Wideacre

by Philippa Gregory

  ‘Watch Mama,’ I said to Harry, who stood, like an overstaying guest, at the parlour door. He nodded, in dumb misery, and I waited until he had climbed the stairs to Mama’s room and shut the door, and then, for the second time that day, I gathered every scrap of courage I had, and opened the library door to face my husband.

  He was back where he had been all day. But he had a fresh bottle of whisky gripped between his knees, a fresh glass of the amber liquid in his fist, his filthy boots up on the window-seat cushion, his head rolling on the armchair wings.

  ‘What could have caused Mama’s attack?’ I asked, approaching the chair lit only by icy moonlight pouring in from the eerie silver landscape.

  He looked at me, his face as puzzled as a small child who wakens in a darkened room and does not know where he is.

  ‘I do not know,’ he said. ‘She keeps saying, over and over, “Beatrice” and “Harry” as if you two could help her. But I do not know what she means. Nor why she should keep saying, “I only came to fetch my novel.” Do you understand that, Beatrice?’

  ‘No,’ I said, hoping that my lie, my certain lie, would carry the weight I needed. ‘I do not know, John. Something has obviously upset her, but I do not know what it can be. I do not know what she was reading.’

  He turned his face from me then, and I knew that he had forgotten his patient and remembered his wife.

  ‘Go now, Beatrice,’ he said piteously. ‘You know I long to forgive you and make all well between us, but I am exhausted. I have cared for your mama as well as I am able. Her condition is stable; there is nothing more I can do for her tonight. I promise you she will live. I promise you I will speak to you tomorrow. But right now I feel that I must be alone. I must mourn. I came home a man full of dreams and I cannot tolerate the sudden change. Everything in my life is upside down. Give me a little time. Just give me tonight and I will be myself again.’

  I nodded, and bent to kiss his forehead.

  ‘I am sorry,’ I said, and I told no lie. ‘There is much that I have done wrong — how much you may never know. But I am sorry for the grief I have caused you. I love you, you know that.’

  His hand touched mine, but he did not take my fingers in his firm grip. ‘I know it, Beatrice. Now grant me a little time alone. I am drunk and tired and I cannot talk.’

  I bent and kissed him again, and then I walked as silently as I could from the library. At the door I paused and looked back at him. He was in his own private world of drink and fatigue. As I watched he poured himself another glass of whisky and took a deep draught, holding the spirit in his mouth to savour it. The world seemed very unfair and bitter to me then. If only there could have been a different path to Wideacre.

  But I could not sit in a library and say I needed time to think. Upstairs my mother moaned on her bed and my brother listened in mounting fear. Outside the land called and called for a clear master to rule it. I could never rest. There was always work to do for me.

  Harry was sitting with Mama, his face as white as hers.

  ‘Beatrice!’ he said, as soon as I entered the room. He drew me away from the bed and spoke in a frantic undertone. ‘Beatrice, Mama knows! She saw us! She is talking in her sleep, and she knows! Whatever shall we do?’

  ‘Oh, stop it, Harry!’ I said abruptly, too exhausted to soothe his conscience while my husband needed to rest from the sight of me, and my mama’s heart stopped at my approach as if I were an angel of death.

  ‘Stop it, Harry! It is all bad enough without you playing queen o’ the may.’

  Harry gaped at me and at the hard tone of my voice, and I pushed him ungently from the room. ‘One of us has to sit with Mama and give her laudanum,’ I said tersely. ‘I’ll stay up with her till three or four, then you can do the rest of the night. Go now, and sleep.’

  He would have argued, but I gave him another two-fisted shove. ‘Oh, go, Harry!’ I said. ‘I am sick of this night, and I am sick of you. Go and sleep now, so that I can sleep later, and in the morning we will find some way out of this coil. But for pity’s sake go now.’

  Some tone of desperation in my voice cut through Harry’s old-maidish flappings, and he kissed my clenched fists without another word, and disappeared down the corridor to his bedroom. I turned on my heel and went wearily back into Mama’s bedroom like a prisoner walking to the scaffold.

