the village, but she had no knack of free and easy speech with our people. When she asked them how they did, or when a baby was due, she sounded as if she did not really care (which was true) or as if she found their whole lives sordid and tedious (which was also true). So they mumbled like idiots, and the women twisted their aprons in their hands as they spoke, and kept their mob caps dipped low.
‘I really fail to see what you see in them,’ Mama complained languidly after one of these abortive attempts at conversation. ‘They really are positively natural.’
They were natural. Oh, not in the sense she meant: that they were half-witted. They were natural in that they did as they felt and said what they thought. Of course they became tongue-tied and awkward in her chilly presence. What could you say to a lady who sat in a carriage high above you and asked you with every appearance of boredom what you were giving your husband for dinner that night? She might ask, but she did not care. And even more amazing to them, who believed the life of Wideacre was well known throughout the length and breadth of England, was that the Squire’s lady clearly did not know she was speaking to the wife of one of Acre’s most successful poachers, and so a true answer to the question would have been: ‘One of your pheasants, ma’am.’
Papa and I knew, of course. But there are some things that cannot be told, cannot be taught. Mama and Harry lived in a world that dealt in words. They read huge boxfuls of books delivered from London booksellers and libraries. Mama wrote long criss-crossed letters that went all over England: to her sisters and brothers in Cambridge and London, and to her aunt in Bristol. Always words, words, words. Chatter, gossip, books, plays, poetry and even songs with words that had to be memorized.
Papa and I lived in a world where words were very few. We felt our necks prickle when thunder threatened haymaking and it only needed a nod between us for me to ride to one corner of the field and Papa to ride away over to the other acres to tell the men to stack what they could and be ready for the bad weather. We smelled rain on the air at the start of harvesting and, without speaking, would wheel our horses round to stop the sickle gangs from cutting the standing corn with the storm coming. The important things I knew were never taught. The important things I was born knowing, because I was Wideacre born and Wideacre bred.
As for the wider world, it hardly existed. Mama would hold up a letter to Papa and say: ‘Fancy …’ And Papa would merely nod and repeat: ‘Fancy.’ Unless it affected the price of corn or wool, he had no interest.
We visited some county families, of course. Papa and Mama would attend evening parties in winter, and now and then Mama would take Harry and me to visit the children of neighbouring families: the Haverings at Havering Hall, ten miles to the west, and the de Courcey family in Chichester. But the roots of our lives were deep, deep into the Wideacre earth and our lives were lived in isolation behind the Wideacre park walls.
And after a day in the saddle, or a long afternoon watching the labourers ploughing, Papa liked nothing so much as a cigar in the rose garden while the stars came out in the pearly sky and the bats swooped and twittered overhead. Then Mama would turn from the windows of the parlour with a short sigh and write long letters to London. Even my childish eyes saw her unhappiness. But the power of the Squire, and the power of the land, kept her silent.
Her loneliness showed itself only in her continual letters, and in the way her disagreements with Papa were never won nor lost, but dragged on in indecisive pain.
The riding quarrel rumbled on throughout my childhood. My mama was bound to conventional obedience to the Master’s word, but utterly free of any moral standard. Behind her respectability and her worship of the conventions she had the morality of the gutter. Without power, she had spent all her life seeking minuscule advantages in perpetual quest for the satisfaction of getting her own way in something, anything, however small.
Poor woman! She had no control of the housekeeping monies, which were submitted by butler and cook directly to Papa and paid for out of the estate accounts. She had no control over her dress allowance, which was paid direct to the Chichester dressmaker and milliner. Once a quarter she received a few pounds and shillings for spending money: for her church collection, for her charities and for the dizzy indulgence of buying a posy of flowers or a box of sweetmeats. And even that little purse was discreetly regulated by her behaviour. After a moment’s lapse when she had spoken out to Papa shortly after my birth, the allowance had magically stopped – a seven-year-old secret that still rankled enough for Mama to whisper it to me in her enduring resentment.
I listened not at all and cared less. I was for the Squire. I was Papa’s little girl, and I understood well enough that disloyal, resentful whispers like that were part of the same attack on me and my papa as her opposition to my riding. Mama was always in search of family life as it was depicted in her quarterly journals. That was the secret reason for her hatred of my father’s uncompromising loudness, his bawdiness, his untamed joy. That was why she gloried in the quiet prettiness of her fair-haired boy. And that was why she would have done anything to get me off horseback and into the parlour where young girls, all young girls, whatever their talents and dispositions, belonged.
‘Why don’t you stay at home today, Beatrice?’ she asked in her sweet plaintive voice one morning at breakfast. Papa had already eaten and gone, and my mama turned her eyes from his plate with the great knuckle bone of ham chewed clean and the scatter of crumbs from a crusty Wideacre loaf.
‘I am riding with Papa,’ I said, my words muffled by my own hearty portion of bread and ham.
‘I know that is what you planned,’ she corrected me sharply. ‘But I am asking you to stay at home today. To stay at home with me. This morning I should like to pick some flowers and you could help me to arrange them in the blue vases. This afternoon we could go for a drive. We could even visit the Haverings. You would like that. You could chatter with Celia.’
‘I am sorry, Mama,’ I said with all the finality of an indulged seven-year-old, ‘but I promised Papa I would check the sheep on the downs and I will need all day. I shall go to the west side this morning and then ride home for dinner. This afternoon I shall go to the east side and not be back till tea-time.’
Mama compressed her lips and looked down at the table. I barely noticed her rising irritation and her tone of anger and pain was a surprise to me when she burst out: ‘Beatrice, I cannot think what is wrong with you! Time and time again I ask you to spend a day, or half a day with me, and every time you have something else you would rather do. It hurts me; it distresses me to be so rebuffed. You should not even be riding alone. It is outrageous, when I have specifically asked for your company indoors.’
I gazed blankly at her, a fork of ham halfway to my mouth.
‘You look surprised, Beatrice,’ she said crossly, ‘but in any ordinary household you would not even have learned how to ride. It is only because your father is horse-mad and you are Wideacre-mad that you have such licence. But I will not tolerate it in my daughter. I will not permit it!’
That made me afraid. Mama’s overt opposition to my daily rides could mean I was returned to the conventional pursuits of a young lady. A miserable enough fate for anyone, but if I was to be kept inside when the ploughing started, or when the reaping bands were out, or at harvest time, I should be in continual torment. Then I heard my papa’s clatter in the hall and the door banged open. Mama winced at the noise and my head jerked up like a gun dog at the sound of game, to see his bright eyes and merry smile.
‘Still feeding, little piglet?’ he bellowed. ‘Late to breakfast, late to leave and late in the fields. You have to be on the west slope and back in time for dinner, remember. You’ll have to hurry.’
I hesitated and glanced at Mama. She said nothing and her eyes were downcast. I saw the game she was playing in one swift, acute second. She had put me in a position where my defiance of her would be absolute if I went now with my papa. On the other hand, my obedience and devotion could be transferred wholesale to her if I insisted on staying indoors. I was not going to be managed by such paltry parlour games. I swallowed my mouthful and cast Mama’s secrets before my father.
‘Mama says I must stay at home today,’ I said innocently. ‘What am I to do?’
I glanced from one to the other, the picture of childish obedience. I looked as if I sought only guidance, but in my heart I had staked a large gamble on my papa.
‘Beatrice is needed out on the downs today,’ he said baldly. ‘She can stay at home tomorrow. I want her to look at the flocks today before we separate them for market and there is no one else free who can ride up there and whose judgement I can rely on.’
‘Young ladies do not generally spend all day in the saddle. I am afraid for Beatrice’s health,’ Mama said.
Papa grinned. ‘Oh stuff, ma’am,’ he said rousingly. ‘She’s as lean and as fit as a racehorse. She’s never had a day’s illness in her life. Why don’t you say what you mean?’
Mama bridled. Plain speaking is not the natural voice of ladies. ‘It’s not the proper upbringing for a girl,’ she said. ‘Spending all her time talking with such rough men. Knowing all the tenants and cottagers and galloping around the countryside without a chaperone.’ Papa’s blue eyes sparkled with temper. ‘Those rough men earn our bread and butter,’ he said. ‘Those tenants and cottagers pay for Beatrice’s horse, aye and even the dress on her back and the boots on her feet.
A fine little city-miss you would have on your hands if she did not know where the wealth is made and where the work is done.’
Mama, a city-miss in her girlhood, looked up from the table and came perilously close to defying the convention that Ladies Never Raise Their Voices, Never Disagree with Their Husbands, and Keep Their Tempers Under the Tightest of Wraps.
‘Beatrice should be brought up in a manner befitting a young lady,’ she said tremulously. ‘She will not be a farm manager in later life; she will be a lady. She should be learning how a lady behaves.’
Papa was red to the ears – a sure sign of his temper. ‘She is a Lacey of Wideacre,’ he said, his voice firm and unnecessarily loud for the little breakfast parlour. The cups jumped and chinked as he bumped the table.
‘She is a Lacey of Wideacre, and whatever she does, however she behaves, will always be fitting. Whether she checks the sheep or even digs ditches, she will always be a Lacey of Wideacre. On this land her behaviour is the pattern of Quality. And no damned mincing, citified, pretty-pretty gentility could change that. And nothing could improve that.’
Mama was white with fright and temper.
‘Very well,’ she said through her narrowed lips. ‘It shall be as you order.’
She rose from the table and picked up her reticule, her shawl and the letters that lay by her plate. I could see her fingers tremble and her mouth working to hold back resentful, bitter tears. Papa detained her with a hand on her arm at the door and she looked up in his face with an expression of icy dislike.
‘She is a Lacey of Wideacre,’ he said again, trying to convey to this outsider what that meant on this, our land. ‘Bearing that name, on this land she can do no wrong. You need have no fears for her, ma’am.’
Mama tipped her head in cold acquiescence and stood like a statue till he released her. Then she glided, in the short dainty steps of the perfect lady, from the room. Papa turned his attention to me, silent at my breakfast plate.
‘You didn’t want to stay at home, did you, Beatrice?’ he asked, concerned. I beamed at him.
‘I am a Lacey of Wideacre, and my place is on the land!’ I said. He scooped me from my place in a great bear-hug and we went arm in arm to the stables, victors of a righteous battle. Mama watched me go from the parlour window, and when I was on my pony and safe from her detaining hand, I reined in by the terrace to see if she would come out. She opened the glass door and came out languidly, her perfumed skirts brushing the stones of the terrace, her eyes blinking in the bright sunshine. I stretched an apologetic hand out to her.
‘I am sorry to grieve you, Mama,’ I offered. ‘I shall stay at home tomorrow.’
She did not move close to take my hand. She was always afraid of horses and perhaps she disliked being too close to the pony who was pulling against the bit and pawing at the gravel, keen to be off. Mama’s pale eyes looked coldly up at me, sitting high, bright and straight-backed on a glossy pony.
‘I try and try with you, Beatrice,’ she said and her voice was sad, but also flawed with self-righteous complaint. ‘I sometimes think you do not know how to love properly. All you ever care for is the land. I think sometimes you only love your papa so much because he is the master of the land. Your heart is so full of Wideacre there scarcely seems room for anything else.’
The pony fidgeted and I smoothed her neck. There seemed little to say. What Mama said was probably true, and I felt a momentary sentimental sadness that I could not be the daughter she wanted.
‘I am sorry, Mama,’ I said awkwardly.
‘Sorry!’ she said and her voice was scornful. She turned and swept back through the door leaving me holding a restless pony on a tight rein and feeling somehow foolish. Then I loosened the rein and Minnie sprang forward and we clattered off down the gravel to the grassy track of the drive. Once in the shadow of the branches, which cast dappled bars of shade across my track while the early summer sunshine warmed my face, I forgot all about the disappointed woman I had left in her pale parlour and remembered only my freedom on the land and the work I had to do that day.
But Harry, her favourite, was a disappointment to her in another way. The high hills and the rolling chalk valleys and the sweet River Fenny flowing so cool and so green through our fields and woods were never enough for him. He seized at the chance of visits to our aunt in Bristol and said he preferred the rooftops and rows of tall town houses to our wide, empty horizon.
And when Papa broached the idea of a school, Mama turned white and reached a hand for her only son. But Harry’s blue eyes sparkled and he said he wanted to go. Against Papa’s certainty that Harry would need a better education than his own to deal with an encroaching and slippery world, and Harry’s quiet but effective determination to leave, Mama was helpless. All August, while Harry was ill again, Mama, Nurse, the housekeeper and every one of the four upstairs maids dashed around all day in a frenzy of preparation for the eleven-year-old hero’s departure for school.
Papa and I avoided the worst of the fuss. In any case, there were the long days we had to spend on the open downland pastures collecting the sheep to separate lambs from ewes for slaughter. Harry, too, remained secluded in library or parlour choosing books to take to school with him, and scanning his newly purchased Latin and Greek grammars.
‘You cannot want to go, Harry!’ I said incredulously.
‘Whyever not?’ he said, frowning at the breeze that had blown in with me as I flung open the library door.
‘To leave Wideacre!’ I said and then stopped. Once again Harry’s world of words defeated me. If he did not know that nothing outside Wideacre could match the smell of Wideacre’s summer wind, or that a handful of Wideacre earth was worth an acre of any other land, then I had no way to tell him. We did not see the same sights.
We did not speak the same language. We did not share even the similarity of family resemblance. Harry took after my father in colouring, with his bright blond curls and his wide blue, honest eyes. From Mama he had inherited her delicate bone structure and the sweetness of her smile. Her smiles were rare enough, but Harry was a merry-faced golden cherub. All the petting and indulgence he had from Mama had been unable to spoil his sunny nature – and his smiling good looks reflected his sweet and loving spirit.
Beside him I was a throwback to our Norman ancestors and the founders of the line. Foxy-coloured, like those greedy and dangerous men who came in the train of the Norman conqueror and took one look at the lovely land of Wideacre and fought and cheated and lied until they got it. From those ancestors I had my chestnut hair, but my hazel-green eyes were all my own. No portrait in the gallery showed a set of eyes slantingly placed above high cheekbones like mine.
‘She’s a changeling,’ Mama once said in despair.
‘She’s her own pattern,’ my blond papa said consolingly. ‘Maybe she’ll grow into good looks.’
But Harry’s golden curls could not last for ever. His head was cropped for his first wig as part of the preparation for school. Mama wept as the radiant springs fell all around him on the floor, but Harry’s eyes were bright with excitement and pride as Papa’s own wigmaker fitted a little bob-tailed wig on his head – as shorn as a lamb. Mama wept for his curls; she wept as she packed his linen; she wept as she packed a great box of sweetmeats to sustain her baby in the hard outside world. The week before his departure, she was in one continual flood of tears, which even Harry thought wearisome, and Papa and I found pressing business on the far side of the estate from breakfast to dinner.
When he finally departed – like a young lord in the family carriage with his bags strapped on the back, two outriders and Papa himself riding alongside for company for the first stage – Mama shut herself in her parlour for the afternoon. To my credit, I managed a few tears and I took good care to tell no one they were not for Harry’s departure. My father had bought me my first grown-up mount to console me for the loss of my brother. She was an exquisite mare, Bella, with a coat the colour of my own chestnut hair, a black mane and tail and a stripe like starlight down her nose. But I would not be allowed to try her paces till Papa came home, and he would be gone overnight. My tears flowed easily enough, but they were all for me and white-nosed Bella. Once Harry turned the corner of the drive and was out of sight, I scarcely thought of him again.
Not so Mama. She spent long solitary hours in her front parlour fiddling with little pieces of sewing, sorting embroidery silks or tapestry wool into the ranges of shades; arranging flowers picked for her by me or one of the gardeners, or tinkling little tunes on the piano – absorbed by the little time-wasting tedious skills of a lady’s life. But, unconsciously, the little tune would stop and her hands would fall into her lap, and she would gaze out of the window to the gentle shoulder of the green downs, seeing their rippled loveliness, yet all the time seeing the bright face of Harry, her only son. Then she would sigh, very softly, and drop her head to her work, or take up the tune again.
The sunlight, so joyous in the garden and in the woods, seemed to beat cruelly on the pretty pastel colours of the ladies’ parlour. It bleached the pink out of the carpets and the gold out of Mama’s hair, and the lines into her face. While she faded in pale silence indoors, my father and I rode over the length and breadth of Wideacre land, chatting to the tenant farmers, checking the progress of their crops against those we farmed ourselves, watching the flow of the River Fenny over our turning millwheel, until it seemed that the whole world was ours and I might take a proprietary interest in every living thing that – one way or another – belonged to us.
Not a baby was born in our village but I knew of it and generally the child took one of our names: Harold or Harry for my father and brother, Beatrice for my mama and me. When one of our tenants died, we concerned ourselves in the packing and the leaving of their family, if they were going, or the succession of the oldest son and the cooperation of his brothers if they were staying. My father and I knew every blade of grass on our lands, from the weeds on the lazy Dells’ farm (they would be looking for a new tenancy when their lease ran out) to the white-painted fence posts on the spick-and-span Home Farm we farmed ourselves.
Small wonder I was a little empress riding over our land on our horses, with Father – the greatest landlord for a hundred miles around – riding before me and nodding to our people who dropped a curtsy or pulled their forelocks as we passed.
Poor Harry missed all this. Not for him the pleasure of seeing our land under every daily light and in every season. The ploughed fields ringed with white hoarfrost and crunchy as fudge, or the swaying corn in the beating heat of summer. While I rode like a lord at a lord’s side, Harry moped at school and sent sorrowful letters home to his mother, who replied in pale blue ink blotted with tears of sympathy.
His first year was miserable with longing for his mama and her quiet sunny parlour. The boys all belonged to gangs with fierce tribal loyalties, and little Harry was bullied and tormented by every child an inch taller or a month older. Not until his second year brought a new batch of victims into the arena did Harry’s life improve. His third school year meant the dizzy heights of being nearly a big boy, and his cherub-like brightness and his undimmed sweetness brought him petting as well as occasional cruelty. More and more often, when he came home for the holidays, his great trunk was crammed with comfits and cakes given him by older boys.
‘Harry is so popular,’ Mama said proudly.
Each holiday, too, he would tell me tales of the courage and dash of his gang leader. How every term they would plan a campaign in the war against the apprentice lads of the town. How they marched from the school gates to spring upon the lads in glorious, epic battles. And how the hero of the day was always Staveley, Lord Staveley’s youngest son, who gathered around himself the strongest, the meanest and the prettiest of all the boys in the school.
Harry’s new-found zest for school could only widen the gulf between us. He had caught the schoolboy’s tone of arrogance like a galloping infection and, apart from boring me to death about the demigod Staveley, scarcely deigned to speak to me at all. Towards Papa he was always polite, but his unconcealed enthusiasm for his studies made Papa at first proud, and then irritated that Harry should so obviously prefer to spend his days in the library when the windows were open and the cuckoos calling to everyone to take a line and rod and try for some salmon.
Only with Mama was he totally unchanged, and those two spent long, intimate days in easy companionship, reading and writing together in library and parlour while Papa and I, intent on wider, freer pursuits, watched the land under every light, under every season and under every sort of weather. Harry could come and go as he pleased; he was always a visitor in his own home. He never belonged to Wideacre as I belonged. Only Papa, the land and I were the constant elements in my life. Papa, the land and I had been inseparable since the first time I had seen Wideacre in its wonderful wholeness from between the hunter’s ears. Papa, the land and I would be here for ever.
2
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‘I don’t know what I’ll do without you when you leave,’ Papa said casually to me one day as we rode down the lane to Acre village to see the blacksmith.
‘I’ll never go,’ I said, my confidence unshaken. I was only half attending for we were each of us leading one of the heavy plough horses to be shod. That was easy for Papa, high on his hunter, but my dainty mare only came up to the work-horse’s shoulder, so I had to keep her alert and wide awake to follow his great strides.
‘You’ll have to go some day,’ said Papa, looking over the hedges to see the plough using the second team of horses starting to turn over the sluggish winter earth. ‘You will marry and leave with your husband. Perhaps you’ll be a fine lady at Court, not that there’s much of a Court left and all filled with ugly German women, Hanover rats, they call ’em; but you’ll be away and care nothing for Wideacre.’
I laughed. The idea was so ludicrous and adulthood so far away that nothing could shake my belief in the trinity of Papa, and me, and the land.
‘I won’t marry,’ I said. ‘I shall stay here and work with you and look after Wideacre, like you and I do now.’
‘Aye,’ Papa said tenderly. ‘But Harry will be Master here when I’m gone, and I would rather see you in your own home than rubbing against him. Besides, Beatrice, the land is well enough for you now, but in a few years you will want pretty clothes and balls. Then who will watch the winter sowing?’
I laughed again with my childish confidence that good things never change.
‘Harry knows nothing about the land,’ I said dismissively. ‘If you asked him what a short-horn was, he would think it was a musical instrument. He’s not been here for months – why, he hasn’t even seen the new plantation. Those trees were my idea, and you planted them just where I thought they should be. The man said I was a proper little forester – and you said I should have a stool made from the wood of my trees when I was an old lady! Harry cannot be Master here – he is always away.’
I still had not understood. Silly fool that I was. Though I had seen enough older sons inheriting the farms and enough younger sons working as day labourers or going into service before they could marry their patient sweethearts, I had never thought of them as landowners as we were.
I never imagined that the rule that favoured older sons to the exclusion of all others could ever, possibly, apply to us – to me. I had seen village girls of my age working as hard as adult women to earn money for the family coffers. I had seen their sisters, a few years older, on the look-out for older sons – always the eldest – to marry. But I never thought that the rigid, crazy rule that the first boy takes all could apply to us. It was a feature of the lives of the poor, like early death, poor health and starvation in winter. These things were not the same for us.
Oddly, I had never thought of Harry as the son and heir, just as I had never thought of Mama as the Mistress of Wideacre. They were simply private individuals, seldom seen outside the walls of the park. They were the background to the glory of the Squire and me. So my father’s words had not disturbed me – they had passed me by.
I had much to learn, the little girl that I was then. I had never even heard of ‘entail’, the legal process of tying up a great estate so it is always handed to the next male heir – be he ever so distant, even if there are a hundred daughters loving the land before him. With childlike concentration I still had the ability to hear only what interested me – and speculation about the next Master of Wideacre was as remote as the music of the spheres.
While I dismissed the thoughts from my mind, my father had pulled up his hunter to chat with one of our tenants trimming his boundary hedge of blackthorn and dogroses.
‘Good morning, Giles,’ I said, my seat in the saddle, the tip of my head, a perfect copy of my father’s friendly condescension.
‘Mistress.’ Giles touched an arthritic hand to his head. He was years younger than my father but bent double with the burden of poverty. A lifetime of waterlogged ditches, muddy fields and frozen pathways had permeated his bones with agonizing arthritis which no amount of dirty flannel wrapped round his skinny legs seemed to cure. His brown hand permanently ingrained with dirt (our dirt) was as knotted and as gnarled as a holly trunk.
‘A grand little lady she’s becoming,’ he said to my father. ‘’Tis sad to think she’ll have to leave us some day soon.’ I stared at the old man. My father picked a sprig of clipped elder from the hedge with the butt of his whip.
‘Aye,’ he said slowly. ‘But a man must run the land and maids must marry.’ He paused. ‘The young Master will be home soon when he’s finished with his books. Time enough then to learn of country ways. The fields and the downs are good enough for a girl with the teaching her mother gives her, but these are bad times. The next Master of Wideacre will need to know his way in the world.’
I listened, silent. Even my mare seemed to freeze as my father spoke and the great shire-horses dropped their heads as if to listen while my father tore down the secure world of my childhood with his quiet, deadly words.
‘Yes, she’s a good girl and as sharp on the land as a bailiff for all she’s so young. But she’ll be off to marry some lord or other some day, and young Harry will take my place. He’ll be all the better for his learning.’
Giles nodded. There was a silence. A long, country silence punctuated with the springtime birdsong. There was no hurry on that timeless afternoon which marked the end of my childhood. My father had said all he had to say and said nothing. Giles said nothing, thought nothing, gazed into space. And I said not a word for I had no words to deal with this pain. In a series of clicks, like the moving parts of some strange and cruel clock, all my pictures of the adult world were falling into place. The precious elder son always took the land – and the redundant girls could go where they could find a man to take them. My residence at Wideacre was not an exclusive favour, and Harry’s departure an exile – but I was kept at home because I was not worth educating.
Harry’s school was not an interruption of his Wideacre life but an essential preparation for it. While I had been revelling in the land and the freedom of being the only child at home, Harry had been growing stronger and more skilled and would return to expel me from my home. Papa did not love me best. Papa did not love me best. Papa did not love me best.
I took a deep shuddering breath, softly, softly, so that no one could hear. And I looked at my father with a new, strange clarity. He might love me tenderly, but not enough to give me Wideacre. He might wish the best for me, but he could see no further than a good match and permanent exile from the one place in the world that was my home. He might plan ahead for Harry’s future but he had forgotten me. Forgotten me.
So that was the end of my childhood; that warm spring day on the lane to Acre with the two great shire-horses beside my papa and me, and Giles, blank as chalk scree, staring at nothing. The absolute security of owning the land I loved left me, then, in that moment, and I never had it fully back. I left my childhood with my heart aching and my mind full of anger and resentment. I started adulthood with a bitter taste in my mouth and a formless determination that I would not go. I would not leave Wideacre. I would not surrender my place to Harry. If it was the way of the world that girls left home, then the world would have to change. I would never change.
‘You’ll have to hurry and change,’ my mama said in her continual, unconscious contradiction of me. She held the hem of her green silk dress clear of the puddles in the stable yard as we clattered in. Always, she had this way of innocently opposing me, just as she continually opposed my father. From her I learned early that you do not have to argue or to state your beliefs to oppose someone. You can simply turn your head from them; from their ideas, from their loves and their enthusiasms. Without Papa, she might well have been a more direct, a sweeter-natured, woman. With him, her sense of her own purpose had soured into frustration. What should have been directness and honesty had become unspoken opposition.
‘You must hurry and change into your pink silk,’ she repeated with emphasis as I slid from the saddle and tossed the reins to a waiting stable lad. ‘We’ve a special guest for dinner – Harry’s headmaster.’
My father directed a long, silent look at her.
‘Yes,’ she said defensively. ‘I did ask him to visit. I am worried about the boy. I’m sorry, Harold, I should have told you earlier, only it is some time since I wrote and I thought he was not coming at all. I would have mentioned it before …’ She broke off and stopped. I understood my father’s rising irritation. But his reply was checked, as a man all in black except for the white band of a clerical collar appeared at the rose-garden gate.
‘Dr Yately!’ my father said in a tone of convincing delight. ‘How good to see you! And what a surprise! I should have been home to meet you had I known you were coming.’
The tall man nodded and smiled and I gained a quick impression of a cool, astute man of the world. I dipped my curtsy and shot another look at him as I rose. This was no social call. He had come for a purpose and he was anxious to complete his mission. I saw his wary eyes assessing Papa, and I wondered what he wanted of us.
He had come, it was clear, to do Mama’s work for her. She still longed to have Harry home to fill the gap his absence had left in her life. Dr Yately, for reasons I could not yet guess, was ready to take the part of the pale wife against the Squire himself. For some reason, he was as anxious to be rid of Harry as Mama was to have him home.
I attended dinner in the girlish dress of maidenly pink and correctly said not a word except in reply to a direct question – and I had few of them. I sat facing my mother. It was one of my father’s foibles that a male guest should take the foot of the table and he the head. So Mama and I – equally unimportant – sat in silence while the men talked over our heads.
Dr Yately had evidently come to persuade my father to remove Harry from his expensive, exclusive school. But if he succeeded, he stood to lose a pupil who had taken every costly extra, who was likely to need a tutor from the school to attend him to university, and who might well choose to take that tutor with him to Europe on the Grand Tour. With the disappearance of Harry, Dr Yately could say goodbye to thousands of pounds of fees. So why should he want to be rid of him? What could Harry have possibly done that was too gross a secret for a frank explanation to my father, and too shameful for Dr Yately simply to overlook and continue to pocket the money?
The clever man knew his business. He kept off the subject of Harry but praised the roast beef and relished the wine (only our second-best claret I noticed). He clearly knew nothing about farming but he drew my father out to talk about some of the new techniques we might try. My father grew expansive, jovial. He even offered Dr Yately the chance of a few days’ hunting next season if he could take a holiday. Dr Yately was polite, but non-committal.
Once Papa started melting towards the visitor and broached another bottle, Mama was in a hurry to leave the gentlemen together. With the sharp regret of a fourteen-year-old girl who had been on horseback all day, I watched some apple charlotte returning to the kitchen. But Mama rose from the table and Dr Yately and Papa politely bowed us from the room and settled down to their port and talk.
My mother’s pale face was flushed with pleasure as she opened her workbox and handed me my embroidery.
‘Your brother Harry will come home as soon as term ends, and never go to that dreadful place again, if only your papa agrees,’ she said, elated.
‘So early?’ I asked, keenly defensive of my position. ‘Why? What has he done?’
‘Done?’ Her eyes met mine directly, no subterfuge in their pale shadows. ‘Nothing! Whatever could he do? It’s what those brutes of boys have done to him.’ She hesitated and chose a strand of silk.
