Wideacre

by Philippa Gregory

  ‘What is the matter?’ asked Celia gently. She had slipped from her window seat and come to stand beside me, her arm around my waist, her eyes on my face.

  ‘Look at us,’ I said, and she turned to look in the mirror as well. It reminded me of the day we were fitting for her wedding and my bridesmaid’s dress, so long ago at Havering. Then I had been a pattern for any man’s desire, and Celia had been a pale flower. Now as we stood side by side I saw she had worn the years better than I. Her happiness had put a bloom in her cheeks, a constant upturning of her mouth. She had lost the scared look she had worn at Havering Hall, and was ready to laugh and sing like a carefree bird. The battle she had fought and won, over John’s drinking, against her husband and Lord, Harry, and against her best friend, me, had put an aura of dignity around her. She still had her childlike prettiness, but she had cloaked that vulnerable girlishness with the dignity of knowing her mind when others did not. And being able to judge, and judge rightly, when those around her were ready to do wrong. She would be an old lady beloved for her charm, but also for her uncompromising moral wisdom.

  It was not in Celia’s nature to be unforgiving, but she would never forget the selfishness I showed and Harry showed when John trembled at the sight of a bottle, and we drank before him and praised the wine. She no longer depended on me, and she would never trust me again. There was a little distance between us that not even Celia’s loving spirit would attempt to bridge. And as she watched my eyes in the glass I could no longer predict with certainty what she was thinking.

  ‘I think you could ride to see the wheat crop,’ she said temptingly. ‘I do think you could, if you wanted to, Beatrice.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, smiling. ‘It has been nearly a year. I should love to ride up to the downs again. Tell the stables to get Tobermory ready for me.’

  Celia nodded and took her dismissal from the room, pausing only to gather her sewing. Lucy handed me my grey kid gloves and my whip.

  ‘Better already,’ she said, and her voice was cool. ‘I have never known a lady who could recover like you, Miss Beatrice. Sometimes I think that nothing will stop you.’

  My weeks in bed had rested me well. I took Lucy by the arm, just above the elbow in a hard, pinching grip, and I pulled her a little towards me.

  ‘I don’t like the tone of your voice, Lucy,’ I said confidentially. ‘I don’t like it at all. If you want to look for a new place without a reference, with a week’s wages in your purse, and far away from here, then you have only to say.’

  She looked back at me with villager’s eyes. Hating and yet craven.

  ‘I beg your pardon, Miss Beatrice,’ she said and her eyes fell below my blazing green ones. ‘I meant no harm.’

  I let her go with a little push and swung out of the door and pattered down the stairs to the stable door. John was just outside, watching the tumbler pigeons on the stable roof.

  ‘Beatrice!’ he said, and his cold eyes scanned my face. ‘You are better,’ he said definitely, ‘at last.’

  ‘I am!’ I said, and there was a gleam of triumph in my face that he could no longer look on me as a patient that he was nursing to a slow and painful end. ‘I am rested and well again, and I am going out riding,’ I said.

  One of the lads led Tobermory from the stable door. In the hot sunshine his coat gleamed exactly the colour of my own chestnut hair. He whickered when he saw me and I stroked his nose. I gestured to John and there was nothing for him to do but to cup his hands for me to put my booted foot in then, and to toss me up into the saddle. I had a thrill of pure joy when I felt his white hands, doctor’s hands, under my boot, and I beamed down on him from Tobermory’s high back, as if I loved him.

  ‘Do you see Death in my face today, John?’ I said teasingly. ‘You were in rather a hurry to think that I would die to please you, weren’t you?’

  John’s face was serious and his eyes were as cold as flints.

  ‘You’re healthy as ever,’ he said. ‘But I still see Death coming for you. You know it, and so do I. You feel well now because the sun is shining and you are out on horseback again. But things are not the same for you, Beatrice. And you are not such a fool you do not know when everything around you has been destroyed, and that the only thing left to die is you.’

