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‘Rough!’ exclaimed Harry. ‘Beatrice, I swear I only kissed her on the lips and held her in my arms. I may have pressed …’ He broke off. ‘But I would hardly call that rough. Would you?’ His reasonable tone of argument died on his lips as he recalled exactly what would seem rough between us and he grinned with remembered pleasure. With one accord we rose from the table and stood side by side at the fireplace looking down at the smouldering logs. In the mirror above the fireplace I could see how the dark violet gown enhanced the colour of my smiling sun-rosy face. How my hazel eyes gleamed more cat-like and satisfied than ever. The sun had placed copper lights in my hair and they gleamed through the light powder. I stood at arm’s length from Harry, teasing myself with his nearness.
‘She would like an arrangement,’ I said.
‘She means this?’ Harry asked incredulously.
‘I believe so,’ I said honestly. ‘She knows Wideacre must have an heir and she’s prepared for that. But I think at heart she’s a cold woman who prefers to be alone. She’s a quiet girl, and shy, and it isn’t hard to guess that her home must be a torment to her. What she wants is the position and peace of Wideacre without having to pay for it more than once in the shape of a son.’
‘How would this suit us, Beatrice?’ Harry asked and my heart warmed at this reassurance that it was my word now at Wideacre. It would be I who decided whether the wedding went ahead or not. Celia could be the pawn I moved on the chessboard of my desires. My mama, too, could be present or absent as I desired. I held the Master of Wideacre in the palm of my hand, and his land, and his power, and his wealth, were mine as they should be.
I shrugged negligently.
‘It is your choice, Harry,’ I said, as if I did not plan to make the decision. ‘You have to marry to come into full ownership of the estate and to take control of the capital from the lawyers. Otherwise we will have to wait until you are of age. It might as well be Celia as any other. The plans have gone ahead and it would be difficult to withdraw. Besides, a wife who does not seek your company too often will make it easy for us to be together.’
Harry glanced up quickly from watching the fire to look at me, tantalizingly out of reach.
‘Do you find me rough, Beatrice?’ he asked thickly.
A denial and reassurance in case he was afraid he had hurt me was on the tip of my tongue, but some wise instinct made me pause. There was some flaw in Harry that mingled pleasure and pain in his mind and that I never would understand. The thought of hurting me was making him breathe a little faster, was making his cheeks flush. I did not dislike it, for his arousal made me shiver inside. Harry’s way would never be my way. Yet I could satisfy him.
‘Yes, you hurt me,’ I breathed.
‘Are you in pain?’ he asked, as taut as an animal ready to spring.
‘I am bruised,’ I said. ‘You hammered my head on the ground and you bit my lips till they bled.’
We were both breathing faster but still I stayed just out of his reach.
‘Were you afraid of me?’ Harry asked.
My eyes met his and I could see our family likeness. Brother and sister, our darkened eyes of desire were the same. In that frozen hot second we were more than siblings, we were like twins.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But I shall have my revenge when I hurt you.’
I had the key to Harry. The statues moved. His arm pinned me to him for a hard biting kiss and his other hand smoothed down the silk of my back and then clenched my buttocks with his fingernails digging in. My mouth opened wide under his and he forced me down on the dining-room floor and took me as roughly as an enemy. One of his hands clasped mine above my head so that I was helpless beneath him, while the other hand pulled up my skirts and petticoats. But when I struggled he instantly released me and checked his inexpert heavy thrusts. But I freed my hands only to hold him closer and guide him inside me.
‘My love,’ I said. Perverse. Wordy. Pompous. He was still the Squire of Wideacre and I wanted him inside me.
‘My love,’ I said.
I slept in my own bed, the first sweet sleep I had had since the death of my father and the crippling of Ralph. My darling Harry had taken from me the dreadful tension and I felt I could rest. Not once in the night did I hear the snap then the thud of a closing mantrap and the sharp crack of breaking bones. Not once did I jerk into wakefulness, thinking I heard a clank outside my door as some hideous cripple clawed into my room, dragging his legs in the mouth of a monstrous trap behind him. Harry had set me free. The golden boy had released me from my darkness, and I no longer ached with pain and fear, nor with longing for those I had loved whom I would never see again.
And their loss now seemed to me to be part of the natural order of things. In farming you have to break the earth and drain ditches to make the land flower and fruit. I had done some breaking; I had ordered a culling. But now the new life was in the earth; there was a new young master, and the proof that I had done right was that the future was very bright and sunny, and that I was safe on the land where I belonged.