  She was tossing on her pillows and moaning in horror. Now and again she would say ‘Harry!’ or ‘Beatrice!’ or ‘No! No!’ but the laudanum kept her from saying more. It was no pleasant vigil I spent there beside the shadowy bed. Downstairs my husband dozed and drank rather than look at me. Along the corridor Harry crept into the sheets longing for Celia’s sinless honest warmth. In her bed my mama’s heart struggled to keep beating despite its deadly knowledge. Only I was awake that night. Like a witch I sat in the moonlight and in the shadows and watched the silvery light make a magic path across the floor from my chair to Mama’s bed. I gathered power around me from the sleeping black land outside the windows, and I waited for the moment when it seemed right to move.

  The moon’s slow pace across the clear sky made a river of light on the floorboards linking Mama and me for the last time. Then I trod lightly down that eerie track and looked at her. She stirred as if she felt my green-eyed gaze on her, but she did not wake. I watched her pale face and heard her rattling, gasping breath, and smiled a gentle smile of certainty. I checked the clock, in another hour she would be ready for her next dose. I would wake Harry.

  I slid like a ghost from the room to tap at his door, but it was Celia, not Harry, who opened it.

  ‘Harry is asleep,’ she said in a whisper. ‘He told me that your mama is ill. Can I come and sit with her?’

  I smiled like a woman possessed. It was all coming easily to my hand just as the moonlight had shown me the way to Mama’s bed.

  ‘Thank you, Celia. Thank you, my dear,’ I said gratefully. ‘I am so weary.’ I had the phial of laudanum in my hand with the little medicine glass. ‘Give her all of this in half an hour’s time,’ I said. ‘John told me exactly what to do before he went back to the library. He said to be sure she takes all of it.’

  Celia took the laudanum bottle and nodded her comprehension.

  ‘I will make sure she does,’ she said. ‘Is John still weary?’

  ‘He is rested now,’ I said. ‘He was wonderful with Mama, Harry will tell you. And so clear with his instructions!’

  Celia nodded. ‘You go and sleep now,’ she said. ‘I will call you if there is any change, but you need your rest, Beatrice. Go and sleep now, and I will give her the laudanum just as John directed.’

  I nodded my acquiescence and left Celia at Mama’s door. I went soft-footed down the stairs. I paused outside the library door to hear a stertorous breath. I pushed the door open cautiously, and went in.

  Daylight was making the windows shady grey and I could just make out the wreck of the man who had once been proud to love me. He was still in his chair, but he had vomited, staining his plum travelling jacket and his riding breeches. At some time he had smashed his glass on the stone fireplace and instead drunk from the bottle, for it was almost drained dry. It had at last put him soundly to sleep. His medical bag was tumbled on the floor beside him, the pills and the little bottles spilling out of its open mouth.

  Keeping my eyes fixed on his sprawled, sodden, stained body I held my skirts outwards and stepped backwards, slowly, slowly and silently, until I could close the door and turn the key to lock him in. I wanted no loyal housemaid or young footman cleaning up Miss Beatrice’s young husband before she saw him, to spare her pain.

  Then, my silken evening gown whispering around me, I glided through the connecting door to the west wing, to my room.

  My maid was long since abed, for I encourage no one to wait up for me past midnight. So I shifted for myself and slid out of my gown and sweaty petticoats. Half a lifetime ago, these had been pulled to my waist to enable me to couple with Harry. Now they seemed soiled
in the ancient past, and I left them: gown, stays, petticoat, stockings and all, in a heap on the dressing-room floor.

  From my cupboard I chose a light morning wrapper, as pink and promising as the rising sun, which I could see warming the rose garden. It was going to be a hot day. It was going to be a long hard day, and I would need my wits about me. The water in the ewer was cold, of course, but I splashed it on my face and all over my shivering body. Of all the people in this sleeping house I would need to be the most awake, the most alive. This day would be a trial in which my claim to Wideacre could turn on the flip of a coin. I would neglect nothing that would make me more alert, or stronger.

  I slid on the cold silk wrapper, wrapped a shawl around my shoulders, and settled in my chair to wait. It must have been about an hour since I had left Celia, but I was too wary to creep back to the main part of the house to listen. I was wise enough, and controlled enough, to sit with my feet resting on a little stool, and wait for events to turn the way I had ordered. Then I heard a door bang, and the library door rattle, and Celia’s voice sharp with fear calling for my husband.

