Wideacre

by Philippa Gregory

  He knew what I meant. Mama glanced curiously from his face to mine.

  ‘Celia has many years ahead of her to learn to share Harry’s tastes,’ she said gently. ‘I am sure she will do her very best to please him and make him happy.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ I said in ready agreement. ‘I am sure she will make us all happy. She is such a sweet good girl; she will be a marvellous wife.’

  The thought of a lifetime with a ‘marvellous wife’ cast a shadow over Harry’s face. I took a gamble on Mama’s innocence and rose from my seat and walked to the head of the table. To Mama’s view from the foot I was prettily coaxing my dear brother, but he and I knew as I came near him the speed of his pulse was raised and, at my touch and at the smell of my warm perfumed skin, his breathing became faster. I kept my back to Mama and put my cheek against his face. I felt his skin grow hot under mine and I knew that my touch, the glimpse of my breasts at the top of my gown, were winning the battle for me against Harry’s weathercock feelings. There was never any need to argue with Harry. He was lost at the first reminder of pleasure.

  ‘Do take me with you, Harry,’ I pleaded, in a low coaxing tone. ‘I promise I will be good.’ Hidden from our mother, I breathed a kiss high on his cheek near his ear. He could stand no more and gently pushed me from him. I saw the muscles around his eyes were tense with self-control.

  ‘Of course, Beatrice,’ he said courteously. ‘If that is what Celia desires, I can think of no more agreeable arrangement. I shall write her a note and join you and Mama in the parlour for tea.’

  He got himself quickly out of the room to cool off and left me alone with Mama. She was peeling a peach and did not look at me. I slipped back into my seat and cut a few grapes from the fat cluster with a pair of delicate silver scissors.

  ‘Are you sure you should go?’ Mama asked evenly. She kept her eyes on her neat hands.

  ‘Why not?’ I asked idly. But my nerves were alert.

  She groped for a good reason and could not answer me at once.

  ‘Are you anxious at being left alone?’ I asked. ‘We shall not be gone very long.’

  ‘I do think it would be easier if you stayed,’ she concurred. ‘But I dare say I can manage for six or eight weeks. It is not Wideacre …’ She let the sentence hang, and I did not help her to complete it.

  ‘Perhaps they need time to be alone together …’ she started tentatively.

  ‘Whatever for?’ I said coolly, gambling on her belief in my virginal innocence. Gambling also on her own experience of marriage, which had not included courtship as a preliminary, nor a honeymoon as an introduction, but had been a business arrangement contracted for profit and concluded without emotion, except mutual dislike.

  ‘Perhaps you and Harry would do well to be apart …” she said, even more hesitantly.

  ‘Mama,’ I said challengingly with my brave courage high. ‘Whatever are you saying?’

  Her head jerked up at the strength in my voice and her pale eyes looked half frightened.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said, almost whispering. ‘Nothing, child. Nothing. It is just that sometimes I am so afraid for you — for your extreme passions. First you adored your father to such a height of feeling, and then you transferred that affection to Harry. All the time you will do nothing but roam around Wideacre as if you were a ghost haunting the place. It frightens me to see you so obsessed with Wideacre, so constantly with Harry. I just want you to have a normal, ordinary girlhood.’

  I hesitated. ‘My girlhood is normal and ordinary, Mama,’ I said mildly. ‘It is not like yours because times are changing. But even more so because you were reared in town whereas I have had a country childhood. But I am no different from girls of my own age.’

  She remained uneasy, but she would never have the courage to look into the pictures she had of Harry and me, to see clearly what was taking place before her frightened half-shut eyes.

  ‘I dare say you are not …’ she said. ‘I cannot judge. We see so few young people. Your papa had little time for county society and we live so withdrawn … I can hardly judge.’

  ‘Don’t be distressed, Mama,’ I said soothingly, my voice warm with assumed affection. ‘I am not obsessed with Wideacre, for, see, I am leaving in mid-autumn, one of the loveliest seasons. I am not possessive of Harry for I am happy at his marriage and I am making close friends with Celia. There is nothing to fear.’