‘When he was last home for the holidays he needed a chest plaster, do you remember?’ Of course I did not. But I nodded.
‘Both Nurse and I saw marks on his poor body. He had been beaten, Beatrice. He begged me to say and do nothing, but the more I thought of it the more certain I was he should be taken away from that school. I wrote to Dr Yately and he replied that he would see what was happening. Then he arrived here today!’ My mother’s voice was full of pride that she had taken action that had produced results, and dramatic results. ‘He tells me that Harry has been forced to join one of the boys’ gangs, and that in their games they have some shocking rules and punishments. The worst boy – the ringleader – is the son of …’ She paused. ‘Well, never mind who, precisely. But it is someone the Doctor simply must not offend. This boy has established some sort of hold over Harry. He made him sit next to him in class, have his bed next to him in the dormitory and has teased and bullied him all term. Dr Yately says he cannot separate them and he suggests – Oh! I hope your papa agrees – that Harry is of an age when he could pursue his studies at home and learn about the estate at the same time.’
Unseen by Mama, my head low over my embroidery, I raised ironic eyebrows. Harry learn about the estate, indeed! He had lived here all his life and did not even know the exact lie of our borders. He had driven through Wideacre wood every Sunday, and yet he did not know where in the wood there was a nightingale’s nest, or where in the stream you could always find trout. If Harry was going to learn about the estate it was to be hoped he could find it in a book, for he had never even glanced from the library windows when he was last home.
But my confidence was undermined by a shiver of unease. All Harry knew about Wideacre at the moment could be written in a chapbook. But once he was home at the request of Mama, and not because Papa needed him, he might become the son my papa had wanted; had sought in me. He might become, in truth, the heir.
The gentlemen did not come to the drawing room for tea and Mama sent me early to bed. After my maid had twisted my chestnut hair into one fat plait down my back, I sent her away and climbed out of my bed to sit on the window seat. My bedroom was on the second floor, facing east, overlooking the fat sickle of the rose garden, which curves around the front and east of the house and with a glimpse of the peach trees and fruit cages of the kitchen garden. Not for me the larger bedrooms in the front of the house, like Harry’s room, which faces south. Still, from where I sat I could see the garden in the moonlight and the wood pressing up to the garden gates. The cool night air carried countryside smells to me. The promising scent of growing meadows, damp with dew and the occasional warble of a restless blackbird. From the woods I heard the abrupt bark of a dog fox and from downstairs I could hear the rumble of my father’s voice as he talked about horses. I knew then that the quiet man in black had got his way with Papa and Harry would be coming home.
A dark shadow crossing the lawn interrupted my thoughts. I recognized the gamekeeper’s lad, a boy of my age, built like a young ox, with a lurcher dog – a poacher’s dog to catch poachers – at his heels. He saw the candle in my window and came from the garden (where he had no business to be) to stand beneath my window (where he had no business to be), one hand casually on the warm sandstone wall. The silk shawl I had over my nightdress seemed too flimsy when I saw his warm eyes on me, and his smile as he gazed upwards.
We were friends, and yet not friends, Ralph and I. One summer, when Harry had been especially unwell and I had been left to run wild, I had found this unkempt boy in the rose garden and, with the haughtiness of a six-year-old, ordered him out of the gate. He tipped me into a rose bush with one hard shove as his reply, but when he saw my shocked, scratched face, he kindly offered to pull me out again. I took his proffered hand and, as soon as I was on my feet, I bit it as hard as I could and took to my heels – not to the Hall for shelter, but through the lychgate to the wood. This refuge was impenetrable to Mama and Nurse who were ignorant of the little animal pathways among the thickets, and were forced to stand at the gate, calling and calling, until I chose to reappear. But this stocky child wormed along the tracks as fast as I went, and arrived at a little hollow among brambles, roses and bushes on my heels.
His dirty little face was split in a broad grin and I grinned back. It was the start of a friendship that, childlike, lasted the summer and then stopped as quickly and as thoughtlessly as it had begun. Every day during that hot, dry summer I would escape from the busy parlourmaid, who had suddenly found my care added to her duties, and skip down to the woods. Ralph would meet me by the Fenny and all morning we would fish and splash in the stream, go on great expeditions all the way to Acre lane, climb trees, rob birds’ nests, or catch butterflies.
I was free because Harry was watched night and day by Nurse and Mama. Ralph was free from the day he could walk because his mother, Meg, a slattern in a tumbledown cottage in the middle of the woods, had never troubled where he went or what he did. This made him a perfect playmate for me – and he taught me all the paths and trees of Wideacre woods in a great sweep around the Hall as far as my little legs could carry me in a morning.
We played like country children, speaking little and doing a lot. But the summer soon ended; Harry recovered, and Mama returned to her eagle-eyed scrutiny of the whiteness of my pinnies. Mornings were again given over to lessons, and if Ralph waited in the woods while the leaves turned yellow and red, he would not have waited for long. Very soon he had given up playing altogether and trailed around behind the gamekeeper, learning the skills of keeping game and killing vermin. Papa heard Ralph’s name as the handiest lad in the village for pheasant chicks, and by the time he was eight he was paid a penny a day in the season.
By the time he was twelve he was earning half a man’s pay but doing a man’s job in and out of season. His mother had come from nowhere; his father had disappeared, but that meant he was free of the family loyalty that kept poachers safe in Acre village. And his tumbledown house in the woods was an advantage too. They put the pheasant breeding pens all around the dirty little cottage by the Fenny and Ralph’s deepest sleep could always be broken by the crack of a twig near the game birds.
Eight years is a lifetime in childhood, and I had almost forgotten the summer when the dirty little urchin and I had been inseparable. But somehow, when I was mounted on my pretty mare, with my tailored habit and tricorn hat, I felt awkward riding past Ralph. When he pulled his forelock to Papa and nodded to me I did not feel easy and gracious as I said, ‘Good day.’ I did not enjoy stopping and talking with Ralph, especially if I was riding alone. And I did not like now the way he leaned, so self-possessed, against our wall and looked up at me, illuminated by my candle.
‘You’ll take cold,’ he said. His voice was already deep. He had filled out in the past two years and had the solid strength of a young man.
‘Yes,’ I said, shortly. I did not withdraw from the window for that would somehow have been a concession to his advice … and an acknowledgement that I was conscious of his eyes on me.
‘Are you out after poachers?’ I asked, unnecessarily.
‘Well, I’m not going courting with a dog and a gun,’ he said in the slow drawl of the downs. ‘A fine lass I’d get with a gun and a trap, don’t you think, Miss Beatrice?’
‘You’re too young to think of courting,’ I said dictatorially. ‘You’re no older than me.’
‘Oh, but I do think of courting,’ he said. ‘I like to think of a warm, friendly lass when I wait alone in the woods on a cold night. I’m not too young for courting, Miss Beatrice. But you’re right, we are the same age. Are girls of near fifteen too young to think of loving and kisses on warm summer nights?’
His dark eyes never left mine, and they seemed somehow to shine in the moonlight. I was very glad – and yet somehow sorry – that I was safe in the house, high above him.
‘Ladies are,’ I said firmly. ‘And the village girls would know better than to think of you.’
‘Ah.’ He sighed. The country silence filled the pause. His dog yawned and stretched out on the gravel at Ralph’s boots. Contradictorily, I wished with all my heart that he would look at me again in that shining, hot way, and that I had not called myself a lady and reminded him that he was nothing. His head dropped and his eyes no longer stared up at me, but were fixed on the ground. I could think of nothing to say; I felt awkward and foolish and also sorry, deeply sorry, to have been arrogant to one of our people. Then he shifted his weight and hefted his gun over his shoulder. Despite the shadows I could see he was smiling, and that he needed my pity not at all.
‘A lady is the same as a village girl in the cold, or in a quiet hayloft, or in a little hollow of the downs, I reckon,’ he said. ‘And if fifteen is old enough for me, I reckon it’s old enough for you, too.’ He paused. ‘My lady,’ he added, and his voice made it into an endearment.
I choked with shock, and while I said nothing like a fool, Ralph whistled to his dog, a black dog, his shadow, and left me without even a by-your-leave. He walked like a lord across his own acres, a dark shape in the shadowy garden, over our lawn and through the little gate to our woods. I was stunned at his impertinence. Then, with a sudden spurt of rage, I bounced from my window seat to go down to the Squire, who should have him whipped. Dragging on my wrapper, I was halfway to the door before I paused. For some reason, I could not think why, I did not want Ralph whipped – or thrown off Wideacre. He should certainly be punished, but not by my father, nor the gamekeeper either. I, alone, should find some way to wipe that insulting, warm smile from his face. I went to bed planning revenge. But I could not sleep. My heart was thudding so loud. I was surprised it should beat so fast with rage.
In the morning, I had all but forgotten him. It meant nothing, nothing at all, that I chose to ride in the direction of his home. I knew he would have been watching for poachers in the woods all night, and so would be home till noon at least in the horrid, damp cottage near the disused mill on the River Fenny. The flow had never been reliable there, and my father’s father had built a new mill to grind our corn further upstream. The old mill had fallen into disrepair and the tiny worker’s cottage alongside seemed to be sinking into the boggy ground. The woods grew close to the back door of the low-roofed shack, and as Ralph grew taller I believe he must have stooped all the time indoors. It was a two-roomed place, more a hovel than a cottage.
His mother was a dark, large-boned woman with wild, dangerous looks like his. ‘A gypsy of a woman,’ my father called her with relish.
‘Really?’ said my fair-haired mother coldly.
We often rode this way, my father and I. He would stop outside the poor cottage and Meg would come out to him, stooping under the low eaves, her skirt held high above the mud, barefoot, her strong brown ankles splashed and dirty. But she met my father’s eyes with a proud, bright smile like an equal, and brought him home-brewed ale in a rough cup. When he tossed her a coin she caught it as if it were her due, and sometimes I saw the hint of a smile of understanding between them.
There could not be secrets between this wild and lonely woman and the Squire, my father. But once or twice when he had ridden fast from home, full of impatience with my mother and her small, fiddling ways, we had seemed naturally to drift towards the Fenny and the little cottage in the woods where Meg, the gypsy woman, swayed towards us with her barefoot dancing step and her eyes bright with knowledge.
She was supposed to be a widow. Ralph’s father, the black sheep of one of the oldest families in Acre, had been pressed into the Navy and disappeared: dead, or missing, or run away. The other men of the village followed her with their eyes like hungry dogs but she looked neither to right nor left. Only my father, the Squire, brought a smile to her eyes, and those dark eyes to his face. No other man was ever worth a second glance. So, although she had offers, oh, many, she and Ralph never moved from the dark little house by the river.
‘A hundred years ago she would have been burned for a witch,’ said my father.
‘Oh, really?’ said my unbewitching mother.
She did not seem surprised to see me at her garden gate alone, but then nothing surprised her. She nodded and brought me a cup of milk in the way of country hospitality. I drank, still sitting sidesaddle on my mare and, as I drained the cup, Ralph came like a midnight shadow from the woods. He had a pair of dead rabbits hanging from one hand and his dog, as ever, at his heels.
‘Miss Beatrice,’ he said in a slow greeting.
‘Hello, Ralph,’ I said graciously. In the bright daylight his nighttime power had gone. His mother took my cup and we were alone in the sunlight.
‘I knew you would come,’ he said confidently. It was as if the sun had gone out. Like a mesmerized rabbit I gazed straight into his dark black eyes and could see nothing, nothing, but his eyes fixed on mine and the slow smile of his mouth, and the way a small pulse was beating quick under the tanned skin of his throat. The tall youth had all the power of last night. He carried it with him. He stood at my mare’s head and I was glad to be seated above him, at shoulder height in the saddle.
‘Oh, really?’ I said, in unconscious imitation of my mother’s frigid tones. Abruptly, he turned, and walked away from me, through the purple foxgloves to the Fenny. Without thinking what I was doing, I slid from the saddle, hitched my horse’s reins to Meg’s ramshackle fence and followed him. He never glanced behind, he never waited for me. He walked as if he were quite alone, down to the riverbank, and then turned upstream to where the ruins of the mill stood, the deep millpond dark behind it.
The wide, arched door where they used to load the wagons stood open. Ralph never looked back and I followed him without a word inside. A half-floor for storing sacks stretched across the room, a rickety ladder leading up to it. In the warm gloom of the old building I could smell the fusty, safe odour of old straw and feel the thick softness of dusty chaff underfoot.
‘Want to see a swallow’s nest?’ Ralph offered nonchalantly.
I nodded. Swallows are lucky and their little mud and grass cupshaped nests on beams or ledges under the eaves always pleased me. He led the way up the ladder and I followed unhesitatingly. When he reached the top he stretched out a hand to pull me up, and when I stood beside him, he did not let my hand go. His eyes met mine in a long, measuring stare.
‘There they are,’ he said. He pointed to the nest being built on a low beam under the roof. As we watched, a parent bird swooped into the barn with a tiny beakful of mud to add to the growing sides and swooped away. We watched in silence. Ralph let my hand go and slid his hand around my waist, drawing me closer. We stood side by side and his hand smoothed over the velvet of my gown up to the curve of my small breast. Without speaking a word, we turned together and he dipped his head to kiss me. The kiss was as gentle as the flight of the swallow.
His mouth brushed mine with soft, gentle touches. As he repeated them, I felt him tense, and the grip on my waist grew tighter. Swoony with pleasure, I found my knees giving way beneath me and I sank on to the dusty straw-strewn floor with my arms around him.
We were half children, half adult. I knew everything about mating animals, but nothing of kisses and lovemaking. But Ralph was a country lad and had been drawing a man’s wage and drinking with men for two years. My hat fell off as I tipped my head back to meet his kisses, and it was my hands that opened the neck of my gown to his exploring, clumsy fingers, and opened his shirt so I could press my forehead to his chest and rub my burning face against him.
Somewhere in the back of my mind a voice said: ‘Fever. I must have a fever.’ For my legs were too weak to rise and somehow I was trembling, trembling all over. In the core of my body, under my ribcage, was a fluttering, painful feeling. Down my spine was a long, long shiver. Ralph’s smallest move made me shudder. When his forefinger drew a line from under my ear to the base of my neck, he could feel me tremble all over. ‘I must be ill,’ said my drowning consciousness. ‘I must be very, very ill.’
Ralph eased back from me and leaned on an elbow looking down into my face. ‘You should go,’ he said. ‘It’s getting late.’
‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘It can’t be two o’clock yet.’
I fumbled in my pocket for my silver watch, a miniature copy of my father’s, and opened it.
‘Three!’ I exclaimed. ‘I shall be late!’ I jumped to my feet, reaching for my hat and shaking the straw from my skirt. Ralph made no effort to help me, but leaned back against an old stook of straw. I buttoned the front of my gown, watching him covertly under my eyelashes. He pulled a straw from the stook and chewed on it, watching me, impassive. His dark eyes showed nothing. He seemed as content to be left as to be visited, as still as a secret pagan god left neglected in old woods.
I was ready to go and should have been hurrying away, yet the flutter under my ribcage had become some sort of ache. I did not want to leave just yet. I sat down again beside him and laid my head prettily on his shoulder.
‘Say you love me before I go,’ I whispered.
‘Oh, no,’ he said without heat. ‘I’ll have none of that.’
In surprise I jerked my head back to stare at him.
‘You don’t love me?’ I asked, astounded.
‘No,’ said Ralph. ‘You don’t love me, do you?’
I paused, a cry of outrage on my lips. But I could not say I did love him. I liked the kissing very much, oh, so very much, and I would like to meet him again, here in the darkness of the old mill. Perhaps the next time I would slide my dress off and feel his hands and lips all over me. But he was, after all, Meg’s son. And he lived in such a dirty little cottage. And he was only the gamekeeper’s lad and one of our people. And we let him and Meg live in the cottage for practically nothing; it was almost charity.
‘No,’ I said slowly. ‘I don’t suppose I do.’
‘There are those who love and there are those who are loved,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘I’ve seen grown men weep like babies for my mother, and she never look at them. Gentlemen, too. I’ll never be like that for a woman. I’ll never love and pine and fall sick for someone. I shall be the one who is loved, and gets the presents and the loving and the pleasure … and then moves on.’
I thought swiftly of my father, bluff and heart-whole, and of my mother’s stifled sighs and pining for the love of her son. Then I thought of the girls I had seen in the village follow a lad with their eyes and blush scarlet and grow pale. Of the village girl who drowned herself in Fenny pool when her lover went into service in Kent. Of the constant pain there is for a woman in loving, and wedding, and childbirth and the loss of looks and then the loss of love.
‘I shan’t be the one who loves either,’ I said firmly.
He laughed aloud.
‘You!’ he said. ‘Oh, you are like all the Quality. All you care for is your own pleasure and owning the land.’
Our pleasure and owning the land. It is true. His kisses had been pleasure; wonderful swoony pleasure. Good food, a taste of wine, hunting on a frosty morning; these things are pleasure. But to own Wideacre is not pleasure; it is the only way to be alive. I smiled at the thought. He smiled kindly in return.
‘Oh,’ he said longingly, ‘you’ll be a proper little heartbreaker when you are ready. With those slanty green eyes of yours and your beechnut hair, you’ll get all the pleasure you want, and all the land, too.’
Something in his voice convinced me he was telling the truth. I would have all the pleasure, and all the land as well. My misfortune of being born a girl would not be my destiny. I could take pleasure, and I would take land, too, just like a man. And the pleasure I would have in courting would be far more than any man would have. Ralph had enjoyed our kissing, I knew, but his pleasure had been nothing to mine. I had been faint with delight at the feelings of my silky skin. My body was a perfect animal, so lithe and slim and sweet. I would get pleasure with any man I wanted. I would get the land, too. I wanted Wideacre with every waking thought, and breath, and dream. And I deserved Wideacre, too. No one cared for it as I did, or loved it as I did, or knew it as well as I.
But I looked at Ralph speculatively. I had heard something else in his voice, and his eyes were no longer impassive; they were warm and sensuous again.
‘You could love me!’ I said. ‘You nearly do already.’
He threw out a hand in the way the lads do when they wrestle and want to surrender.
‘Oh, yes,’ he said, as if it hardly mattered. ‘And perhaps I could make you love me. But there would be no place for us. You belong at the Hall and I belong in Meg’s cottage in the woods. We can meet in secret and take our pleasure in dark and dirty places, but you will marry a lord and I will marry some slut from the village. If you want love, you must find someone else. I will take you only for pleasure.’
‘For pleasure then,’ I agreed, as seriously as swearing to a covenant. I turned my face to him and he kissed me solemnly as a binding pledge. I scrambled to my feet, but then I paused to look at him. Leaning against the stook of straw, he looked like some dangerous harvest deity. I smiled at him, almost shyly, and went back to stand before him. Lazily, he reached up a hand to me and pulled me down to him. I was in his arms once more; we smiled into each other’s eyes like equals, as if there were no Hall and no cottage. Then his hard mouth came down on mine and my hat fell off again.
I did not get any dinner that day.
But I was not hungry.
3
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For three unbearable days, Mama, in a flutter of excitement over Harry’s promised return, had the landau out every day to take us into Chichester to buy new wallpaper for his room. The journal she read was full of the craze for the Chinese style, and Mama and I leafed through prints of dragons until my head spun with weariness and boredom. Three long days, while the early summer sun grew hotter and, somewhere, by the river, Ralph waited. Yet I spent every one of them in the drapers of Chichester choosing a new bedspread for Harry, selecting new brocades for the curtains and hangings in his room.
It was all for Harry, all for Harry’s return. When I asked if I might also have new curtains and hangings for my room, I met with one of Mama’s most hurtful rebuffs.
‘It hardly seems worth it,’ she said vaguely. She said no more. She needed to say no more. It was not worth the expense for the second child, in second place. It was not worth the expense to please a girl. It was not worth the expense to decorate a room for one who was merely passing through on her way to a marriage and another home.
I said nothing; but I begrudged Harry every penny. I said nothing; but I begrudged him every fraction of his unearned status. I said nothing; but I ill-wished him every morning of those three long days.
If I knew my brother at all, he would enjoy his fashionable room for the first week, then forget it. But I knew also his sweetness, and that Mama would be repaid for her trouble in full by one of his tender, gentle smiles. Nothing would repay me for my trouble because I loathed days in Chichester, sitting idly in a shop while Mama played princess and hesitated between one shade of colour and another. Worse than all of this, for some reason I was ill.
I did not tell Mama, for I dreaded her concern, and for some reason I did not want to be touched by anyone. When I stretched out my kid-gloved hands and spread the fingers, I could see they trembled. Worse, my belly gave great, unaccountable leaps in swoops like fear or dread. I was not hungry. Only Mama’s obsession with the redecorating distracted her from the fact that for the past three days I had eaten only at breakfast.
Stroking the pile of some printed velvet in one shop, I thought suddenly of the smoothness of the skin of Ralph’s shoulders and my knees buckled suddenly. I sank into a chair and found my heart racing and I could not catch my breath. ‘I must be ill,’ I thought.
On the evening of the third day we followed the sun home. It was setting over the downs in a gold and rosy glow. Mama was a fulfilled woman. In the bandboxes of the landau we had silks and satins for new cushion covers, quilting and new patterns. Following us tomorrow would be brocades, wallpapers and several pieces of extremely ugly furniture which were to convert Harry’s lovely old English bedroom into something as like a pagoda as the Chichester merchants and Mama could imagine.
Mama was at peace with her purchases all around us, and I was smiling like a madonna to be driving home through the mild evening air of a Wideacre spring. The smells of the roadside flowers blew towards us as the weary horses trotted home, ears pricked for their stable. In the banks I could see the greeny yellow of the last primroses and in the little coppices the bluebells shimmered in a watery haze. Blackbirds singing for their loves trickled out notes so sad and lovely, and as we turned through the tall lodge gates, I could hear the insistent call of the cuckoo.
In the shadow of a great yew tree by the lodge gate stood Ralph. The horses were walking and I was carried slowly past him. His eyes were fixed on mine as if neither of us could see anything else. All around me the wood grew dim as if I were suddenly blinded. My belly gave a great lurch as if in mortal terror and then the terror turned to joy and I smiled at Ralph as if he himself had brought the spring, the bluebells and the cuckoo. He tipped his head at the landau – but he did not tug his forelock in the usual way of our people – and his eyes never left mine. His face warmed and his eyes crinkled in a slow intimate smile. The carriage went past at walking pace, but oh! far too fast. I did not look back, but I felt his eyes, warm, desiring, on the back of my neck all the way up the drive until the sweep around the great copper beech hid me from him.
The next day, God bless them, the carters lost a wheel from the wagons and could not bring the goods. Mama was in a fidget to set me to work hemming curtains but she had to wait. Tomorrow, I might be indoors labouring over Harry’s damned dragons, but today I was free. The day stretched before me like a reprieve from a death sentence. I changed out of my morning dress into my new green riding habit – back from Papa’s tailor only that week – and twisted my hair under the matching green hat with especial care. Then I was off on pretty Bella, down the drive and across the stone bridge over the Fenny. I turned her to the right to let her canter down the track that runs alongside the river.
The Fenny was swollen with the spring rains and was brown and boiling like clear soup. Its swirlings and splashings over new-formed waterfalls matched my mood and I rode at an easy canter beside the river, smiling. The beech trees were in their early haze of green over my head and between the rustling leaves of last autumn new straight shoots were poking through, miraculously slender and strong. Every bird in the world was calling, calling for a mate. The universe of Wideacre was alive with the urgency of love and springtime, and I was dressed in green like life itself.
Ralph was sitting beside the river, a rod in his hands, his back against a fallen pine. He looked up at the sound of my horse’s hoofs and smiled without surprise. He seemed as much part of my beloved Wideacre as the trees themselves. We had not planned this meeting but it was as natural as the birdsong that we should meet whenever we wished. Ralph by the river drew me to him as surely as hidden water draws a forked willow stick to point downwards.
I tied Bella to an elder bush and she drooped her head in recognition that we were here for the afternoon. My steps rustled in the leaves as I walked towards him and stood, waiting, before him.
He smiled up at me, squinting against the brightness of the springtime sky behind me.
‘I’ve missed you,’ he said suddenly and my heart jumped as if I had taken a tumble from one of Papa’s hunters.
‘I could not get away,’ I said. I put my hands behind my back so he should not see them tremble but, absurdly, my eyes seemed to be filling with tears and I could not keep my lips from quivering. I could hide my hands and no one could tell under the smooth skirts of my green gown that my knees were weak, but my face seemed naked as if I had been caught in sleep or in a second of shameful fear. I risked a glance at his face and caught his eyes upon me. I saw in that second his easy confidence had gone. Ralph, too, was as tense as a snare. I could see his breath was as fast as if he had been sprinting. In wonder, I stepped forward and put out a hand to touch his thick, black hair. In a swift, unpredictable movement he snatched my hand and tugged me down beside him. Both his hands on my shoulders he glared into my face as if torn between a desire to murder, and a desire to love me. I had no thoughts. I just gazed back as if I was famished for the look of him.
Then the dangerous, fiery look melted from his eyes and he smiled at me as warm as a summer day.
‘Oh, Beatrice,’ he said, lingeringly. His hands slid from my shoulders down the neat-cut jacket to my waist and he pulled me close and kissed my lips, my eyelids and my throat. Then we sat side by side, with his arm around me and my head on his shoulder, watching the river and the bob of his pine-cone float for a long, long time.
We spoke little, for we were still country children. When the float bobbed and Ralph jumped to pull the line in, I had his cap ready to catch the fish as neatly and surely as in our childhood summer. Dead leaves, bracken and old twigs made a little fire under the trees by the river, and Ralph cleaned the trout and spitted it on a twig while I fed the little flames. I had eaten little for three days and the burned skin of the trout was salty and good. It was part raw, but whoever cares for such things when it is your own trout from your own river cooked on a fire of your own twigs? I washed my fingers and mouth in the rushing water and drank some of the sweet flood. Then I leaned back against the log and Ralph’s arms were around me.
Young ladies, girls of the Quality, are said to have painful childbirths, difficulty monthly seasons, fearful loss of virginity. Without one direct, honest word, Mama had ensured I knew that wifely duties included the making and bearing of an heir, and had convinced me that the task would be disagreeable and painful. Perhaps it is. Perhaps mating the man of your parents’ choice in the great wooden family bed, with the plans of two families on you, and your duty clear before you, is a painful insult to your body. All I know for certain is that to lie with the lad of your choice, like any free maid, under the Wideacre trees and sky is to become part of the old magic of the land, to hear the great heart of Wideacre thud in your ears, to feel the pulse of the earth.
We rolled together as inexpert, yet as graceful, as otter cubs; then the inexplicable, unexpected, unplanned sensations added and added and added up to a sudden crisis of delight that left me gasping and weeping into Ralph’s shoulder while he said, ‘Oh,’ as if he were extraordinarily surprised.
Then we lay in silence, clasped together as close as interlaced hands. And then, like the children we were, we fell asleep.
We woke, cold, cramped and uncomfortable. My back was patchy with the impress of twigs and leaves and Ralph had a red line across his forehead from pitching forward against the bark of the log. We huddled into our clothes and hugged for warmth as the quick springtime twilight lengthened the shadows of the bushes and the trees. Then Ralph cupped his hands for my foot and tossed me into the saddle. There was one wordless, warm look between us and then I turned my horse’s head and trotted for home. I felt badly in need of a hot bath and a huge meal. I felt like a goddess.
Those first wordless meetings set a pattern of pleasure that grew and grew all spring and early summer as the days warmed and the crops greened the dark fields. The lambs, the cows in calf and the sowing kept me out of Mama’s way with an excuse for absence almost every day. Once I had looked over the animals, or helped move the flocks up to the sweet grass of the spring downs, I could do as I pleased. Ralph knew some hidey-holes in the woods further afield than where we had played as six-year-olds, and on the few wet days we met at the old mill again. Above our shifting bodies, the little swallows hatched and were fed. I knew we had been lovers for weeks when the little hungry squeaks from the nest of mud grew louder and louder, and then one day they had flown. It was the only sign I noticed of passing time.
The transition from spring to high summer seemed to stand still that year to allow Ralph and me endless warm secret afternoons. The land itself conspired to hide us as the bracken on the common grew taller, and the undergrowth in the woods thicker and more lush. The weather of that wonderful spring smiled and smiled until Papa said he had never known such a season – that it must be magic to make the hay so early.
Of course it was magic. Through every warm day and through every dream at night, Ralph strode like a dark god of the earth making all of Wideacre glow with growth while our passion and our loving made the days sunny and long and the night skies full of the clearest stars.
We grew more skilled at pleasing each other but we never lost some sense of awe at each other’s mere presence. Just being there, under the swooping tall beech trees or curled up under the bracken, seemed a continual wonder to me. Anything we could imagine, any refinement of pleasure we could dream, we did with tenderness, with laughter, with breathless excitement. We would lie naked for hours touching each other all over, taking turns.
‘Is it nice if I touch you like this? Like this? Like this?’ I would ask while my fingers, face and tongue explored Ralph’s outstretched body.
‘Oh, yes. Oh, yes.’
