Wideacre

by Philippa Gregory

  Enough there to keep me indoors, even when the swallows came and swooped low over the Fenny in the morning. Enough there to keep me waiting for the postman every morning in a frenzy of anxiety that today might be the day when Dr Rose would write one of his gentle, but increasingly confident letters saying, ‘I am so pleased to tell you that your husband has made a complete recovery. As I write he is packing his bags to come home!’

  Every day I expected a letter announcing John’s return. Every day I prayed for the letter to tell me that our cousin had accepted the compensation and John’s fortune could be paid to him, and the legal work to change the entail could begin in earnest. Every morning I awoke with those two converging processes racing closer and closer together. And every day the postbag was brought to me in my office I opened it with dread, waiting to see if I had won or lost Wideacre for my son.

  I had won.

  On that sweet April morning with the daffodils nodding golden heads in the garden outside my window and the birds carolling to the spring sunshine, the postbag held a thick cream envelope with our lawyers’ crest embossed on the corner, and their pompous seal on the flap. With much self-congratulatory flourish they wrote to say that our cousin Charles Lacey had accepted compensation and was prepared to resign his rights to Wideacre. I had won. Richard had won. The horror and confusion of the past few months could slip behind me and would soon be forgotten. It would be as if this icy spring, this glassed-in shut-out spring had never been. Richard would be reared on the land as the future Squire. I should teach him all he needed to know about the land and the people, and he would bring in the harvest every year of his life. He would marry a pretty Sussex-bred girl of my choice and they would breed new heirs to the land. Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh. I would have established a line that could stretch down the centuries to the unimaginable future. And I had done it with wit and with cunning and with courage. I had done it, although I had lost the sound of my own heartbeat, of Wideacre’s heartbeat, of a voice of love from anyone. But I had done it.

  I sat in silence with the letter in my hand and great floods of release and relief sweeping over me as tangible as the spring sunshine that warmed my face and my silk shoulder. I did not move for long, long minutes, savouring the time of victory. Only I knew what it had cost me, what it had cost Wideacre, what it had cost Acre village, to get us to this point where the way was clear for my son. Only I knew that. Even so, there were costs that I did not know, that I did not fully realize. I had won the land for Richard but this spring it had been dead to me. I could not be sure that my feeling for the land could come back to me. The people had turned against me; the grass was too bright a green, even the thrushes’ song failed to pierce the wall around me. But it might all be a price that had to be paid to put Richard into my seat. And I was paying and paying and paying, and now the reward was in sight.

  I drew the embossed notepaper to me with a sigh and wrote to our bankers ordering them to realize John’s entire fortune, to sell all the MacAndrew shares and pay them into our cousin’s account. I enclosed the power of attorney document to forestall any query from them at such an extraordinary move. Then I drew another sheet of paper towards me and started a letter to the lawyers to tell them that they could now go ahead with the legal processes to change the entail to favour my son Richard and my daughter Julia as joint heirs.

  Then I sat still, with the sunshine warm on my shoulder and gave myself a few silent moments to consider and reconsider what I was doing.

  But I was as impatient as I had been when I had been fifteen and said, ‘Now.’ The price Richard might face, Julia might face, lived in the future. I could deal only with now. I owed it to myself. I owed it to my son that he should sit in the Squire’s chair. I was wilfully blind, I had to be wilfully blind, at the price I might be laying on him. The mortgages I had already accepted on the estate he would have to clear. The cost of working all his life with his sister would fall on him and her too. I would have done my duty by him, to her, to myself, and even in some odd way to my papa and the long Lacey line when I put the heir, the best heir possible, in the Squire’s chair. Future debts would have to be met in the future.

  I blotted the letters, and sealed them, and then I wrote a third. To Mr Llewellyn. I offered him another mortgage on Wideacre: the new meadow lands we had enclosed near Havering. They had come to the estate as part of Celia’s dowry and if the worst came to the worst and we had to sell land, I should feel better about losing those newly gained fields. I could not have borne a mortgage on the fields I had ridden with my papa, even for his grandson. But we needed the money. The legal agreement would have to be signed and witnessed in the House of Lords itself and there were many pockets to be lined on the way, as well as legitimate fees to pay. The green shoots of wheat would have to be golden indeed this summer or we would face ruin.