  Mama had neither wits sharp enough nor instincts true enough to filter truth from lies. In any case, if the truth of my relationship with Harry had stared her in the face she would have died rather than see it. So she swallowed her last slice of peach and gave me an apologetic smile.

  ‘I am foolish to worry so,’ she said. ‘But I do feel the responsibility of you and Harry heavily on me. Without your papa you two have only me to guide you and I am anxious that ours shall be a truly happy home.’

  ‘Indeed it is,’ I said firmly. ‘And when Celia lives here with us all it will be even happier.’

  Mama rose to her feet and we walked together to the door. I opened it for her in a pretty gesture of courtesy and she paused to give me a gentle kiss on the cheek.

  ‘God bless you, my dear, and keep you safe,’ she said tenderly, and I knew she was reproaching herself for her lack of warmth towards me, and for the unease she felt when she saw me with my arms around my brother’s neck.

  ‘Thank you, Mama,’ I said, and the gratitude in my voice was not assumed. I was truly moved by her attempt to do her duty by me, and to love me into the bargain. She had hurt me, and her preference for Harry turned my heart to ice towards her. But I could recognize her honest, honourable attempt to care for Harry and me equally.

  ‘I’ll order tea,’ she said and left the room.

  She left me beside the dining table, turning over a conflict of feelings. If only life was as my mama perceived it, how simple it would be. If Harry and I had an easy, sinless working partnership, if Harry’s marriage was a real one of love, if my future could be a happy one in a new home with a loving husband — how easy it would be to live without sin. Then the door opened and Harry came in, his letter to Celia half finished in his hand.

  ‘Beatrice,’ he murmured. We faced each other at the foot of the polished table, our faces reflected in the dark wood. He had the face of an angel, and the shadowy reflection only made his clear-cut features more luminous. As I glanced down at the table I saw my own face, pale as a ghost with my white powdered hair piled on my head, regal as a queen. But my eyes were large and serious, and my mouth was sad. We appeared what we were: a weak boy and a proud and passionate young woman. But for that moment we could have halted the process we had, half consciously, started. I was filled with a sense of peace at my mother’s gentle blessing, at her humility and at her own confused quest for proper behaviour in a world where sin was in every corner of her house, half sensed, half understood, but secretly threatening. Watching her struggle to find the courage to confront the truth, her struggle to love me, I saw the pattern of another sort of life, one where people might choose renunciation rather than grabbing for pleasure. Where one might count the cost in moral terms, and decide it was too high. Where one might search for goodness rather than gratification.

  But the vision was a brief one.

  ‘I’ll come to your room tonight,’ said Harry urgently. Then he paused and glanced curiously at my face. ‘You do wish it?’

  I hesitated. The refusal was on my lips and I believe that the first refusal would have been the hardest. Then perhaps we could have left those two evil days behind us. But then I caught sight of the letter to Celia. The page was open and I could see the first words written in Harry’s boyish hand. ‘My good angel,’ it said. He called her his good angel even when he was hot with desire for me. And she would come into our house — my house — and be the angel of Wideacre while I would be married off and banished.

  Not only Harry but Celia, Mama and I were all trapped in the roles we had to play. A second’s hesitation from m
e and Celia would win Harry and Wideacre for ever, as surely as if she had plotted and schemed against me. She could take Wideacre from me without exertion, as a tribute to her sweetness and kindness. While I could hold it only by striving and planning and struggling. She was his good angel, and I, in the battle for ownership, was forced to be Lucifer.

  I shrugged. My passion for Wideacre had brought me this far. It might take me further yet. In any case, it was not in my nature to say no to Harry when he stood there with a love letter to my rival in his hand, and his eyes dark with desire for me.

  I walked through the doorway and let my body brush briefly against him as I passed. ‘At midnight,’ I said. ‘Come to my room.’

  I heard a sigh, almost like a growl, as my hair touched his cheek and then he followed me like an obedient puppy to the brightly lit parlour, to the cheerful fire, and to Mama with her loving smile for both of us, her good children.