We loved the excitement of near discovery as well. We met unplanned one afternoon when Ralph had come to the Hall with a hare and I was picking roses for Mama in the garden. He came from the kitchen at the back of the house and the gate clanged as he entered the garden. I turned, saw him and the basketful of roses dropped, instantly forgotten. Reckless of the windows of the house, which overlooked the garden, Ralph simply strode towards me, took my hand and led me to the summerhouse. He stood, back arched to carry my weight, and lifted me on to him, my silk dress creased and bunched between us, his head pressing down to kiss my breasts. We gasped in hasty incredulous pleasure, and Ralph set me down on my feet again. Then we laughed, and could not stop laughing at the sheer comic audacity of lovemaking in the garden in broad daylight before Mama’s parlour, before every window in the front of the house.
On my birthday morning in May, when I woke early with excitement to hear the birds singing and singing at the rosy dawn, my first thought was not of the expensive presents I could expect from Papa and Mama, but what Ralph might bring me.
I did not have long to wonder. While I splashed water on my face I heard a low, long whistle under my window and, wearing only my shift, I swung open the casement window to lean out and see Ralph, smiling with joy at seeing me.
‘Happy birthday,’ he called in a hoarse whisper. ‘I have brought you a present.’
I jumped down from the window seat and went to my dressing-table drawers for a ball of yarn. Like a fairy-tale princess, I dropped it from my window and Ralph tied a little withy basket carefully on the threads. I pulled it in as gently as if I were landing a salmon, and laid it on the window seat beside me.
‘Is it alive?’ I said in surprise when I heard a rustle of leaves inside the meshes.
‘Alive and scratching,’ said Ralph and held up a hand to show me a long red scratch along the back.
‘A kitten?’ I guessed.
‘Not for you,’ Ralph said dismissively. ‘Something more exciting.’
‘A lion cub,’ I said promptly and smiled to hear Ralph’s slow country chuckle.
‘Open it and see,’ he advised. ‘But open it carefully.’
I unfastened the little catch on the lid and peeped inside. A deep blue gaze met mine, a glimpse of ruffled, fluffed-out, angry feathers – a baby owl, rolled on his back with his sharp taloned feet pointing up at me in defence, a hoarse, cross squeaking coming from his open, buttercup-yellow beak.
‘Oh, Ralph!’ I said, entranced. I glanced down; Ralph’s face was beaming with love and triumph.
‘I climbed the pine tree right up to the top for that one,’ he said proudly. ‘I wanted to give you something no one else could give you. And something from Wideacre.’
‘I shall call it Canny,’ I said, ‘because owls are wise.’
‘Not very wise,’ he said, teasing. ‘We nearly fell out of the tree when it scratched me.’
‘And I shall love it for ever because you gave it to me,’ I said, gazing at its mad, deep blue eyes.
‘Wisdom and love then,’ said Ralph, ‘and all earned by one little owl.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, with my heart in the words.
‘Coming out later?’ he asked casually.
‘I might,’ I said and beamed down at him. ‘I’ll be down at the mill straight after breakfast,’ I promised. Then I turned my head to listen for the noise of a maid stoking the kitchen fire. ‘I must go,’ I said. ‘See you at the mill, and thank you for my present.’
There was a small, disused store room among our outbuildings and there we decided to keep Canny. Ralph taught me how to feed the baby bird with raw meat wrapped in fur or feathers, and how to gently stroke its breast feathers so it hooded its blue eyes to doze.
That summer, Ralph would have climbed any tree, dared any risk for me. And I would have done anything for him. Or almost anything. One thing I would never do for him, and if he had been wiser, or less in love, he would have been warned by it. I would never take him into my papa’s bed. Ralph had a longing to lie with me there, in the great master bed, under the dark, curved wooden roof upheld by the four pillars as thick as pine trunks. But I would not. However much I loved the gamekeeper’s lad, he would never lie with me in the bed of the Squires of Wideacre. I evaded the question, but one day, when Papa and Mama were visiting in Chichester and the servants were on a half-day holiday, Ralph asked me directly to lie with him there, and was met with a direct refusal. His eyes went black with anger, but he said nothing and went alone to set snares in the woods instead. He soon forgot that one isolated refusal. A wiser man would have remembered and carried that reservation of mine through every day of that golden, timeless summer.
It was no timeless summer for Mama, who counted the days until the return of her golden boy from his school. She even made a little calendar, which she hung on the parlour wall, marked with the days of his term. Indifferently, I saw one day ticked off every evening. With little enthusiasm, and even less skill, I hemmed curtains and helped embroider the dragon counterpane for Harry’s new-style bedroom. And despite my ham-fisted efforts with the curly tail of the stupid beast, it was completed in time and spread on Harry’s bed to await the arrival of the emperor himself.
The first day of July, too good a day to waste at the parlour window listening for Harry’s carriage, saw us waiting for him. As soon as I heard hoofs on the drive I obeyed my instructions and called to Mama. She summoned Papa from his gun room and we stood on the steps as the carriage swept around the bend in the drive and drew up before the front door. Papa greeted Harry, who jumped boyishly from the carriage, without waiting for the steps to be let down. Mama surged forward. I held back, resentment, jealousy and some sort of fear in my heart.
Harry had changed in this last term. He had lost his rounded, puppy-fat face and looked like a clear, lean youth rather than a golden baby. He was taller. He greeted Papa with a frank smile of affection and beamed at Papa’s great bear-hug. He kissed Mama’s hand and cheeks with tenderness, but he did not cling to her. Then, and this was the greatest surprise of all, he looked around for me and his bright blue eyes lit up when he saw me.
‘Beatrice!’ he said, and jumped up the front steps in two long-legged strides. ‘How pretty you have grown! How grown up you are! Do we still kiss?’
I lifted my face to him with an easy smile in reply, but I felt my colour rise at the touch of his lips on my cheek and the soft prickle of the little growing hairs of his upper lip.
Then Mama swept upon him and took him into the house, and Papa talked loudly over her fluttering inquiries about the roads and the inns and when he had last dined, and they all left me alone on the sunny front door steps as if I had left the house and belonged nowhere at all.
But it was Harry who paused at the parlour door and looked back through the open front door and called to me. ‘Come in, Beatrice!’ he said. ‘I have a present for you in my bags.’
And my heart suddenly lightened to see his smile and the hand he held out to me. And I went with quick steps into the house and felt that perhaps Harry might not displace me, but could make my home a happier place for me.
However, as the days went on Harry’s charm wore a little thin. Every housemaid, every tenant’s daughter, had a smile for the good-looking young Master. His new confidence and awareness of himself won him friends everywhere he chose to ride. He was charming, and he knew it. He was handsome, and he knew it. We laughed that now I had to look up to him, for he was a head taller than me.
‘You will not bully me any more, Beatrice,’ he said.
He was still bookish: two of his trunks from school were filled with nothing but writings on philosophy, poems, plays and stories. But he had outgrown his childish illnesses and was no longer forced to spend all days indoors reading. He even made me feel ashamed that I had read so little. I might know more about the land than Harry ever could know, for I had spent years out on Wideacre and my heart was in it, as his never was. But that counted for little when Harry would toss off a reference to a book and say, ‘Oh, Beatrice! You must have read it! Why it’s in our library. I found it when I was about six.’ Some of his books were about farming, too, and not all of them were foolish.
This new Harry was the product of the natural growth of a boy nearing manhood. The ill health of his childhood was forgotten. Only Mama still worried about his heart. Everyone else saw his slimmer body, the strength in his arms, the brightness of his blue eyes and his conscious, sly charm with the pretty housemaids. But the principal influence was still Staveley. Staveley’s name was once more heard daily in Mama’s parlour and at the dinner table. Mama had her own opinions about Staveley and his gang. But she kept her head down, her tongue still and let her adored son talk and talk. He boasted about his role as Staveley’s right-hand man. The gang had grown more and more daring and its discipline more and more strict. Harry was second in command, but that had saved him no beatings from the demigod Staveley. Staveley’s swift rages, his harsh punishments, his tender forgiveness, were retailed to me in many confidences.
Harry missed his hero terribly, of course. Throughout his first weeks at home he wrote every day, asking for news of the school and Staveley’s gang. Staveley himself replied once or twice in an ill-formed and misspelled scrawl Harry treasured. And another boy wrote once or twice. His last letter told Harry he was now Staveley’s second in command. On that day Harry looked gloomy, took his horse out in the morning, and was late for dinner.
Yet however pleasant Harry could now be as a companion, with him at my side I was no longer free to slip away to meet Ralph by the river, on the common land or on the downs. As the days went on, I grew more and more impatient with Harry always at my side. I could not get rid of him. Mama wanted him to sing to her; Papa needed him to ride to Chichester, but Harry chose to go with me, while Ralph waited and waited and I burned up with desire.
‘Every time I order my horse from the stables, he has to go riding, too,’ I complained to Ralph in a snatched moment as we met by accident on the drive. ‘Every time I go into a room in the house he trails around after me.’
Ralph’s bright dark eyes shone with interest.
‘Why does he follow you so close? I thought he was tied to your mother’s apron strings?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘He’s never paid much heed to me before. Now I can’t shake him off.’
‘Maybe he wants you,’ said Ralph outrageously.
‘Don’t be silly,’ I said. ‘He’s my brother.’
‘Maybe he’s learned something at that school of his,’ Ralph persisted. ‘Perhaps he’s had a wench at school and learned to look at a girl. Maybe he sees, like I saw, that you are young and burning and ready for pleasure. Maybe he’s been away from home so long he’s forgotten he should think of you as a sister and just knows he’s in the same house as a girl who is warmer and lovelier every day and looks just about ready for all that a man could offer.’
‘Nonsense,’ I said. ‘I just wish he would leave me alone.’
‘Is this him?’ Ralph asked, nodding to an approaching horseman. My brother, in a riding coat of warm brown, which set off his broadening shoulders, was trotting towards us. He looked, surprisingly, like a young copy of my father, mounted on one of the high Wideacre hunters. He had my father’s proud, easy way and his ready smile. But Harry’s sweetness was all his own and his lithe slimness showed no sign of Papa’s broad solidity.
‘It’s him,’ I confirmed. ‘Be careful.’
Ralph stood a little back from my horse’s head, and pulled his forelock respectfully to my brother.
‘Sir,’ he said.
Harry nodded at him with a sweet smile.
‘I thought I’d ride with you, Beatrice,’ he said. ‘We could go up on the downs for a gallop.’
‘Certainly,’ I said. ‘This is Ralph, Meg’s son, the gamekeeper’s lad.’ Some devil prompted me to make them face each other, but my brother barely glanced at him. Ralph said nothing, but watched my brother intently. Harry simply did not realize Ralph was there.
‘Shall we go?’ he said, smiling. With a sudden shock I remembered the gulf between Ralph and me, which I had forgotten in the days of sensuality under the equal sky. Harry, of my blood and my Quality, ignored Ralph because Ralph was a servant. People like us, my brother and me, were surrounded by hundreds and thousands of our people who meant nothing; whose opinions, loves, fears and hopes never could mean anything to us. We might take an interest in their lives, or we might ignore them completely. It depended wholly on ourselves. They had no choice in the matter. For the first time, seeing Ralph beside my graceful, princely, high-riding brother, I blushed in shame, and the dreams of those spring days seemed a nightmare.
We turned our horses and moved off. I felt Ralph’s eyes on us as he watched us ride away, but this time they did not fill me with joy but with dread. I rode stiff-backed, and my mare felt my unease and pricked her ears and was wary.
I was proud, but I was young and sensual and it had been many days since I had been alone with Ralph. The track up to the downs was where I had ridden with my father on the first day I had seen the sweep of Wideacre from horseback, and it was a favourite meeting place for Ralph and me. As we rode through the beech coppice I could remember a long lazy afternoon of teasing each other’s desire in a deep shady hollow, and as the horses climbed to the highest point of the downs they passed one of our little nests of ferns. My shame faded in the memory of pleasure.
In that spot, only a few yards from the hoofs of my brother’s horse, I had insisted that Ralph lie as still as a statue while I undressed him and ran my tongue and the long tresses of my hair all over his body. He had groaned with desire and with the conflicting pain of the struggle to lie still. In sweet revenge, he had laid me on the grass and kissed me lingeringly all over, in every unexplored sensitive crevice of my naked body. Only when I was actually weeping with longing did he slide into me.
Remembering that pleasure made me burn with a wet heat and I glanced sideways at my brother in sudden dislike that he should interrupt my summer with Ralph now the bracken stood high to hide us, and only a soaring peregrine falcon could see with his sharp black eyes our secret nakedness.
I said suddenly, ‘I have to go, Harry. I am not well. It is one of my headaches.’
He looked at me with quick concern. I felt a passing pity at his tender gullibility.
‘Beatrice! Let me take you home.’
‘No, no,’ I said, maintaining the pretence. ‘You enjoy your ride. I shall go to Meg’s house and have some of her feverfew tea. That always cures them.’
I cut short his protests and anxiety by turning my horse back down the way we had come. I felt his eyes upon me and drooped in the saddle as if every step jolted my aching head. But once I was under the shelter of the beech trees, and out of sight, I sat up and swung along at a good pace back down the track. I took the short cut to Meg’s cottage – not up the drive but a neat little jump over the park wall – and then a brisk canter alongside the Fenny to where the little heap of a house slumbered in the sunshine. Ralph was sitting outside, his dog outstretched beside him, knotting a cord into a snare. At the very sight of him my heart twisted inside me. He heard the horse’s hoofbeats and laid his work aside. His smile as he walked to the gate to meet me was warm and easy.
‘Shaken off your high and mighty brother then?’ he asked. ‘I felt I was dirt on the road compared to him.’
I had no answering smile. The contrast between the two of them was too painful.
‘We rode on the downs,’ I said. ‘Near our places. I missed you too much. Let’s go to the mill.’
He nodded as if accepting an order and the smile had gone from his eyes. I tied the mare to the gate and followed him along the little path. As soon as he was inside the door he turned, took me in his arms and started to say something, but I dragged him down to the straw and said urgently, ‘Just do it, Ralph.’
Then my anger and my sadness melted as I felt the familiar, ever new pleasure starting to warm me. He kissed me hard with an anger and sorrow of his own, and then opened the front of my gown at the neck. With shaking fingers I untied the leather thongs at the front lap of his breeches while he fumbled among the layers of petticoats under my riding habit. I said impatiently, ‘Let me!’ and swept the habit and petticoats off over my head.
Naked, I spread myself under him and shivered with pleasure as his weight came down on me. We were panting like hounds, hard-pressed. My hands gripped his buttocks forcing him into me, and in some distant recess in my head I could hear my sobbing whimper of pleasure settle into a rhythm of sighs that matched the rocking of our loving bodies. Then the great half-door swung wide open and a white wall of brilliant sunshine fell on us like a physical blow. For a second we were frozen with shock and terror, Ralph twisting round and me peeping white-faced over his shoulder.
In the sunlit archway stood my brother, his eyes blinking in the gloom, peering at the sight of his naked sister impaled by lust on a dirty threshing floor. For a split second nothing moved, like an obscene tableau, then Ralph leaped off me. I rolled to one side, crouching for my clothes and Ralph hitched his leather breeches over his hard nakedness. Still no one spoke. The silence lasted a lifetime. I stood, my new riding habit clutched to my naked breasts, staring at my brother in a sort of terror.
Then Harry gave a choking cry and rushed at Ralph with his riding whip upraised. Ralph was heavier and taller, and had been fighting village lads since he could walk. He fended Harry off and Harry’s wild blows with the whip fell only on his arms and shoulders. But then a cut across his cheek slashed him into anger and he jerked the whip from Harry, thumped him hard in the belly and tripped him roughly to the floor. Harry thudded down on his back and a sharp kick from Ralph’s foot into the crutch made him scissor together in a ball. He cried out, I thought in pain, and I called urgently, ‘Ralph. No!’
But then my brother’s face lifted from the dusty straw and I saw his angelic smile and the haze of his blue eyes. My blood ran cold as I recognized Harry’s blissful expression of happiness as he lay in the dirt at Ralph’s feet and gazed slavishly up the length of his tall body and at the whip in his hand. He shifted his body in the dust and crawled towards Ralph’s bare feet.
‘Beat me,’ he said in a begging, childish voice. ‘Oh please, beat me.’
As Ralph’s incredulous eyes met mine in the dawning realization that we would escape scot-free, I knew at last why my brother had been expelled and the mark Dr Yately’s school had left on him for life.
Ralph’s light flicks of the whip slapped Harry’s well-cut jacket and breeches and Harry tightened his grip on Ralph’s naked foot and gave a sharp cry then a shuddering sigh of pleasure. The future Master of Wideacre sobbed like a baby with his face buried in dirty straw, his hands cupping a labourer’s foot. Ralph and I looked at each other in utter silence.
That silence lasted, it seemed, all summer. My brother no longer dogged my footsteps, walked in my shadow, hung around the stables while I watched my horse being groomed, trailed behind me when I walked in the garden, sat at my side in the parlour in the evening. Now he followed Ralph. My father was pleased that Harry should be out on our land and not wandering around the house or sitting indoors. Slowly Harry learned the fields, the woods and the River Fenny as he followed in Ralph’s footsteps as faithfully as Ralph’s new black spaniel puppy. As Ralph checked the coverts, scattered grain for the game birds, set wire-noose traps and noted the fox holes and the badgers’ dens Harry shadowed him, learning, in the course of his faithful pursuits, the secrets of Wideacre I had learned as a child.
I was free of him at last, but Ralph and I were impossibly awkward when we met in my brother’s silent, sharp-eyed presence. Even on the few days when I rode out early to see Ralph before Harry was up, we did not embrace with the old passion. I felt chilly and tense and Ralph was stoical and silent. I felt as if at any moment my brother might come upon us and might again crawl to Ralph’s feet for a beating. I could not even ask Ralph if he and my brother …? If on their long wanderings around the estate they, too, paused in sheltered hollows and …? Whether when Ralph’s untrained puppy rolled on its back after a beating, Ralph turned to Harry with the whip still raised and …? I could not. I could not picture the two of them together; I could not find words for the questions I longed to ask, but did not dare.
Perhaps I should have felt jealous, but I felt nothing. The magical summer of Ralph, the dark god, seemed to be over. It had ended like the magic it was, as soon as it had begun. It ended for me on the drive on that hot day when Ralph pulled his forelock to my brother and my brother had not even noticed. Ralph had taught me about pleasure, and to keep my heart well guarded, but there could be no future for us. He was one of our people, a servant, and I was a lady of Wideacre. When I rode to hounds on a hunter of my own, or took the carriage to church, or walked over our fields, I should not want to see Ralph slouching beside a hedge smiling at me with his secret, knowing smile. It was not jealousy but a sharp sense of caste that made me hate that smile when I saw it directed at my brother; when I saw the gamekeeper’s lad with the next Master at his beck and call.
So I saw little of Ralph in the following weeks and he did not seek me. He smiled that secret smile at me once when I was driving down the lane to Acre beside Mama in the carriage, and I thought I saw behind his velvety black eyes some message. It was as if he were waiting for something. For a chance to speak freely with me, for an opportunity to turn a long-considered idea into words. But he was a country boy and believed in waiting for the right season.
In any case, his time was taken up with a sudden increase in poaching. The price of mutton had soared sky high after an epidemic of foot rot in the spring, and even our own tenants were not respecting our coverts. Pheasant after pheasant went missing and at every meal Harry spoke of Ralph’s plans to catch the poachers and praised Ralph’s determination and daring.
It was a dangerous job. The penalty for poaching is death by hanging and the men driven to it are desperate men. Many a poacher has added murder to his crimes – clubbing down a gamekeeper who had recognized him. Ralph kept his guns constantly primed and carried a heavy stick. His two dogs – the black lurcher and the black spaniel puppy – scouted before and behind him, as much to protect their master as the pheasants.
At breakfast, dinner and tea we had enthusiastic accounts from Harry as to how the war against the poachers was going, and how Ralph’s assistance to the gamekeeper was making all the difference. Then when Bellings, the keeper, fell sick with the flux, Harry was urgent that Ralph be paid an extra two shillings a week and given the job until the older man was well again.
‘He’s very young,’ said my papa cautiously. ‘I think it might be wiser to bring in an older man until Bellings is well.’
‘No one knows the estate better than Ralph, Papa,’ said Harry confidently. ‘And although he is young he is fully grown and as strong as an ox. You should see how easily he throws me when we wrestle! I don’t think any other person could do the job better.’
‘Well,’ said my papa tolerantly, his eyes on Harry’s bright face, ‘you’ll be the Master here when I am gone. Appoint a young keeper like Ralph and you will work with him for all your lives probably. I’m happy to take your advice on this.’
My eyes flickered to Papa’s face and then back to my plate. Only a few weeks ago Papa would have asked me what I thought. Then I would have praised Ralph to the skies, for I adored him. Now I was not so sure. He had my brother in utter thrall, and my ears had pricked up at the mention of their wrestling bouts. It sounded like Staveley all over again. And for some reason, I could not have said why, I feared the idea of Ralph having such a hold on Harry’s impulsive heart.
‘I need someone to check the sheep today,’ said Papa, looking down the table with his eyes equally on Harry and me.
‘I’ll go,’ said Harry, ‘but I must be done by dinner. Ralph has found a kestrel’s nest and I am going after it this afternoon before the hen lays a second brood.’
‘I’ll go,’ I said. ‘They’ll need to be checked for foot rot and you will not recognize the signs, Harry.’
Papa beamed, unconscious of the latent jealousy in my voice.
‘It seems I have two bailiffs then!’ he said, pleased. ‘What d’you say, ma’am?’
Mama smiled, too. At last everything was falling into what she saw as its proper place. Only I was still intractable.
‘Harry should go,’ she said sweetly. ‘I need Beatrice to cut some flowers this morning, and this afternoon she may come with me and pay some calls.’
My eyes flew to Papa’s face in an instinctive, silent appeal. But he was not looking at me. Now his son was home our easy, loving comradeship had taken second place. He was watching Harry learning his way around the land with as much love and interest as he had shown when he had been teaching me. There was pride as well as love in his eyes when he looked at his tall, golden son. He saw Harry growing, broadening and developing from the milksop mother’s boy into a young man. And he saw in him the future Master of Wideacre.
‘Harry can go then,’ he said with careless cruelty. ‘I’ll ride out with you, Harry, and show you what foot rot looks like. If Beatrice is right and you do not know, then it’s high time you learned. Wideacre is not all play, you know!’
‘I wanted to ride today,’ I said, my voice small and my face mutinous.
Papa looked at me and he laughed as if my disappointment and pain were funny.
‘Ah, Beatrice!’ he said with casual, worthless affection. ‘You must learn to be a young lady now. I have taught you all I know on the land. Your mama must teach you all you need to know in the house. Then you can rule your husband in and out of doors!’ He laughed again and Mama’s little tinkling laugh told me I had been beaten.
Harry learned to spot foot rot from Papa and he also used the time to persuade Papa that Ralph and Meg should be rehoused. When I heard him mention it at tea, I could not keep a still tongue in my head.
‘Nonsense,’ I exclaimed. ‘Ralph and Meg do very well in their little cottage. It’s practically rent-free as it is, and Meg is a sluttish housekeeper. The straw roof is blowing away because Ralph is too lazy to glean straw to rethatch it and Meg is too idle to care. They’ve no call to be rehoused. Meg would not know what to do with a good house.’ My father nodded his agreement, but he looked to Harry. The way his eyes strayed from me cut me to the bone. He was looking at his successor, his heir, measuring his judgement. My opinion as the daughter of the house might be right or wrong, it hardly mattered.
But Harry’s judgement mattered very much, for on him the future would depend. He was the male heir.
Papa had not ceased to love me. I knew that. But I had lost his attention. He had broken the thread of our constant companionship that had held me ever since he first took my pony on a leading rein and that had kept my mare to his horse’s shoulder ever after. Now there was another horse riding beside my papa: the future Squire’s.
I might ride my mare, or practise the piano, or paint little pictures, it hardly mattered. I was the daughter of the house. I was just passing through. My future lay elsewhere.
And while Harry had Papa’s ear, Ralph had Harry’s. And if I knew Ralph he would use that influence for his own ends. Only I could see clearly into Ralph’s mind. Only I knew the longing for the land. Only I knew how it felt to be an outsider in your own home, on your own land. Forever longing to belong and to be secure. Forever denied.
‘Ralph’s a first-rate man,’ Harry said firmly. He had lost most of his quiet diffidence but still had his gentle voice and manners. He was openly disagreeing with me, without a thought in the world that I might be irritated or angry. ‘It would be a shame to lose him and there are many landlords who would pay him more and house him better, too. I think he should have the Tyacke cottage when the old man dies. It’s a handy cottage and near to the coverts.’
I nearly exploded with anger at my brother’s stupidity. ‘Nonsense! Tyacke’s cottage is worth £150 a year and the entry fee to a new tenant is £100. We can’t throw money like that away on Ralph’s convenience. We could repair his old cottage or move him into a small cottage in the village, but the Tyacke cottage is out of the question. Why, it’s practically a house! What would Ralph or Meg want with a front parlour – they’d only use it to keep the pheasant chicks in.’
My mother, stone-deaf to the discussion, heard only the tone of my voice and it roused her from her habitual indifference.
‘Beatrice, decorum,’ she said automatically. ‘And don’t interfere with business, dear.’
I ignored the caution, but my father nodded at me to be silent.
‘I’ll consider it, Harry,’ he said. ‘Ralph is a good man, you’re right. I’ll look into it. He’s reliable with pheasants and foxes and we need to keep him on the estate. Beatrice is right that the Tyacke property is a handsome cottage, but Ralph does need something more than that shack by the stream. Full of ideas Ralph is. Why, he’s even got one of those mantraps for the woods. He knows his job and he works hard. I’ll consider it.’
My brother nodded and smiled at me. There was no malice or triumph in his smile. His friendship with Ralph had brought him a new confidence but no arrogance. His smile was still that of a cherubic schoolboy, his eyes still the clear blue of a happy child.
‘He will be pleased,’ he said serenely.
I realized then that this was Ralph’s idea, Ralph’s arguments, Ralph’s very words. He had given me pleasure and possessed me, but he held my brother in the palm of his hand. Through my brother he could influence my father and I knew, because I knew Ralph, that he was after more than the pretty little Tyacke cottage to rent. He was after land, and then more land. More to the point, he was after our land. Few people ever move more than five miles from the village where they are born. Ralph was born on Wideacre land; he would die here. If he wanted land, it was our land he was after. The cottage was just a first step for him and I could not imagine where his hunger would end. I understood it as clearly as I understood myself. I would have done anything, committed any crime, any sin, to own our fields and woods. With a growing fear I wondered if Ralph also had the same desire, and how my besotted brother would ever stand against him.
I excused myself from the table and slipped out to the stables, ignoring my mother’s murmured instructions. I needed to see Ralph, no longer as a lover needs to see the man she loves, but to see if I could feel in him the passion for the land that he had seen in me. If he wanted Wideacre as much as I wanted it – the serene and lovely house, the warm gardens, the folds of the hills and the rich, peaty earth with the silver traces of sand – then my family was lost. Harry’s enthusiasm would admit a cuckoo that would throw us mercilessly to one side and claim the golden kingdom for himself. My mare trotted swiftly down the track to the cottage that was suddenly not good enough for Ralph, and then shied, nearly unseating me, as a bush near the path swayed and rustled.
‘Ralph!’ I said. ‘You nearly had me off!’
He grinned. ‘You should ride on a tighter rein, Beatrice.’
I turned the head of my horse and urged her forward so I could see what Ralph was doing. He was pegging out the jaws of a huge mantrap, a vicious weapon, on to the ground. It yawned like a great clam, custom-made in a London workshop for the protection of the gentry’s sport. Nearly four feet wide, made of sharpened, spiky iron with a spring as quick as the crack of a whip.
‘What a horrid thing,’ I said. ‘Why aren’t you putting it on the path?’
‘I can see the path from the cottage,’ said Ralph. ‘They know that. Just here, before the path bends, they creep through the bushes to get to the pheasants roosting. I’ve seen the prints of their boots. I reckon this will give them a welcome they weren’t expecting.’
‘Does it kill a man?’ I asked, visualizing the jaws snapping shut.
‘Can do,’ said Ralph, unconcerned. ‘Depends on his luck. In the great estates in the north they stake them out round the walls and check them once a week. If a man is caught, he may bleed to death before the keeper comes round. Your father wouldn’t allow such a thing here. If the man is lucky, he has two broken legs; if he is unlucky and it has cut a vital path of blood, he bleeds to death.’
‘Won’t you be there quick enough to save him?’ I asked, repelled by the weapon spread like a deadly invitation in the leaves.
‘Nay,’ Ralph drawled, unconcerned. ‘You’ve seen me cut a deer’s throat. You know how quick an animal dies when the blood is gushing. It’s the same with a man. But chances are they’ll just walk a little slowly for the rest of their days.’
‘You’d better warn your mother,’ I cautioned.
Ralph laughed. ‘She was away as soon as she saw it,’ he said. ‘She’s fey, you know. Said it smelled of death. Begged me to have nothing to do with it.’ He glanced at me sideways. ‘I sleep alone here during the afternoons and I watch at night.’
I ignored the unspoken invitation, though a prickling on my skin reminded me of what a long afternoon in Ralph’s cottage would have meant in the time that had gone.