  I bent down and patted Tobermory so that John should not see that my face had blenched when he spoke to me in that prophet’s voice.

  ‘And what shall you do?’ I said, my voice hard and under control. ‘When you have talked me into an early grave or into madness with boredom at this theme of yours? What do you do then?’

  ‘I will care for the children,’ he answered easily. ‘You hardly see Richard these days, Beatrice. You have either been plotting the downfall of Julia and Richard and Wideacre, or you have been ill in bed.’

  ‘And you care for Celia,’ I said, finding the point at which I could wound him in return. ‘That is why you did not tell her the whole package of crazy ideas you have about me and my life. When she came to you all in grief and all in terror you did not tell her she should be grieved, she should be terrified. Even though you yourself were grieved and terrified, did you? You soothed her and petted her and told her it could all be made right. And then you brought her home to be reconciled with her husband as if nothing were wrong.’

  ‘As if there were no monster in the maze,’ John said softly. ‘Yes. There are some sights and some thoughts that a woman — a good woman, Beatrice — should never have to think, should never need to know. I am glad to protect Celia from the poison that is in her house. It is possible to do because I know that this time of endurance will not go on for ever. The maze will collapse. The monster will die. And in the rubble I want Celia and the children safe.’

  ‘Fustian!’ I said impatiently. ‘It sounds like a scene from one of Celia’s romances. What do you think causes this collapse? How are Celia and the children safe? What nonsense you talk, John. I shall have to get you committed again!’

  His eyes went hard at the jest, but his face stayed serene.

  ‘The collapse will come about through you,’ he said certainly. ‘You have overreached yourself, Beatrice. It was a good plan and a clever one. But the price was too high. I do not think you can service the loans and then Mr Llewellyn will foreclose. And he will not only foreclose on the loans you made with Harry’s consent, he will foreclose on the others: that only you and he, and now I, know about. And he will refuse to accept the land. He will insist on money. And you will have to sell. And you will have to sell cheap, because you will be in a hurry. And all your promissory notes will fall due at once. And you will not be able to pay without selling land and more land. Then Wideacre will be stripped of its land and its wealth. And you will be lucky if you hold on to the house, but all the rest of this’ — he gestured to the garden, the green paddock, the shimmering pigeon-cooing wood, and the high pale hills, streaked with the white path — ‘all this will belong to someone else.’

  ‘Stop it, John,’ I said, my voice hard. ‘Stop it. Stop the way you curse me. Any pain, any threats from you and it will be I who smash the maze. I shall tell Celia that you are in love with her and that is why you drank. And that is why you came home with her. And I shall tell Harry that you and she are lovers. And Wideacre will be destroyed for you and her. She will indeed be in the rubble. And you will have brought the wreckage on her when she is divorced and parted from her child, and thrown off the estate, and shamed. If you threaten and curse me, if you meddle in my financial affairs, if you contact Mr Llewellyn and threaten my ownership of the land, I will ruin Celia. And that would break your heart. So do not threaten me, and do not curse me as you do.’

  John’s eyes were bleak and distant. ‘It is not I who lay the curse, Beatrice,’ he said. ‘You are your own curse. For every road you tread has a snake coiled in the path. If Death comes for you, if ruin comes for you, it will be because death and ruin are all that you know, all that you plan for, everything around you. Even when you think you are p
lanning for the future, for Richard, for life, all you can produce is death in the village and desolation on the land.’

  I jabbed suddenly at Tobermory’s mouth in a spurt of rage and I whipped him. He reared up in the old trick I had taught him and his front hoof caught John a glancing blow on the shoulder. It sent him spinning against the door but did him no great harm, and then I set my heels in Tobermory’s side and we thundered down the drive as fast as if I was riding a race again, but this time against John’s words and his keen sharp insight. Not against John, the man who once rode to win because he loved me so.

