Wideacre

by Philippa Gregory

  Straining my eyes into the darkness I could see, as he had seen, three figures coming silently down the track that leads to Acre. They were walking at the side in single file and their shadowy shapes sometimes blended with the dark bushes. I saw John Tyacke’s blond curls bright in the starlight, and thought I recognized the broad shoulders of Sam Frosterly. I heard John Tyacke say something under his breath and heard Ned Hunter laugh softly. They were quiet because it was night and they were country born and bred. They were not hushed for fear of a trap. They would never have dreamed that there could be a trap laid for Acre lads on Wideacre land.

  They moved to the first fence that straddled the land and readied themselves to push it down. One of them had a spade over his shoulder and he dug out the foundations and then all three rushed at it in a giggling dash and tumbled over when it gave way beneath the charge.

  ‘Now?’ said Brien softly to me.

  ‘Now,’ I said, my lips so cold I could hardly speak.

  ‘Now!’ shouted Harry, and spurred his horse forward as the troopers rose up out of the dark bushes and raced towards the three lads. There were six troopers, a mounted sergeant, Harry, John Brien and I. The lads tumbled to their feet and stared as if they could not believe their eyes, then in a flash they were running like startled deer back towards Acre, heading for home, in the old trust that home was safe for them.

  Ned and Sam leaped the broken fence and raced up the track with the troopers behind them and Harry riding them down. But I saw a glint of fair hair and realized that John Tyacke was running in the opposite direction, down towards the Fenny where he could be sure of a hundred hiding places and a dark secret creep home. He did not know I was there, watching him as he ran straight towards me. His ears and his attention were on the noise of Harry throwing himself from his horse on to the two other lads. He was expecting to be chased from behind. He was upon me almost before he knew it and he skidded to a halt in the darkness at Tobermory’s side.

  ‘Miss Beatrice!’ he said.

  ‘John Tyacke,’ I replied. Then he ducked away from me and fled down the little path towards the river.

  ‘Did you see him go, ma’am?’ called the sergeant, turning his men from the fight in the lane where Ned and Sam were standing sulkily between John and Harry.

  ‘No,’ I said in a quick thoughtless response. He was Tyacke’s grandson and I liked Tyacke. He was one of our people and the sergeant was a stranger. He was not to be ridden down like a dog.

  ‘No, we’ve lost him,’ I said.

  The troopers took Sam and Ned away to Chichester that very night. I had not thought of that. They were committed to trial at the quarter sessions before Judge Browning. I had not thought of that. By the time Acre woke up the next day there was nothing anyone could do. Two of the best-loved lads of the village had been taken away. And their greatest friend, young John Tyacke, could only sit by his mother’s small fire with his head in his hands and mutter that he did not know what he should do.

  The whole of Acre knew that if Ned and Sam had been up to some devilry then John would have been with them. But they also knew that the devilry must have gone badly wrong indeed for the three to have been split up. For John was not the sort of lad to leave his friends to face trouble alone. He sat and brooded all day about what he should do, while the fence was repaired and the felling of the trees inside the enclosed land could at last start. Then he went to his grandfather, Gaffer Tyacke, and told him what had happened.

  Then Gaffer Tyacke came to me.

  I had half expected him, for I had yet to learn that I was no longer the villagers’ first call when they faced trouble. Gaffer came in to my office while Harry was there, and if I had been quicker to send Harry out of the room then I might have stopped the downward spiral from error to tragedy. But Stride had served coffee for Harry and me while we worked on some plans, and Harry was intent on some petits fours and would have been troublesome to move. So I let him munch at the table while Gaffer Tyacke stood in front of my desk with his cap in his hands.

  ‘I’ve come to give myself up, Miss Beatrice,’ he said.

  ‘What?’ I demanded incredulously.

  ‘I’ve come to give myself up,’ he replied steadily. ‘I took the two lads into the woods last night and I ordered them to pull down the fences. I ordered them to help me on that one night. The nights before was me alone.’

  I stared at him as if one of us was crazy, and then slowly it dawned on me what he was doing.

  ‘Gaffer Tyacke, no one could believe that,’ I said gently. ‘You are an old man, you could not possibly have done it. I know what you are trying to do, but it cannot be done.’