‘You’re very thick with Master Harry,’ I said.
He nodded. ‘He’s learning his way round the woods,’ he said. ‘He’s got no feeling for the land like you, but he’ll make a good enough Squire in time with the right bailiff.’
‘We’ve never had a bailiff,’ I said swiftly. ‘We don’t have bailiffs at Wideacre.’
Ralph, still kneeling, gave me a long, cool look. His eyes were as bright and sharp as the teeth of the trap.
‘Maybe the next Squire will have a bailiff,’ he said slowly. ‘Maybe that bailiff will know the land well, better than the Master even. Maybe that bailiff will love the land and be a good Master to it, better than the Squire himself. Isn’t that the Master the land should have? Isn’t that the sort of man you’d like to see here, at your side?’
I slid off my mare and hitched the reins to a low branch, carefully away from the trap.
‘Let’s walk to the river,’ I said. ‘Leave that.’
Ralph kicked a few more concealing leaves over the trap and turned to follow me. I swayed towards him as we walked and my cheek brushed his shoulder. We walked in silence. The River Fenny, our river, is a sweet clean trout stream you can drink in safety over every inch of our land. The salmon reach this far in summer, and you can always have a trout or a bowlful of eels for half an hour’s netting. The pebbles here are golden and the river is a streak of silver in the sunlight with mysterious amber pools under the shades of the trees. We watched the endless flow of water over the stones and said in unison, ‘Look! A trout!’ and smiled that we should speak together. Our eyes met in a shared love of the trout, the river and the sweet Sussex earth. The days of absence slid away from us, and we smiled.
‘I was born and bred here,’ Ralph said suddenly. ‘My father and his parents and their parents have been working this land for as long as we can trace back. That gives me some rights.’
The river babbled quietly.
A fallen tree trunk spanned the river. I stepped on to it and sat, my legs dangling over the water. Ralph balanced down the trunk and leaned against one of the branches looking at me.
‘I can see my way clear now,’ he said quietly. ‘I can see my way clear through to the land and the pleasure. D’you remember, Beatrice, when we spoke that first time? The land and the pleasure for both of us.’
A trout plopped in the river behind him, but he didn’t turn his head. He watched me as close as my owl watched me at night, as if to read my thoughts. I looked up, a slanting, sliding glance out of the corner of my tilted eyes.
‘The same land and the same pleasure. We share them both?’
He nodded. ‘You’d do anything to be Mistress of Wideacre, wouldn’t you, Beatrice? You’d give anything you owned, make any sacrifice there was, to be the Mistress in the Hall and be able to ride over the land every day of your life and say, “This is mine.”’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘But you’ll be sent away,’ he said. ‘You’re not a child any more. You can tell what your future will be – sent to London and married to a stranger who will take you far away, perhaps to a different county. The land, the weather and the farming will be all different. The hay won’t smell the same; the earth won’t be the same colour. The milk and cheese will taste different. Harry will marry some high-bred girl who will come and queen it here and take your mother’s place. You’ll be lucky if you’re allowed a visit once a year at Christmas.’
I said nothing. The picture was too clear, all too likely. Ralph had been planning while I had been dreaming. Everything he said was right. I would be sent away. Harry would marry. Wideacre would not be my home for ever; I would be far away in some unknown part of the country. Perhaps, even worse, I would have to live with some fashionable husband in London and never smell new-mown hay again. I said nothing, but I hurt inside and I was afraid.
The bedroom my mama would not redecorate for me, the warning my papa had given me, the love they both showed for Harry all told me, as clear as a tolling bell, where I was going. I was on my way to exile, and all my will and all my passion could not save me.
Ralph turned his head from my shocked face and watched the stream. The slim, silver trout was finning gently, nose pointing upstream as the sweet water flowed all over him.
‘There is a way to stay here and be the Lady of Wideacre,’ he said slowly. ‘It is a long and crooked way, but we win the land and the pleasure.’
‘How?’ I said. The ache of loneliness in my belly made my voice as quiet and as low as his. He turned back to me and sat beside me, our heads together like conspirators.
‘When Harry inherits you stay beside him. He trusts you and he trusts me,’ Ralph said. ‘We cheat him, you and I. As his bailiff, I can cheat him on his rents, on his land, on his harvests. I tell him we have to pay more taxes and I bank the difference. I tell him we need special seed corn, special animals, and I bank the difference. You cheat him on his accounting. In his wages for the house servants, the house management, the home farm, the stables, the dairy, the brewery. You know how it could be done better than I.’ He waited and I nodded. I knew. I had been involved in the running of the estate since my earliest years when Harry was away at school or staying with relatives. I knew I could cheat him of a fortune in the household accounts alone. With Ralph acting with me I calculated that Harry would be bankrupt inside three years.
‘We ruin him.’ Ralph’s voice was a whisper, mingling with the clatter of the stream. ‘You’ll have a jointure protected, or probably a dower house protected, or funds. Your income is safe, but we make him bankrupt. With the money we’ve saved I buy the estate from him. And then I’m the Master here and you’re what you deserve to be, the Mistress of the finest estate and house in England, the Squire’s Lady, the Mistress of Wideacre.’
‘And Harry?’ I asked, my voice cold.
Ralph spat contemptuously to the riverbank. ‘He’s clay to anyone’s moulding,’ he said. ‘He’ll fall in love with a pretty girl, or maybe a pretty boy. He could hang himself or become a poet. He could live in London or go to Paris. He’ll have some money from the sale; he won’t starve.’ He smiled. ‘He can visit us if you like. I don’t think of Harry.’
I smiled in return, but my heart was beating faster with mingled hope and anger.
‘It could work,’ I said, neutrally.
‘It would,’ he said. ‘I have been many nights planning.’
I thought of him, hidden among the ferns in the woods, his dark eyes staring brightly into the darkness, watching for poachers and yet looking beyond the shadows to the future when there would be no cold, uncomfortable nights. When other men, paid men, would do his watching for him, and he could drink and dine and stand before a roaring fire and speak of the slackness of servants and the problems with rent rolls, and the state of the crops, and the incompetence of the government; and gentlemen would listen to him and agree.
‘It would work, except for one thing,’ I said.
Ralph waited.
‘My father’s healthy, strong as an ox. He could sire another son tomorrow and provide the child with trustees and guardians. Apart from that possibility, Harry may be fascinated with you now, but I doubt you’ll hold him for twenty years. My father’s forty-nine. He could live another forty years. By the time he’s dead, I’ll have been married thirty-five years to some fat old Scottish nobleman with a pack of barefoot children, maybe future dukes and duchesses, and probably grandchildren on the way too. Harry’s wife, whoever she may be, will have settled in nicely, growing fat and comfortable with two new heirs out of short clothes. The most you can hope for is Tyacke’s cottage. And the most I can hope for’, my voice quavered on a sob, ‘is exile.’
Ralph nodded. ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘That’s the difficulty. It would work, but it would only work now, this summer. If it’s to happen it’s got to be done while Harry’s at a loose end, trailing around after me, or mooning around after you. In love with both of us and afraid of both of us. It has to be now while we are land-hungry and love-hungry. I don’t want to wait, Beatrice.’
His eyes on my face were bright. He was in love with me and with my land, a heady mixture for a labourer, the son of a labouring man. But the bleak reality of my life away from Wideacre as it must be, as it was bound to be, was a stark contrast to this dream future that Ralph saw, that Ralph thought we could win: as Lady of Wideacre.
‘My father looks well,’ I said drily.
There was a long pause as our eyes met in clear mutual knowledge of how far we were prepared to go to achieve Ralph’s dream, my dream.
‘There are accidents.’ Ralph’s words fell into a silence as ominous and deep as the still millpond. Like a stone tossed in deep water the idea spread widening ripples in my mind. I measured the appalling loss of my beloved, my delightful, papa against the certainty of my loss of Wideacre.
The precious, essential presence of my vital, noisy papa against the certain loneliness and coldness of my exile, which would come as surely as my sixteenth birthday would come, and at much the same time. I looked at Ralph unsmiling.
‘Accidents,’ I said flatly.
‘It could happen tomorrow,’ he said, as cold as me.
I nodded. My mind searched like a skilled spinner over a tangled skein of wool to find the ideas and threads of ideas that would lead me through a maze of sin and crime, and out of the maze into the broad sunshine of my home. I measured in silence how much I needed my papa against how much I needed that security; considered Harry’s infatuation with Ralph and how far it would lead him. Thought of my mama and how the loss of my father would make me more vulnerable to her, but ever and again came back to that picture of me in a comfortless northern castle far away from the land where I belonged, pining my heart out for the sound of a Wideacre morning. Always seeing my papa’s profile as he turned his face from me to watch his son. He had betrayed me before I ever dreamed of betraying him. I sighed. There could only ever have been one answer.
‘It could work,’ I said again.
‘It would work now,’ Ralph corrected me. ‘Harry could change in a year, in a couple of months. If he is sent away to prepare for university we will both lose our hold on him. It would work only this summer. It would work tomorrow.’
‘Tomorrow?’ I said with a flash of irritation. ‘You say tomorrow. Do you really mean tomorrow?’
Ralph’s dark eyes were black with the knowledge of what we were saying.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I do.’
I gave a gasp. ‘Why so soon?’ I said in instinctive fear. Yet my heart had leapt at the thought of moving quickly, of securing my future in an instant; of making something happen at once.
‘Why wait?’ said Ralph with cruel logic. ‘Nothing will change for me. I trust your mettle, Beatrice. If you are for Wideacre, if you wish to live there, if you are as determined as I think you are – why wait?’ His eyes were narrowed, measuring me, and I knew that together we were an explosive combination of elements. Without me this plan would never have been in his mind. Without me it could not have worked. Without his urgent pressure I could not have gone ahead. We led each other on like a pair of falling angels spinning down into hell. I breathed a deep sigh to slow the pace of my heart. The river bubbled neutrally beneath us.
4
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I woke with a jolt in the pearl-grey light of a summer dawn and knew that today I had to do something – that I had woken myself early because I had something to do. But for a few dozy, sleep-drenched moments I could not for the life of me recall what it was. Then I gave a little gasp as yesterday came back to me – bright as an enamelled picture – Ralph and me sitting with the Fenny flowing beneath us, talking madness, talking death, talking treason.
Ralph had caught me while I was off balance; he had touched me on the raw of my jealous, exclusive heart, which says – which always said – ‘Love me. Love me only.’ The sight of my papa loving someone else, choosing another to ride with him, to chat with him, to run the land with him, had thrown me into such churning rage that I simply wanted to lash out – to hurt everyone as much as I was hurt. If I could have dropped Harry dead to the ground with a wish, I would have done so, for usurping my place with Papa. But the deep core of my resentful grief was directed against the father who had turned against me, the fickle and worthless man, after I had loved him without fail and without faltering for all of my life. It was his lack of fidelity to me that laid me open to any alliance. It was his failure to honour the love and trust between us that sent me spinning, rootless, amoral, into the world where any chance thought or vengeful plan could catch and hold me. It was as if I had sworn him fealty and he had broken his oath as liege lord. Disappointment and grief were the least of it – I had been betrayed.
And Ralph had made my counter-attack sound so easy. Ralph had made it sound so gentle. Ralph had made it sound so sensible. A well-schemed, cool-headed plan anyone would be wise to undertake. So logical that I could not fault it. It would work. It would give me what I needed – Wideacre – and it would revenge me for the pain my papa had caused me.
I shook my head on the pillow in the grey light of my white-washed bedroom. I had been mad for a few seconds there, back on the tree trunk with Ralph’s persuasive voice gentle in my ear. I had been mad to listen and doubly mad to appear to consent. The thought of my papa in pain and realizing at last that he needed me was a sweet picture. The thought of him magically gone, and Harry magically gone, leaving me alone, in sole control, was another fine picture. But I was not fool enough to think such things could happen because I willed them. They were the dreams of a hurt child. I had been dangerously close to believing them.
To set such a course in motion was madness, and yesterday I had been mad with my jealousy and fear of the future. But today, with the dew falling and the sun not yet hot and the birds not yet singing, was another day. As soon as the servants were up and had unbolted the kitchen doors I should slip down to Meg’s cottage in the woods and tap on Ralph’s window and tell him I did not mean it. I would not have long to wait for they work long hours in the kitchen and the youngest maid would be stoking the kitchen fire and bringing in the logs in less than an hour. Until she opened the back door I could not get out without leaving an unbolted door behind me, and that would lead to questions that might take some answering. I had only to wait a few minutes, slip on some clothes, tiptoe downstairs and slide out while her back was turned. If Ralph had been out for poachers last night I might even meet him on his way home.
I snuggled a little lower under the covers, relishing the warmth in the knowledge that in a few moments I would have to leave the cosy softness of my bed and get dressed in a cold room and washed in cold water. I would set things right with Ralph and we would think of some other way. Perhaps things would come right of their own accord. If Harry left early for university, or even went to stay with some of Mama’s family for a few weeks, I would have the time to win back Papa’s attention. He might turn from me now, but I knew in his heart he loved me. He would tire of Harry; he would tire of teaching him. He would want the wordless instinctive companionship he and I had developed over years of riding the land together. Then he would look for me, and I would be at his side, and Harry would be the one who was left out and unwanted. Comforted by the thought I dozed and woke to check the brightness of the window. I listened for the kitchen maid but there was no sound. It was too early. If I fell asleep I would wake the moment I heard the back door open or the girl bring the logs in. I dozed, then I slid into a deeper sleep.
I awoke with a jump to see my window bright with early morning sunshine and my bedroom door opening as my maid brought in hot water for me to wash and an early morning cup of chocolate.
‘You slept late, Miss Beatrice,’ she said cheerily and clattered the cup at my bedside table. I threw back the covers and ran to the window. It was full day.
‘What time is it, Lucy?’ I asked urgently, splashing water on my face and throwing off my shift.
‘Eight o’clock,’ she said, as if it did not matter. As if it did not matter at all.
I gasped. Pointless to reproach myself for oversleeping on this one vital morning. ‘Help me,’ I said peremptorily. ‘I’m in a dreadful hurry.’
She moved like a dolt but I was dressed in minutes and racing down the stairs to the hall. No need for the kitchen door; the front door stood wide open. I caught sight of my papa eating his breakfast as I dashed past. He called good morning to me and I called back but did not stop. There still might be time to catch Ralph.
There still might be time, I thought as I ran, through the rose garden, through the little gate, across the paddock, the burrs catching at my long skirt, which I held bunched up in one hand. Then I was in the wood and settled down to a steady pace along the riverbank. A hundred things could delay Ralph at home and make him late setting out today. If he had been out late last night he might oversleep as I had. If he had stayed out all night he might now be having breakfast before going out again. He might still be out and on his way home. Or – and I had some faith in this – he might know, as lovers and young people often do know, that I was desperate and anxious; he might be waiting for me because he could somehow sense my urgency to see him, to tell him I had changed my mind, that I had been mad for a few moments – for an afternoon and a night only! – and that I knew now, as I had always known really, that of course my papa was sacred. On his own land he was the Squire and could not be touched. As my papa he was my dearest love – dearer to me than my own life I thought. What I said against him was spoken out of grief and hurt. I had never meant it for more than one foolish afternoon and one night.
My breath was coming in gasps and my tight-fitted dress was soaked with sweat under my arms and down my back but I did not dare stop. I thought I was as fit as a hunter in training but I was hampered by my skirts and by the rough ground under my boots. And it is a long way. But I did not dare stop. At this very moment Ralph might be pulling a jacket on, reaching for his cap and going out into the woods where I could not find him.
I had not asked him for a plan so I did not know, had no idea where he would then go. How he planned to meet my father, how he planned to do the act to which I consented – but did not mean. So I gasped at the burning pain under my ribs and panted for breath but ran on. It was like one of those nightmares when you run faster and faster but can get no purchase on the earth. My beloved Wideacre earth seemed to be turning to clay underneath my boots and though my legs were running I could feel that I was slowing, slowing; that my strides were not so long, that they were not so quick. I was losing time because I could not run, because I could not fly, and every second that passed might make the difference between seeing Ralph at the edge of the wood at the back of his cottage – or not seeing him at all.
I burst into the sunlight by the little cottage, speechless with lack of breath, banged through the garden gate and staggered, half drunkenly, up to the front door. I thumped on it with both clenched fists, then doubled up on the threshold whooping for breath, near sick with the strain of running so hard and so far. I heard footsteps inside and I felt dizzy with relief that I was in time. It would be all right. I had caught him, and the madness of yesterday’s conversation would be something we would both laugh about in a few moments. When he would say, ‘You did not think I really would have?’ and I would be able to laugh and laugh and say, ‘No, of course not.’ The door opened, and there was Meg.
‘Meg!’ I said, my face aghast, peering past her into the gloom. ‘Where’s Ralph?’
‘Gone out,’ she said, her dark eyes blank to conceal her curiosity, her face impassive at the sight of the Squire’s daughter, wet with sweat, hair down her back, gasping on the doorstep.
I gaped at her as if she had signed my death warrant. Death indeed. Death I thought it was.
‘Where?’ I asked. I was still panting and could say only one or two words.
She shrugged, still carefully incurious. ‘Into the woods,’ she said. ‘Towards the common, I think.’
I put my face in my hands. I could not think. I had been so sure that if I had run without pausing, had punished myself with such a merciless pace, I would certainly catch him. Or that he would somehow know. That, in any case, the dream of a vengeful child does not become reality. That I could count on the world’s not being such that if I wished something it would happen.
Meg left me abruptly and came back with an earthenware beaker filled with water in her hand. I took it and drank it without seeing or tasting. I had overslept. I had run as fast as I could. But Ralph had gone.
The sun was hot on the side of my face; I could feel sweat on my scalp and my face was wet with it. I sat numb and unmoving and cold with horror.
‘Did he take his gun?’ I asked, my voice bleak.
‘No, nor the dogs,’ Meg replied, nodding towards the two of them tied up by a shack that was their kennel.
No gun. My mind seized on that like a hopeful omen. Perhaps it meant he had known when he woke this morning, as I had known, that it was all madness, all folly. That we had been talking, as children will talk, about what they would like to do. Or what they would do if they could. He had not taken his gun. Perhaps he had just gone out to check the traps. Perhaps my father was safe.
My father.
I suddenly realized that my father could be perfectly safe. Ralph was somewhere out there, but inside the house my papa was utterly secure. With me, he was absolutely safe. Indeed, if he was with anyone Ralph would not touch him, but leave the execution of the plan for another day. Ralph would certainly come home this afternoon or evening. I could see him then and tell him that I had changed my mind. All I had to do was to ensure that my papa did not ride alone today. And I could do it by merely asking if I might ride with him. He was safe. And I could save him.
‘Tell Ralph I want to see him urgently,’ I said peremptorily to Meg. I got to my feet and found I swayed a little with dizziness. I ignored it and went through the garden and back to the path along the riverbank where I had dashed in such terror only a few minutes before. My breathing was back to normal and I walked briskly, the sun shining in my face. I walked a little faster. Worry snapped at my heels like a black dog. I had left my papa at breakfast and he had the morning papers; the post had not yet come. I could be fairly sure he would not have finished his meal by the time I got back to the Hall. Or could I? I quickened my pace a little, my heart thudding faster again, not at the speed but at the dawning of fear.
He would almost certainly wait for his letters. He might even be waiting for me to return. With a little luck I should walk up the path through the rose garden and see him standing on the terrace, sniffing at the air and smoking a cigar with the morning paper under his arm. The thought of him there was so clear in my mind I could almost smell the blue cigar smoke drifting on the air. I dropped into a trot. He was there, I had a certainty he was there. Looking at the roses, wondering what took me out of the house in such a tearing hurry, and waiting for the boy to come back with the mail from the early coach from London. The trot speeded into a run. I knew he was there, but I had been so frightened today that I wanted to see him. I wanted to race up to him, even hot and dishevelled and sweaty as I was, and feel his strong heavy arm around me in a hard hug, so I could know for certain, know for sure, he was safe. That I could not possibly harm him. Even if I had wanted to. I had a sharp pain under one of my ribs that made every breath a little gasp as a red-hot needle pricked me with each step. And I could feel an ominous tightening in my calf muscle. Although I knew, I knew, he was safe, it seemed some sort of magic that I should run as fast as I could. I was not in terror for him, but I would not feel easy until I saw him, until I could take his arm and say, ‘Today, I shall ride with you all day.’ Or even say to stupid Harry, ‘If you are riding with Papa today you must be with him all the time, and you must promise that.’ Harry would promise, and Harry would keep his word. So my papa was safe. I just needed to see him.
I was running as fast as I could again, and the bushes were tearing at my skirt and the noise from the Fenny, rippling beside the path, was as loud as the thudding of my heart, and the thundering of my boots on the soft earth. I raced over the fallen tree that made a bridge to the paddock gate, tore it open and banged it behind me. With sweat in my eyes I could not see the terrace clearly and the run had given me dancing flecks before my eyes as if I was looking through a veil. Papa was on the terrace, I was sure of it. I could not see him, but I felt he was there. There safe. And Ralph might wait in the woods all day and it would not matter.
At the gate to the rose garden I blinked to clear my eyes and scanned the front of the house. I could not see him, but the front door stood wide open; he might that moment have gone back inside for another cigar or another cup of chocolate. I trotted along the flagged path, looking towards the front door, expecting to see him at any moment, strolling out into the sunshine unfolding the paper and heading for one of the stone seats. I was up the steps and into the hall so quickly I was blinded by the darkness after the brightness of the sun outside.
‘Where’s Papa?’ I asked one of the maids, a tray in her hands, coming from the breakfast parlour.
‘Gone, Miss Beatrice,’ she said, dipping a curtsy. ‘Gone out riding.’
I stared at her disbelievingly. This could not be happening. All there had been was one little rolling pebble of an idea and it was growing and growing into what threatened to become an avalanche.
‘Gone riding?’ I said incredulously.
She looked at me a little oddly. Since Papa rode every morning of his life my tone of horror must have sounded strange.
‘Yes, Miss Beatrice,’ she said. ‘He left about a quarter of an hour ago.’
I turned on my heel then and went to the front door. I could have called for a horse from the stables and ridden desperately down the drive, or spent the day chasing round the estate looking for Ralph or for my papa, or for both of them. But I felt like a sailor must when he has been throwing ballast over the side, and pumping out water, and yet still the ship is sinking. The luck was all against me today. It might be the luck was all against my papa also. He had ridden out this sunny morning on to his land where a murderer might be waiting for him. And there was nothing I could do. Nothing. Nothing. Except protect myself. I slipped up the stairs to my room like a shadow. I wanted to wash and change before I met Mama or Harry. What was happening out there in the woods was beyond my control, beyond my responsibility. I had helped in the germination of a deadly seed. But it might not grow. It might not grow.
That afternoon they brought my father home. Four men shuffled slowly and stiffly at the four corners of one of the withy fences we use for penning sheep. It was bowed in the middle under his weight, and the weave was splitting. He lay on his back. His face was crumpled like a ball of parchment. The real person, my beloved, vigorous, spirited papa was gone. All they brought home to Wideacre was a heavy bundle.
They carried him through the front door and across the hall, their dirty boots marking the polished floorboards and the rich carpet. The door to the kitchens banged and half-a-dozen white faces peered. I stood motionless, holding the door as they carried him past me. There was a great crater of a wound on the side of his skull. The father I had adored was gone.
I stood like a tree frozen in mid-winter as they shuffled past me so slowly. They crept past as if it were a dream and they were wading thigh-deep in thick water. They dragged their feet as if we were locked in a nightmare and they wanted me to see the dreadful wound in my papa’s head. The great, deep gash half into his skull, and inside the great hole some grainy mess of bones and blood.
And his face! His face was not like my lovely papa at all! His face was a mask of horror. His brave, bright, laughing face had gone. He had died with his teeth, yellowish, bared on a scream, and his blue eyes popping at the sight of his murderer. The colour had gone from him and he was as yellow as the sandstone of the Hall. He was a statue of horror in Wideacre stone, and the withy fence bowed under him as if the very wood could not bear the burden of this death.
The slow, clumsy march of the men passed me at last and my father’s unseeing, staring blue eyes passed by me and were gone, no longer meeting my blank gaze of terror. Every step of the great staircase creaked as they humped their burden up to the master bedroom, and somewhere in the house I could hear the nagging noise of someone crying. I wished I might cry. I stood unmoving in the brightness, still holding the door, staring unseeingly at the shaft of sunlight shining on the polished floor where the mud from their boots was drying. Outside, waiting, were half-a-dozen of our tenants, the men bareheaded, the women with their aprons to their eyes.
They said his horse must have thrown him. He was found dead beside the little wall separating the park from the farmland on the northern boundary. The horse, unhurt, was grazing near by and the saddle was pulled round as if the girth had been too loose. He had set the horse at the wall and then tumbled off on the Wideacre side. The unwanted, inescapable picture of Ralph hiding in the lee of the wall and then reaching up to grab the horse’s reins and to club my father with one of the stones from the wall came to my mind unbidden. The only comfort I could find was the idea that my father had died on the park side of the wall, under the trees he loved, on the land he loved. But there was no other comfort for me.
Ralph had done this. Ralph had committed this assault. This filthy attack. This dark wicked sin. While my mama wept and wept easy tears that cost her little, and Harry wandered round the house in a haze of shock, I found my mind clearing and sharpening to a point of utter hatred. Ralph had done this thing. He alone was responsible.
Aye, I had been there, on the tree trunk spanning the river. My lips had met his. I had said, ‘Accident’, and ‘It would work’, but I had not known it would be like this. I had agreed. But I had not known what I was setting in train. Ralph had known. Ralph had knifed deer, skinned hares, hand-chopped rabbits. Ralph knew all about death and he invited my consent to his dark plots while I was a mere child. I had not known. I had not understood. And when I did, it was too late. It was not my fault.
I did not wish my father dead! I wanted him to turn to me again with his blue eyes bright with love. I wanted him to insist once more on my company when he was rounding up sheep. I wanted him to call for me as easily and naturally as whistling his dogs. I wanted him to forget Harry and Harry’s claims to the land. I wanted Harry to slip from his mind again, as Harry had gone once before. I wanted to be first in his heart again and first on Wideacre, and safe in his love and safe in the land.
Now Ralph had killed him and my papa would never love me again.
But Ralph had done worse. He had forgotten the divide. There was a gulf between Ralph and me he had forgotten. I never took him to my papa’s bed; I never took him inside the Hall. He was not Quality; he was not fit to wear linen. Homespun, Ralph was, and his mother wore rags. And this lad had dared, he had dared to lie in wait for my bright-brave Squire papa and leap on him like a thief and bring him down. And my papa had died in pain and terror at the hands of his false servant.
Ralph should pay.
While Harry’s grief and sense of loss grew, and he daily came to me for instructions and advice, and while Mama’s slight tears dried and she busied herself with ordering gloves, mourning favours, mourning clothes, and funeral plans, I stayed dry-eyed and burning with hatred.
Ralph should pay.
No man touches a Lacey of Wideacre and escapes. No Lacey of Wideacre ever fell without a sword to defend him. If I could have had Ralph arrested and hanged I would have done so. But he might have accused me and I could not bear to have such horrors spoken aloud. The death of my papa was not my plan. The murder was not my act. I did not order it. Ralph carried me along towards it because I did not know what it meant. Now every day the memory of my father’s silently screaming face would come before my eyes and the only way I could blot out that horror was to say silently, reassuringly, to myself, ‘Ralph will pay.’
At the funeral service my eyes behind my dark veil were black with hatred for the murderer and I said not one prayer. No Christian God could play any part in this blood that called for revenge. The Furies were after Ralph, and I was coming for him as deadly as any vengeful, thirsty goddess, hot with hatred, riding a wave of dark will.
My hatred made me sharp and cunning and nothing of my thoughts showed in my face. When the earth thudded on the lid of the coffin I drooped against Harry as if I were not rigid with anger and strong with hatred. We held hands in the coach on the way home and my grip was gentle and tender. I would be saving Harry too when I wiped out this killer, this deadly parasite on our land.
Mama was weeping again and I took her hand in mine. She was cold and she did not return the squeeze I gave her. She had been withdrawn ever since the slow shuffle of feet of four men bringing Papa home, and now and then I would feel her eyes fixed on me as if she did not see me, or as if she was looking through me to some speculation of her own. Now, through the black mesh of her veil, her eyes met mine with an unusual sharpness.
‘You know your papa’s hunter, Beatrice,’ she said suddenly in a clear voice, quite unlike her usual tentative murmur. ‘How could it have thrown him so? He never fell in year after year of riding. How could he have fallen, and fallen so badly, at such a little jump?’
My hatred of Ralph kept my own conscience clear, and I met her eyes directly.
‘I do not know, Mama,’ I said. ‘I suppose it may have been his saddle slipping. I have thought of nothing else, and of the pain he suffered. If it were the horse at fault I should order it to be shot. I would not suffer an animal to live which had injured my papa. But it was just a tragic accident.’
She nodded, her eyes still on my face.
‘There will be many changes now,’ she said. The carriage rocked as we turned right up the drive. ‘The estate is entailed on Harry, of course. He will have to get a bailiff to run it for a while. Or do you propose to help Harry?’
