Wideacre

by Philippa Gregory

‘Now, now,’ said Harry, blustering after catching my look. ‘It is no use blaming Beatrice simply because we now farm in the way of everyone else. Of course we farm for maximum profit. Beatrice has simply employed the obvious methods.’

  ‘It seems to me that there is a choice,’ said John. He was still infuriatingly cool, as if he were conducting a debate at his university chambers. I walked to the fireplace, leaned one arm along the cool mantelpiece and watched him.

  ‘There is the choice between saying the important thing in life is to make as much money as possible and saying the important thing is trying to live without abusing other people. Perhaps even to try to make their lives a little better. You and Beatrice — forgive me, Harry — seem to be committed to profit at any price. I find I don’t admire that.’

  John’s look at Harry and me was like a lance on a gangrenous wound. He made me feel filthy. I gave an affected sigh.

  ‘Really, John, for a nabob’s son your moral obligations to profit sit rather oddly! You can enjoy the luxury of a conscience because someone else did the dirty work of earning the wealth for you. You were born and bred to a massive fortune. It is easy enough for you to despise wealth.’

  ‘I had so much,’ he corrected me, a gleam in his eyes. ‘You had better pray I do despise wealth, Beatrice. For I have my wealth no longer.’

  Celia leaped to her feet, then checked herself. She had been about to run from the room but she hesitated and turned to Harry.

  ‘We all seem to be talking about different things and even quarrelling,’ she said sadly. ‘But while we talk things get worse and worse in Acre. Harry, I do implore you to stop this headlong dash for profit and at least give the poor the chance to buy Wideacre wheat at a proper price.

  ‘We all know that forestalling the market is wrong. Your papa never did it. You promised that you would never do it. Please, please, sell the wheat to the village.’

  ‘Now, Celia!’ said Harry, falling back on the reliable weapon of a loud-voiced bluster. ‘Are you accusing me of breaking my word? Are you challenging my honour?’

  ‘Oh, no!’ she said. ‘But …’

  ‘That’s enough!’ said Harry, with a bully’s abruptness. ‘Beatrice is running the land as we see fit. And I shall go harvesting another year, when Acre has come out of this fit of the sullens. This conversation is closed.’

  Celia dropped her eyes to the coffee jug and I saw a single tear fall like a raindrop on to the silver tray. But she said nothing. And John, after one compassionate glance at her downcast face, said nothing more. I waited until I was sure they were completely silenced and then I went back to my office. I had work to do.

  At last the prospects seemed to be brightening. The fields were being cut faster than ever before and I was out every day in a fever of impatience to get the job done.

  Not only could I see the chance of a great bounty on the way for Wideacre, and a chance to be free, utterly free, of the creditors but I also felt a storm in the air. It prickled on the horizon. I felt it on my skin. The skies were clear, I could not wish for clearer. But I could feel the clouds massing against me, somewhere over the horizon.

  The days were hot, too hot. They had lost their honest summertime heat and were sultry, threatening. Tobermory’s neck was streaked with sweat even while he stood in the shade and the flies buzzed ominously low about his head. The men in the field suffered as it became hotter and damper. One day a reaper fainted — Joe Smith, old Giles’s son. He fell on his sickle like a fool and the line broke as they ran around him. I rode over. It was a nasty wound, open nearly to the bone.

  ‘I’ll send for the Chichester surgeon,’ I said generously. ‘Margery Thompson can bind it up for now, and I will send for the doctor to stitch it for you.’

  Joe looked up at me, white with shock, his dark eyes hazy.

  ‘I’d rather have Dr MacAndrew if I may, Miss Beatrice,’ he said humbly.

  ‘Get in the wagon then,’ I said with sudden temper. ‘It’s going up to the Hall. I think your beloved Dr MacAndrew is in. If he’s out doing good deeds in Acre you can sit in the stable yard and wait for him. I hope you don’t bleed to death while you are waiting.’

  And I wheeled Tobermory and trotted back to my patch of shade by the hedge, and watched them help Joe into the wagon. He was in luck, John was in the garden and saw him as soon as the wagon drew up in the stable yard. He treated him for free and with such skill that Joe was out gleaning two days later. Another proof of John’s skill. Another reason for them to love him. Another enemy of mine.