  ‘Beatrice! You look so much better!’ said Celia, when I joined her and Harry for breakfast after my morning of shuddering relief.

  ‘I feel better,’ I said, smiling. Celia’s cook had sugar-roasted a ham with apricots, accompanied by little spicy beef pies. ‘What a wonder Mrs Gough is in the kitchen. I really do not begrudge her her wages.’

  ‘No, why should you?’ asked Celia, her brown eyes wide. ‘All London-trained cooks are expensive. I should think she is rather underpaid here.’

  I smiled and shrugged. ‘No, don’t worry, Celia. I am not about to bring the parish labourers into the kitchen to cook your dinner. I have just been working on the accounts and cannot help pricing everything I see.’

  ‘They cannot be too bad, Beatrice, for your eyes are shining green again and they only do that when you are happy,’ said Celia observantly. ‘Have you had some good news?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I had a letter that made me very happy.’

  Celia’s face lit up as if someone had given her a thousand candles.

  ‘John is coming home!’ she said, and her voice was full of joy.

  ‘No,’ I said, irritated. ‘John is not coming home. This good news was business news that you would neither understand nor appreciate. I have not heard from Dr Rose this month, but in his last letter he said that John still had much progress to make before he could come home.’

  Celia’s eyes dropped to her plate and I guessed that tears were prickling under the downcast lids. When she looked up, her mouth was trembling slightly, both at the disappointment and at the sharp way that I had dashed her hopes.

  ‘I am sorry, my dear,’ she said. ‘It was thoughtless of me to jump to that conclusion just because you said you had some good news. I think of John and of your unhappiness without him so constantly that as soon as I saw you I thought it could only be his return that could make you so blooming again.’

  I nodded ungraciously and turned my attention to my breakfast. Celia, I noticed, ate little and refused some fruit.

  ‘Shall you go to Bristol to see him?’ she asked tentatively. ‘It seems to have been such a long time. He left in the first week of December, and it is now mid-April.’

  ‘No,’ I said, and my voice was firm. ‘I feel I should obey Dr Rose’s advice on this. He said he would tell me the moment John could receive visitors. It would hardly help John if I were to go pushing in before he was ready to see me.’

  Celia nodded submissively.

  ‘As you wish, my dear,’ she said tenderly. ‘But if you should change your mind, or when Dr Rose says you may go, you know that Richard would be perfectly able to do without you for a few nights. I should make sure that he was happy.’

  I nodded. ‘I know. Thank you, Celia,’ I said.

  I need not have been in such a fret of impatience. While the April days grew warmer and longer and the green shoots that were to pay for my son’s inheritance grew stronger and taller, the lawyers in London started the process of hearings and counter-arguments that would take them to the House of Lords. The bankers raised their eyebrows at my letter, but were bound by the power of attorney. One fine morning
in mid-April Charles Lacey received into his account £200,000: a fortune for any man. But worth every penny to me and to my son.

  On Charles Lacey, who would have come to Wideacre as Master on Harry’s death, who could even have expelled me, I showered the wealth of the MacAndrew fortune and kept not a penny back for myself. Not a penny for Wideacre. In one profligate gesture, I threw the MacAndrew fortune into his lap and left Wideacre without protection, without emergency capital.

  And I had to write to another London banker to inquire about another mortgage to buy new stock to replace those we had sold in a poor market. It might all be coming to my hand, but it was a near-run thing.

  In Dr Rose’s Bristol home my husband was growing stronger. His hands stopped shaking and his eyes were losing their feverish brightness. Through the bars across his window he could see the treetops greening and hear the rooks cawing around beakfuls of twigs. He could hear the wood pigeons murmuring over and over. He did not yet know that he was a pauper. He did not yet know that I had ruined him. But as he gained weight and grew stronger, his mind was turning back to me with less dread and less terror.