I stood before the little mirror on my dressing table and tilted it to see how I must look to Harry. I saw a bruise mouth-shaped on my left breast and I touched it with wondering fingers that I should have been bitten so hard, and yet remembered no pain. In the morning sunshine my skin had the bloom of a ripe peach, ready for picking. From my feet, so white with such high-arched insteps, to the copper curls that framed my face and warmed and tickled the curve of my bare back, I was made for loving. I fell back on the bed, my hair fanned out on the pillow, and craned my neck to see in the mirror how I had appeared to Harry when he took me on grass or on wooden floor, wide-eyed and wide-legged. Watching myself I became luxuriously certain that Harry would soon come to me. It was early; my maid would not call me for an hour; my mother was still safe in her drugged sleep. Harry and I could lie together now and steal off to a hollow in the downs or in the woods after breakfast.
I did not move when I heard the step outside my door but simply turned a lazy head to the opening door and smiled my welcome to Harry. Instead – I jumped as if I had been scalded – there was my mother!
‘Good heavens, child,’ Mama said calmly. ‘You’ll catch your death of cold. Whatever are you doing?’
I held my tongue and blinked lazily at her. The only thing I could do.
‘Have you just woken?’ she asked. I yawned and carelessly reached for my shift.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I must have thrown off my clothes in the night as it was so hot.’ I felt better with my shift on, but underneath my relief I was prickly with irritation – at myself for that guilty start, and at my mother who walked so calmly into my room as if she owned it.
‘How lovely to see you up and about again,’ I said smiling. ‘Are you sure you are well enough? Hadn’t you better go back to your room after breakfast?’
‘Oh, no,’ said Mama as if she never had a day’s illness in her life. She crossed the room, her morning dress rustling, and made herself at home on the window seat.
‘I am feeling so much better! You know how it is with me after these attacks. Once they are over I feel as if I should never be ill again. But you, Beatrice,’ – she narrowed her gaze and looked at me closely as I sat up in bed – ‘you are looking so well, so glowing! Has something pleasant happened?’
I smiled and shrugged my shoulders.
‘Oh, nothing really,’ I said dismissively. ‘Harry took me for a ride on the downs yesterday, and I felt so happy again to be out and about in the lovely weather.’
Mama nodded.
‘You must go out more,’ she said. ‘If we could only spare a lad from the stables it would be all right for him to ride behind you and then you could go out more. But I doubt if there is one to spare with the horses wanted out on the land. Still once Harry is married you will have Celia for company. You can teach her to ride and take her out.’
‘Lovely,’ I said absently and turned the subject. Mama spoke about clothes and said how glad she was to be out of the heavy mourning black we had been wearing.
‘You can have something pretty for Harry’s wedding, but not too bright,’ she said. ‘And while they are away we can plan for a little party to welcome them home and that can be your coming-out party, Beatrice. That way you will be able to make more calls with Celia, and if the Haverings take her to London, you will be able to go too.’
I stopped stock-still in the act of pouring water from my ewer into the basin. ‘Going away?’ I said blankly.
‘Yes,’ said Mama lightly. ‘Celia and Harry are to have one of these new-fangled wedding tours. They are planning to go all the way to France and Italy – did no one mention it to you? Celia wants to sketch and Harry wants to visit some farms he has read about. I should hate such a marathon and, I dare say, so would you. But if the two of them wish to go they may enjoy it. You and I can keep each other company here, my dear. You will be busy overseeing the winter sowing for Harry, I suppose.’
I bent my head over the basin and splashed the cold water in my face, keeping my head down so that Mama could not see me. I reached blindly for a towel. Mama would not be able to tell I could not control a grimace of pain and fear. I buried my face in the towel and held its softness to my eyes where tears of anger and fear were stinging hot. I did not feel unhappy; I felt murderous. I wanted to strike Celia, to smash her pretty face and scratch her soft brown eyes. I wanted Harry to suffer the torments of the damned and crawl to me for forgiveness. I simply could not bear the thought of those two alone together, travelling in a post-chaise and staying at hotels. Dining together without family or friends around them, able to slip away for kisses and caresses any time they wished, while I ached with desire and loneliness and waited for Harry’s return like an old spinster, unwanted at home.