  Tobermory was in high fettle and as glad to be out of his stable as I was glad to be on his back and not in the gig. The sunshine was as golden as champagne on my face and I flushed warm as he cantered past the new corn meadow up to the slopes of the downs. The birds were singing with summer madness and somewhere up in the hills a pair of cuckoos were calling in their two-toned notes like a pipe played by a child. The larks were singing their way up into the summer sky and the earth was breathing, a warm lush smell of grass growing and flowers blooming and hay readying. Wideacre was eternal. Wideacre was the same.

  But I was not. I rode like a city girl. I looked around me and saw all I needed to see, all I had come to see, all there was to see. But it did not speak to me. It did not chime in my heart like a clear-toned bell. It did not call to me like one loving cuckoo to another. It did not sing to me in a lark’s voice. It was eternal, eternally lovely, eternally desirable. But it no longer needed me. I rode on the land as a stranger. I rode on Tobermory like someone who has just learned to ride. I did not breathe with him. When I whispered his name his ears did not flick back to listen to me. The saddle felt stiff and awkward under me and the reins too big for my thin hands. Tobermory and I did not move as one, an unthinking half-human half-horse animal. And his hoofs did not cut into the land like the Fenny cuts out its riverbed. We were not part of the land. We were merely on it.

  So I looked at the corn with conscious care, with extra care, because I knew I could no longer know by instinct whether the crop was healthy. I rode along the line of the fences and when I saw a gap where a sheep could push in and ruin the crop, I hitched Tobermory to a tree and slid from the saddle. I heaved a branch over the gap and stared at it with my experienced dry eyes. It would keep a sheep out. The job had been done. But the branch had seemed very heavy, and I felt weary through and through.

  I trotted along the top of the downs and dropped down by the Acre track into the village. In my numb cold mood I had forgotten that I had not been in the village for nearly a month. Not since the base threat of my birthday presents. They would know that the breakfast parlour floor had been scattered with flints, for the servants coming home to Acre on their day’s holidays would have spread that rich piece of gossip. And they would know that Miss Beatrice had gone to bed stumbling like an old woman and had not got up for weeks. I had not planned to come home this way; Tobermory’s head had turned to Acre out of habit and I had been in a daze and not stopped him. Now I rode down to the village on a slack rein and let who dared threaten me. I could face down Lucy when she challenged me and I was fresh from my bed, but to be on Wideacre land and not to feel at home drained my strength from me like life-blood into the earth. My shoulders drooped, but my back was straight as ever, as my papa had taught me to ride. My head was up, but my fingers holding the reins were numb. Tobermory felt the change in me and he picked his way carefully, his ears flickering uneasily.

  The track drops down into Acre past the churchyard, around the corner they call ‘Miss Beatrice’s Corner’ with the graves of the two, the only two, suicides in the long history of Wideacre. Someone had put fresh flowers on both of the little mounds. But there was neither headstone nor cross. Not even a wooden one. Dr Pearce would not have permitted it. Once they grew careless and forgot the flowers, the graves would hardly show. And then they might forget. And then they might cease calling those two little heaps by my name.

  We turned left, past the church, and rode down the lane. I half expected, half feared some sign of the villagers and I faced that thought not with courage but with dull numbness. What more could they do? They had ceased to love me; they had learned to hate me. They dared do nothing against me other than hidden threats and childish cruelty. I might ride down Acre street every day of my life. If they did one thing to displease me I had the power to raze the whole village. I could burn the roofs over their heads. And they knew it.

  As Tobermory walked down the street a woman in one of the gardens looked up from the pitifully short row of vegetables she was weeding. She took in the handsome hunter and my smart grey habit in one swift glance, and then she gathered up her child and swept indoors. Her cottage door banged, like a shout. And I could hear the sound of the bolt being shot. As if to distract me from her rudeness — although I knew her name, Betty Miles — a barrage of bangs followed me down the village street. They had seen me from the little windows of their unlit cottages. They had heard Tobermory’s hoofs as they sat beside their empty fireplaces with little in the stew pot and no wage coming in, and then they had gone to their front doors and banged-them sharply two, three times. Acre was shut against me, as the land was closed to me.