  I was surrounded by them. I worked all day in a field full of men who hated me and women who feared me. I slept at night with only a door between me and a man who wished for my death. And I woke every dawn to know that somewhere, out on the downs, was another enemy who was planning my death, who was readying himself to come for me.

  The weather seemed to hate me. The heat held but there was no wind. The wheat barely rustled before it was cut down. In the hot humid days there was utter silence. The men did not talk in the fields; the women did not sing. Even the little children, twisting the stalks for tying the stooks, played and spoke in whispers. And if I rode Tobermory over towards them, they backed away with silent mouths agape, black stubs of teeth showing, and melted, like diseased fox cubs, into the hedgerow.

  Not even the birds sang in the heat. You would think they shared Wideacre’s baking despair and were silent for sorrow. Only in the cool ominous dawns and in the uneasy twilight would they start up and their voices sounded eerie, like the whine of a whipped dog.

  The light seemed wrong to me, as well. I was coming half to believe that it was my eyes and senses that were deceiving me, tricking me into fearing a storm when I so desperately needed a settled calm. But if I had mistrusted the prickle down my sweaty spine, and the wet smell of the heavy air, I could not be wrong over the brightness of the day. It stung my eyes. It was not the brightest honest yellow heat of a Wideacre midsummer, but something with a sickly dark core. A bluish light, a purple light hung over us. A sun like a red wound in a yellowing sky. When I opened my eyes in the morning I shuddered instinctively as if I had a fever. I dressed in my hot full-skirted habit with no joy. The sky was like an oven above me, and the ground as hard as iron beneath my feet, all the moisture baked from it. The Fenny was shrunk so small I could not hear its ripple from my bedroom window, and when it flowed through Acre it stank with the slops thrown into it, and the cattle fouling it. I too felt desiccated: as dry as an old leaf, or an empty seashell when the smooth little wet animal that lived inside it is dead.

  So I hurried the reapers. I was there first in the field every morning, and last to leave every night. I rode them as I would a sluggish horse and they would have kicked out if they had dared. But they could not. Whenever they halted the line to wipe their heads or to rub the stinging sweat from their eyes they would hear me call, ‘Reapers, keep moving!’ And they would groan and grasp the handle of the sickle — slick with sweat and turning painfully even in their callused hands. They did not murmur against me. They had not even breath enough to curse me. They worked as if they just longed for the whole miserable job to be done, the harvest in, and winter to bring cold starvation and quick death to end it all.

  And I sat high on the sweating horse, my face white and strained beneath the cap that cast no shade on my eyes, and knew that longing for myself. I was bone-weary. Tired with days and days of watching and worrying and driving them, and driving myself. And tired with a deep inner sickness that said to me as slowly and as firmly as a funeral bell, ‘All for nothing. All for nothing,’ as if the words made any sense at all.

  But we were nearly done. The stocks were piled in the centre of the field awaiting the wagons, and the men had collapsed, gasping in the airless shade of the hedge. The women and the old people stacking the stooks were nearly finished, and the men watched their bent-backed wives and parents with lack-lustre beaten eyes, without the strength to help them.

  Margery Thompson,
who had been at the vicarage when John saved Richard’s life, had ceased her work already. I watched her under my eyelashes, my attention suddenly sharpened with unease. She had seated herself on the bank by the hedge and was twisting stalks of corn on her lap. It is the tradition on Wideacre that the last stook, the last one of the whole harvest, is a corn-baby, a corn-dolly. Woven by the cleverest old woman, the doll represents the leader of the harvest. Season after season I had loaned my ribbons to make the circle of magic between the harvest and me complete. I had seen a little corn-dolly Beatrice triumphant at the top of the pile of stooks. In the year Harry brought in the harvest the corn-dolly was bawdy, with a scrap of linen for its shirt and a head of wheat between the stalk legs, grotesquely erect, and everyone had roared. Harry had taken that one home, grinning, and hid it from Mama. The corn-dollies they had made for me were pinned on the wall of my office. Proof, if ever I was near forgetting, that the world of papers and debts and business was the pretend life, and the real world was the corn and the goddesses of the fertile earth.