‘Of course I will help all I can,’ I said delicately. ‘We never have had a bailiff and Papa thought they were not a good idea. I would prefer if we could manage without. But that is a decision for you, Mama … and Harry.’
She nodded. There was a pause. The horses’ hoofs were muffled where the drive was carpeted with autumn leaves.
‘The only thing Beatrice loved more than her father was his land,’ said Mama, musingly, gazing out of the window. Harry and I exchanged a startled glance. This vague, seer-like voice was so unlike Mama. ‘There never was a girl who loved her father as much as Beatrice, but she loved the land, Wideacre, even more. If she had been forced to choose between them I think she would have chosen the land. It will be a great consolation to Beatrice to think that although she has lost her papa she still has Wideacre.’
Harry’s shocked blue eyes met mine.
‘There, there,’ he said feebly, patting Mama’s black-gloved hand. ‘You are upset, Mama. We all loved Papa and we all love Wideacre.’
Mama turned her gaze from the tall trunks of the trees and the fields and stared at me as if she would read the very depths of my soul. I met her eyes look for look. It was not my crime. I need take no blame for it.
‘I shall help Harry as much as I can,’ I repeated steadily. ‘My papa will not seem so very far away. I shall do what he would wish. I shall be the daughter he deserved.’
‘There, there,’ said Harry, deaf to all meaning, but catching the tone of my voice. He reached out his hand to me and his other to Mama. Handfast we arrived outside the Hall and sat for a moment in silence. I swore once more, before I let their hands go, that Ralph would pay for the injury he had done us all. He would pay at once. He would pay that night.
My papa’s will was read that afternoon. It was the straightforward work of an honest man. My mama had the dower house and a fair income from the estate for her life. I had a substantial dowry in money invested in the City, a home on Wideacre until my brother married, and then with my mother wherever she might choose to live. I kept my eyes on the table at this easy disposition of me and my love for the land, but my colour rose.
Harry inherited, by unquestioned right, all the fertile fields, the rich woodland and rolling downs. And if he died before providing an heir, the whole lovely land would go intact to the nearest male relation, as if I had never been born. My entire family, Papa, Mama and Harry, could all die in pain and horror and still I would be no nearer to the ownership of the land. There was a barrier against me no skill of mine could overleap. Generations of men had built defences against women like me, against all women. They had ensured we would never know the power and the pleasure of owning the earth beneath our feet and growing the food that went on our tables. They had built a great chain of male control, of male power and beastly male violence between me and my need for the land. And there was no way, enforced by male-dominated laws and male-established tradition, that I could overthrow them.
His father had served him well. Harry took the land, the produce of the land and the joy of ownership. His to enjoy, to use, to exploit or to abuse as the whim took him. There were no surprises in such an inheritance, and no sense in any heart (except mine) that what seemed so fair on the surface was part of a conspiracy to defraud me of my beloved home and to exile me from the one place on earth to which I could ever belong. My home was given away to the male newcomer, to the male stranger; he neither knew the land nor loved it, and yet it was his.
I heard the will read in a haze of hatred. Not towards Harry, who benefited despite his doltish silliness, but towards Ralph who had cost me my papa in return for this pittance of a dowry and this treasure for Harry. Harry had everything. I had lost the love of my papa, who would never have let me go, unhappy, into exile. And Ralph’s foul scheming had benefited only Harry.
After the petty bequests and little gifts, there was a personal message from Papa to Harry, exhorting him to care for the poor of the parish: standard rhetoric that no one would take seriously. But then Papa had written, ‘And I commend you, Harry, to take care of your mother, and my beloved daughter Beatrice – most dear to my heart.’
Most dear to his heart. Most dear. The tears, the first since his death, stung in my eyes and I choked on a great sob of grief that seemed to be tearing its way out of my chest.
‘Excuse me,’ I whispered to Mama and rose from the table and hurried from the room. In the open air on the front steps my sobs were stilled. He had called me ‘beloved’; he had told them all I was ‘most dear’. I breathed the smells of a late summer twilight and felt an ache like an illness, which was my longing for him. Then I walked bare-headed through the rose garden, through the little gate into the paddock and towards the wood down to the Fenny. My papa had loved me. He had died in pain. And the man who had killed him still lived on our land.
Ralph was waiting for me at the old mill. He lacked his mother’s gypsy second sight and he did not see his death when it walked towards him, smiling. He held out his arms to me and I went into his embrace and let him hold me and kiss me in the dark shadows of the barn.
‘I have been longing for you,’ he whispered in my ear as his hands moved quickly over my body, opening the front of my dress. I sighed as he smoothed my breasts and he bent his head and kissed me. His stubbled chin scratched my cheek and then my throat as his head dropped down the open gown. I shivered as I felt his warm breath on my neck.
Above us the last late swallows lined up on the old beam. I saw and heard nothing but the dark outline of his head and the steady, rapid sound of his breath.
‘Oh, it is so good to touch you,’ Ralph said earnestly, he pressed me backwards to a heap of straw and lifted my skirts and petticoats.
‘When we have each other and Wideacre, that will be a pleasure, eh, Beatrice? When we make love as man and wife in the great master bedroom at Wideacre? When I come to you like this, in the great carved bed under embroidered quilted covers and between fresh linen sheets like I was gentry born and bred?’
We closed together, and his words went unanswered as I clung to him, begging him to move faster and faster, harder and harder. I groaned like a dying man as easy passion overwhelmed our destiny and the world grew dark and still as if a great wave had washed over me and drowned me. Alone, I was yet enveloped and held by Ralph as he thrashed, and he groaned too and lay still. Then the feelings drained from me, and left me weak but clear-headed and cold as ice. I had a sense of deep, sudden sorrow for the pleasure that had gone so fast and left me so empty. And because that moment, that precise moment, would never come again.
‘That’s a good, dutiful wife,’ Ralph said, teasingly. ‘That is how it will be in the master bedroom. I shall sleep between linen sheets every night of my life, and you may bring me coffee in bed every morning.’
I smiled at him under my half-closed eyelids.
‘Shall we spend all our time here?’ I asked. ‘Or shall we go to London for the season?’
Ralph sighed luxuriously and lay back beside me, hands behind his head, his breeches still around his ankles.
‘I’m not sure,’ he said deliberately. ‘I’ll have to decide. Winter in town would be nice, but there’s the fox hunting and shooting here. I wouldn’t want to miss that.’
My lips curled in a smile, but no trace of sarcasm crept into my voice.
‘Do you think you can take my father’s place?’ I asked. ‘D’you think the county gentry will accept you when they’ve known you as Ralph, the gamekeeper’s lad, the son of Meg the gypsy and a runaway father?’
Ralph was unmoved. Nothing could penetrate his contentment. ‘I don’t see why not,’ he said. ‘I’m no worse than they were a dozen generations ago. I’ll have earned my place at Wideacre, which is more than they have done to gain theirs.’
‘Earned it!’ I could scarcely keep the disdain from my voice, but I kept my tone sweet. ‘Odd work you have done this day, Ralph! Murder and unchastity!’
‘Ah, hard words,’ Ralph said negligently. ‘A sin is a sin. I’ll take my chance at the Day of Judgement with this on my conscience. Any man in the country would have done the same. I’m prepared to stand alone. I don’t share the blame with you, Beatrice. I planned it. I’ll take the guilt and the consequences. I did the act – I did it partly for you and partly for our future together – but I’ll take the blame alone in this world or the next.’
The tension sloughed off me like a snake’s skin. It was his crime. I was innocent.
‘You did it quite alone?’ I questioned. ‘You had no one to help you at all? You spoke of it with no one but me?’
He tightened his grip on me and touched my face in a gentle caress. He had no idea his life hung on a thread. He had no idea when he had snapped that thread in two.
‘I work alone,’ he said proudly. ‘There’ll be no gossip in the village, no tongues wagging, no fingers pointing. I would not risk that for myself, and I would especially not risk it for you, Beatrice. I did it alone. No one but you and I know.’
He touched my face with his fingertips in one of his rare, precious caresses. I saw in his eyes and in his gentle smile his tenderness for me, and the slow and steady growth of a love that would last as long as our two hearts were beating in time with Wideacre. Despite my anger, I felt tears prickle behind my eyes and my mouth quivered when I tried to smile back at his loving face. How could I help but love him – whatever he was? He was my first love and had risked everything to give me the greatest gift any man would ever be able to give me: Wideacre.
I lost my childhood on the road on that damp spring day when my papa spoke of my banishment. I lost my contented, easy childhood in the moment when I realized he would take Wideacre from me, would take it to favour Harry, with no thought of me and my pain at all. But that hurt was healed when I lay in Ralph’s arms and knew he had gambled everything to have me and Wideacre. And my tears rose at the thought of the reckless, gallant gamble he had so utterly lost.
Ralph had a dream, a hopeless, impossible dream, that only a very young lover could have. The two of us, married despite the conventions, as if the world were some paradise where people may marry the love of their hearts and live where they wish. As if all that truly matters is love and passion and loyalty to the land.
It was a dream of the future that could never have been, and the only stupid mistake I ever saw Ralph make was to forget that however often we tumbled in straw, grass or bracken, or whatever I called out in my fainting pleasure at the strength and skill of his hard force, he was just a servant, the son of a slattern. And I was a Lacey of Wideacre. If it had been any other land I swear I would have sacrificed it for Ralph. If it had been any other house I believe I would have schemed to put him into it. Any other house in the land and Ralph should have slept in the master bed and sat at the head of the table. Any other land in the country could not have hoped for a better master than Ralph.
But it was not any land or any house. It was my beloved Wideacre. And no damned gypsy’s brat would ever rule there.
The gulf between Ralph and me was as wide as the Fenny in flood, and as deep as the green millpond. I might take Ralph for pleasure, but I would never be his woman, his wife. The moment Ralph thought to rule me, he made our end certain.
Besides – how could he have forgotten? – he was of gypsy stock; he understood he was my father’s assassin. And I would never, ever forgive him.
In my mind was a vivid, angry picture of my father, the brave, bright Squire, being pulled down and clubbed to death like a brawling common man in a back-street fight. The man with Lacey blood on his hand would never live on Wideacre. The poor man who attacked the gentry would never hide here. The upstart who planned to climb the ladder to the master bedroom through lust and bedding and blood should be destroyed, like any vermin on the land, at once.
When one says at once at fifteen one means at once. That meant my father died the day after Ralph’s ugly egg of a plan hatched its nightmare brood. That meant Ralph must die with my father’s blood still wet on his hands.
‘It is our secret then,’ I said. ‘And it dies when we die. And now, I must be going.’ He helped me to my feet and dusted my black mourning dress. The straws clung to it and he knelt and with meticulous care picked off every incriminating speck.
‘It will be better when I have Tyacke’s cottage,’ he said impatiently. ‘See to it that your brother expels the Tyackes first thing in the morning. I can’t wait for the old man to die. He can die in the poorhouse if he wishes. I’d like to move in there this quarter day, and there’s no cause to wait now. See to it in the morning, Beatrice.’
‘Of course,’ I said submissively. ‘Is there anything else while I’m speaking with Harry?’
‘Well, I’ll need a horse soon,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Perhaps one of your father’s hunters? I suppose brother Harry won’t be riding out for a while, and your mother can hardly want to keep your father’s favourite in the stables after the accident? He’s a good animal. I made sure he wasn’t hurt. You could tell Harry he should be given to me.’
The thought of Ralph riding one of my father’s high-bred horses made me flush with anger and an icy cold rage was steady behind my eyes, but my smile did not flicker. It was only words and plans.
‘Of course, Ralph,’ I said gently. ‘There will be many changes you will want to make.’
‘Aye,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘And when I’m master here, even more.’
The word ‘master’ on his lips made my skin crawl, but my eyes stayed fixed on his face and their green hazel gaze never wavered.
‘I must go,’ I said again and he held out his arms to me in farewell. We kissed goodbye, a long sweet kiss, and I broke from it with a sob to turn my face into his shoulder. His rough fustian jacket smelled so good – of woodsmoke and clean sweat and the inimitable heart-wrenching smell of his skin. The familiar pain of first love mounted inexorably and ached at my heart. My arms tightened around his waist in a fierce hard hug of farewell to the strong, lovely body I had known so well and loved so much.
With my head against his chest I heard his quickened breath, and his heart speeding, as his desire for me rose again at my closeness. He kissed the top of my head hard, and turned my face up with a pinch on my chin.
‘What’s this?’ he said tenderly. ‘Tears?’ He dropped his head and, gently as a mother cat, licked each wet eyelid in turn. ‘There’s no need for tears now, my bonny Beatrice. No need for your tears ever again. Everything is going to be different from now on.’
‘I know,’ I said, speaking from a heart so full of pain I could believe it might break. ‘I know everything will be different. That’s what made me sad. My love, my darling Ralph. Nothing will ever be the same again.’
‘But it will be better, Beatrice!’ He looked questioningly at me. ‘You surely regret nothing?’
I smiled then. ‘I regret nothing,’ I confirmed. ‘Now or later. What has been done you did for me and for Wideacre. What is going to happen is also going to happen for Wideacre. I have no regrets.’ But my voice quavered as I spoke and Ralph’s grip on me tightened.
‘Wait, Beatrice,’ he said. ‘Don’t go while you are so sad. Tell me what is wrong.’
I smiled again to reassure him, but the ache under my ribs was growing into such a pain of grief I was afraid I might weep.
‘Nothing is wrong. Everything is as it should be, as it has to be,’ I said. ‘Now goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye, my darling.’
I really thought I should never find the courage to leave as he looked at me so tenderly, so concerned and so trusting in my love for him. I kissed him once more – a gentle, final kiss on the lips – and then I pulled myself from his arms. I felt as if I had left half my soul with him. I walked away and then turned to see him. He raised a hand to me and I whispered, ‘Goodbye, my love, my only love,’ so low he could not hear me.
Then I saw him turn into his cottage and stoop his dark head under the low door. I drew into the thick bushes at the side of the track and counted a slow and careful three hundred. Three hundred in counted seconds. Then I waited. My love and my anger were one mesh of pain and rage in my head. I was half blind with the conflict. It was as if the Furies were in my head – not after Ralph at all – but tearing me apart with two loyalties, two loves, two hatreds. I gave a little silent groan of physical pain and then saw on my closed eyelids once again the stare of my murdered papa carried past me into the darkness of the Hall. Then I took two deep shuddering breaths, opened my mouth and screamed as loud, as shrill, as panic-stricken as I could:
‘Ralph! Ralph! Help me! Ralph!’
The door of the cottage exploded open and I heard the noise of his sprinting feet up the track. I screamed again and heard him swerve from the track towards my guiding voice. I heard his feet pounding through the deep leaves and then the deep and dreadful twang of the mantrap’s forged steel spring, and simultaneously the sound of his legs breaking – a clear and unmistakable snap! snap! like chopping wood – and Ralph’s hoarse, incredulous scream of pain. I dropped to the ground as my knees buckled under me and waited for another scream. My head against a tree trunk I waited and waited. None came. My own legs were useless, but I had to see him. I had to know I had done it. I clawed my way up the beech tree’s comforting grey trunk, clinging to it for support and so that its rough bark pressed against my face would keep me from fainting before I had seen – because I had to see.
There was still no sound.
For long minutes I clung to the tree, feeling, but not aware of, the reassuring sun-warmed bark under my fingers, and the familiar, safe smell of dry leaves. The silence seemed as if the world that had been cracked apart by Ralph’s shriek was quietly rebuilding itself.
Somewhere, a blackbird started to sing.
Then I ceased to take comfort from Ralph’s long quietness and was filled with a horrid senseless fear. What was happening only yards away from me, hidden in the bushes? My legs moved as stiff as a cripple. As I left the beech tree I staggered and nearly fell, but I had to see him.
I parted the bushes and gave a whimper of horror as I saw my lover caught like a rat in the trap I had baited with love. He was slumped over the upright jaws. He had fainted from the pain of his crushed knee bones, and the teeth of the trap held his legs as stiff as a marionette’s, while the top half of his body slumped like a doll’s. One of the sharpened teeth of the trap seemed to have severed a vein and the steady flow of blood darkened his breeches and soaked down his leg into the black earth.
Faced with the wreck of my lover, my knees buckled again and I put out my hands to save myself as I collapsed before him. My hands clenched on the dark peaty earth as if I was hanging to a rope to pull me from a crevasse of horror. Gritting my teeth, I got to my feet again, and then, as quietly and as carefully as I had come, as if I feared to wake a beloved, weary husband, I walked backwards, one stiff, courtly step at a time, with my eyes never moving from his crumpled body while his lifeblood drained into the earth; left to die like vermin.
I crept home like a criminal and slipped in by the open kitchen door. Then, remembering, I went back to the little store room and fetched the owl, Canny. I met no one. I glanced out of the window at the rising moon, a sad thin sickle of a waning moon with a little teardrop of a star beside it. Ten lifetimes ago I had sat at the window and felt Ralph’s eyes shining on me, laughing at me. Now I could not face starlight. I wondered with one sharp corner of my mind if he was dead yet, or if he was lingering, like a rat in a gintrap, in unrelieved pain. If he had recovered consciousness and was crying my name, hoping I would come and help him, or if he guessed it was my trap and was facing his death, staring grim-faced into the darkness.
Canny was perched, wide-eyed, alert on the top of the wardrobe. He was fully fledged, nearly ready to fly. Ralph had promised to hack him back to a wild life in the woods, to feed him little by little until he had learned to hunt. Now he would have to fend for himself. In this new harsh world lit by the sickly yellow moon, we all had to learn how to survive, and there was no help. Trust I had felt for my papa in the golden summer of my childhood, or Ralph had in my smiles, for my lying direct eyes, trust and keeping faith had gone. So I lifted him down, his talons gentle and feathery on my bare hand, and untied the jesses on his bony legs. His foot, which had been up inside his fluffed-out feathers, was endearingly hot. I opened the window and held him out. The night breeze ruffled his feathers.
‘Go then, Canny,’ I said. ‘For I do not know love and wisdom any more.’
His grip tightened as the wind rocked him, and his head bobbed as his body moved, but he stayed quiet, looking around him.
‘Go!’ I said, and I cruelly tossed him, aiming him direct at the moon as if he could fly away and take all the pain and sorrow with him. Instead he fell, tumbling like a feather duster over and over down from the second-floor window and I gasped to see him fall. But even as I gripped the sill I hardened myself. I had learned one thing in this painful struggle into adulthood: that everything you do, and everything you say, everything has a consequence. That if I threw a newly fledged bird into the night he might fall and break his neck. If I nodded to a killer then bloody murder would follow. If I called my lover into a trap he would be caught by his legs and bleed and bleed.
The owl tumbled over and over but spread his wings before he hit the ground. He glided down towards the kitchen garden and clattered into a currant bush. His feathers were pale in the moonlight and I watched him as he sat still, perhaps surprised to find himself free. Slowly I relaxed the hand that was gripping on to the window sill. But my other hand held something. I could not think what it was. The cramped fingers unfolded and showed me a handful of earth and leaves. I had clenched my hand on it when I had gripped the forest floor in my mindless vigil waiting for a second cry from Ralph. Now I still held tight to it as Canny spread his wings and flew low over the kitchen garden towards the waiting wood like a message of my loss of wisdom, of my loss of love.
I slept with that handful of leaves and earth under my pillow, still gripped in my cold hand, soiling the clean Irish linen Ralph had coveted so. I slept easily, like a good child, and dreamed no dreams. In the morning, I wrapped it in curl-paper and put it in my jewel box. An odd thing to do. But that morning I felt odd: light-headed and unreal as if the previous night and all the days of the summer had been a strange dream I was still dreaming. At first it seemed to me like a talisman, to ward off the fear that followed me home like a black dog. It is all I have left of Ralph; the only thing I have from him now his owl has flown. A handful of earth from the place of his death. A handful of our land, Wideacre.
The next day I waited for the news of Ralph’s death. I was certain it would be brought to the Hall by some gossip from the village and waited for my mother or for Harry to repeat the story of the dreadful accident at breakfast. I waited for the story at dinner. I waited for the story at tea. I waited for the story as we sat in Mama’s parlour in the evening … Nothing.
‘You’ve not eaten a thing all day, Beatrice,’ my mother said gently. ‘You must try, my dear. And you seem so overwrought.’
Harry looked up, his attention now drawn to my evident paleness and strain.
‘She is grieving, Mama,’ he said. He got up from his chair on the other side of the parlour fire to cross to me and sit beside me on the sofa. He took my hand gently in his own. ‘Poor Beatrice, you must try not to be so sad. Papa would not wish it.’
I smiled, but my heart was cold. Then the thought flashed through my head that Harry knew Ralph was dead, and was keeping the news from me, to protect me.
‘I just have this feeling that something awful is going to happen,’ I said. I shrugged. ‘I don’t know why. I think I should feel better if an accident did happen, and then I could believe the bad luck had passed.’
‘Like happenings in threes.’ My mother spoke foolishly, but her eyes were sharp. ‘But nothing has happened, has it, Harry.’
Harry patted my hand; his sympathy and gentleness could not reach my cold isolation. ‘No, Mama. No, Beatrice. What could happen? Beatrice is just overtired, and you, Mama, are full of fairy tales. We shall all feel better in the morning.’
I did not feel better in the morning. Nor the next morning, nor the morning after. Surely someone had found him by now? His mother, Meg, must have come home and found the cottage empty, the front door banging. She would call his name and then follow the track along and then back. Surely she would call someone to help her search for her boy, and surely they would find him soon, doubled up over his trapped legs. Dead? I sat in the window seat of my room looking out over the garden unconsciously kneading my hands until my wrists showed red marks. What could they be doing, so slow and so lazy that they had not found him now? How could Meg pretend to be a loving mother with her fey fears for her son if she had not yet sensed that something was wrong and found him?
Over and over my mind pictured the scene: the message to the village, and the village carpenter making the coffin. The gossip brought to the Hall by a friend or relation of one of the servants. Told to my brother, or even my mother, or perhaps whispered to me by Lucy, my maid. Surely the story even now was the talk of the kitchen and one of the servants would tell one of us soon. I had to be patient. And I had to watch myself with every care so that not a flicker of this turmoil showed. But surely they had found him by now!
I rose to leave my bedroom and join Harry and Mama for breakfast. Another day – the fifth day – and still no news. It had to be today. I had to be ready. My hand on the door of my room, I turned and looked at myself in the glass. My eyes were an opaque green that showed nothing of my distress. My skin was pale, pale cream against the blackness of my dress. I was a beautiful daughter grieving for her dearly loved papa, no trace of the vengeful goddess showed in my face. No trace of the secret strain showed, although my skin felt too tight on my head and around my eyes. I missed my papa; I missed him so badly that tears rolled down my cheeks when I was alone. And I missed Ralph, too, with a feeling of physical sickness. Always, beneath my ribs, I carried this deep gulf of longing and desire, and always my heart ached for the two men who had made that golden summer perfect. That easy summer world when my papa had loved and protected me, and when Ralph had loved me, and teased me, and lay beside me every long lazy afternoon.
So what if a few years had brought me exile and misery? If I could have wakened this morning and had breakfast with my beloved papa, and ridden out in the afternoon to hide in the woods with my dark and clever lover, I should have wakened happy. And I should have been free of this pain of emptiness and longing and grieving and lost love.
I smoothed the skin of my forehead in the unconscious gesture of an older, tired woman; then I turned and went downstairs. Even my light steps on the wooden stairtreads sounded lonely, and there was no laughter floating up the stairs from the breakfast room.
There was no news. We sat in silence while Harry ate a hearty breakfast at the top of the table and Mama crunched toast at the foot. I drank tea and said nothing. We were a picture of domestic peace. When Harry had finished eating and my mother had left the room, Harry looked at me tentatively and said, ‘I have some odd news for you, Beatrice, that I hope will not upset you.’
I had half risen and I sank back on my chair. My face was calm but my head was dizzy with fright.
‘Ralph, the gamekeeper’s lad, seems to have gone missing,’ my brother said uncertainly.
‘Missing!’ I exclaimed. My head jerked up to stare disbelievingly at Harry. ‘He can’t be missing!’ The picture of Ralph anchored so securely by his broken legs in the mantrap was so bright that I feared Harry would see two little reflections of it in my staring eyes. ‘How could he get away?’ I said, betraying myself.
‘What do you mean, Beatrice?’ Harry asked gently, shocked at my outburst. ‘Here,’ he said and handed me my cup of tea. I found my hands were shaking so badly I could not hold it and when I put it down on the saucer there was a click and the delicate porcelain had cracked. I must control myself; I must not break down. Aware of Harry’s eyes upon me I took a deep breath and tried to force myself to appear calm. This could be Harry’s way of breaking the news to me gently, but to hear that Ralph was missing rather than dead was like a flowering of the nightmare of the past four nights when I dreamed Ralph was crawling behind me, as fast as I could run, with the mantrap clanking at his bloody knees. I gave a gasp of fear and Harry turned with an exclamation and fetched the brandy from the dining room.
‘Drink this,’ he said. ‘Go on, Beatrice.’ I swallowed and felt the warmth spreading through me. I cleared my throat. ‘I am sorry, Harry. My wretched nerves. Were you saying something about Ralph?’
‘Another time, Beatrice, it doesn’t matter.’ Harry was patting my hand again. ‘I had no idea you were so distressed still, my poor sister.’
I stilled his hand and tried to keep my voice steady. ‘I’m not really distressed, Harry dear,’ I said gently. ‘My nerves are bad, as you know. And I have had a premonition that Ralph is dead. I don’t know why. But please tell me if that is so?’
‘No, my dear, no,’ said Harry soothingly. ‘It’s not as bad as all that. He just seems to have gone missing. A loss for the estate, and for me especially because he was as good as a manager for me. But we will survive without him.’
‘Harry, I must know,’ I said. ‘How did he leave? Why did he leave?’
‘Well, that’s the mystery,’ said Harry, seating himself beside me and still holding my hand. ‘My man tells me that someone from the village called at Meg’s cottage and found their few things strewn around, their clothes gone and Ralph’s two dogs missing. No message, no word. They just seem to have vanished.’
The nightmare was slowly becoming real. Somewhere, beyond the walls of the Hall, Ralph was alive and free. He would know, as no one else would, that I had planned his death, that I had left him in his agony to die. He would know that I had let him kill my father and then tried to destroy him. And now, outside the walls of the house, Ralph would be waiting for me. Waiting and waiting and never, for a second in all my life, would I be free from fear again.
‘What sort of state did they leave the cottage in?’ I asked. I could scarcely believe the coolness of my voice. It was as if I were thinking of re-letting the miserable heap.
‘Well, we’ll never get a local tenant for it again,’ said Harry. ‘There’s all sorts of nonsense about blood sacrifice and Meg’s witchcraft. Gossip I won’t repeat to you, my dear.’
My mind shrank in fright, but I had to know. ‘Oh, I’m all right now, Harry,’ I said reassuringly. ‘Please tell me what people are saying. I would rather hear it from you than from my maid or someone in the village.’
Harry needed little encouragement: the schoolboy in him was bursting with the news.
‘Well, it is odd,’ he said with ill-concealed relish. ‘Mrs Tyacke called to see what furniture Ralph wanted in her cottage. Ralph had told her he would be taking the place over. First she noticed the door open, and then she saw bloodstains on the step.’ Every fraction of my body froze rock still. ‘There were marks on the floor as if someone had dragged a kill into the kitchen. But what is equally odd is that there were bowls and buckets of bloodstained water all around, and Meg’s only sheet was all torn and bloody.’
I could see the scene too well in my mind. Meg, warned by her second sight, coming home early, hunting for her son, perhaps guided by his cries of pain. Finding some lever and using all her strength to prise the jaws of the dreadful trap apart. Ralph tumbling to the ground and Meg picking him up and dragging him with all the strength of a passionate mother into the cottage, blood draining across the floor. Then her desperate attempts to staunch the flow, ripping up the one sheet and pressing cold cloths into the wound, and then … and then … and then …? Was Ralph dead? Had Meg hidden the body? She would not know it was not an accident. Perhaps even now she was mourning him in some quiet part of the wood and I was safe. I clung to that hope and turned an untroubled face to my brother.
‘Is that all?’ I asked.
‘Well, I should think it was enough!’ he said with the gossip’s relish for bad news. ‘But there is more actually. Although they left their furniture, they took an old handcart. Old Betty swears she saw someone who looked like Meg pushing the handcart with a body in it and two black dogs following up the London road three mornings ago. She never said anything before because she thought she was mistaken. But with the handcart missing and all, the village has put two and two together.’
I nodded and kept my eyes and face down so my brother should not see my despair and my fear. It had all gone wrong. It sounded very, very likely that Meg had managed to save Ralph’s life, though he was too weak to walk. Ralph must have been able to tell her who set the trap, and who had baited it. If he had not told her, she would have instantly brought him to the Hall. But she did not! She had taken him away, far away from the Hall and out of my reach; away to her people, to her unknown gypsy family. Away to heal him so that he could get fit and strong and able to come back and confront me. Away from our lands and our influence, so he could move and plot and scheme and forever threaten my life and my future. Every waking moment from now on I would half expect to see him as I already did in every night’s dreams. Limping, or horribly mutilated, coming after me for revenge. The picture in my mind was so bright, so vivid, so inescapable, that it seemed to me Ralph was at that second heaving his legless body up the steps to the door of the Hall. I could control myself no longer.
