‘Of course I plan for the future, John,’ I said, and I saw him wince when I used his name. ‘I plan for our baby, just like any mother. And I plan for you and me, just like any wife. You can be sure that I will always be thinking of you, and planning for you, just as long as you live.’
Celia looked relieved at the sweetness of my tone, and at the loving nature of the words. But John went pale and looked sickly as he heard the threat behind them. I would hear no more from him today. And I would find a way, I most certainly would find a way, to silence him for ever.
I rose from the table.
‘My room, in ten minutes, Harry?’ I asked.
Harry rose to his feet and nodded his assent as I made to leave. John was a little slow in rising to show his respect for me, and I waited, motionless, my eyes on him, until he had done so. His pushing back of bis chair was like a surly boy and I felt secret pleasure at mastering him, as steadily and as surely as one trains an ill-bred dog. But some dogs are such trouble that one puts a stone around their neck, and drops them in the Fenny.
I went to my office.
Anywhere at Wideacre I am at peace, but when I sit in the Squire’s chair with the great round rent table before me, and the papers on all the tenants tucked safe in the drawers, the map of the estate on the easel board, and the swallows swooping low outside the window, I am in bliss. This is where the heart of Wideacre beats. In the deep secret hidden places in the woods, in the son, sandy, sunny common, and on the high thyme-scented downs, but also here where the lives of the people, our people, are recorded in my clear ledgers, and their futures planned on the great charts of the desk. This is where the revenue comes in, in the weekly rents, in records of yields surpassing yields, in the banker’s orders from Chichester corn merchants, in the wool sale cheques, in the meat market gold. And this is where the wealth is spent: in the orders for equipment, for new stock, for new seed, and for the ceaseless buying for the house, which Celia seems to think is needed, and which I do not refuse. We live well on Wideacre, and my ledgers tell me, in reassuring thick black pen strokes on a white page, that we can afford to live well, for this country makes us rich.
And now this wealth, this steady circulation of paper and gold money must be diverted to a new reservoir — a fund to buy my son into the chair where I sit, into the room where I give the orders, into the land and into the power. Richard, my lovely baby, whose bath I would go and watch in a few minutes, would be Master here if any act, any act at all, of mine could put him in this place.
Harry tapped on the door and came in. His kiss on my cheek was the second he had given me that day, but it recognized that our first kiss of greeting at breakfast had been in public, as brother and sister. This one, no warmer or more loving, was a private one between old, familiar lovers.
‘Sit down,’ I said, and he drew up a chair to the table.
‘I shall be writing to the London solicitors this morning to raise the question of the entail with them, and when we know how much they estimate the purchase will cost, we will know better where we stand,’ I said in a businesslike tone.
‘Good,’ said Harry, nodding in assent.
‘But I think we should keep this matter between ourselves, until we know we can go ahead,’ I said. ‘I shall not tell John yet, and I think it would be better if you did not tell Celia.’
‘Oh?’ said Harry. ‘Why not?’
Oh, Harry,’ I said. ‘You understand so little about women! If Celia knows you are planning to make Julia your heir, she will know you believe she is barren. I think that would break her heart. Worse, she will know that I told her sad secret to you, so she will feel betrayed by me. Until we know for certain that we can buy the entail, indeed, until the entail is actually purchased and signed over to Richard and Julia, I think Celia should know nothing about it. It would only be a reproach to her for something she cannot possibly help.’
‘Very true,’ said Harry, with the quick tenderness he always had now for Celia, his pretty wife. ‘I should hate her to be distressed. But she will know that I think there will be no more heirs when the contract of partnership between Richard and Julia is signed.’
‘But then she will have the comfort of knowing that Julia’s future is secure and that at least she has played a part in providing Wideacre with an heir. Julia and Richard will inherit jointly.’