  ‘He seems to have come to terms with the fact that the un-happiness of recent months was not wilfully caused by you,’ Dr Rose wrote to me, with his usual tact. ‘He speaks of you now as an ordinary mortal and not as some witch. I know how much this must have distressed you. You will be glad that the delusion passed so quickly.’

  I smiled as I read. John’s restoration to normality might prove very fragile when he came back and found himself a beggar living on my charity. He should not even have a frank for a letter to his father unless I had seen the contents.

  ‘I think he will soon be ready to come home,’ wrote Dr Rose. ‘I have discussed this with him and he says he is certain he could live in a normal household again without needing to drink to excess. At present he is abstaining altogether, but he sees drink around him and is able to resist it. In your own household he might learn to take the occasional drink with family and friends. He is confident he could learn to manage this, and I believe he may be right.’

  I nodded and turned the page.

  John might no longer be half-mad with fear of me but he still would hate and despise me. I knew a certain squirm of fear at the thought of how much he must hate me now, now he had been bound and drugged and imprisoned at my command. And I hated him, and feared him too. If I had my way he should never come home, my quick clever husband with his keen blue eyes. He had all the power that men’s laws and men’s traditions could give him. I feared that. He knew what I was and he knew a great deal of what I had done, and I feared the bright daylight of his vision. If I had had my way he could have stayed incarcerated for ever. But I had chosen a bad doctor for that. Dr Rose was a good sympathetic practitioner. He had sided with me because my story was persuasive, my face beautiful, and my husband clearly demented. But he could not be asked to hold John for ever. John would have to come home.

  And if I knew him, he would be coming home to hate me, and coming home to love Celia and her child. Before he arrrived I had to complete the plan that would give Wideacre to Richard. And it had to be done while I had Celia on her own. So she would gain neither support nor, worse, damning information from John. I would find the news of the entail and Julia’s and Richard’s partnership easier to force upon Celia if she had no help at all, not even the help of such a broken reed as my convalescent husband.

  I took up my pen and drew a sheet of paper to me and wrote a swift and easy reply. ‘What wonderful news!’ I told Dr Rose. ‘My heart is overflowing with happiness.’ But I had to advise caution. My sister-in-law, who had been so distressed over John’s illness, was herself now unwell. I thought it better that John should wait in peace and quiet at Bristol until his affectionate family were restored to their usual harmony.

  I signed with my confident scrawl and sealed it, and sniffed the hot wax with relish. Then I leaned back in my chair and gazed out of the window.

  The glory of the Wideacre daffodils was lingering on, and the cherry-red shoots in the rose garden were hidden under great clouds of yellow. Paler and daintier, beyond the cultivated daffodils, were the wild ones: self-seeded in the paddock. As I watched, Tobermory bent his handsome head and nibbled at a bunch. He came up, a yellow bloom drooping from his mouth, looking like a clown and I wished I had Richard by me to show him the comical sight of the best hunter in the stables looking so silly. In the banks of the woods beyond the paddock the brown earth was green in lush patches with the new growth of moss and the tiny plants that struggle up to the spring sunshine. Everything was growing and greening and nesting and mating and in all the loud-singing sweet-scented world I seemed the only cold figure in a dark dress, alone indoors.

  I jumped up from my desk in sudden impatience and tossed a shawl over ray shoulders and went out bare-headed into the garden. I walked through the rose garden, sniffing at the warm gusts of the light scent of the daffodils, which blew, tantalizing, into my face. Through the little gate into the paddock I strolled and Tobermory saw me and came trotting to meet me, his lovely neck arched and his head high.

  I reached up to pat him and his gentle huge face came down to nuzzle at my pockets with soft lips, hoping for a titbit.

  ‘Nothing there,’ I said to him tenderly. ‘I forgot. I’ll bring you something later.’