  There was no responsive gleam in his eye. He had known me and loved me since as far back as I could remember. He saw me christened in the parish church, and on my first rides with Papa. But now he looked through me as if I were a smeary window, and said, ‘I’ve come to give myself up, Miss Beatrice, and I ask that you will have me arrested and send me to Chichester.’

  ‘What’s this?’ said Harry, coming out of his dream of chocolate cakes with a start. ‘What’s this I hear? Was it you breaking the fences, Tyacke?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the old man steadily.

  ‘No!’ I said, breathless with irritation and a rising sense of fear. ‘How could it be, Harry? Don’t be so foolish. You saw the man run last night. It could not have been Gaffer Tyacke.’

  ‘It was me, begging your pardon,’ said George Tyacke steadily. ‘And I have come to give myself up.’

  ‘Well, you’ll have to stand trial and it’s a most serious offence,’ said Harry warningly.

  ‘I know that, Squire,’ said Tyacke evenly. He knew it better than any of us. It was only because he really understood what was happening that he was here. I put out a hand to him.

  ‘Gaffer Tyacke, I know what you’re doing,’ I said. ‘I did not mean it to go this far. But I can probably stop it. There’s no need to try and save them this way.’

  He turned his face towards me and his dark eyes were as black as a prophet. ‘Miss Beatrice, if you did not mean it to go this far you should never have started it. You told us yourself this is the way of the world outside Wideacre. You have brought that world to Wideacre and now it will mean death. You have brought death to Wideacre, Miss Beatrice. And it had better be mine rather than anyone else’s.’

  I gasped and fell back in my chair, and Harry stepped forward with bullying authority.

  ‘Now see here, that’s enough!’ he said. ‘You’ve upset Miss Beatrice. Hold your tongue!’

  George Tyacke nodded his head, his eyes still upon me burning with reproach while Harry crossed to the bell and ordered the carriage for Chichester.

  ‘Harry,’ I said urgently. ‘This is nonsense and it must stop now.’

  He hesitated at my tone and looked from me to George Tyacke.

  ‘I’ve come to give myself up to you,’ said George. ‘But I can go to Lord Havering. I’m prepared to take the punishment.’

  ‘It’s too serious to let pass, Beatrice,’ said Harry, his tone reasonable but his babyish face alive with excitement at the drama of these petty, deadly events. ‘I’ll take Tyacke here to Chichester at once and make my deposition. You come along, now,’ he said rudely to Tyacke and took him from the room.

  I saw the carriage go past the window and I could think of no way to stop it. I could think of no way to stop anything. I sat with my head in my hands by my desk for a long, long hour. Then I went up to my nursery to find my son, the future Squire.

  They hanged him.

  Poor, old, brave, foolish, Gaffer Tyacke.

  The two lads would not agree that it was all his doing but the court was happy to have a man who confessed to breaking fences, trespassing on property and burning wood. So they hanged him. And Gaffer Tyacke went with steady steps to the scaffold and his old shoulders straight with pride.

  The two lads, Hunter and Frosterly, they transported. Ned Hunter caught gaol fever and died while
he was awaiting transportation. They said that Sam was with him all the time and he died in Sam’s arms, his lips black with the fever, longing for a sight of his home and the touch of his mother’s hand. Sam Frosterly sailed on the next ship out, and his family had a letter from him, just once. He was in Australia, a hard life and a bitter life for a lad reared in the gentle heart of Sussex. He must have longed and longed for the green hills of home. And they said it was the homesickness, not the heat or the flies or the dreadful bloody brawls, that killed him. He died within the year. If you are Wideacre born and Wideacre bred you cannot be happy elsewhere.

  I heard of the deaths — Gaffer’s through the trapdoor, and Hunter’s on the convict ship — with a thin mouth, a white face, and dry eyes. After Hunter’s death, John Tyacke, the young lovely grandson and the pet of the village, disappeared. Some said he had run off to sea, some said he had hanged himself in the Wideacre woods and would be found when the autumn winds came and swept the leaves away from shielding him. He was gone, anyway. And the three of them would roister arm in arm down Acre lane no more. And when they brought the harvest in, John Tyacke would not swirl me round in a leaping jig while the others twisted their caps in their hands and giggled and nudged each other. The three of them were gone.