Harry nodded, and got up from the table to gaze out of the window. I heard the scrunch of footsteps on the gravel, and went to stand beside him. My husband was wandering aimlessly towards the rose garden. I could tell from the droop of his shoulders that he had found the drink I had left in the library and he had taken a glass to help him face the day looming ahead. All day without laughter, or joy, or love in a house that stank of sin. He had lost the quickness and lightness of his step. He had lost the pride that made him a swift walker, a fast dancer, a fine lover. I had taken the virtue, the strength and the power from him. If I could see my way to it, I would take more.
‘What about John?’ Harry asked in an undertone.
I shrugged. ‘As you see,’ I said. ‘I shall tell him of no plans. He is indiscreet, he is incompetent to judge. If he continues to drink in this way then I shall write to his papa and see if you and I can have power of attorney over his MacAndrew shares. He is not to be trusted with a fortune. He could spend it all on drink tomorrow.’
Harry nodded, his eyes still on John’s bowed back.
‘He is ashamed because he made a mistake with Mama’s dose?’ he asked.
I nodded. ‘I suppose that is it. He does not confide in me. He knows I cannot forgive his behaviour that night. If he had not been drunk our darling mama might have lived.’ I rested my head against the window frame. ‘I cannot stop weeping when I think of her in illness, and that clown muddling the dose.’
Harry’s face was flushed with anger. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘If we had only known! But, Beatrice, we cannot be sure. She always had a weak heart; we all knew that one day we would lose her.’
‘What I cannot bear is to have lost her through his folly!’ I said.
‘I wonder what set off Mama’s attack,’ Harry said, his cowardly eyes on my face. ‘Does John have any idea?’
‘No,’ I said, lying in my turn. ‘Mama collapsed just before she came into the parlour. Perhaps she came down the stairs too fast. John has no idea what caused it.’
Harry nodded. He was greedy for sweet untruths when reality was uncomfortable.
‘I know we cannot be sure,’ I said. ‘But you believe it, and I believe it; the whole house knows how drunk he was. All of the county knows he attended her although he was drunk, and that she was dead the next day. Of course I cannot forgive him. Of course he is ashamed. He has not shown his face off the estate except for her funeral since it happened. And he is not called out even to the poorest houses. Everyone believes he was drunk and made a mistake.’
Harry nodded. ‘It must be a bitter thing for him,’ he said. John was walking along the paths of the rose garden that led to the little summerhouse. As we watched he dawdled up the steps and sat down inside as if he were worn out.
‘It is indeed,’ I said. ‘His whole life and his pride was in his practice of medicine. I expect he wishes he were dead.’
The relish in my voice penetrated even Harry’s dullness.
‘You hate him that much?’ he asked. ‘Because of Mama?’
I nodded.
‘I cannot forgive him for failing Mama, for failing me, for failing in his duty. I despise him for his drunkenness that night, and for his drunkenness every night since. I wish I had never married him. But with your support and help, Harry, we will ensure he cannot harm me.’
Harry nodded. ‘Aye, it’s a bitter shame for you, Beatrice. But you will always be safe here with me. And if his father does indeed invest the MacAndrew shares on you and takes them away from John, then he will be harmless. He will be able to do nothing if he has only what you give him, and has to live where you permit.’
&nbs
p; I nodded. ‘It will have to do,’ I said, half to myself. ‘It will do, at any rate, until we know about the entail.’
Two long months passed before we had news. In London the lawyers consulted their dusty files and traced back through hundreds of years the decision to invest only boys of Wideacre stock with the power to inherit. It was the usual way. In the earliest days, when my ancestors first came to Wideacre and saw its dreaming hills and the little cluster of mud and lath buildings, they were fighting men, arrived with the Norman conqueror, hungry for land. Women to them were carriers and breeders and rearers of soldier sons. Nothing else had any value. Of course they settled it that boys and only boys should inherit.
And no one ever challenged it.