‘I am ill, Harry. Call my maid,’ I said, and I dropped my head on the breakfast table in a swoon of terror.
My mourning now looked real enough and I smiled no more at my mirror. I could not eat my food for fear that Ralph had been in the kitchen with one of Meg’s brews to poison me. I dared not even walk as far as the rose garden in case he was waiting for me in the summerhouse, or at the gate to the wood. Even in the house I was on the precipice of a collapse every second of the day, but especially when the early winter darkness came and the curtains were drawn, and there were dark shadows on the stairs and in the hall where he could hide unseen, and wait for me to pass. I slept little at night and awoke with screams of terror. My mother called the local apothecary and then a London surgeon and they gave me draughts to make me sleep. But the deeper the sleep, the worse the dreams, and for three, nearly four, months of cold, hard, iron season I endured, like a captured wild animal, inescapable days and nights of terror.
But slowly, mercifully, it dawned on my panic-stricken imagination that nothing had happened. In my terror, in my anticipation of fear, 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.
5
(#ulink_5a8fdd5a-4db9-52eb-b1b7-b9cccdf50dce)
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 suppose I should have been shocked, but instead I merely smiled and sat up in bed. To dream of Harry while the spring was stirring seemed natural and right. We were constantly in each other’s company and I gained more and more pleasure from our comradeship. It was pleasant to walk in the gardens with him. We were planning a shrubbery, and we would take a stake and map out the shape of the paths on the newly turned earth. Then, when the carter came loaded high with swaying trees and shrubs, we spent a glorious couple of days ordering their planting by the three gardeners, and even treading them in, tying and staking out the branches ourselves.
Sometimes we drove up to the downs together. Although I was still forbidden to ride outside the grounds, I had hunted out an old governess cart and broke my mare to driving so I could range all around the estate and drive as far as the foothills of the downs with Harry riding alongside. I thought sometimes how pleased Papa would have been to see us in such unity on the land he loved.
‘Are you not tired, Beatrice?’ Harry would ask solicitously.
And I would smile without replying and we would stroll together to the top of the downs to look down on the surrounding greening fields and woods; or turn our backs and look southwards to where the sea gleamed like a blue slab in the distance.
I started to lose my fear of Harry’s superior education, especially when I saw how little he still knew about the land. And I started to enjoy hearing about his books and the ideas that interested him. I could never see what actual difference it made whether one had an agreement called a Social Contract or not, but when Harry spoke of the struggle for the ownership of land, and whether land could be owned by an elite of a people, I found my interest suddenly sharpened.
He would laugh at me then and say, ‘Oh, Beatrice, you care for nothing at all unless it relates to Wideacre. What a little heathen you are! What a little peasant!’
And I would laugh back and accuse him of being so full of ideas that he could not recognize wild oats in a wheat crop – which was shockingly true.
If there had been more young people in the neighbourhood we would have spent far less time together. Or if Harry had known more about the land he would not have needed my company daily. If we had not been in heavy mourning, Harry would probably have spent the previous winter in London for the season, and even I might have been taken to town for a few days. But as things were, we were very much on our own. My returning spirits showed themselves in my better health and I became once more buoyantly fit, restrained only by Mama who tried to keep me eternally stitching embroidery by her side in the pale parlour. There was no Papa to come banging in from the stables and rescue me from the tyranny of conventional behaviour now, but I could generally rely on Harry to need my advice for some work on the land.
The land missed Papa. Harry was inexperienced and slow to learn how to control the tenants who poached and thieved outrageously. Nor could he organize the villagers’ sowing and weeding of our crops. But beside his ignorance my status grew, and it was very pleasant to be able to order this thing or that thing to be done without confirming an order with the Master. I kept thinking how good it would have been if I could have had the land wholly to myself, but it was only ever a passing thought. It was also good to drive down the lanes to the fields with Harry riding alongside, and to look up in the evening and find his eyes smiling upon me.
He was no longer the schoolboy home early. He was a man in the first broadening and strengthening of his youth. As for me, every day made me a shade more golden, my eyes brighter hazel, my hair a tinge redder from the sun. Every day as I bloomed in the warmth of that especially fine spring, I felt a greater longing for a lover. I pressed my lips together remembering Ralph’s rough biting kisses, and my body warmed and tingled under the black silk of my mourning dress when I remembered his intimate, shameless probing. Harry once caught my eye in one of these erotic daydreams as we sat alone beside the library fire one evening, supposedly doing accounts. I blushed at once to the roots of my hair.
Harry, oddly, said nothing, but he looked at me as if he were somehow bemused and blushed too.
We were so delightfully strange to each other. My pleasure with Ralph had been in confirming the person I was, the things that were important. With Ralph I hardly needed to speak. We both knew if the day would be fair or if it would rain. We both knew that the villagers would be planting the fields on the bottom slopes of the downs so we would have to hide in the woods that day. We both knew that passion and the land are the most important things in anyone’s life, and that any other interests are secondary and slight.
But Harry knew none of these things, and while I could not help despising his ignorance, I felt also a great curiosity about the things he did know, and the things he did care for. Harry was a great intriguing mystery to me, and as the warm spring days became reassuringly hot summer ones I found my interest in him growing and growing while the corn turned silver-green. The only distraction from this growing affection and intimacy was Mama, who would intermittently insist that I behave as a normal young lady and not as a farm manager. But even she could not ignore Harry’s real need for me on the land. One day when she insisted that I stay at home to receive a call from the ladies from Havering Hall, we lost something like fifty pounds on one day’s work! Harry could not control the reaping gang and their families following behind to glean robbed us of one stook in every three.
The ladies – Lady Havering and little mousey Celia – had chatted politely with Mama as I watched the sun stream through the window, and knew in impotent rage that Harry would not be watching the reapers. When he came in for afternoon tea my fears were confirmed. He reported with great pride that they had finished the Manor Farm fields already. Properly cut they should not have been finished until the following day. Harry sat beside Celia Havering and nibbled seed cake like a sun-kissed cupid without a care in the world, while I could hardly sit still for anxiety.
He chatted away like a caged songbird to Celia, who actually spoke back in a voice a fraction clearer than her habitual whisper. Half an hour he spent talking of the lovely weather and the latest novel, before a hard look from me reminded him that he had workers in the field who were, I knew, taking an equally lengthy break. He took himself off with much flowery bowing and kissing of hands and seemed almost sorry to leave. The mysterious tastes of my beautiful brother were not always a delight.
‘You seem very anxious about the harvest, Miss Lacey,’ said Celia softly. I looked sharply at her to see if she was being impertinent, but the soft brown eyes were guileless and her face pale and quite without a spark of malice.
‘It is the first harvest Harry has had to supervise,’ I replied absentmindedly. ‘He had been away from home and does not know our country ways. I am afraid I am needed out in the fields.’
‘If you would like –’ she paused delicately. ‘If you would enjoy a drive –’ She broke off again. ‘We came in Mama’s carriage and you and I could … I am sure …’ Her flutter of words came to a total standstill but her meaning finally penetrated my ears. I had been watching some rain clouds on the horizon that would have ruined everything if they had come to anything, but they seemed to be breaking up.
‘A drive?’ I said. ‘I should love it!’
‘Mama’s carriage’ turned out to be a large old-fashioned open landau, and after much fussing with parasols to protect our delicate complexions, we drove towards the fields. Celia tilted her sunshade precisely at the sky to cast a shadow over her face. She was milk compared with honey sitting beside me. Her skin looked as if she had been reared in a cellar she was so beautifully pale, while I was a clear gold on face, hands and throat, and had even a disastrous dusting of freckles on my nose. Even in my dark mourning clothes I was bright beside Celia, with flushed cheeks from the warmth of my heavy dress in the sun. She was pale and cool, her shy brown eyes scarcely daring to look over the hedges as we drove. She had a little trembly face and a quivering rosebud mouth. She seemed so young beside me. Five years older but such a sweet baby.
She showed no signs of anxiety at the plight of being ill-loved and unmarried at twenty-one. Her pale prettiness had not taken in London during her one cut-price season. Lord Havering had opened Havering House for her coming-out ball and had stood her the price of a court gown. But all of Lady Havering’s fortune at marriage had been squandered on betting and gambling, and there was little to spare for her daughter. Celia’s own substantial fortune, secure from her step-papa by sensible settlements, had guaranteed her one or two proposals. But Celia had demurred, and Lady Havering had not insisted, and she had come home to her restricted and hard-working life at the Hall with little idea that life for a young girl could include pleasure, or liveliness or joy.
She had little enough in her life. When her mama accepted Lord Havering and moved into the Hall little Celia went too, more like an extra bandbox than a person whose wants might be consulted. Aged eleven, she had been put in charge of the jolly, noisy Havering children for day after long crowded day, while Lord Havering recouped his gambling debts by dismissing housekeeper, governess and nurse, leaving his new wife and stepdaughter to share the work of running house and nursery between them.
The nobly born, ill-bred Havering children cared not a rap for their quiet-voiced, subdued new sister, and Celia, in silent mourning for her papa and their quiet, invalid’s routine, lived a life of loneliness and solitude in the very heart of one of the biggest houses in the county.
Enough in that situation to make any girl nervous. Celia was fortunate only in that her dowry, which was a handsome parcel of land adjoining ours, a good half-dozen farms tied up by her mother’s lawyers, was safe from her spendthrift stepfather as part of the marriage settlement. I knew her from childhood when our mamas would call on each other and I would be taken to the nursery to romp with the small Haverings and attend Celia’s solemn dolls’ tea parties. But when I grew old enough to ride with my father, I saw little of her. We sometimes took our hounds over to Havering Hall, and I would wave to her as I rode beside my father in my smart dark green or navy riding habit, and see her watching, a fragile flower in white satin, from an upstairs window. She never rode, of course; she never even came to greet us from the front door. I think the major expeditions in her week were the two church services on a Sunday, and the occasional social visit like this one. What can have prompted the idea of a drive, the Lord only knew. I would have driven with the devil himself to see the fields; what Celia hoped to gain I neither knew nor cared.
As soon as we came in sight of the field I saw that I had been right. A dozen men were cutting in the line with their wives and children coming behind to collect the corn and set it in stooks. By rights, when the corn had been cut, the women and children and the men could then glean, picking up the broken straw for bedding or fodder for their animals, and picking up the dropped heads of corn for themselves. Harry had been letting them cut so carelessly that whole patches of the crop would be left standing for the convenience of the gleaners, and they were trying the old cheat of slicing the corn so short it would not bind into a stook and would be dropped for the families to collect.
Instead of supervising this shambles, Harry was stripped down to shirtsleeves himself and playing around with a sickle at the end of the line. Even in my temper I could not ignore his dazzling looks. Wig off, his own hair shone like pure gold in the bright sunshine and his loose white shirt billowed around him. He was taller than the men around him and slim. His dark breeches were cut close to his strong legs and back. I swear a saint would have felt desire on seeing him. Celia’s eyes, like mine, were glued to him, and he glanced up and saw her and waved and came to the gate.
‘It’s to be hoped you don’t cut your feet off,’ I said acidly. I was hot and irritable draped in my heavy black mourning clothes. Celia beside me was the picture of cool perfection in white silk under a cherry parasol.
Harry laughed in delight. ‘I dare say I will!’ he said happily. ‘It’s splendid fun! When I think of all the harvests I’ve missed! Do you know this is my first-ever harvest at Wideacre?’
Celia widened her brown eyes sympathetically. She could not drag her gaze from him. His open shirt revealed the glint of a few hairs at the top of his chest, and his skin was as pale as creamy milk with a pink tinge where he was catching the sun.
‘They should be closer together,’ I said. ‘They’re missing more than a yard every time they move forward.’
Harry smiled at Celia. ‘I’m such a beginner,’ he said helplessly.
‘I know nothing of such things,’ Celia said in her soft voice. ‘But I do love to see the men working.’
‘Working!’ I said impatiently. ‘That lot are on holiday! Help me down, Harry.’ I left the two of them admiring the beauty of the scene and stalked across the stubble (or rather through it, because it was a good foot high) to sort the men out.
‘Watch out,’ said one, loud enough for me to hear. ‘Here comes the Master.’ The slow chuckle of country humour spread among them and I grinned too.
‘Enough of this,’ I said, loud enough for the whole reaper gang to hear. ‘You close up, all of you. John Simon, I don’t plan to keep your family in corn for free all winter! Move closer to William there. You, Thomas, you cut nearer to the hedge. Don’t think I don’t know what game you’re all playing! Any more of this nonsense I’ll have you all out at Michaelmas!’
Grumbling and chuckling, they closed the ranks and started the process again, scything their way in a line up the field, this time leaving no part of the swathe uncut. I smiled in pleasure at the sight of our corn rippling and falling in great pale golden heaps in our fields, and turned and made my way back to the landau.
Celia’s laugh trilled out, as happy as a mistle-thrush, and I saw my brother smiling warmly at her. I paid no attention at all.
‘D’you see now, Harry, how they’re closer together and there’s less waste?’ I asked.
‘Yes, I do,’ said Harry. ‘I did tell them but they just seemed to straggle apart again.’
‘They’re hoodwinking you,’ I said severely. ‘You must show them that you’re the Master.’
Harry grinned at Celia and I saw her smile shyly in reply.
‘I’m a worthless fellow,’ he said to Celia, begging for a contradiction.
‘You are indeed,’ I said before she could disagree. ‘Now get back to the men and don’t let them stop for more than ten minutes for tea, and they’re not to go home till sunset.’
He stuck to his job and the labourers did not trudge home to their cottages until long after sunset. Harry rode home whistling under a round golden harvest moon. I heard him as I dressed for dinner, and for some silly reason I felt my heart lift as his horse clattered up the drive and around to the stables. I paused in twisting my hair into a knot on the top of my head, and looked more carefully at myself in the glass. I wondered how I looked beside Celia. I was beautiful, there was no doubt, thank God, about that, but I wondered how my clear, bright looks compared to Celia’s sweet loveliness. And when I remembered the scene at the field it struck me, for the first time, that Harry might not relish being reprimanded by his sister in front of the men. Perhaps his heart did not lift at the sight of me, and certainly I knew he did not watch my body and my movements as I had watched his when he bent and stretched in the cornfield.
I slipped down to Mama’s room where she had a long pier glass so I could see my full-length reflection. The sight reassured me. Black suited me – better than the pale pinks and blues I had been forced to wear before. The gown was tight-waisted with black stomacher and square neck, showing me as slim as a whip. The shorter hair around my face twisted into natural curls (with a little help from the tongs) and my eyes in the candle-light were as inscrutable as a cat’s.
Behind the image of my dark figure the room was reflected in shades of shadow. The deep green curtains of the old four-poster bed were dark as pine needles in the light from my single candle and, as I moved, my shadow leaped, huge as a giant’s, on the dim wall behind me. Some trick of light, some nervous fancy, made me suddenly certain I was not alone in the room. I did not turn to look quickly behind me as normally I would have done. I stayed facing the mirror with my unprotected back to the room, my eyes trying to pierce the shadowy corners of the dark room reflected in the darker glass to see who was there.
It was Ralph.
He lay, where he had longed to be, on the master bed. His face was warmed with that familiar, that beloved smile that always lighted him when he turned to me. A look part confident, part male pride, part tenderness, and the anticipation of rough as well as gentle pleasure.
I froze. I could not see his legs.
I neither moved nor breathed.
I could not see his legs.
If they were whole, then the last months had been a nightmare and this was sweet reality. If they were gone, then the nightmare was with me and I was in its grip, but a million times worse than I had dreamed in my bed. The curtains of the bed cast deep slabs of shadow across the counterpane. I could not see his legs.
I knew I must turn and face him.
My face in the glass was the only bright thing in the dark room and it glowed like a ghost. I bit the inside of my cheeks for courage, and like a doomed man turned slowly, slowly, around.
There was nothing there.
The bed was empty.
I croaked, ‘Ralph?’ out of my tightening throat and only the candle flame moved. I took three stiff steps and held the candle high to see every inch of the bed. There was no one there. The pillows and the embroidered silk counterpane were smooth and undented. I put a shaking hand out to touch the pillows and they were cool.
No one had been there.
I staggered to Mama’s dressing table, set the candlestick carefully down, and crumpled on to the stool, my head in my hands.
‘Oh, God,’ I said miserably. ‘Don’t let me go mad. Don’t send me mad now. Oh, don’t let it end in madness when I am so nearly at peace at last.’
Long minutes passed in utter silence except for the steady ticking of the grandfather clock in the corridor. I took a deep breath and took my hands from my face. My face was as serene and lovely as ever and I gazed at it in the glass as if it belonged to someone else, a stranger’s beauty. Even I could not penetrate its calm looks or imagine what terrors were hidden behind that green cat-like gaze.
Then a floorboard outside the door creaked and the door opened. I jumped with a scream in my throat, but only Mama stood there. For a second she did not move and I read her concern for me, and some hint of a darker thought in her expression.
‘It’s not like you to be preening in front of a mirror, Beatrice,’ she said gently. ‘Did I startle you? What were you thinking of, I wonder, that you should be so pale?’
I smiled a strained smile and turned away from the glass. She said nothing but crossed the room and opened her top drawer and took out a handkerchief. The silence lengthened and I felt a familiar drumming of blood in my head as I became anxious, wondering what would come next.
‘You must have missed your pretty dresses when you saw Miss Havering this afternoon,’ my mother said, wrong as usual. ‘How lovely she looked, didn’t she? I thought Harry was most struck.’
‘Harry?’ I said mechanically.
‘There could scarcely be a better match,’ my mother said, spraying eau-de-cologne on the lace handkerchief. ‘Her dowry lands lie so convenient for our own – your papa always had his eye on them – and she is such a dear, charming girl. I understand she is accustomed to very difficult circumstances at home, and the poor thing is well used to adapting herself. Lady Havering assured me that, should there be a match of it, you and I would stay here as long as we wished. Celia would expect no alteration. I do not think that one could plan better.’
I felt a growing chill inside me. Mama could not be talking about a match for Harry. Harry was my friend, my companion. We farmed Wideacre together. We belonged together, alone on Wideacre.
‘A match for Harry?’ I asked incredulously.
‘Of course,’ Mama said, not meeting my eyes. ‘Naturally. Did you think he would stay a bachelor all his life? Did you think Harry would forget his duty to his name and die childless?’
I gaped at her. I had never thought of the matter at all. I never thought beyond this easy summer of my growing intimacy with Harry. Of the happiness I felt when he was so sweet to me. Of the warmth of his smile. Of the tenderness in his voice when he spoke to me.
‘I never thought of the future at all,’ I said, speaking truly of my youthful, feckless half-planning.
‘I have,’ said Mama, and I realized that she was watching me intently and that my face was unguarded before her. I had thought of her for so long as an unimportant pawn on the great chessboard of our fields that it came as a shock to recall that she had been watching me for all my life, watching me closely even now. She knew me as no other person could. She had given birth to me and watched me walk away from her, watched my growing passion for the land and my growing pleasure in running it. If she knew …! But I could take that thought no further. It was impossible to consider what she might think if she had dared to go beyond the barriers I had placed on my own mind.
But she had been uneasy about me for years. Her little plaintive, nagging contradictions added up to a great suspicion that I was not a child of proper feelings. While my father had insisted that a Lacey of Wideacre could do no wrong, she had been forced to acquiesce and had assumed, as he had insisted, that her complaints about me stemmed merely from her town-bred conventionality. But now no rowdy, careless Papa was there to overbear her judgement and she could see me ever more clearly. She did not merely object that I did not behave in a conventional way – that would have been easily mended. She objected, she suspected, that I did not feel in my private heart as a young girl should do.
‘Mama …’ I said, and it was a half-conscious appeal to her to protect me, as a parent should, from my fear. Even though what I most feared were the thoughts behind her suddenly sharp eyes.
She ceased her fiddly tidying of her chest of drawers and turned towards me, leaning back against the chest, her blue eyes scanning my face with anxiety.
‘What is it, Beatrice?’ she said. ‘I cannot guess what is in your mind. You are my own child, and yet sometimes I cannot even approach a guess at what you are thinking.’
I stammered. I had no words to hand. My heart was still hammering from my foolish vision of Ralph. It was too much to have to deal with Mama, to have to face her only minutes later.
‘There is something wrong,’ she said with certainty. ‘I have been treated as a fool in this house, but I am not a fool. I know when there is something wrong, and there is something wrong now.’
I put my hands out, half to stretch towards her, half to ward off the words and the thoughts I feared she had in her mind. She did not take my hands. She made no move towards me. She was not grateful for a caress; she stayed cold and questioning, and her eyes drained me of courage.
‘You loved your papa not as an ordinary child loves its father,’ she said definitely. ‘I have watched you all your life. You loved him because he was the Squire and because he owned Wideacre. I know that. No one cared what I knew, nor what I thought. But I knew that your sort of love is, somehow … dangerous.’
My breath hissed in a gasp as she searched and then found that dreadful, illuminating word.
My hands were loosely clasped to hide their trembling. My face upturned to my mama felt as white as a sheet. If I had been a murderer on trial in the dock I could not have seemed more aghast, more guilty.
‘Mama …’ I half whispered. It was a plea to her to stop this remorseless progress of ideas which could lead her all the way into the deep secret maze of the truth.
She moved from the chest of drawers and came towards me. I nearly shrank away, but something, some pride, some strength, kept me rock-still. I looked into her face with my brave, lying eyes, and matched her gaze.
‘Beatrice, I am preparing for Harry’s marriage to Celia,’ she said, and I saw her eyes glisten with a hint of tears. ‘No woman welcomes the arrival of another into her home. No woman looks forward to seeing her son turn away from her to his bride. But I am doing this for Harry.’ She paused. ‘I am doing this for you,’ she said deliberately. ‘You must, you shall be freed from your fascination with this land and with its master,’ she said urgently. ‘With another girl a little older than you in the house, you will go out more. You can visit the Haverings, perhaps go to London with them. And Harry will be absorbed in Celia and he will have less time for you.’
‘You wish to come between Harry and me?’ I said in impulsive resentment.
‘Yes,’ said my mother baldly. ‘There is something in this house. What it is I cannot say, but I can feel it. Some hint of danger. I feel as if I can smell it in every room where you and Harry are working together. You are both my children. I love you both. I should guard you both. I will save you both from whatever danger it is that threatens us all.’
I found, in the deepest reserves of my courage, a confident smile, and I held it on my face.
‘Mama, you are sad and still grieving for Papa. We are all of us still mourning. There is no danger, no threat. There is only a brother and sister trying to get the work done that only their papa knew and understood. It is just work, Mama. And Celia will help us and soon Wideacre will be straight again.’
She sighed at that and her shoulders trembled in a nervous shudder, and then straightened.
‘I wish I could be sure,’ she said. ‘I sometimes think I must be mad to think of danger, danger everywhere. I suppose you are right, Beatrice. It is only grief letting in foolish thoughts. Forgive me, my dear, if I alarmed you with my silliness. And yet, remember what I said. Now your papa has gone you are in my charge and you will have to lead a more normal life. While Harry needs your help you may indeed aid him, but when he has a wife you will be less important on Wideacre, Beatrice. And I expect you to accept that change with good grace.’
I bowed my head, my eyes smiling under the lowered eyelids. ‘Yes, indeed, Mama,’ I said submissively. And at the same time I thought, ‘You won’t keep me stitching in the drawing room when the sun is hot and the reapers need watching in the fields.’ And I knew she could not.
But the betrothal exposed once more my vulnerability. I had no plan. Ralph had been the planner and Ralph had paid for his upstart wickedness. I had only let the sunshiny days slip by me, resting like a child in the pleasure of the day. I was not even the principal person on the land that summer. I still knew more than Harry could ever learn. I still knew the needs of the lands, the needs of our people and the additional, slightly special Wideacre ways. But that summer Harry’s star was in the ascendant and while I might give orders, the sun came out when he came into a cornfield.
He could never control a reaper gang as I could. He was both too friendly – with his eccentric insistence on using a scythe very badly himself – and too distant – leaving them at dinner break to come back to the Hall. They preferred to have me overseeing, knowing that I would do my job well – watching the line, checking the yield and planning the work – and leave them to do theirs. Then when the girls came through the stubble with great flasks of cider and home-brewed beer and huge crusty loaves of yellow bread, they knew I would sit in the prickly field beside them and eat as hungrily as any of them.
But that year they were not my people. They were Harry’s.
I could not hate Harry for it. I hated with every fibre in my spiteful, resentful body the old men, the male lawyers, the male Parliament, the male judiciary and the male landowners who had constructed a system of laws expressly designed to ensure that their mothers, their wives and even their own little daughters should forever be excluded from everything that makes life worth living: the ownership of land. But I could not hate Harry. No one could. His ready smile, his sweetness of temper, his quick humour and his dazzling good looks earned him favour wherever he went. The men of the reaper gang might prefer working in the field where I was watching, but their women blushed as red as cherries if Harry so much as rode down the lane. He was the harvest deity that summer. All I could be was priestess at the shrine.
No one was immune to the high summer appeal of the new young Master of Wideacre. I think I was the only person on Wideacre who remembered the previous Master with continual regret. For everyone else, Harry was the rising sun; and his good looks – enhanced by hard work and radiant health – and his joyous energy clearly identified him as the summertime prince of Wideacre. Only I, dark in my black mourning, sour in my temper, worked in that golden summer with relentess efficiency but with little joy.
The cream of the year at Wideacre is the harvest supper when the last of the wheat is in. No one on the estate escapes the drudgery of the final days of the harvest when every man, woman and child is racing against the weather and the coming of the autumn rain to get the golden corn under cover before the dark clouds build up and demolish the year’s profit in one wicked night.
You work half consciously to that end from the first winter ploughing and spring sowing of seed. All the long year you watch the earth and the sky. Not too cold for the new seeds at the end of spring. Not too dry for the little shoots. Plenty of sun to ripen the grain but enough rain to make it green and lush. Then no rain – oh, you pray – no rain when the corn is standing proud and high but so vulnerable to storm and disease. Then the sense of triumph when the reaper gang go swish, swish, into the first field, which is as ripply as a vast, golden inland sea. Then the race starts between people and the wanton and unpredictable gods of the weather. And this year, the year of the harvest god Harry, the weather held and held and held until the people said they had never known such a summer, and everyone forgot the hot summer Ralph and I had made last year, a lifetime ago.
On the last day of harvesting, I watched the work in the morning and Harry rode out to the last field in the afternoon. When I judged they would be nearly finished, I rode down to the great granary and barn behind the new mill to watch the carts come in. Only the miller – Bill Green – and his wife were at home. Their two labourers and three sons had all gone off to bring the harvest home. Mrs Green herself was in a flurry of preparation for the evening harvest supper and her kitchen was crowded with the staff from the Hall, unpacking great hampers and flagons from our kitchens.
I sat alone in the courtyard, listening to the tumble of the water into the millpond and the rhythmic slap, slap, of the millwheel, and watching the flock of doves leaving and returning to the dovecote built into the point of the roof.
A solitary cat stretched out in the sun, too hot and too lazy to wash her crackling, dusty fur. When I moved, her eyes, as green and inscrutable as my own, snapped open and gave me gaze for gaze. By the river, the tallest beech trees rustled in the breeze but the lower branches never stirred. The wood birds were silent in the heat; only the doves cooed in a continual purr of courtship. Courtyard, cat, doves and I were all motionless in the heat of the afternoon, baked into silence by the August sun.
Unbidden, into my dozy, daydreaming mind, came thoughts of my brother. Not Harry my brother the schoolboy, nor Harry the incompetent farmer. But Harry the harvest demigod at whose bidding and on whose land the corn stood tall. At the Harry that Celia saw when she found the courage to order out her mama’s landau to drive down the lanes under the pretext of obliging me, but really to see him stripped down to shirtsleeves and riding breeches. Of the Harry that I saw growing in authority and power. Of the Harry who was daily becoming a true Master of Wideacre, whom I could never shift.
And then I thought, with dawning clarity, that I did not want to shift Harry. That I liked seeing him learning about the land, that I liked seeing the earth growing to his bidding. That I liked seeing him at the head of the table smiling down the length of it to me. That every second of this hot summer I had spent with Harry had been delight and pleasure. And the long periods of dull time without him had been spent in thinking of him, and remembering his smile, his special tone of laughter, or just hearing again in my mind snatches of our conversation.
In the distance I heard the rumble of the carts and the sound of people singing. I hardly knew what to do, I had been so enwrapped in this revelation of the rightness of Harry at Wideacre. I crossed the yard and entered the barn as Mr and Mrs Green exploded from the house and ran to open the yard gate. I could clearly hear the harvest songs as they rounded the track to the mill – even distinguish different voices and Harry’s clear tenor ringing out.
The beam across the great curved barn door was heavy and I had to go to the furthest end to lever it up. Then it jerked and tilted away from me and I could drag it from its mountings. As the carts rumbled into the yard in a great triumphant procession of proven fertility, I swung the great double doors open and faced the Wideacre harvest.