  17

  And something had gone from me, too.

  I could not hear the heartbeat of Wideacre any more. I could not hear the heartbeat; I could not hear the birdsong. As the spring warmed up, slowly, slowly, as if there was a lump of ice at the heart of England that year, I did not warm. The cuckoos were calling in the woods; the larks started to make small experimental upward flights and try their voices, and I did not warm. My heart did not sing. The spring, with all its bobbing wild daffodils in the woods, and its scattering of meadow flowers, with all the leaves and the sweetness, and the rushing of the Fenny, the Wideacre spring came, but I did not melt from my winter coldness.

  I could not tell what was happening. I could neither hear nor see. Nothing, nothing in my life seemed real to me any more and I looked out on the greening, damp land as if I were looking through a wall of ice that would separate me for ever from the land I had loved, and the people I had known.

  I spent much time gazing out through the window, through the glass pane. Looking incredulously at the greening woods, which were as bright and as fluttering as if everything was still the same, as if my heart still pattered to the tune of the steady thud of my home. I did not dare to go out. I was weary of driving and not yet released from mourning so I could not ride. But I did not even wish to ride. I did not care either to walk in the fields. The warm moist earth that caked on my boots seemed to pull me down like a bog of clay — not like Wideacre’s soft loam at all. When I was driving it seemed such an effort to turn the horse’s head, to click to him to trot, to hold him steady on the road.

  And this spring the countryside was not so lovely; it was too bright. The colours of green this spring hurt my eyes with their vibrant growth. I squinted when I tried to look towards the downs, and the sunshine put hard lines around my mouth and on my forehead where I found I was scowling.

  There was no pleasure for me out on the land this spring, I could not tell why. And there was no pleasure for me in the village either. As I had ensured, no one noticed the lack of kindling from the enclosure. I had timed the fencing in of the common carefully. They should not have reproached me for that. No one went cold in the village that spring by my action. So I did not do all things badly.

  But they gave me no credit. Just as that year with Ralph the greening of the shoots and the warming of the land had seemed all part of my magic, all part of my good blessings on the land, now everything that went wrong was laid at my door. The Sowers’ cow died and that had to be my fault, for she had not been able to graze on the good green shoots of the common. One of the Hills’ children fell sick, and that was my fault for my husband doctor was far away and they could afford no other. Mrs Hunter sat by a blackened grate and wept without ceasing for the shame that had taken her son from her. And because he had died calling for her and she could not go to him. That was my fault, they said. That was my fault.

  And I knew that it was.

  When I had to drive through the village I kept my head high and my eyes blazed with defiance. There was still no one who could meet my gaze then, and they looked away with surly faces. But when I saw Mrs Hunter through her cottage window, sitting motionless beside the black grate, and noted her chimney with no little swirl of smoke, I did not feel defiant. I did not feel ready to brazen out the disaster on my land. I just felt afraid, and comfortless and cold. I pulled up at the cobbler’s one chilly afternoon and called out, ‘Mrs Merry!’ to the group of gossiping women. Their faces turned on me were sulky and closed, and I remembered in disbelief the time when they would have called out ‘Good day’ and smiled, and crowded around the gig to tell me the village gossip. Now they stood in a circle like a gang of hanging judges and looked at me with cold eyes. They parted to let Mrs Merry come to the carriage and it struck me she came towards me dragging her feet. She did not smile to see me, and her face was guarded.

  ‘What is wrong with Mrs Hunter?’ I asked, gathering reins into one hand and fitting my whip into the stock.

  ‘No physical ill,’ said Mrs Merry, her eyes on my face.

  ‘What ails her then?’ I asked impatiently. ‘Her fire is out. I have driven past the cottage three days running and she is always sitting by the empty fireplace beside a cold grate. What ails her? Why don’t her friends go in and light the fire for her?’

  ‘She does not wish it lit,’ said Mrs Merry. ‘She does not want food. She does not want to speak with her friends. She has sat like that since last week when they sent her Sam Frosterly’s letter that Ned was dead. I read it to her, for she cannot read. She reached to the bucket and poured it over the fire and sat by the wet ashes till I left her. When I returned in the morning it was the same.’