  That night I lay in Harry’s arms and let him love me as if we could hold back the morning. My willingness and passion excited him and kept him from sleep for hour after heady hour. And after he had loved me we dozed and then woke, and loved again. He did not creep back to his own chill bedroom until the first notes of the chorus of summer birdsong were starting in the rose garden, and when I could hear, muffled by the servants’ door, the clatter of water jugs and milk pails and the kitchen fire being lit.

  When I was alone in my narrow bed I did not sleep but propped myself up on the pillows to look out over the garden. I felt physically sated, even physically exhausted, for we had kissed and rolled and embraced and loved all night. But I did not feel the deep calmness that I used to feel after as little as ten minutes with Ralph. Harry might fill me with desire, he might give me hours of pleasure, but he never left me at peace. With Harry I always had a lingering sense that I had to stay alert. With Ralph, the gypsy’s son, I had been a sensual equal. But Harry owned the land, and I could never sleep easy beside him.

  Now my plans seemed to have brought me to some secure harbour. The wedding would go ahead and both bride and groom counted on me as their main friend and ally. With them using me as confidante and messenger, I would be able to keep them estranged for ever. The only danger to my future I could foresee was the possibility of Harry having a son and heir. I could tolerate sharing the estate with Harry, but I could not have borne the sight of Celia’s brat growing up on my land. While Harry feck-lessly passed over to me all the management and power on the estate I could feel myself a joint owner, but once he had a son he would start planning for the future on his account — and I could not have borne that.

  But it seemed so unlikely. Celia, who already trembled and turned pale at the very thought of the nightmare of marital duties, seemed unlikely to be a lusty breeder. I could not imagine them making love more than a few token occasions. I could not imagine Celia conceiving easily, like healthy peasant stock.

  And I was not now jealous of Celia. I should not mind when she preceded me into the drawing room and into dinner as, following the conventions, I stepped back for her and then for Mama. I should not mind because I would know, and everyone would know, who was the true power on Wideacre. Ours is a small county and everyone knows everyone else’s business. All our workers had long acknowledged me as the real force on the estate and all our tenants habitually consulted me first. While Harry had spent much time at Havering Hall this spring I had ordered fences to be repaired, entire cottages to be rebuilt, without his even noticing. The whole county knew that I ruled.

  It would not take them long to realize that I would not release my control over the house to the new bride either. I controlled the purse strings at Wideacre and cook, butler and chief groom all brought their monthly accounts to me. There would be no extra expenditure made in the house or stables which was not first agreed by Miss Beatrice. If Celia tried to do so much as plan a dinner party without my knowledge she would find the cook apologetic, but reluctant. The wine could not be brought from the cellar, the lamb could not be butchered on the Home Farm without Miss Beatrice’s say-so. Celia would discover — if she did not guess already — that her role in the household would be a very limited one.

  What she might do, with my blessing, was to take from me the tedious time-wasting business of ladies’ social calls and tea parties. No work on the land was so urgent that I could escape my duty as the daughter of the house to accompany Mama on one of these ‘treats’ at least once a week. We were ‘at home’ to callers every Wednesday afternoon, and my week seemed punctuated by those dreary afternoons when, dressed in silk or velvet, depending on the season, I sat behind the tea urn and poured tea and smiled and talked of the weather or the new play at Chichester, or the vicar’s sermon, or a pending marriage.

  Every Wednesday was overshadowed by the prospect of an afternoon that made my idle legs ache with boredom, as if I had the ague.

  ‘Sit down, Beatrice, you are so restless,’ Mama would say to me when the last nodding bonnet had driven away down the drive.

  ‘I am stiff with sitting, I am aching with sitting,’ I would reply desperately. And she would sigh, and look at me with irritated incomprehension. And I would throw on a shawl and walk until I was under the cover of the wood, and then I would lift my skirts and pelt along the woodland paths until the blood was back in my cheeks and the clean air back in my lungs and my legs no longer felt like lead. Then I would saunter home, my bonnet swinging on its ribbons in my hand, my head tipped back to watch the interlaced branches over my head, and my ears rinsed clean of the chatter and full of birdsong.

