Wideacre

by Philippa Gregory

  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 untamed gypsy tribe. 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 gypsy 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 fe
ar, 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

  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 gar
dens 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 élite 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.