And I was angry, for it had only been last night that I had drawn such pleasure from the knowledge that never again would I be the one whose life was planned for her, whose days were made to revolve around another’s. I was certain that with Harry’s heart in my hands and my secret key to Harry’s sensuality, I should have Wideacre. Now, mere hours after I had lain with Harry on the hard wooden floor, my mama was telling me news as if I was of no more importance than the young daughter of any house.
‘Is this Harry’s idea?’ I asked, coming out of the towel and dressing with my back to Mama in the window seat.
‘He and Celia dreamed it up together when they were always singing Italian songs,’ she said complacently. ‘He thought she would like to hear them sung by Italians or some such nonsense. They won’t be gone long, only two or three months. They will be home for Christmas.’
I gasped, but she did not hear me, and as I turned to brush my hair at the mirror she did not notice that my face was white. All my old pain of longing for a safe arm to hold me and a promise of love I could trust was flooding back over me. It was even worse now I had lain with Harry and knew what it was to be loved by him. I could perhaps live without his loving. Or I could live without being the first person on Wideacre. But I could not live with neither. And I could not bear the prospect of another woman having both the love and the power. If Celia was a beloved wife there was nothing to stand between me and the dominance of my mama. Nothing to save me from the emptiness of dutiful daughter days. Nothing to prevent me from being married off to the first likely suitor who chanced our way. If I lost Harry now, I would lose everything I had ever wanted – my pleasure and land. Just as Ralph had said.
This trip had to be prevented. I knew, because I knew Harry, that if he were all alone with Celia for two months he would come to love her. And who could resist him? I had seen him with a frightened foal or an injured hound, and I knew how he prided himself on his gentle understanding, on winning a shy creature’s confidence. He would see Celia’s coldness as a result of her cruel treatment at home and set himself the task of becoming her friend. Once he came to know her he would realize she was indeed the best bride he could have found.
Under her shy and cool defences, Celia was warm and loving. She even had a little bud of humour, and Harry would learn to make those brown eyes twinkle and he would hear her girl’s ripple of laughter. It would be inevitable that they would warm to each other, and equally inevitable that one night, after the opera or the theatre, or some peaceful dinner for two, Celia would be smiling with wine and new confidence. Harry would turn to her for a kiss and she would give him one. He would touch her breast and she would not push his hand away. He would stroke her narrow pliant back and whisper endearments, and she would smile and twine her arms around his neck. And I? I would be forgotten.
Nothing of these panicky thoughts showed in my face as Mama and I went downstairs, but when we entered the breakfast parlour some hours later I had a second shock of pain at Harry’s delighted greeting to Mama and his warm smile to me was as sunny and open as his delight in seeing her. I drank tea and ate a little toast, while Harry wolfed down cold ham, cold beef, some new bread and honey, some toast and butter and finally a peach. Mama ate heartily too and laughed and joked with Harry as if she had never been ill. Only I sat silent. I was back in my old place at the side of the table rather than at the end. The outsider again.
‘Beatrice looks so well and so happy I think she should have some more riding,’ Mama remarked as Harry carved himself one more slice of meat. He picked at the white fat with his fingers and ate it first. ‘Perhaps you could make a point of seeing she goes out daily,’ Mama said, as if I were a lapdog that needed walking.
‘Rather,’ said Harry unhelpfully.
‘Could she ride today in the morning or in the afternoon?’ she asked. I looked up from my plate and my eyes sent an urgent message to Harry. ‘Now! Now! Say now, and let us race up to the downs and tumble into our little hollow and I will forget this jealousy and pain and give you such pleasure that you will never want to come home and never want another woman in your life.’
Harry smiled at me, his open, brotherly smile.
‘If you don’t mind, Beatrice, I will see to it tomorrow. I promised Lord Havering I would look at his coverts with him today and I dare not be late.’
He took out his watch and pushed back his chair to go.
‘I’ll not be back till late tonight, Mama. I shall stay to dinner if I’m asked. I have not been there for three days and I shall have to make my apologies!’
He bent and kissed her hand and smiled at me in farewell and strolled out of the room as if he had not a care in the world. I heard his footsteps cross the hall, then the front door open and close. In the silence I could hear the clatter of his horse as the groom led it round from the stable and then the clip-clop as he rode away. He rode away as if love and passion meant nothing. He rode away because he was a fool. I had put my heart in the keeping of a fool.
My mama looked at me.