  The corn-dolly tradition had slipped from my worried, money-mad mind, but as I watched the old woman’s nimble fingers moving so cleverly and so quickly among the stalks I knew a twinge of dread warning me of some fresh disaster, that some magic against me was brewing.

  The clouds had come out from hiding at last and were piling up on the horizon like great walls, blocking out the eerie sunlight and making a premature dusk. It had held off long enough to save me. As long as the wagons came safely through, and took Wideacre’s corn to the richest market in the world, the rain could pour down and wash Acre and all Wideacre into the Fenny for all I cared. I had done what I set out to do, and I cared little if the storm drowned me.

  Tobermory shivered in the breeze, not because it was cold, for it carried no freshness, but it blew like the breath of a threat. It was as hot as if it blew from India with the black magic of distant dangerous places. Margery Thompson had the corn-dolly on her lap and was muttering to it as if she were nursing a baby, and chuckling to herself. The others had finished piling the stooks and were looking at her curiously. The stooks were heaped in an unstable pyramid in the middle of the field, wanting only the corn-dolly to top it off and to mark the end of the harvest.

  ‘There. ‘Tis done,’ she said, and tossed it high in the air. She threw it accurately and it balanced on the top of the pile. The reapers moved forward, drawn by the old tradition as if they hardly knew what they were doing, their sickles sharp in their hands.

  The game was that they stood some distance from the heap and shied their sickles at it. The sickle that stuck in the dolly belonged to Bill Forrester and he walked wearily towards the stooks to claim his prize and bring it to me. But when it was in his hand he flushed scarlet to the roots of his hair and chucked it, like a football, to the man next to him. They tossed the dolly down the line and then one skilful hand, I don’t know whose, sent it whirling into the air towards me. Tobermory threw up his head in fright and I tightened one hand on the rein and caught the dolly — faster than thought, which would have warned me to let it fall.

  It was not one corn-dolly but two. It was two figures coupled. It was the two-backed beast Mama had seen before the fire. A piece of grey ribbon filched from me was round the neck of one of the dollies, and a scrap of linen to indicate Harry was twisted around the other. The head of wheat that had been such a good bawdy joke four seasons ago was now obscene. The phallic sheath of corn was stuck between the other dolly’s straw legs. She was meant to be me; he was meant to be Harry. The secret was out.

  Not out as gossip, I thought, shaken to stillness by this horror made from good Wideacre wheat, that seemed to stink in my hand. But out of something sensed. Something as threatening and permeating as woodsmoke. Something as indescribable yet as certain as the feel of thunder on the way. Margery Thompson, the clever old woman, had listened with her inner ear, and made a joke that hit the mark. The truth had come to her despite herself. She had not spoken it of her own free will. She had just smelled the stink of lust and incest that lingered around my skirts, that Celia feared and Mama had sensed. And she had fashioned a horror from good Wideacre wheat to show that everything was wrong.

  I tore at the delicate bodies and dropped them to the ground beneath Tobermory’s hoofs.

  ‘You disgust me,’ I said to the thickening air over their heads. ‘You are scum. You deserve to be treated like pigs for you think like swine. The treatment you have had from me has been the best I could do. But now I shall feel nothing, nothing for you. If we are at war then well and good. I shall enclose all the common. Indeed I shall enclose and flatten Acre village itself. I shall clear my land of you altogether. And the good clean land will grow pure without your stinking cottages, and your fearful children, and your dirty minds.’

  The men had hunkered down again, and only the women sighed like fir trees when the first breath of a storm moves the feathery tops. But they did not weep or call out. The baking air was draining us all, sucking the strength from us in unpredictable eddies of little hot whirlwinds.

  ‘Now go,’ I said. My voice was full of hate but cracked with weariness and the dryness of my tense throat. ‘Go. And when I come to the harvest dinner this afternoon remember that the man there who does not doff his cap to me and the woman who fails to curtsy is penniless, homeless, and jobless, from that moment.’

  They sighed again like a forest when a woodland fire is taking hold, licking like a lover up the young saplings while the tops of the trees flutter as if to call for help.