Generations of women came and went on this land. Married, bedded, bore children with pain and with courage and were left to run the estate alone. Mothers and daughters-in-law inherited responsibility but no power, as husbands and sons gave the orders, took the profits and took themselves off. Crusading Squires left Wideacre for years in the care of their wives and came back to find the fields peaceful, the crops yielding, the cottages repaired and newly built, and the land fertile. Strangers on their own land, tanned brown from foreign suns, they retired at last to their home and took back the power without a murmur from the women who had poured their own lives and love into keeping Wideacre Hall and Wideacre land strong and thriving.
They are buried in Wideacre church, these absentee Lords. There are great effigies of them in their armour, on their backs, their hands piously clasped over their metal bellies, their feet uncomfortably crossed. Their eyes stare sightlessly at the church roof and I imagine they sometimes lay in bed like that, beside their sleeping wives, gazing at the roof of the great wooden bed that I now sleep in, but seeing in their mind’s eye the desert, and the bands of infidels, and Jerusalem on the horizon.
The wives would be as sound and as deeply asleep as I am after a day when I have worked so hard and so long on the accounts that the figures dance before my eyes until I take my candle and go to bed in a haze of tiredness. Or on the days when we have to round up sheep and I spend all day riding around the silly things in circles and bawling like a peasant at the dogs. Or when harvesting goes badly and is interrupted by rain and I have to be out all day to keep the men working and say, ‘Hurry! Hurry! Hurry! The storm is coming! The autumn is coming! And the crops are not in!’ The crusaders’ wives would be as tired as I am after days like that, and they would sleep as I do — the sleep of a woman who runs the house and the land. We have no time to dream, or go riding off to find wars and battles and glory. We are left with the home to run and the land to run, and no glory, no power, and no wealth.
Wideacre Squires were not great Lords like the Havering family, nor great merchants like the de Courceys. They stayed home a little more than the greater men, but still they roamed. With Wideacre at their back and Wideacre wealth at their beck and call they rode out for the King during the war, and lived long years in exile. Wideacre wives ran the estate then too. Writing letters, sending money from coffers that grew steadily more and more empty. Arguing, dealing, persuading the Roundhead army to leave the hay standing, the horses in the field.
In the long years of the Protectorate the Wideacre women were exiles on their own land — staying quiet, staying unobtrusive, hoping that they would be left to live their lives in peace and security. Of course they managed it. What woman does not know how to melt into a threatening landscape so she becomes half invisible and can concentrate on surviving — without power, without wealth, without help?
So when the Stuart Squires came riding home in triumph there was a tired, pale woman on the doorstep ready to welcome the Master home. And he stepped from his horse and into the Master’s chair as if he had never been away. And she turned over the books to him, the keys to him, the plans and the orders and the decisions to him, as if all she knew was her needle. As if she had never been anything else but a peg to hang clothes on, an arranger of flowers, and a singer of little songs.
My great-great-great-grandmother was one of those women. I pass her portrait every day of my life, for it hangs on the curve of the west-wing stairs. She has the low-cut gown and the fat white arms of all the women of her day. She has the pretty rosebud mouth that slightly echoes Harry’s. But I like to think that she had a strong mouth, a firm chin like mine, which the painter never saw for he was looking for prettiness, not strength. For I know I see something of myself in her eyes. They are not like mine for they are blue, and not feline. But there is something about them. A wariness, a suspicion, that I know mine have when men speak of land and ownership. She learned, as I learned: that women can deserve, or women can earn, but women can never own. And my eyes narrow in recognition when I pass her portrait, and I wonder how well she hid her hatred and her rage when she was moved out of the Master’s chair and into the parlour. And how I can avoid that fate myself.
If I could have seen my way to it I would rather have won Wideacre as my Norman forefathers did: with a straight challenge and a fight to the death to own the land. But we are civilized now, and so women are serfs without hope of recompense. No landed Squire even considers the rights of his wife or his daughters. The only chance I have ever had to own the land that I loved and deserved was by being indispensable to the men who owned it: indispensable to them in the field, like Papa, or — in the case of Harry — in field, office, and bed.