  Celia could have Wednesday afternoons with my blessing. She could have Sunday afternoons, too. After we had attended Matins and eaten a substantial Sunday dinner, it was Harry’s privilege to go to the library and supposedly read serious books — actually he used to put his feet up on the desk and doze in his chair, while in the parlour I sat ramrod-backed in a straight chair and read to Mama from a book of sermons. Celia could have the sermons, and much good might they do her.

  All I cared for in county social life were impromptu occasions which happened when there were enough young people to roll back the rugs, and beg an aunt or an indulgent mother to let them dance. I liked the assemblies at Chichester we attended when lambing was done and the roads became easier. And I loved the easy male camaraderie out hunting, and the dances after dinner in winter. But outside those times, when my feet would tap and I would dance with anyone, anyone at all, for the sheer pleasure of swirling round the room, I could do without a social life. I followed my papa. My home was all I needed, and Wideacre could be represented by quiet, pretty little Celia at every county tea party from now till Doomsday with my blessing.

  I should have been less easy at the promotion Celia would gain on marriage if I had not seen, without vanity but with clear eyes, that I was far the prettier. Celia was a lovely girl, brown eyes as soft as pansies, skin like cream. But set beside me she became invisible. That summer I glowed with beauty and sensuality. I never walked down a Chichester street but I felt people watching me — women as well as men — and watching me with pleasure in my easy swift stride, in the way my copper hair caught the light in its dancing, wavy ripple, and in my bright face and easy laugh.

  If I had lived the life my mama wanted, I should have been as proud as any silly peacock in a dry aviary, for I should have had nothing to think about but how I looked and what colours best became me. But leading the life I had chosen, it mattered less to me whether my hair was right or my eyes bright or my skin clear than whether I could keep a gang of reapers in line. And I prized my eyes less for their clear lovely greenness, and more because one hard look from them could have a lazy ploughboy turned around and speeded up in one second.

  But I should have been a saint in heaven if I had not watched Celia narrowly, for she was my rival. And I should have been an angel indeed if I had not looked forward to her wedding day when I was to stand beside her as bride’s attendant, at a time when we would be side by side and I w
ould shine her down.

  I would look well in the grey silk Celia had chosen. My hair would be piled high except for one negligent curl, which would trail over my bare shoulder. It would be powdered with white, white powder, which set off the bright green of my eyes and the warm living tints of my skin. The cross old dressmaker, brought from London to Havering Hall for the final fittings, actually gasped when I came out of Celia’s dressing room to stand before the glass in the dress.

  ‘Miss Lacey, you will be the loveliest lady there,’ she said.

  I gazed at the pier glass in Celia’s bedroom. The gown was watered silk, catching the light as I moved, yet as dully smooth as pewter. You could not look at it and not want to touch me. It clung to me — and as I was mother-naked underneath every movement I made let the rich fabric shout, ‘Look! Look! Look!’ I really was very, very lovely. And I was glad to be so lovely.

  The grey stomacher was embroidered with tiny seed pearls and tied so tight that I could scarcely breathe. Its pressure on my breasts made them flat so they overflowed in two warm curves at the low neck line. The silk overskirt parted to show the underskirt, which was not of the usual thick quilt. I had deliberately chosen a silk of fine light weaving and I could feel its smooth, satiny texture against my bare legs as I walked.

  But my complacent smile was wiped off my face as the door to the closet at the side of Celia’s bedroom opened and she came out to stand beside me at the pier glass. In her wedding dress of white silk with a silver thread of pattern, she looked like a fairytale princess. No man could look at me and not feel hot desire. But no man or woman could look at Celia and not love her. Her waist, as slim as my own, was enhanced by the pointed triangle of the stomacher, and her slim back was hinted by the straight fall of silk at the back of the gown that swayed, tantalizingly, when she moved. Her soft brown hair was piled above her face. She had not powdered it today, but I could imagine that when she was powdered and curled she would set any man’s heart racing, not only with desire, but with tenderness, too.