  My face stayed hard, but my eyes were despairing.

  ‘She will recover,’ I said. ‘It is just a shock for her to lose a son. Her a widow, and him her only child.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Mrs Merry.

  A cold hard monosyllable from the woman who had delivered my child, who had been with me during that crisis of effort and pain, who had promised me she would not gossip, and who had kept that promise. The woman who had told me I was just like my papa in my care for Wideacre people.

  ‘It is not my fault, Mrs Merry,’ I said with sudden passion. ‘I did not mean it to happen like this, I did not plan this. I only had to increase the wheatfields; I did not dream the lads would pull the fences down. I meant them to have a fright with the soldiers and cease teasing me. I did not think they would be caught. I did not think Gaffer would go. I did not think he would be hanged, and Ned die, and Sam be sent far away. I did not mean this.’

  Mrs Merry’s eyes had no pity.

  ‘You’re the plough that does not mean to slice the toad then,’ she said dourly. ‘You’re the scythe that does not mean to maim the hare. You go your own sharp way and do not mean to cut those who stand before you. So no one can blame you, can they, Miss Beatrice?’

  I put out a hand towards Mrs Merry, the wise woman.

  ‘I did not mean it,’ I said. ‘Now they blame me for everything. But my son will set it to rights. Tell Mrs Hunter I will see that her lad is brought home to be properly buried in the churchyard.’

  Mrs Merry shook her head.

  ‘Nay, Miss Beatrice,’ she said with finality. ‘I’ll carry no message from you to Mrs Hunter. It would be to insult her.’

  I gasped at that, and dropped my hands on the reins. Sorrel started forward and I snatched the whip from the stock to flick him into a canter. As I pulled away from the women I heard the clatter of something against the side of the gig.

  Someone had thrown a stone.

  Someone had thrown a stone at me.

  So I cared neither to drive in the woods, nor to walk in the fields, nor
to go down the lane to Acre that spring. Harry came and went as he pleased. Celia continued her visits, and it was Celia who made the arrangements to bring Ned Hunter’s body home from the hulks at Portsmouth. And it was Celia who paid for his funeral and for the little cross over his grave. Celia and Harry were still met with a bob or a pulled forelock when they went into Acre. But I did not go to the village. Only on a Sunday morning during that warm wet spring did I go past the cottages with the staring windows. Past the smokeless chimney of Mrs Hunter’s little home. Past the fresh graves in the churchyard of Gaffer Tyacke, of Ned Hunter. And walked the long slow walk up the aisle of the church past the rows of pews where my people looked at me with eyes as hard as flints.

  My work lay indoors that spring. John Brien did the riding and the ordering for me. Daily he came to my office and I told him what work needed doing, and he went off to supervise it. So the land that had never had a bailiff, that had always felt the print of a Master’s boot, was watched over and worked by a man who was not a Lacey, who was not even a farmer, but a town-bred manager; who was not even Wideacre born.

  With the gang he ordered he had the common cleared and the fields planted with wheat. There was no more trouble from the village. He ploughed up the half-dozen meadows where the children played and the plough cut through the surviving marks of the village’s common plot. We planted wheat everywhere a plough could run. And still we were not making enough money.

  I was reserving John’s fortune to buy off our cousin and I did not want to touch that for the lawyers’ fees. But as they dragged on and on, their bills steadily mounted. We had borrowed from Mr Llewellyn to cover the first three months’ bills, but then we also had the problem of meeting the repayments on the loans, and no extra money coming in until the wheat crop was sold, the wheat crop that had not yet shown green shoots.

  Nothing was coming to my hands fast enough. I had consulted with Harry at the start of the plan, but now I dared not show him the real figures. We were paying out more on the repayment of the loans, and on the lawyers’ fees, and John’s medical bills, and on the new labour gangs and equipment and seed, than we were earning. We were drawing on our reserves of capital. We were drawing so heavily that I could start calculating how long it would be before the fortune my papa had so slowly and carefully amassed would be exhausted. Then we would have to sell land.