  ‘John! John! Wake up!’

  I heard her bang the door to the west wing and I tore open my bedroom door to greet her on the stairs as if I had leaped from my bed on hearing her call.

  ‘What is it?’ I demanded.

  ‘It is Mama,’ she said desperately. ‘I gave her the laudanum as you said, and she seemed to fall asleep. But now she seems too cold, and I cannot find her pulse.’

  I held out my hands to her, and she gripped them hard, her face absurdly young and anxious, then we turned and fled down the stairs together.

  ‘John?’ I asked her.

  ‘I cannot wake him, and he seems to have locked himself in,’ she said, despairingly.

  ‘I have a spare key,’ I said, and opened the door and flung it wide so Celia could see the chaos.

  The morning light picked out the stains on John’s clothes and the splashes of vomit on the stone fireplace and on the priceless rugs. In his doze he had knocked over the final bottle and his head lay in a pool of sour-smelling whisky. The chair was kicked over, and there was manure from his boots on the window-seat cushions. My husband, the light of the healing profession, lay like a dog in his vomit, unstirring even when we erupted into the room calling his name.

  I strode over to the bell and rang a loud peal, and then picked up a jug of water and threw it into his face. He rolled his head in the wet and groaned. From the servants’ quarters I heard a clatter of pans and hurrying footsteps, and from above I heard Harry pattering barefoot down the corridor and down the stairs. He and the scullery maid arrived together.

  ‘Mama is worse, and John is drunk,’ I said to Harry, conscious that every word would be relayed to Acre village and far beyond by the girl.

  ‘Go to Mama,’ Harry said authoritatively. ‘I’ll wake John.’ He bent over my husband, and hauled him into a chair. ‘A bucket of cold water,’ he said to the girl, ‘fresh from the kitchen pump, and a couple of pints of mustard and warm water too.’

  ‘Then wake the stable lads and Stride,’ I said to her as I went towards the stairs. ‘Tell one of the lads to ride to Chichester. We need a competent doctor.’

  I ignored Celia’s gasp and went up to Mama.

  She was dead, as I knew she would be.

  She had not suffered, and I was glad of that, for Papa’s death had been hard and brutish, and Ralph had a long vigil of agony. But this last and, I hoped, final death for Wideacre had been easy drugged sleep. She was lying on her rich, lacy pillows in her fancy new white and gold bed. The drug had seen her on her way smiling at pleasant visions. Under the massive overdose given her by the loving hands of her sweet daughter-in-law she had slid away from the nightmare truth of our lives into a palace of hallucination where nothing could ever disturb her again.

  I kneeled at the bedside and put my forehead to her hand, and shed a few easy tears on the embroidered sheet.

  ‘She is gone,’ said Celia, and she knew there was no doubt.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ I said softly. ‘But so peacefully, Celia, I have to be happy she went in such peace.’

  ‘Although I ran for you and for John, I knew it was too late,’ said Celia quietly. ‘She was just like this then. I think she must have died as soon as I gave her the medicine.’

  ‘John said her heart might not survive it,’ I said. I rose to my feet and mechanically straightened the smooth covers, and then went to open the window and draw the curtains. ‘But I wish to God he had sat with her.’

  ‘Don’t blame him, Beatrice,’ said Celia, instantly tender. ‘He had a long hard journey. He could not have anticipated that your mama would become ill so suddenly. He had been all this time away, and we have been with her every day and noticed nothing. Don’t blame him.’

  ‘No.’ I turned from the window back into the shaded room. ‘No. No one is to blame. We all knew Mama’s heart was delicate. I do not blame John.’

  Around us were all the noises of Wideacre awakening, yet curiously hushed, as the servants scurried to prepare the house and pass the news among each other in shocked whispers. Celia and I closed Mama’s door, and went down to the parlour.

  ‘Coffee for you,’ said Celia tenderly, and rang the bell. As we sat in the parlour I could hear the heavy tread of Harry walking John up and down the library floor, marching him into consciousness. And then a muffled sound of choking as he forced the mustard and water down John’s throat, and then a horrid retching noise as John vomited on the emetic and brought up neat whisky. Celia grimaced and we moved to the window seat where we could hear the morning birdsong instead.