But my son and my daughter would not have to plot and contrive and lie and give their bodies to buy themselves into their rights. They would inherit legally, through men’s law, by an act of the men’s Parliament, with the blessing of male lawyers and male delegates. And I would smile and smile with my green eyes lidded to hide the gleam of triumph on the day that Richard and Julia were solemnly contracted as equal partners and named as the joint heirs of Wideacre.
The London lawyers’ letter outlined how it could be done. The process was as costly as we had feared; it had to be agreed up to the very House of Lords. And then we had to compensate the cousin, Charles Lacey, who would be disinherited. While his hopes could not be high at the moment, for no word of Celia’s barrenness had gone beyond the walls of the private rooms of Wideacre, he would guess soon enough when Harry wanted to settle the estate on his daughter and his nephew that Harry knew he would never have a son. Then we might expect a claim of more than a hundred thousand pounds — and we had to meet that claim before the entail could be changed.
‘I don’t know how we will ever raise that sort of money, Beatrice,’ said Harry, the letter in his hand, seated at the rent table. ‘We cannot raise it by mortgaging Wideacre for that would be a poor inheritance to pass on to the two of them. And we will never be able to save that sort of money from our revenues.’
‘It has to be the MacAndrew fortune,’ I said decisively. ‘If we could use that to pay Charles Lacey, then I think we could mortgage some land to pay for the legal fees — and pay it off over time. With good management, and high-profit farming, we could probably free the estate from debt in ten or twenty years — certainly before the two children inherit.’
‘Yes, but old Mr MacAndrew is hardly likely to buy his grandson into Wideacre at that price,’ Harry objected. ‘Besides he settled nearly that sum on John only a year ago.’
‘It is John’s fortune I’m thinking of,’ I said musingly. ‘If we could get power of attorney over that we could use it however we wished.’
‘But on what grounds?’ Harry asked, getting up from the table and looking out of the window. The Michaelmas daisies were still blooming beneath my window and their purple smell and the peppery perfume of the chrysanthemums were drifting into the room.
‘Because of his drunkenness,’ I said crisply. ‘It might be possible to have him certified.’
Harry recoiled as if he had been stung by a bee.
‘Certified!’ he choked. ‘Beatrice, it is you who are mad! I know that John is drinking steadily, drinking every day. But he seldom shows
it. He is hardly insane!’
‘I think his drinking is increasing,’ I said, suppressing a fleeting sense of regret. ‘I think he will drink more rather than less. And if he drinks much more he will either become incompetent, in which case you can have power of attorney, or he will drink himself to death, in which case I inherit his fortune with you and old Mr MacAndrew as trustees. Either way, his money is ours.’
‘Yes, but Beatrice,’ — Harry turned back into the rom and his face was serious — ‘if this was to come about it would be a tragedy. John is a young man; he has all his life ahead of him. If he were to recover you might still be happy together, and he might well be happy to invest in such a good scheme for his son’s future. I know you are angry and distressed with him now, so soon after Mama’s death, but I am sure the two of you will be happy again, when John is his old self once more.’
I gave Harry my brightest, most angelic smile.
‘It is what I pray for, every night,’ I said. ‘You heard me then, planning as a business woman. Now you see me as a wife. Of course I hope and believe that this shadow will pass from John. But if it does not, I will be responsible for my son’s future, so naturally I have to plan ahead.’
Harry’s smile was relieved.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I knew you were thinking aloud and planning for Richard and Julia. And I knew you were not really thinking that John should be certified.’
‘Of course not,’ I said lightly, then turned the subject away from my dangerous husband’s future, and led Harry to think of other things.
But I could not turn Celia so easily. She had been walking Julia in the rose garden when John had seen her from the summerhouse and come out to take a turn. Julia’s little bandy legs were eager to take wobbly steps, and she loved holding on to adult hands while she toddled, uncertainly, with many changes of direction and sudden plumpings to the ground on her well-padded bottom.
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