  I rode Tobermory home, and stopped only briefly to look at the great wheatfield where the common land had once been. As if by some spell you could see the old landmarks under the blanket of the pale green wheat crop. The two valleys showed as indistinct lines. Even the great hollow, where the oak tree’s roots had spread, showed as a dip. And the two footpaths that led from where I sat on my horse showed as two little trenches leading from the oak tree’s gap up to the hills where the heather was budding and the ferns showed green. In my clear tired mind I knew that the infilling had been done badly because I had not been on the land to check it; that another year’s ploughing would wipe out all traces that the land had been open and loved and free to all the village.

  But sitting on my high hunter with my pretty cap perched on my head, it seemed to me that I might plough and plant this field every season for a thousand years and you would still be able to see where the village children had driven the geese, and where the oak tree had stood for courting couples to carve, announcing their betrothal.

  I turned Tobermory with heavy hands and headed for home at a jolting trot. It was a warm scented humming summer afternoon. The silk of my dress was rippling in the breeze of the trot that lengthened into a canter as I dropped my hands and Tobermory lengthened his stride. I moved in the saddle like a lump of wood, and under my ribs felt like a frozen stone.

  *

  Only Harry welcomed me back with blind good humour. They were taking tea in the parlour when I came in, unpinning my cap for it seemed suddenly too tight.

  ‘Good to see you out on the land again!’ he exclaimed, his voice muffled around some fruit bread.

  Celia’s eyes were on my face, worried at my pallor. I saw her glance at John and he scanned me with his measuring, professional, unloving stare.

  ‘Have a cup of tea,’ Celia said, gesturing to John to pull the bell pull. ‘You look tired. I’ll order another cup.’

  ‘I am perfectly well,’ I said with some impatience. ‘But you were quite right, Celia, it does look like being an excellent crop. With a good summer we should clear many of the outstanding debts of the estate.’

  I shot a look from under my eyelashes at John as I said this. He looked scornful, and I was certain, as I had guessed, that the MacAndrew fortune had bought even lawyers’ and merchants’ secrets, and that John alone of the three of them knew that one season would not clear our debts. Four or five good ones would be needed. And whoever had good weather when your survival depended on it? I was running on the spot with Wideacre, like one of those dreadful dreams when you cannot flee from a threat coming for you.

  ‘Excellent!’ said Harry heartily. ‘I am especially glad that you are up and about, Beatrice, because I wanted you to take the London corn merchant to the
fields next week.’

  I frowned at Harry, but the damage was done.

  ‘A London corn merchant?’ asked John quickly. ‘What can he want here? I thought you never sold direct to the merchants?’

  ‘We don’t,’ I said promptly. ‘We never have done. But this man, a Mr Gilby, wrote to say that he was in the area and would like to look at our fields to give him some idea of the standard of Sussex wheat.’

  Harry opened his mouth at the lie, but at a look from me closed it again. But that single betraying gesture was enough for John, who looked hard at Celia in an unspoken message that as good as called me a liar to my face.

  ‘Perhaps it would be better if you did not see him, Harry,’ Celia said, her soft voice tentative. ‘If he were to offer a very good price you could not help but be tempted, and you know you have always said that local corn should be locally sold and locally ground.’

  ‘I know,’ said Harry impatiently. ‘But one has to move with the times, my dear. Wideacre is farming in the way that all sensible land is now run. And the old idea of little markets and a pennyworth of corn for the poor is really not good business sense.’

  ‘And hardly a conversation for the parlour,’ I suggested smoothly. ‘Celia, could I have another cup? This warm weather makes me so thirsty. And do you have some sugar biscuits there?’