The first cart was a swaying wall of golden stooks with Harry perched high up to the sky on top of them all. The heavy shire-horses halted before me at the door and the load rocked as the wheels stilled. Harry leaped to his feet and stood framed against the hot, blue sky looking down at me. My head tipped back to see him; I gazed up at him on his mountain of wheat. He was in his gentry clothes stripped for work, an outfit both impractical and indecent. A fine linen shirt, already torn on one shoulder and opened wide at the throat, showed the brown column of his neck and a glimpse of hard smooth collarbone. His riding breeches fitted snugly to his body and emphasized the muscles of his thighs. His knee-high leather riding boots were scratched beyond repair by his walking through the stubble. He looked exactly what he was: Quality playing peasant, the worst sort of landlord one could have. And I looked at him with naked delight on my face.
His spring down to the carter’s seat and to the ground was stopped short by the look on my face. He paused and his eyes suddenly darted to mine. The careless, hedonistic, laughing look vanished and he looked deeply shocked as if someone had suddenly slapped his smiling face. His eyes never left mine, as if he were about to ask me some question of enormous importance – but had never guessed before that I would know the answer. I stared back at him, my lips half open as if to answer, but able only to take shallow fast breaths. Harry’s gaze slowly ranged from the top of my glinting chestnut hair to the black hem of my skirt and returned again to my face. All he said, very low, was, ‘Beatrice’, as if he had never known my name before.
The carter waited for me to step to one side, then clicked to the team who ambled past me into the barn. Other carts drew into line behind and the men sprang up beside Harry to help throw the stooks down, while others below caught and stacked them in a great spreading and growing mountain of Wideacre wealth. I don’t think Harry even saw them. He stood in the middle of the flying stooks, his eyes on mine, and his look had the intensity and the disbelief of a man drowning.
We exchanged not one word all the rest of that long hard-working day, though we worked near each other until every stook of corn was piled in the barn and every scrap of straw either in the barn or lashed under covered stacks. When the great trestle tables were laid in the yard in the twilight, Harry took the head and I the foot and we smiled when they drank our healths and cheered us. We even danced a little jig, first with each other in a breathless, dreamlike circle, and then with the handful of the wealthiest tenants who had turned out to work on the harvest that day.
As it grew darker and the moon rose, the respectable villagers said their goodnights and rode the carts homeward. The young men and girls stayed behind to dance and to court, and the wilder, single men and bad husbands started to circulate little flasks of the powerful gin they had bought from the London carters. Harry fetched my mare from the mill stables and his own hunter, and we rode home under a harvest moon as round and as golden as a guinea. I was so weak with desire that I could scarcely hold the reins or keep straight in the saddle. The merest glance from Harry set me trembling, and when our horses brushed together and our shoulders touched, I jumped as if I had been scorched.
In the stable yard luck favoured me for there was no groom to lift me from the saddle. I kept my seat until Harry came towards me and then I put out both hands on his shoulders. He lifted me down and I swear he held me close to him. I shuddered as I slid down every inch of his hot, weary body, and smelled the open-air smell and the warm maleness of him. As his gripping hands gently set me on my feet I swayed slightly towards him and lifted my face. In the magical moonlight his clear hard-boned face was an invitation to swift, gentle kisses all over his eyes, forehead and scratchy cheeks. His eyes were hazy as he looked down at my face.
‘Goodnight, Beatrice,’ he said with an undertone of huskiness in his voice. His face came down to mine in a gentle, dry, chaste kiss on my cheek. I hardly stirred. I let him kiss me as he would and I let him release me. I let him step back and take his hands from my waist. Then I slid away, consciously graceful, towards the stable door and up the back stairs to my bedroom. The golden moon lit my way like a promise of paradise.
It was a painful paradise, that autumn and winter. Harry’s courtship of Celia and his growing maturity meant he was away from home often, dining or drinking with new friends, or visiting Celia at Havering Hall. While my power on the land grew in his absence, my power over myself diminished, and I longed for him every second of every dull day that he was away.
I watched him secretly at breakfast, watched him read the paper and comment with assured knowledge on political developments and the news of London society. I watched his quick stride out of the room and listened for the bang of the front door as he went out. At dinner I was by the window to see him ride home, his head full of ideas about his agricultural books. I sat at his right hand and made him laugh with gossip about Mama’s afternoon callers. At tea in the evening I poured his cup and my hand trembled as I gave it to him. I was hopelessly, desperately in love, and I rejoiced in every painful, delightful moment of it.
When he spoke of Celia I cared not at all. Her pretty manners, the fresh flowers of her parlour, her marvellous needlework and her tasteful sketches meant nothing to me. My brother’s genteel courtship of the angelic Celia was not what I wanted. The little songs and pretty presents, the odd bouquet and the weekly visit – she could keep them. I wanted my brother to feel for me the passion I felt for him, which Ralph and I had shared. Instead of shying away from the memory of Harry burying his face against Ralph’s foot and his groans of pleasure at the feel of Ralph using the riding whip on his back, I recalled it with hope. He could feel abject desire; he could be fascinated and overwhelmed. I had seen him with Ralph; I had seen him infatuated and helpless with love. I longed for him to be infatuated again – this time with me.
I knew also – a woman always knows though she may conceal her knowledge even from herself – that Harry desired me in return. When he knew I was in the room his face was schooled and his voice neutral, but if he came upon me unexpectedly, or if I walked into the library when he had thought I was out, his eyes would light up and his hands would tremble. The long discussions we shared over the planting of next year’s crops and Harry’s new theories on crop rotation were spiced and lightened by this unspoken exchange of excitement, and when my hair brushed his cheek as we both leaned over a column of figures, I felt him stiffen. Disappointingly, he did not move forward, but nor did he draw away.
All the long autumn and winter I hardly noticed the chill and the dreary rain, I burned so inside. In the early months, when the chrysanthemums and the thick Michaelmas daisies bloomed, I carried them in to fill the house with their peppery smell and shuddered at the flaring colours. The hunting season came and I had to trail around in my heavy black dress on mornings when the sun rose like a red ball over the hoar-frosted fields and I could hear the hysterical yelp of hounds rushing like mad things in the first runs of the year. By some erratic social ruling, Harry was allowed to attend the meet, dressed in dark colours, and follow the hounds over the first few fields, but was not allowed to be in at the kill. The same inflexible social code ruled that I could not ride in company, and was thus banned from hunting for the whole of the frosty bright season. Only my secret rides about the estate were allowed, as long as none of the gentry saw me.
So there were no wild gallops for me to burn off the energy I felt. There was little work to do on the land, so I was much indoors. As the damp and the rain lifted, and the frost took hold, I longed for Harry with sharper and sharper need. My desire grew so strong that the pleasure curdled into pain on some days. Once, waiting for his return in the stable yard, I broke the ice on the drinking trough and crushed the splinters in my hand to still my impatience. But then, when he came riding in like a warrior high on a steed, and his face lit up to see me, every icy bit of pain melted into joy.
Christmas and New Year passed quietly for we were in second mourning. When a sudden frost made the roads usable, Harry took the coach to town for a week to transact some business. He came home full of the new fashions and plays of the season.
His absence gave me an opportunity to note, with ironic self-knowledge, that although I missed him, I relished the absolute power over the land that was mine when he was away. Our tenants, our labourers and the Acre craftsmen knew well enough who was the master, and would always consult me first before taking a plan or request to Harry. But merchants or dealers who did not know the county well sometimes made the mistake, that first year, of asking to see the Squire. I was always piqued when they entertained me with social gossip but then paused, waiting for me to leave the room before they started business talk. And Harry, with one half of my knowledge and experience, would always be flattered and would sometimes say, with a smile to me, ‘Don’t let us detain you, Beatrice, if you have something to do elsewhere. I am sure I can manage this alone and I will discuss it with you later.’ At which I was supposed to take my leave. Sometimes I went. But sometimes I committed the social solecism of smiling back and saying, ‘I have no business elsewhere, Harry. I would rather stay.’
Then the merchant and Harry would exchange the rueful grin of two men with a recalcitrant female, and discuss the deal for wool or wheat or meat. Wideacre always had the best of it when I was there, but I was unfailingly offended at the assumption that my business could be elsewhere when wealth was on the table.
While Harry was away, however, the merchants, the traders, the lawyers and the bankers had perforce to recognize my ability to give and honour my word. The law, the eternal male law, did not recognize my signature, any more than if I were a bankrupt, a criminal, or a lunatic. But a business man generally needed only one hard look from me before he realized that if he wanted a contract with Wideacre he had better not suggest awaiting Harry’s return. In Harry’s absence my power on the land shed its concealment and everyone, from the poorest tinker or shanty dweller to the leaders of county society, could see that I ruled the land.
We had a week of cold, clammy fogs after Christmas but in mid-January the hills shed their grey and became clear and frosty and bright. Every morning I awoke from a night of confused hot dreams and got up from my bed to throw my window open and breathe in the sharp freezing air. A few hard gasps would send me shivering back into the room to wash and dress before my log fire.
The weather took its toll in Acre. Bill Green, the miller, slipped on some ice in his mill yard and broke a leg and I had to send for the Chichester surgeon to come and set it for him. Mrs Hodgett, the lodge-keeper’s mother, took to her bed when the snow started falling and complained of pains in her chest. They could not root her out. After a week of this nonsense, Hodgett held the gate for me one morning and confessed that he was sure she was in bed only out of pure spite, and that his wife, Sarah, was exhausted with the extra cooking and washing and tired by two walks a day to Acre village to take the old crone her meals.
I nodded and gave him a smile and the next day took my roan hunter down to Acre village and tied him to old Mrs Hodgett’s wooden gate. I could see no face at the window of the little cottage but I knew the old witch would have been peeping. By the time I had swept up her snowy garden and burst into her house, stamping the snow off my boots and pulling my gauntlets off, she had skipped back into her sick bed, covers up to her chin, her bright healthy eyes shifty with deceit.
‘Good day, Mrs Hodgett,’ I sang out. ‘I am sorry to see you abed.’
‘Good day, Miss Beatrice,’ she quavered. ‘It is kind of you to visit a poor old lady.’
‘I can do better than a visit,’ I said encouragingly. ‘I have come to tell you that I am sending for the new Scottish physician, Dr MacAndrew, to come and see you. I hear he is wonderful with chest complaints.’
Her eyes were bright with eagerness.
‘That would be grand,’ she said. ‘I’ve heard tell on him. They speak well of him indeed.’
‘But have you heard of his special treatment?’ I asked. ‘He has a wonderful reducing diet which they say never fails.’
‘No. What is that?’ she asked, walking unsuspecting into the trap.
‘He calls it starving out the infection,’ I said, lying through my teeth with a candid gaze. ‘The first day you take nothing but hot water, and the second day you have hot water with one spoonful, no more, of gruel. The third day you have plain hot water again and the fourth you have a spoonful of gruel. That goes on until you are cured. They say it never fails.’
I smiled encouragingly at her and inwardly apologized to the young doctor whose reputation I was traducing so wilfully. I had not yet met him, but I heard he was excellent. His practice was mainly with the Quality families, of course, but he had a growing name for caring for the poor, and in some very hard cases he gave his services for free. He would survive this taradiddle. No one but a very foolish old lady would believe such nonsense. But Mrs Hodgett was aghast. She stared incredulously at my face and plucked at the bedding with her plump fingers.
‘I don’t know, Miss Beatrice, I’m sure,’ she said hesitantly. ‘It can’t be right to eat so little when you’re poorly.’
‘Oh, yes,’ I said blithely, and turned as the door opened. It was Sarah Hodgett, who had walked from the gatehouse with an earthenware bowl of stew in her hands and a crusty new-baked loaf of bread wrapped in a spotless towel balancing on the lid. The smell of rich rabbit stew filled the frowsy little room and I saw the old lady’s eyes gleam.
‘Miss Beatrice!’ said Sarah with a courteous half-bob and a warm smile for me, her favourite. ‘It’s good of you to call on Mother while she’s poorly.’
‘She’ll be better soon,’ I said with certainty. ‘She’s going on Dr MacAndrew’s special reducing diet. You might as well start now, had you not, Mrs Hodgett? So you can take your rabbit stew home again, Sarah. I dare say that it won’t go to waste there!’
‘I could start the treatment tomorrow!’ Mrs Hodgett intervened despairingly, fearing the disappearance of Sarah’s hot dinner.
‘No, today is best,’ I said firmly. ‘Unless you are already feeling better?’
She seized on the way out with an audible gasp of relief.
‘I am a bit stouter,’ she said. ‘I think I might well be on the mend.’
‘Exercise then,’ I said, firmly putting out an imperious hand and hauling the old lady out of her bed. ‘Sarah can pop home and lay an extra place, and you can walk up to the lodge for your dinner today.’
‘Out in the snow?’ she squawked, as if its touch would poison her. I glanced to the door and saw the pair of stout leather boots and the warm shawl and bonnet hanging on a peg.
‘Yes,’ I said inexorably. ‘It’s either exercise or the special diet for you, Mrs Hodgett. You are too important to us all for us to take any chances with your health.’
She smiled at the compliment but scowled at the options and then, grudgingly, complied. I left Sarah bundling up the old devil in layers of flannel for her outing and went to untie Sorrel, well satisfied. I had done the Hodgetts a favour that they would not forget, and I had given the village a joke that would last them until spring. My swinging stride into the cottage and my starvation diet would be mimicked and laughed over in every taproom in a hundred miles’ radius. And the toast, when the long country guffaws had died down, would be the joking tribute: ‘The Master of Wideacre – Miss Beatrice!’
I called to one of the Tyacke boys, who was making snowballs in the lane, to come and hold Sorrel while I climbed awkwardly on the wall to reach the saddle, and then tossed him a penny for his help, and then another one because I liked his gap-toothed smile of hero worship as he looked up at me.
‘Gaffer Cooper is poorly, too,’ he volunteered, turning the coins in his hand and planning a feast of buns and toffee.
‘Bad?’ I asked, and the lad nodded. I could call on my way home. He was one of the cottagers who patched together a living on the fringe of the village where it merges with the common. In summer he had the odd day’s work harvesting or reaping in the Wideacre gang, in winter he would help someone kill a pig and be paid with a good measure of bacon. He had a couple of scrawny hens that sometimes laid an egg or two. He had a thin old cow that gave him a little milk. His cottage was built from wood scrounged and stolen from our woods, and from branches legitimately cut on common land. His roof was made of branches and sods of turf. His wood fire burned turves and wood from the common and filled the little room with smoke. He sat on a three-legged stool carved years ago, and he ate from a wooden bowl with a tin spoon. He cooked in a three-legged pot set in the embers of his fire, which burned on a stone in the middle of the room and smoked the room as well as the bacon hung from the rafters.
It was not a life I would choose to lead, but Gaffer Cooper had never had different and never settled to regular work and called no one master. In his dirty little shanty, sleeping on a bed of bracken, rolled up in rags, Gaffer Cooper called himself a free man; Papa, who had a sensitive eye for other men’s pride, always called him Gaffer Cooper and never John. And so did I.
Sorrel was tired of standing still, and chilled, so I gave him a brief canter down the snowy lane and back before turning right down the track that leads towards the cottages. The wood was silent, magical in the snow. The deep green pine trees and firs each held a thick line of snow along their branches and pointy fingers. Even the tiniest pine needles were capped with a sliver of ice. The silver birches looked grey instead of white against the icy brightness, and the beech trees’ grey trunks were pewter-coloured. As I rode I could hear the Fenny clattering louder around the ice-floes and I went closer to see the green water sliding secretly under little silver skins of ice to make silent pools under the white ceiling.
The snow in the woods was pockmarked with animal tracks. I saw the two round two long prints of a rabbit and the little dots of a weasel or stoat following close behind it. There were fox tracks, like a little dog’s, and even the scuffed trail of a badger whose low belly brushed the thicker drifts.
Looking up through the tracery of snow-laden branches, I could see from the sky that we would have more snow later in the day and I put Sorrel into a canter to get home before dinner. Someone had been down the track before me. A stout pair of boots and a pair of wooden clogs, so Gaffer must be ill indeed if he was being visited.
As we rounded the bend to his cottage I guessed I was too late. The door of his cottage stood wide open, something that happened generally only on the most scorching of summer days, and coming out was Mrs Merry, midwife and layer-out in Acre parish – and owner, as befitted her rank, of a good pair of boots.
‘Good day, Miss Beatrice. Gaffer’s gone.’ She greeted me matter-of-factly.
I drew rein beside the fence of hazel sticks.
‘Old age?’ I asked.
‘Aye,’ she said. ‘And the winter takes them.’
‘He had enough to eat, and enough clothes?’ I asked. Gaffer was not one of our people. He was neither tenant, labourer nor pensioner, but he had scraped his living on our land and I should feel to blame if he had died in want.
‘He ate one of his hens only last night,’ said Mrs Merry. ‘And he had survived many winters in those clothes and in that bed. You need have no fears, Miss Beatrice. Gaffer’s time was come and he went peacefully. Would you care to see him?’
I shook my head. There was no family in Acre who would be offended by my refusal. I could please myself.
‘Did he leave any savings?’ I asked. ‘Enough for a funeral?’
‘Nay,’ she said. ‘It’ll be a pauper’s grave for him. We have found nothing.’
I nodded. ‘I’ll stand the coffin and the service,’ I said briefly. ‘Set it in hand, Mrs Merry. I won’t have Wideacre folk buried in shame.’
Mrs Merry measured me with her eyes and smiled.
‘Eh, but you’re so like your papa!’ she said, and I smiled in return at the compliment: the best that could be paid me.
‘I hope so,’ I said and nodded my farewell.
In a day or two the plain whitewood coffin would take Gaffer’s remains to the churchyard and he would be buried in the far corner where the water pump is and the tools are kept. I would pay for a plain wooden cross with his name on it. The service would be read by the curate to whoever was there, idling from work, for Gaffer had few friends. A couple of the other cottagers might attend to pay their respects to one of their own from the village within a village, but Acre itself would be little touched. I would pay the extra penny necessary to toll the funeral bell for him, and at the sound the men ploughing in the fields, or trimming the hedges and digging ditches, would stop their work and pull off their caps to be bare-headed for the passing of the old man who never earned such a mark of respect in his life.
Then the bell would cease and the caps would go back on to the quickly chilled heads. The men digging would spit on their cold hands, grasp the spades again and curse the life that forced them to stand knee-deep in icy water in mid-January with no break until dinner, and no chance of being warm and dry until dusk.
The freezing weather was hard enough on the labourers but this winter it was a nightmare for the shepherds. It was especially hard because the snow fell so thick and so early that the sheep had not been gathered off the downs in time for them to lamb on the lower, more accessible hills. Day after grey snowy day we toiled up that blocked track to the top of the downs to poke about with long sticks in the snow to try to find the firm white lump that meant a buried sheep, and then set to the miserable job of digging the thing out.
We lost remarkably few because I made sure the men were out from dawn to dusk and they cursed me with language that should have dropped me faint with horror from the saddle, but that instead made me laugh.
They learned a great, if grudging, respect for me that winter. Unlike the labourers and tenants who saw me almost daily, the shepherds worked alone. Only at a time of crisis like this one when most of the flock was buried under six-foot drifts did they work in a gang commanded by me. They noted the advantage the horse gave me and cursed me roundly when I trotted past them up the track, or when they slipped and fell into great deceiving hills of snow while I rode dry-shod. But they knew also that not even the oldest, wisest one of them could match me for sensing where a sheep was buried or guessing where a little flock would have huddled. Then, when they were digging, more often than not I would be side by side with them in the snow, probing for the buried animal, and feeling for its head.
And when it came to rounding up the chilled and silly things to move them downhill, the shepherds knew that although I was tired and cold I would ride behind the stragglers and bawl at the dogs until we had them all safe in a lower meadow.
Only then, when the gate was pulled shut and hay thrown on the snow, would our ways diverge. The men would go home to their little cottages to dig out potatoes, or swedes, or turnips for their dinner, or reluctantly go to work their tract on the common fields. Or they would go out to set a snare for a rabbit or mend a leaking roof. Working, even in the dark, working, working, working, until they fell into their beds and slept, sometimes still in their wet clothes.
But I would trot home and toss the reins to a stable lad, climb the stairs to my room and sink into a tub before the fire while Lucy poured ewer after ewer of hot water over me and said, ‘Miss Beatrice! You will scald! You are all pink!’
Only when my skin was stinging with the heat would I heave myself out and wrap up in a linen towel while Lucy brushed my hair and piled it up and powdered it ready for the evening.
I found I could chat to Mama at dinner, and she showed some interest in my day, although the weight of her disapproval curbed my tongue. She disliked what I was doing, but even she could see that when a fortune of wool and meat lay buried in the snow one could not leave it to paid labourers to dig out, when and how they fancied.
But once the covers were removed I became quiet, and by the time the tea tray came into the parlour I was weak with sleepiness.
‘Really, Beatrice, you are good for nothing these days,’ Mama said, looking pointedly at a spoiled piece of embroidery which had been in and out of the work basket every night for a sennight. ‘It is hardly like having a daughter at all,’ she said.
‘I am sorry, Mama,’ I said in sudden sympathy. ‘I know it seems odd. But we have had such bad luck with the sheep. Another couple of days and they will all be in, and then Harry will be home in time for lambing.’
‘In my girlhood I did not even know the word lambing,’ said Mama, her tone plaintive.
I smiled. I was simply too tired to try to restore her to good humour.
‘Well, as Papa used to say, I am a Lacey of Wideacre,’ I said lightly. ‘And while I am the only one, I have to be Squire and daughter, all at once.’
I tossed the stitchery back into the workbox and rose to my feet.
‘Forgive me, Mama. I know it is early and I am no company for you, but I am too tired to stay awake.’
I bent down for her goodnight kiss, a cool resentful one, and left her.
Every night was the same. As I climbed each stair my tiredness fell away and my thoughts turned to Harry. His smile, the sweetness and tenderness of his expression, his blue eyes and the set of his coat became more and more vivid with every step I took up to my room. By the time I was undressed and lying on my back in bed, I could almost feel his body on mine and his arms around me. With a moan I would roll on my side and try to put the insane, senseless picture from my mind. I was sure that I longed for the touch, for the pleasure of Ralph. But the thought of Ralph was a nightmare to me, so my mind had played this trick on me and made me dream of Harry. Once he was home, and we were working side by side again, I might enjoy his company and this strange, fevered dreaminess would be gone. I tossed and turned, and dozed and woke with a jump until midnight. Then I sank into sleep and dreamed only of golden curls and a sweet, honest smile … and acres and acres of snow hiding precious sheep.
Harry came home the second week of February, later than he had promised. His lateness meant I had the first week of lambing to manage alone. The shepherds and I spent each long dark evening, after every long cold morning, finding sheep in lamb, checking the lambs and moving the sickly ones indoors to barns where they could be watched. Some of the flock, the less hardy ones, were to lamb indoors anyway.
I loved going into the barn when it was full of sheep. They rippled like a woolly river away from me as I walked through them. Outside the wind howled and the beams of the barn creaked like a ship at sea; but inside it was snug and sweet-smelling. The oil lantern cast a yellow glow when I checked the newborn lambs early in the morning, or last thing at night, and the smell of the oil on their fleeces lingered on my greasy hands when I rode home.
I was tired and chilled and smelling of lanolin one night riding home, when I noticed fresh hoof marks in the snow of the drive and, absurdly, my heart sprang up like a winter robin. ‘Perhaps Harry is home,’ I said to myself and spurred Sorrel on to a faster canter, sliding on the icy snow.
His horse was standing at the front door and Harry, gross in a caped cloak, was in the doorway, hugging Mama and answering her babble of questions with a laugh. The sound of Sorrel’s hoofs on the icy gravel made him turn and come back out to me, though I saw Mama’s detaining hand on his cape.
‘Beatrice!’ he said and his voice was full of joy.
‘Oh, Harry!’ I said and blushed as scarlet as a holly berry.
He reached his arms up to me and I slid from the saddle towards him. The capes of his riding cloak billowed round and half drowned me in the smell of wet wool, of cigar smoke and horse sweat. He held me in a hard hug before he released me and I sensed, with the sureness of my leaping heart, that his heart was pounding too, as he held my slim body in his arms.
‘Come along, you two,’ called Mama from the doorway. ‘You will both catch your deaths of cold out there in the snow.’
Then Harry’s arm was round my waist and he swept me indoors like some buffeting winter wind, so we arrived in the parlour breathless and laughing.
Harry was full of town gossip – the snippets of political news he had heard from old friends of Papa’s, the family news of our cousins and a bundle of little presents. He had the playbill of the theatre he had visited and the programme from a concert.
‘Wonderful music,’ he said enthusiastically.
He had visited the sights of London, too; Astley’s amphitheatre and the Tower of London. He had not been to Court but he had been to several private parties and met so many people he could not remember half their names.
‘But it’s fine to be home,’ he said. ‘My word, I thought I should never get here at all. The roads were shocking. I planned to come post but I left my baggage at Petworth and rode the rest of the way. If I had waited for the road to be cleared for carriages, I think I should have been there for Easter! What a winter it has been! You must have been busy with the sheep, Beatrice!’
‘Oh! Do not ask her!’ Mama threw her hands up with sudden vivacity at the return of her lovely boy. ‘Beatrice has become a full-time shepherdess and she smells of sheep, and talks sheep and thinks sheep until she can barely speak at all but only bleat.’
Harry roared. ‘I can see it’s high time I came home,’ he said. ‘You two would have been pulling caps in another week. Poor Beatrice, you will have had hard work to do in this weather! And poor Mama, with no company!’
Then I saw the clock and hurried to my room to change. My bath was even more scalding than usual that night and my scrubbing with the perfumed soap even more meticulous. I chose a deep blue gown of velvet with wide swaying loops of material over the paniers at the side. My maid powdered my hair with extra care and placed among the white curls deep blue bows that echoed the colour of the gown. Against the powder, my skin was clear, pale honey, my eyes hazel rather than green. I doubted if there were lovelier girls even in London, and after Lucy left me I stayed seated before my mirror gazing blankly at my reflection.
The gong roused me from my daze and I hurried downstairs in a rustle of silk petticoats and rich velvet.
‘Very nice, dear,’ Mama said approvingly, noting my unusually thorough powdering and the new gown.
Harry frankly gaped at me and I stared back at him.
In half-mourning, like Mama and me, he had to wear dark clothes, but his waistcoat was a deep, deep blue embroidered with intricate black thread. His long coat with the dandified wide cuffs and lapels was deep blue also – a sheeny satin that caught the light when he moved. His hair was tied back with a bow of matching blue material, and his satin evening breeches were blue also.
‘You match,’ Mama said unnecessarily. ‘How very fine you both look.’
Harry smiled, but his eyes had a confused, transfixed expression in them. With jesting ceremony he bowed to Mama and me, and offered us both an arm, but behind the smile and the ready courtesy I knew him to be keenly aware of my every move. I smiled back as if I was at ease, too, but the hand I put on his arm trembled, and when I sat in my chair the table swam before my eyes as if I was going to faint.
Harry and Mama exchanged family news over the dinner table and I concentrated on schooling my voice to make normal, laughing replies when one or other of them turned to me. After dinner Harry refused port and said he preferred to come at once with us to the parlour.
‘For I have brought home the family jewels from the bank, Mama,’ he said. ‘And I am longing to see them. Such a great weight! I had them tucked under my arm on the horse for I feared to leave them with the rest of my baggage. I was certain I should be robbed!’
‘There was no need to carry them,’ Mama said apologetically. ‘You could have left them with your valet. But you shall certainly see them.’
She went to her room for the key and then opened up the little chest and lifted out the three fitting trays.
‘Celia shall have these on her wedding day,’ she said, picking out the family heirloom, the Lacey diamonds: a set of gold and diamond rings, bracelets, a collar of diamonds, eardrops and a tiara.
‘I should think they would bring her to her knees,’ said Harry laughing. ‘They must weigh a ton. Have you ever worn them all, Mama?’
‘Good heavens, no!’ she said. ‘We only had one season in town after our marriage and I looked behind the times enough without being draped in old-fashioned jewels. These were given to me on my wedding day, as is the custom, and then stored at the bank. But Celia should at least see them in October.’
‘October?’ I said. The eternal piece of embroidery slipped in my hands and the needle jabbed into my thumb.
‘Oh, poor Beatrice!’ said Harry. ‘I must have this embroidered kerchief when it’s done. There are more blood spots on it than thread. What tortures you put her through, Mama!’
‘The torture is in trying to teach her,’ Mama said, laughing with her beloved son. ‘After a day out with your sheep she can barely see to put a stitch in its place. And she was always clumsy with a needle.’
She packed the jewels back into the box and took them up to her room. Harry took my hand in his and inspected the welling spot of blood on the ball of the left thumb.
‘Poor Beatrice!’ he said again and kissed the thumb. His lips opened and he sucked the little spot of blood. In my nervous, passionate state I trembled like a high-bred mare. The ball of my thumb was pressed against his teeth, and I could feel his tongue, wet and warm, sliding over the ridges of the thumbprint. His mouth was hot, and fascinatingly wet. I held my hand up to his face and scarcely breathed.