  The ice seemed to be melting around my heart as I walked on down to the wood and heard the burble of the Fenny, high and brown, full of spring run-off from the downs. The path has no bridge opposite the Wideacre gate, but there is a fallen tree trunk that serves the purpose for me, though Harry fears he is too heavy and Celia is too afraid. In the middle of it were the Hodgett children sitting dangling their legs over the flood, each equipped with a little stick and a line, hopeful for stickleback. They were the youngest three of the family from the lodge house. Sarah Hodgett had sworn she would have no more after the twins five years ago and had managed to hold to that promise, though often she and her husband looked strained.

  ‘Hello,’ I called, my voice as light as the blackbird preening his feathers in the sunshine.

  It was as if a dark cloud had come over that sunny wood. The five-year-old twins, mere moppets with a tumble of brown curls and large scared blue eyes, leaped up so suddenly they nearly fell in the water. Their sister, a serious-faced seven-year-old, grabbed a child in each hand and rushed them along the tree trunk to the opposite bank.

  ‘Beg pardon, Miss Beatrice,’ she said and started to pull them away, down the path towards their home.

  ‘Don’t go!’ I called to them. ‘You’ve left your rods!’

  The little girl was trailing, looking back at me, and I crossed quickly to the middle of the tree trunk and picked up the sticks and string and smiled encouragingly at her. ‘Don’t leave your tackle behind!’ I said in mock reproof. ‘How will you catch the salmon in season?’

  The oldest child turned. Her eyes were wide with anxiety.

  ‘We weren’t after your salmon, Miss Beatrice,’ she said earnestly. ‘The little ‘uns were just playing fishing, we didn’t take anything. We didn’t break anything on your land, Miss Beatrice. We used to play here last summer, before we knew we weren’t allowed. The little ‘uns wanted to come here again. I’m sorry, Miss Beatrice, I’m sorry!’

  I could scarcely understand this rush of words, and I jumped down from the tree trunk, the rods in my hand, to gather the children to me and tell them of course they could fish in the Fenny. That they should always have a right to the childhood I had lived. The perfect Wideacre childhood where the woods stretched farther than your little legs could go, and the river flowed faster than you could run alongside.

  ‘Come here,’ I said kindly, and started towards them.

  The oldest child gave a piercing scream and started to run away from me, dragging the two little ones with her. The baby girl tumbled and fell and her sister snatched her up, an impossibly bulky burden, and staggered along with her, the lit
tle boy trotting alongside. I took three swift steps and caught the oldest child by the shoulders and turned her to face me. Her eyes darted wildly and were full of terrified tears.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked. I was catching her fear and anguish and my voice was high. ‘What’s the matter with you?’

  ‘Don’t send the soldiers after us, Miss Beatrice!’ she howled in a collapse into her fear. ‘Don’t send the soldiers after us and have us hung. We didn’t do no harm. We didn’t break nothing or fire anything. Please don’t have us hung, Miss Beatrice!’

  My hands dropped to my sides as if her bony shoulders had burned me. My head rolled back and my eyes shut as I tried to register, to understand this blow to my idea of myself as Miss Beatrice, the darling of Wideacre. While I staggered, with my eyes still shut, the little girl snatched the twins’ hands and hurried them away, down the little path to the cottage. And she would not feel safe until they were inside the garden with the gate shut. For out in the woods was Miss Beatrice, whose green eyes could see through walls to what the naughty children were doing. Who could ride down the fastest runners in the village — for who had ever gone quicker than Ned Hunter when he was running a race? Who could hang the most honest man in the village — for who had ever been cheated by Gaffer Tyacke? Out in the woods was Miss Beatrice, dressed in black like the witch she was, guarding the land she now said was hers, and that no one else should have. And little children had better play on the lane, or Miss Beatrice would be after them. And little children had better say their prayers or Miss Beatrice would come for them in the night. And little children had better make themselves scarce for fear that her shadow, her witch’s shadow, fall on them. And hadn’t they run when they saw me!