‘You must not mind, Beatrice,’ she said. ‘A young man is bound to be thoughtless of his family when he is engaged to be married. You cannot blame him for preferring Celia’s company to ours. We will all be more settled when this time of waiting is over. I am sure he will find time to ride with you tomorrow.’
I nodded and moved my face muscles into a semblance of a smile.
I held that smile all the long day.
In the afternoon Mama was going calling, but she had enough sympathy with my forlorn state not to force me to go with her. As soon as her carriage had vanished, I took my horse out and rode down to the River Fenny – not near the old cottage where Ralph used to live – but upstream to a deep, clear pool where Harry sometimes tried to catch fish. I tied the horse to a bush and lay face down on the ground.
I did not weep or sob. I lay silent and let the great waves of jealousy and misery wash over me. Harry did not love me as I loved him. Sensuality for him was an occasional pleasure – necessary in that second of desire, but swiftly enjoyed and forgotten. To me it was a way of life, the very kernel of myself. Harry had his outside life: his newspapers, his journals, his books, his men friends, his engagement to Celia and his visits to the Haverings. All I had to dream of, to fill my life, to keep me alive and glowing, was Wideacre. Wideacre and Harry.
And at this moment I had only Wideacre. My cheek lay on the damp, dark leafmould of the forest floor, and when I opened my eyes I could see small, spindly plants with heart-shaped leaves pushing their narrow stems up through the dark peat. Beyond their bowed little heads was the sheen of the Fenny, gleaming like pewter. It flows almost silently here between deep banks, overhung with maidenhair fern and lit by brilliant lanterns of kingcups – as bright above the water as their reflections on the shiny surface.
In the centre of the river one can see two worlds. The reflected world of air and winds, the tossing trees and cloudy sky, and the underworld of the riverbed, a mixture of pure white sand and stones as yellow as gold. In the dark curves of the river where ponds have formed the filtered scraps of peat make the hollows black and ominous, but in the main stream the riverbed glows like sunshine. The bright green weed tossing in the current hides young trout, baby eels and a few salmon. The green ferns at the bank mask the holes of water shrews and otters.
I lay in silence until the thud of my own angry and resentful heart had stilled and until I could hear the safe steady beat of the heart of Wideacre. Deep, deep in the earth, so deep most people never hear it, beats the great heart, steady and true. It spoke to me of endurance and courage. Of setting my heart on the land and staying with the land. Of being full of sin and blood to get thus far, and of other sins which would take me steadily further.
I saw them pass before me without blinking. The death’s head of my father’s agonized face; the scream from Ralph; even the fluttering fall from my window of the owl we had called Canny. Wideacre spoke to me in my loneliness and my longing for love and the beat of its heart said, ‘Trust no one. There is only the land.’ And I remembered Ralph’s advice – which he himself had fatally forgotten – to be the one who is loved. Never to make the mistake of being the one who does the loving.
I listened to that secret beat, that hard wise secret, for a long, long time, until my cheek took the impress of the dead leaves and the front of my grey habit was darkened with the damp of the soil. The chill cooled me and hardened me, like a new-forged weapon of iron. Then I mounted my horse and trotted at a ladylike pace for home.
We dined early for there was no point in waiting for Harry. I poured Mama’s tea for her in the parlour and she told me about her calls and the latest women’s tittle-tattle of the neighbourhood. I took care to nod and look interested. When she rose to go to bed, I threw another log on the fire and said I would stay and read for a few minutes longer. She kissed me goodnight and left. I sat stock-still, like an enchantress in a fairy story, my eyes on the burning log in the grate.
The front door opened quietly. Harry made no noise crossing the hall, thinking the whole house was asleep. He saw the light under the parlour door and came in. I saw at a glance that it was as I had hoped. He had been drinking and was unsatisfied. His walk had a quickness and an alertness. His blue eyes sparkled.
‘Beatrice!’ He said my name as a thirsty man might say, ‘Water!’
I smiled and, more like an enchantress than ever, said nothing, but let the magic of my body and face draw him from the doorway across the room to kneel at my feet before the fire.
‘I felt we should be apart today,’ he said hesitantly, apologetically. ‘I needed to think.’
My face showed no sign of my impatience at his silly lie. Harry think indeed! I knew he had lost his nerve and – afraid of my sensuality, afraid of his own, afraid of the sin, afraid of the consequences – had fled to Celia’s coolness to escape the heat of home. And I knew well enough what had happened there. Celia and her pretty young sisters had petted and teased him all afternoon; Lord Havering’s good wine and generous glasses of port had made him bold again. He had begged a moonlit walk in the garden with Celia and her frightened, struggling refusal of a kiss had set him on fire again with unsatisfied desire and brought him back to my feet. But it was not love with Harry. And it should not be love with me.