  It was a perfect, breathless morning with the smell of the roses and the meadows hanging on the warm air like a message of renewal. The fresh leaves of the beeches, still silvered with dew, shimmered in the wood, and in the valleys that intersect the green horizon of the downs the mist was rolling like pale gauze. It was a land worth anything, any price. And I linked my fingers around my cup of coffee with conscious justification, and drank deep of the scalding liquid.

  The parlour door opened, and Harry came in. He looked white and stunned, but better than I had hoped. At least he did not look guilty — which was what I had feared. He held out a hand speechlessly to Celia and she ran into his arms.

  ‘John is himself again,’ he said to me over Celia’s head. ‘He could have chosen a better time to drink, but he is sober now.’

  Celia disengaged herself, and poured him a cup of coffee. Harry dropped into his chair by the hearth, where the embers of last night’s fire still smouldered.

  ‘I have seen her,’ he said briefly. ‘She looks very peaceful.’

  ‘She was,’ Celia assured him. ‘She said nothing. She just smiled, and fell asleep.’

  ‘You were with her?’ he said surprised. ‘I thought it was Beatrice?’

  ‘No,’ said Celia, and I lowered my eyelids to hide the gleam of satisfaction at my magical luck. ‘Beatrice went to bed after she woke me. I was with your mama when she died.’

  I raised my eyes and saw John standing in the doorway listening. He had thrown a dressing-gown over his soiled linen and his face and hair were clean and wet from the soaking Harry had given him. He looked alert and awake. I tensed like a rabbit scenting a stoat.

  ‘She had no more than the proper dose?’ he said. His speech was still slurred and his head was weaving like a fighter who has suffered too many blows to the head.

  ‘As you ordered,’ I said. ‘Celia did as you said.’

  ‘Celia?’ he said. His pale eyes squinted against the bright sunlight. He put up one dirty hand to shield his face from the bright light of the Wideacre sun. ‘I thought it was you who was there, last night.’

  ‘Get to bed, man,’ said Harry coldly. ‘You’re still half foxed. You left Beatrice and me to nurse her, then Celia took my place. You yourself were little help.’

  John stumbled to a chair near the door and stared at the floor.


  ‘Four drops,’ he said eventually. ‘Four drops, four-hourly; that should not have been too much.’

  ‘I don’t know in the least what you’re talking about,’ I said, and my voice was like a sharp stone skimmed over a frozen river. ‘You gave me a phial and told me to give it to her. Celia did so, and then she died. Are you telling us now you made a mistake?’

  John squinted at me through his sandy lashes as if he was trying to see something in his memory that had escaped him.

  ‘I don’t make mistakes with medicines,’ he said flatly, holding on to that one certainty.

  ‘Then no mistake was made,’ said Harry impatiently. ‘And now get to bed. Mama has just died. You should show some respect.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said John inadequately. He stumbled as he rose to his feet. Harry, resigned, went to support him and nodded me to his other arm.

  ‘Don’t you two touch me!’ he exclaimed, and he spun on his heel for the door. The swift movement was too much for his spinning head and his knees buckled. He would have fallen but Harry grabbed him and I went unwillingly to hold his other arm. We marched him, sagging between us, up the stairs to the west wing and slung him on to his bed.

  I turned to go but John grabbed at my wrist with sudden strength.

  ‘Four drops I said, didn’t I, Beatrice?’ he whispered. His eyes were suddenly bright with comprehension. ‘But I know too what she was talking about. What she had seen. What she found when she came for her novel. Beatrice and Harry. I told you four drops, but you told Celia the whole phial, didn’t you?’

  I could feel the delicate bones in my hand starting to crack, but I made no effort to free myself. I had been readying for this since dawn and he could break my arm, but he could not defeat me. It hurt me still to lie so bold-faced, to the only other man who had loved me honestly, but I gave him look for look and my eyes were like green ice. Energy coursed through me for I was fighting for Wideacre. Against me, he was weak, just a drunk dreaming a nightmare.