  I wheeled Tobermory round and left them in the stubble. The wagons were lumbering over the fields towards the pile of stooks and I could see John Brien in the leading cart.

  ‘I’m away to change,’ I said. ‘I will come down to the mill later.’

  ‘There may be trouble at the harvest dinner,’ he said warningly, his strange town face forever fearful on the land, sharp in this early gloaming. His face was greenish yellow from the uneasy storm light. I heard a crackle, sharp as fire, in dry bracken behind me, and his face was suddenly blazing like a white angel as the sheet lightning dropped like a shard of glass on the upper horizon of the downs.

  ‘There is always trouble,’ I said wearily. ‘We can always arrest some young lads. We can always hang another old man. They can start trouble but we always finish it. I have men from Chichester to guard the corn tonight and till it is threshed. And Mr Gilby will send guards with his wagons. I do not fear Acre’s spite. And tomorrow I shall speak with you about expelling them all from Acre and firing the village. I want it no more. I need it no more.’

  His weasel eyes glinted at the prospect of violence to the people he despised.

  ‘I shall see you at the mill,’ I said. ‘Make haste to get this load into the barn. I think the rain will hold off, but when it comes it will be a great storm.’

  He nodded and cracked his whip at the horses but he need not have hurried. I was right about the rain. It held off for all of my wearisome ride home when I could scarcely breathe the hot air. I felt as if someone was holding a damp muffler over my mouth and if I could have breathed I would have screamed for help.

  Even inside the Hall the light made everything strange. Celia’s parlour was an undersea green, and her face was white coral, a drowned virgin. Her eyes were like brown hollows in her head and when she poured my tea her hands were shaking.

  ‘What’s the matter, Celia?’ I asked.

  ‘I scarcely know,’ said Celia. She tried to laugh but the lilt in her voice had a hard edge. John was alert, his eyes on her strained face.

  ‘Are you unwell?’ he asked precisely.

  ‘No,’ said Celia. ‘I suppose it is just this horrid weather. This endless threat of storm that never comes weighs and weighs on me. I feel hot and then shivery. I have been down in Acre today and it feels all wrong there too. Some of the women seemed to be avoiding me. I feel certain that there will be trouble over the grain wagons, Beatrice. The air is full of th
reat. I feel almost fearful. I feel that something most dreadful is going to happen.’

  ‘It’s going to rain, that’s what’s going to happen,’ I said drily, to shake Celia out of her fancies. ‘It’s going to pour. We had better take the carriage to the harvest dinner and not the landau.’

  She nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I ordered the coach. One does not have to be as weather-wise as you, Beatrice, to feel this storm coming. I feel like a cat with my fur rubbed all the wrong way. I have felt thus for days. But I fear more than a storm. I fear the mood of Acre.’

  ‘Well, I shall soothe my nerves with a bath and a fresh dress,’ I said with pretended indifference. But I knew I had John’s eyes on my face, and I knew my eyes were dark with fear at Celia’s forebodings. ‘And then, I suppose, we will have to go. When did you plan we should be there, Celia? The carts will be unloaded within an hour.’

  ‘As soon as you wish,’ she said absently. As she spoke there was a rumble of thunder along the heads of the downs. Another flash, so bright it stabbed our eyes, lit the room with a blaze of blue and then vanished, leaving us blinking in total blackness. Celia laughed at her jump, but her voice had a high note of hysteria.

  ‘I will be quick then,’ I said. But I could not move fast. The air was too thick for me. It quivered around me with meanings and resonances with a stink of horror I could not face. I swam through it to the door and tried to smile casually at them. My teeth were bared in an awkward grimace and my eyes were dead and cold. John moved to open the door for me, and his fingers brushed my hand.

  ‘You are icy cold, Beatrice,’ he said, his professional interest kindled, but malice in his voice. ‘Have you a fever? Or are you, too, afraid of this storm? Do you also feel the tension, the hatred all around us?’

  ‘No,’ I said wearily. ‘I have been bringing in the corn for what seems like all my life. I have been out in the fields every day. While you two sit in the parlour and plot against me, and drink the tea my labour has paid for, I am out there in the baking sunlight trying to save Wideacre. But I would not expect anyone to understand that.’