‘Poor Beatrice,’ he repeated. He raised his eyes and looked at me. I hardly dared move. There was such pleasure in having him touch me, such delight in a tiny gesture. I could not have taken my hand away had my life depended on it. But somewhere in the back of my mind was a growing awareness that he had kept hold of my hand for some time. The casual gesture was turning into a caress. There was silence.
He took the thumb from his mouth and inspected it with playful seriousness.
‘Do you think you will survive this wound?’ he asked.
‘I’m scarred from a thousand similar battles,’ I said, trying to keep my voice light, but I could not help it quivering. I noticed that he was breathing slightly faster and his eyes had that absorbed, incredulous look again.
‘Poor Beatrice,’ he said, as if he had forgotten any other words. He still held my hand and I rose from my seat to stand beside him. We were nearly the same height and if I had moved half a step closer my breasts would have rubbed his chest and our bellies brushed.
‘I hope you will always care for my wounds and sorrows so tenderly, Harry,’ I said.
‘My dear sister,’ he said sweetly. ‘I will always care for you. You must promise to tell me if ever you are unhappy or unwell. I am sorry I left you with so much work to do, and I was sorry to see you so pale.’
‘My heart flutters so, Harry,’ I whispered. It was hammering like a drum at the closeness of him. He put his hand against my ribs as if to feel for the pulse and I covered it with my own, pressing his palm against me. Scarcely knowing what I was doing, I slid it towards the curve of my breasts, very soft under the blue velvet.
Harry gave a gasp and his other hand came around my waist to draw me towards him. We stood like two statues scarce believing that our hearts were hammering hot blood round our bodies and that we were moving closer and closer together. I felt his leg press forward, then closed my eyes at the blissful moment of contact as our bodies touched down the quivering length. With my eyes still closed I blindly lifted my face and felt the warmth of his breath as his head bent down to me.
His lips touched mine as gently and as chastely as any brother’s could. Instinctively I opened my mouth in pleasure and felt his whole body flinch in surprise. He would have pulled away but my hand was behind his neck and held his face to me. Then my tongue slid into his virginal mouth and I licked him in a thoughtless fit of passion.
He jerked back, and I came to my senses and let him go.
‘That was a brotherly kiss,’ he said gently. ‘I am so glad to be home and to see you again that I wanted to give you a hug and a brotherly kiss.’ Then with cruel suddenness he turned on his heel and left me. Left me with a sweet smile and a sweet unconvincing lie.
He had lied to spare us both the knowledge of our mutual desire. He had lied because he knew nothing of passion between a man and a woman. He lied because he had two irreconcilable pictures of me in his mind. One his dear pretty sister, and the other the irresistible beauty who greeted the wheat carts with her head tipped back and the glory of a goddess of the harvest in her eyes.
So he left me with a lie and I stood, one hand on the mantelpiece of my mama’s parlour and my feet on the hearthstone of my home, and shuddered with longing for him. And looked that longing, at last, in the face.
Nothing could stop us or divert us from the road down which we were travelling, Harry and I. No word of mine or act of will could have kept us from each other. We were both like driftwood on the Fenny’s springtime floods, and our passion and our love grew as remorselessly as the buds on the trees and the spring flowers in the hedgerows.
If I had wanted to escape this destiny I do not know where I could have gone. I was as driven to Harry as the birds were driven to build nests and lay eggs; my heart and my body called to him as wilfully as the cuckoos called in the greening woods. He was the Master of Wideacre; of course I wanted him for my own.
The first days of the warm spring weather passed for me in a haze of sensual daydreaming. The lambs were fit and we transferred the flock back to the spring grass on the downs and I was suddenly at leisure. I rode around the woods; I even made myself a little line and spent one morning fishing in the high fast river. I took myself up to the downs and lay on damp grass gazing up into the blue sky where a few early larks were climbing. The spring sun warmed my cheeks, my closed eyelids, but inside I was scorching. And there was nothing I could do to stop it.
My nonchalant dismissal of the courtship Celia enjoyed was now past history. When Harry and Mama spoke of the October wedding, I felt nauseous with envy. Harry’s every other sentence was of Celia and her likes and dislikes and I could scarcely school my face to remain smiling and serene when I heard her name. She was no longer something off Wideacre, as distant and unimportant as the London scene; she was a threat to me that was coming ever closer. She held my brother’s heart in her little hands. She would be coming into my home; she would sit at the foot of the great Wideacre table and Harry would smile down the length of it to her. Worse, most nightmarish picture of all, every night of our lives she and Harry would climb the stairs together and shut the bedroom door, and he would hold her and possess her while I lay in my single bed and trembled with longing.
I did not dream now; I started to think. In the back of my mind a plan was forming to give me the land, and to give me Harry. To forge out of these demented, unlikely elements some stability, some basis for my future. But I could not be certain that it could be done. It depended so much on Celia, and I knew her only slightly. Next time she was due for a visit my eyes were sharp upon her.
Harry met the Havering landau at the steps of the Hall with Mama at his side and me in polite and reticent attendance a few steps behind. I had a perfect view of Celia’s face as Harry greeted them, and I saw with amazement that she was nervous with him. Her pale pink parasol trembled over her little head as Harry brushed the footman aside to open the carriage door. He handed Lady Havering out, then turned to Celia. He bowed low and took her gloved hand. The colour flowed from her face and then rushed back as he kissed her hand, but I knew – with the keen insight of a woman in love – that it was not the nervous heat of passion I felt for Harry. What was the silly thing blushing for? Why was she trembling?
I had to understand what went on behind those soft brown eyes, so this time it was I who suggested a drive while our mamas gossiped over the teacups.
We went through the lanes to see Harry’s new turnip field. Harry rode politely behind, at a distance to avoid the white chalky dust of the high lanes. So I had her to myself. It was a warm spring day, almost as hot as last summer when we had gone to see the harvest, when I had cared nothing for either of them. Now I knew they could either wreck or make my life.
‘Celia,’ I said sweetly, ‘I am so glad that we shall be sisters. I have been so lonely with just Mama and Harry and I always wanted you as a friend.’
The colour mounted to her face in one of her easy blushes. ‘Oh, Beatrice,’ she said, ‘I should be so glad if you and I were to become special friends. There is so much that will be new to me and strange. And I feel so awkward coming into your mama’s house.’
I smiled and pressed her little hand.
‘You always seem so grown up and confident,’ she said shyly. ‘I used to watch you and your papa setting off hunting, and wished so much that I could know you better. And the great horses you rode! When I think now of living in Wideacre Hall, I feel’ – she gave a little gasp – ‘quite frightened.’
I smiled gently at her. Although she had lived all of her adult life in Havering Hall, as the unwanted stepdaughter and stepsister, she had seen little of country society, and had played no great part in the life of the Hall. She was nervous, of course, and it occurred to me that she might want Harry merely as the lesser of two evils.
‘Harry will be beside you,’ I said comfortingly.
‘Oh, yes,’ she agreed. ‘But gentlemen can be so …’ She paused. ‘Marriage is so …’ and she stopped again.
‘It’s a big step for a girl,’ I said helpfully.
‘Oh, yes!’ she said with such emphasis in her soft voice that I racked my brains to think what was behind all this flutter.
‘There is the new position – as the Lady of Wideacre,’ I said, biting my tongue on the pain that the title would go to this baby.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That is rather frightening, but …’ There was something more, something else.
‘Harry seldom drinks to excess,’ I said at random thinking of her stepfather.
‘Oh, no!’ she said quickly, and I had drawn a blank there, too.
‘I am sure he loves you very, very much,’ I said. Envy made me faint as if I had an illness. But it was true. I was sure he did, damn her.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That’s the trouble really.’
I recovered rapidly. The trouble? What trouble? ‘The trouble?’ I repeated.
Her head with the pretty little bonnet bowed low. I saw a tear drop on her figured satin and one gloved finger covered the spot.
‘He’s so …’ She couldn’t find the word and Lord help me I couldn’t think what could be wrong.
‘He’s so …’ She tried again, and I was dumb.
‘He’s so … unrestrained …’ she got out. ‘I suppose it is because he is interested in farming … but really …’
I nearly gasped aloud at this revelation. While I had been aching and longing for Harry and trembling at his touch, this little ice maiden had been refusing his kisses and shrinking from an arm around her waist. Envy made me physically queasy, but my face must not show it.
‘I expect men always are,’ I said, imitating her awed whisper. ‘Is he always like that?’
‘Oh, no!’ she said. The deep brown eyes flickered to my face. ‘The last two Sundays, he changed. He tried to kiss me …’ – her voice dropped even lower – ‘on the mouth! Oh, it was horrid.’ She broke off again. ‘Something else, too.’
I remembered with every cell of my sensuous body the warmth of Harry’s body against mine, my lips opening beneath his and my tongue seeking his mouth. His hand tightening and pressing my breast. That had caused the change.
‘He forgot himself,’ said Celia with some little determination. ‘He forgot who I am. Young ladies do not …’ She paused. ‘And certainly they do not let gentlemen touch them … in that way.’
I caught my breath in a hissing sigh. It had to have been the evening in Mama’s parlour that had made the difference. I had pressed his hand to my breast. I had opened my mouth to him. He had gone from me to Celia hot with desire and tingling with the touch of his first woman – and cold, unloving little Celia had rebuffed him.
‘Did you tell him so?’ I asked.
‘Of course,’ she said. The brown eyes opened wider and she stole another glance at me. ‘He seemed angry,’ she said. Her lower lip trembled. ‘It made me rather afraid … for later.’
‘Don’t you want him to kiss you?’ I burst out.
‘Not like that! I don’t like kisses like that! I don’t think I ever will! I don’t see how I can learn to bear them. Mama and Step-Papa don’t behave like that; they … they have an arrangement.’
The whole world knew that Lord Havering’s arrangement was a ballet dancer in one of the London theatres when Lady Havering put her foot down after two children and four miscarriages.
‘You would like that with Harry?’ I asked. I couldn’t believe my ears.
‘Oh, no,’ she said miserably. ‘I know one cannot, until there is an heir. I know there is nothing to be done. I shall just have to … I shall just have to …’ She gave a piteous little sob. ‘I shall just have to endure it, I suppose.’
I took her hand in my firm clasp.
‘Celia, listen to me,’ I said. ‘I will be a sister to you in October, and I will be a friend to you now. Harry and I are very, very close – you know how we run the estate together – he will always listen to me because he knows I have his interests at heart. I will be a friend to you, too. I shall help you with Harry. I can talk to Harry and no one but you and I need ever know what you have told me. I can make it all right between the two of you.’
Celia raised her eyes to my face.
‘Oh, if you would!’ she said. ‘But won’t Harry mind?’
‘Leave it to me,’ I said. ‘I make only one condition.’ I paused and the cherries on her little bonnet trembled. I realized that to escape Harry’s embraces she would promise me anything.
‘The condition is that you always tell me everything about you and Harry, everything.’
The cherries bobbed as she nodded vigorously.
‘Should you change in your feelings to him, or should he change to you, you will tell me at once.’
The cherries bobbed again and she held out her hand.
‘Oh, yes, Beatrice. Let’s shake hands on the bargain. I promise you shall always be my best and closest of friends. I will always confide in you and you shall have thousands of favours from me. Anything you want that I can give shall be yours.’
I smiled and kissed her cheek to seal the agreement. She had only one thing that I wanted – that I would ever want – and she was far along the road to giving it me, my heart’s desire, my brother Harry.
6
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I came home from that drive my head full of anything but turnips. Celia’s inarticulate murmurs about Harry’s courting had made my head throb with jealousy and longing. She might be happy to hand over to me the control of her married life, but it was still her downcast eyes that Harry watched, even when I was near by. And when we stood side by side looking at the turnip field, he had bent his head low to see her pale prettiness under her parasol.
I left her in the parlour and went to my room to take off my bonnet. I looked at myself in the little mirror but my reflection gave me scant joy. If Harry preferred sugar and cream then my clear strong beauty would help me little. My green eyes looked blankly back at me, dark with desire. I could not believe, I could not make my mind believe, that any man would refuse me if I set my heart on him. I sighed and pressed my forehead against the cool glass and longed and longed for Harry.
My skirts hissed as I turned from my room and went downstairs. Celia might not want his love, but she had it. And while I flinched at the sight of his courtesy to her and his gentle words to her as she sat sipping tea, it was worse to be in my room alone, knowing that downstairs he was beside her on the sofa. I might spend more hours with him but never, never could I sit, my eyes downcast, and feel his gaze scanning my face. Never could I look up in the delicious certainty that my eyes would meet his. We were much together, but our magical moments were few. We were always interrupted; Mama was always coming in and out and her eyes were sharp on her beloved son.
At the turn of the stairs I paused. Some careless maid must have left the back-stair door open and one of the stable cats had sauntered in and was sitting, proud as punch, in the first-floor corridor. Mama was ill whenever she was in a room with a cat and it was a house rule that all the stable cats were locked firmly out. I should have to rush this one back to the yard and then air the corridor, or she would have one of her painful gasping attacks when she could not breathe and her face went from white to yellow. Her heart was delicate and last time she had suffered an attack the London specialist had warned her most strongly against risking another. So the rule against cats was rigidly enforced and I should save someone a dismissal if I got the animal away before Mama came up to change.
But as I went towards it something made me pause. And then I stopped stock-still. I had no idea in my head, nor the shadow of a plan. But my passion for Harry moved me as if I had no will of my own. I was in the grip of such a longing to be alone with him that my aching sensuous body moved as if of its own volition. I feared Mama’s sharp eyes, her instinctive knowledge of me. The way she could almost smell my warm sighs. The cat’s eyes met mine, green to green, with a key to Mama’s absence as clear as a spoken word between us. Then my hand was on the latch of her bedroom door and the door yielded to my half-conscious touch. Like some obedient familiar the cat stretched and walked, tail proudly high, into the master bedroom and I shut the door behind it. I still could not be sure what I had done. I still could not have said whether I had let the cat in, or if the cat had let itself in with my hand only opening the door. Cat, Mama, Harry and I seemed caught in a web of someone else’s spinning. I was as unthinking as the cat itself. I went down to the parlour with my face as clear and calm as the Fenny on a summer’s day, and my gaze as opaque as the cat’s green eyes in my delicate mama’s bedroom.
I sat beside Celia and even accompanied her on the piano and sang a little duet with her, her thin warble keeping my richer voice more or less in key. Then Harry and she sang a folk song and I took the moment to excuse myself from the parlour and go back upstairs.
The blessed thing had made puddles all over the floor which I had to wipe up. But it had curled up on Mama’s bed and sunned itself on the pillow where her head would lie that night. I picked it up by the scruff of its neck and swept down the back stairs with it and set it on its feet outside the stable door. It gazed at me unwinkingly as if it knew we shared a secret – a discreet conspirator.
We retired early that night but I was disturbed around midnight by the sound of a door banging and running feet. Mama’s maid was probably carrying her a hot posset from the kitchen and a warming pan for her chilled feet. I half thought about getting up to see if I could help her, but my bed was too warm and I was too sleepy to move. Even as I thought I really should go to her, I fell asleep.
When I visited her in the morning the blinds were down and the room reeked of camphor and lavender water. She lay absolutely still on the great bed, her face white on the pillows where the cat had slept and licked its matted dirty fur.
‘I am so sorry, dear, but I cannot speak. I feel so ill, so very ill,’ said Mama in a thread of a voice. ‘Please tell Harry not to be concerned. I shall be better soon.’
I gave a small murmur of sympathy and bent over and kissed her. Her face was strained with pain and she was as white as her sheets. My own head ached in sympathy when I saw the skin drawn tight across her forehead, and my own heart thudded in fear when I heard how her breath rasped and saw her lips tremble. But my eyes gave away nothing, like the cat’s. I had planned nothing. I was guilty of no premeditated crime. The deceiving, unreliable old gods of the land had set magic at work on Wideacre and all I could do was to follow blindly wherever they were leading me. The insistent pull of my longing for Harry had brought the cat to wait for me outside my mother’s bedroom. Now she struggled for breath in a darkened room. Her pain made me ill. Ill with sympathy for her, and ill with anxiety on my own account.
‘Mama,’ I said weakly. I needed a smile from her to reassure me that this was only a passing illness. That although she looked as white as death she was still breathing, her fluttering heart was still working. She would be recovered in a few days, she would still have time to love me. She might still turn from her adoration of Harry and learn to value me. I might still become her beloved, her perfect child.
She opened her eyes wearily and saw my anxious face.
‘It is all right, Beatrice,’ she said with a hint of impatience. ‘Go to your breakfast and go out if you wish. I only need rest.’
I heard her tone of dismissal and it hurt me, as she was still able to hurt me. She turned her face away from me without the smile that I was waiting for. There was no need for me to stay. I closed her bedroom door behind me with the slightest of clicks and turned my thoughts from her all that day.
In her absence that afternoon, Harry led me into dinner and for the first time in our lives we faced each other at the head and foot of the candle-lit dinner table and dined alone. We spoke in hushed voices. Although Mama’s room was too far away to be disturbed by our talk, the murmur emphasized our privacy in the quiet house, the glow of the room a little island of peace and contentment in the darkened house on the dark land. I sat with Harry as he drank his port, and when he had finished we went to the parlour together. We played cards until Stride brought the tea table in. When I passed Harry his teacup our fingers touched, and I smiled at his touch but I did not tremble. Then we sat in companionable silence before the fire. When he glanced up from watching the burning logs in the grate, he smiled at me and I smiled back without a shadow of need.
It was an evening like an island of peace in a fast-flowing river of desire. We were tired and quiet like two children at the end of a happy, busy day. With no other person calling Harry’s attention from me, with no other person frightening me with the prospect of a loss of love, I was able to sit and smile and dream. And I was free at last from need. I went to bed with a chaste, fraternal kiss on my forehead and wanted nothing more. I slept soundly that night with no ache of desire and no confusing dreams of longing. I was secure at last in his affection and undivided attention and that seemed to me then so much. It even, for that one magic, easy night, seemed enough.
The next day was so lovely we decided to make a holiday of it and we rode out together up to the downs. My mourning was at last reduced and I had ordered a pale grey riding habit which suited me well. The underskirt was a soft grey worsted and the smart little jacket was grey velvet. With a matching grey velvet cap on my head, I felt I could stay in second mourning for years. Nothing in bright colours could set off my figure better.
On the top of the downs the wind was stronger and bowled my cap away so Harry and I rode a race for it. He won. In truth I reined in and let him win, and he leaned low in his saddle and scooped it up on his riding crop. He cantered back to me and presented it with a flourish. I smiled with all my heart in my eyes.
The horses walked shoulder to shoulder on a long rein along the old drovers’ way across the top of the downs and we looked south to glimpse the sea. Larks struggled up and up and up, singing out their achievement, then closed their tiny wings and plummeted to the earth. In the woods a pair of cuckoos called amorously, irresponsibly, to each other, and everywhere there was the lazy rasp-rasp of grasshoppers and the whirring drone of bees.
I was alone on my land with the man I needed, and he had eyes only for me. Today Harry was nobody’s son and nobody’s fiancé. He was alone with me and my jealous, hungry heart could be still, knowing that all day and all evening we should see no one else. No one would come into the rooms when I was longing to be alone with him. His head would lift and his eyes would smile for no one but me.
The horses rubbed shoulders as they walked, and we talked together of Harry’s latest book about farming and my comments on what might work and what would not. We spoke of the house and of the changes that would come in October. Then, without prompting, Harry spoke of Celia.
‘She is so pure, Beatrice, so innocent. I respect her so much,’ he began. ‘A man would be a brute indeed to try to force her in any way. She is like a beautiful piece of Dresden china. Don’t you think so?’
‘Oh, yes,’ I said with ready sympathy. ‘She’s as beautiful as an angel and so sweet. A little shy perhaps?’ I let my voice make a gentle question of the statement.
‘And nervous,’ Harry agreed. ‘With that brute of a stepfather she can have no idea of what a loving marriage can be.’
‘Such a shame,’ I said carefully. ‘Such a shame that such a lovely girl, that your future wife, should be so cool.’
Harry looked quickly at me, his blue eyes piercing.
‘It’s what I fear,’ he said frankly. The horses ambled into a sheltered little dell and stopped to crop the springy downs turf. At our backs the ground rose steeply and below us a hazel coppice shielded us from the north. Sitting there we were screened from everyone and yet could see half of England looking west. Harry jumped down from the saddle and tied his horse. I made no move, but sat idly in the saddle and let my horse graze on a loosened rein.
There was a singing in my ears as sweet and insistent as the lark, and I knew it was the magic of Wideacre and the hum of the spinning wheel spinning the thread of our lives together.
‘You are a man of strong passions,’ I said.
Harry’s profile, as he stood at my horse’s head and looked away from me over our land, was as clear and as strong as a Greek statue. My body ached for him, but I kept my voice steady and low.
‘I can’t help it,’ he said and his cheeks flushed red under the golden colour of his skin.
‘I understand,’ I said. ‘It is the same for me. It is in our blood, I think.’
Harry turned quickly to look at me. I was sweating with nervousness like a mare put to the stallion. I could feel the grey gown damp under my arms. But my face was calm and clear.
‘A lady can be a perfect lady,’ I said. ‘Her public behaviour can be meticulous, and yet she can feel desire when she loves and when she has chosen well.’
Harry was staring at me. I could find no words to go on. I merely looked back at him with my passion and longing written all over my face certain that he would see the truth of what was between us.
‘You have a fiancé?’ he asked in amazement.
‘No!’ I exploded. ‘And I never wish to have one!’
I sprang from the saddle and reached out my arms to him. He caught me as I slid down and I grasped the lapels of his coat and nearly wept in anger and frustration.
‘Oh, Harry!’ I said, and my voice broke on a sob and then I could not stop crying. The ache in my heart was too strong, the singing in my ears was deafening. ‘Oh, Harry! Oh, Harry, my love!’
He froze as if my words had turned him to stone. But I could not stop weeping. I was ruined and he would never love me, but I could not contain myself. I had watched and waited for his touch so long that now his arms were around me I could not play the pretty maiden like Celia. I could not stop myself from clinging to his jacket as if I were drowning. I banged my forehead against the muscled strength of his chest and moaned aloud. He still did not move, but his arms around my waist were as tight as a vice. My sobs quietened and I bit my cheeks to force myself to silence. Slowly, painfully, I pulled a little away from him and raised my eyes to see his face.
Harry’s eyes were dark with desire and his heart under my hands was thudding. His mouth was trembling, just slightly, and he gazed into my face as if he would eat me alive.
‘It is a sin,’ he said in a low voice.
The world was spinning around me. I could hardly hear him; I could hardly find words to reply to him.
‘It is not,’ I said immediately. ‘It is not, Harry. It is right. You can feel it is right. It is no sin. It is no sin. It is not.’
His head came down to me and my eyes half shut in expectation of his kiss. He was so close I could feel his breath on my face and I opened my mouth and breathed in the air from his mouth in a little shudder of longing. But still he would not kiss me.
‘It is a sin,’ he said softly.
‘Worse sin to be married for ever to a woman who is as cold as ice,’ I murmured. ‘Worse to live with a wife who cannot love you, who does not know how to love, while I wear out my days in yearning for you. Oh, pity me, Harry! If you cannot love me, then pity me.’
‘I can love you,’ he contradicted me, his voice a husky rumble. ‘Oh, Beatrice, if you knew! But it is a sin.’
He was holding on to those four words as a talisman to keep his lovely head from coming down that fraction lower to crush his mouth on mine. I could feel his body was taut with desire and yet he had himself under control. He loved me, he desired me, and yet he would not touch me. I could bear his closeness and the half-inch between our mouths no more. I lunged up to him and bit him, as hard as I could, on his teasing, tormenting mouth. My riding whip was still looped on my wrist and I slid my hand from his chest and caught it dagger-like and stabbed it into his thigh.
‘Harry, I will kill you,’ I said and I meant it.
His mouth was bleeding and he took one hand from my waist to put the back of his fingers to his lips. He brought his hand away and saw it was stained with blood. Then he gave a great groan and flung his full weight on top of me. He ripped at my riding habit and as the buttons at the neck parted he moaned and buried his face in my breasts, kissing hard, and biting without mercy. I dragged his breeches down to his knees and he pushed up my skirts and petticoats.
Still half dressed and too desperate to care we rolled together on the grass as Harry thrust with impatient, unskilled stabs at my body, thumping his hardness into my thighs, at my back, against my wet softness until there was that one second of terrifying pleasure as frightening as falling from a tree, as painful as a knife blow and he found the sweet hidden secret place and pushed in, like a fist through curtains. For a split second we both froze still, stunned by the sensation, then he shook my body like a terrier holding a rat, and in seconds I was screaming. My legs and arms grabbed him to me and we writhed like frantic adders. With a great bellow Harry collapsed and lay still and I, hungry, greedy, insatiable, arched my back on the soft downs turf and rubbed and rubbed against him till I gave a great sigh of release and lay still.
Slowly I opened my eyes and saw Harry’s head against our blue sky and our larks singing up and up and up. The Squire of Wideacre lay heavily on me. His seed was in my body, his land beneath our coupled bodies; our grass was in one of my clenched hands, and the little meadow flowers and herbs drenched with my wetness beneath me. At last, at last, I had Wideacre and the Master. Our land beneath me, the Squire inside me. I gave a shuddering sob. The ache of longing I had carried with me all my life was gone, and my jealous anxiety had finally released me.
Harry tensed at the sound of my sob and rolled off me, his face a picture of guilt and misery.
‘My God, Beatrice, what can I say?’ he said helplessly. He sat up and buried his face in his hands. His shoulders sagged, his head bowed. I sat beside him and pulled my gown together at the neck, but not too close. I put a gentle hand on his shoulder. My body was still trembling with the shock of Harry’s rough loving; my mind was too dazed with delight to be able to think what was wrong with him.
Harry lifted his sad face at the touch of my hand and looked at me in abject misery.
‘My God, Beatrice! I must have hurt you so badly! And I love you so! What can I say? I am so ashamed!’
For a moment I gazed at him blankly, and then his words penetrated my dazed mind and I realized he was full of guilt at what seemed to him some kind of rape.
‘It is my fault,’ he said. ‘I have longed for you ever since the day when I rescued you from that brute. But God forgive me, Beatrice, I have kept seeing you in my mind as I saw you then, naked on the floor. Oh, that I should have saved you from him to ruin you myself!’ He dropped his head into his hands again in despair. ‘Beatrice, before heaven I never meant to,’ he said muffled. ‘I am a villain, but God knows not such a villain as to plan this thing. I did not dream such a thing could happen between brother and sister. I am totally to blame and I do not shirk my guilt. But, Beatrice, I did not know such a thing was possible.’
I put my hand tenderly on his silly head.
‘You are not totally to blame,’ I said gently. ‘And there is no blame. You have been dreaming of me, and I have been dreaming of you. There is no need for guilt.’
Harry raised his tear-filled eyes to my face with a glimmer of hope.
‘It is a sin though,’ he said uncertainly.
I shrugged, and at the movement my dress parted and one silky shoulder and the curve of my breast caught Harry’s gaze.
‘I cannot feel it is a sin,’ I said. ‘I know when I am doing wrong and this does not seem to me wrong. It seems to me where I should be, where I have been going towards all my life. I cannot see this as something wrong.’
‘It is wrong though,’ said Harry. He could not take his eyes from the gap in my gown. ‘It is wrong,’ he repeated. ‘And one cannot say something is not a sin just because it feels right …’
His voice, the voice of the authoritative know-all male tailed off as I lay back and shut my eyes. Harry leaned beside me, supported on one elbow. ‘You are not thinking logically, Beatrice …’ he said, and he said no more. He leaned forward and kissed my eyelids as gently as a downland butterfly alighting on a flower.
I made not a move; I barely sighed. I lay as still as a leaf as he traced a line of gentle kisses down my cheek, down my throat, and down the smooth flatness between my breasts. He pushed at the gown with his forehead and rubbed his face, as gentle now as he had been rough before, along the swell of my breasts and then took the crowning nipple in his mouth.
‘It is a sin,’ he said muffled.
His eyes were shut so he could not see me smile.
I lay still with the sun on my eyelids and felt Harry’s weight shift over to come on me again, and felt his insistent hardness. He might have all the resources of education in rhetoric but I had the high singing magic of Wideacre, and the easy pull of two young bodies. We moved together and there was a spark of pleasure like lightning before a storm as we touched, but came no closer. We rubbed like courting otters; face to face, body to body, legs entwined, biding our time.
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Philippa Gregory
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Beatrice Lacey, daughter of Wideacre Hall, will not accept society’s rules that women cannot inherit…The internationally bestselling debut from the author of The Other Boleyn Girl and Three Sisters, Three Queens.Wideacre Hall, set in the heart of the English countryside, is the ancestral home that Beatrice Lacey loves. Built from yellow stone, facing due south and surrounded by the rich woodlands and rolling downs of Sussex, it has been in her family for generations. But as a woman in England in the 1770s she has no right of inheritance; only a loveless arranged marriage lies ahead. Beautiful, sensual and passionate, Beatrice sets out to pursue her own goal: control over Wideacre – at any cost.Yet even as her scheming succeeds, Beatrice is haunted by the one person alive who fully understands her obsession and knows her capacity to let nothing – and no-one – stand in her way.The 30th anniversary edition, with new foreword by the author.