‘I hope you did not mind,’ he asked tentatively. He looked up at me and took one still, unresponsive hand. I looked as if I had no idea why I should mind. My hazel eyes fixed on the fire were wide open with detached and polite interest in Harry’s conversation.
‘I was afraid of us as lovers,’ he confessed honestly, his eyes fixed on my face. Still I said nothing. My confidence was growing but I was still chilled inside from my sad vigil in the wood. And I would never love a man who did not love me more.
He fell silent and I let the silence stretch.
‘Beatrice,’ he said again. ‘I will do anything …’
It was a clear plea. I had won.
‘I must go to bed,’ I said, standing. ‘I promised Mama I would not stay up late. We did not expect you back so soon.’
‘Beatrice,’ he said again, looking up at me.
If I had slackened my control and allowed so much as one of my fingers to touch one of the curls of his head, I should have been lost. I would have collapsed to the hearth rug with him and he would have taken me that night and left me the following morning for Celia on a pendulum that would have swung every day of a miserable life. I had to win this struggle with Harry. If once I lost him, I lost not only the love of the one man I wanted, but I also lost Wideacre. I had staked my life’s happiness on this indecisive, conscience-ridden creature and I had to win. Against his own good conscience and against his own good, sweet betrothed, I had set his passionate nature and the taste of perverse pleasure he had with me – my whip on his thigh, the taste of blood when I bit his lips, which he would never have with gentle Celia.
I smiled down at him but took care not to touch him.
‘Goodnight, Harry,’ I said. ‘Perhaps we will ride on the downs together tomorrow.’
I undressed slowly in a dream by candle-light, hardly knowing whether my desperate gamble had won me security or whether I had lost everything. Was Harry even now on his knees at his bedside praying like a good child for God to keep him pure? Or was he still kneeling by my chair in the parlour burning with desire? I slid between the sheets and blew out the candle. In the dark I could hear the house settle in the silence but I lay wakeful, reliving the scene downstairs and aching for my lover. I waited for sleep but I expected to lie awake. My aroused heart beat fast and every muscle in my body quivered in expectation.
In the silence of the night I heard an odd, soft noise and I held my breath to listen. I heard it a second time – the creak of a board in the passage outside my door and then – the most welcome sound in the whole world – a soft sad moan as Harry pressed his forehead to the unyielding wood of my door and kneeled on the floorboards outside my room.
He did not dare to try the handle of the door; he did not dare even to tap on the door to see if I would let him in. He was like a whipped dog in the passageway and knew his master at last. He knelt in longing and in remorse and silence on my threshold. And I let him wait there.
I turned over in bed, smiled in silent delight … and slept like a baby.
My mother teased Harry about the dark shadows under his eyes at breakfast and said she did not know what to blame – Celia’s pretty face or Lord Havering’s port. Harry smiled with an effort and said with careful nonchalance, ‘A morning’s gallop on the downs will soon blow the cobwebs away, Mama! Will you come riding with me today, Beatrice?’
I smiled and said, ‘Yes,’ and his face lightened. I said not another word at breakfast, nor did I speak until we had ridden up past our fields where the corn was ripening to the downs. Harry led the way like a practised lover to our little hollow among the ferns, dismounted and turned to help me.
I kept my seat and looked steadily down until I saw his confidence waver.
‘You promised me a gallop,’ I said lightly.
‘I have been a fool,’ he said. ‘I have been mad, Beatrice, and you must forgive me. Forget yesterday, remember only the day before. Don’t give me that pleasure and then rob me of it. Punish me another way, be as cruel to me as you like but don’t teach me of the loveliness of your body and then take it from me. Don’t condemn me to live in the house with you, to see you every day and yet never be able to hold you again! Don’t condemn me to a living death, Beatrice!’
He stumbled to a halt on what was nearly a sob and as he raised his face I saw his mouth trembling. I reached out to him and let him hold me as I slid down from the saddle. But I freed myself when my feet touched the turf and stepped back so we did not touch. His eyes were hazy blue with desire and I knew mine were dark. The slow, warm heat of arousal was beating in my body and my control over myself and over this scene was slipping fast. My anger at Harry and my conflicting desire to be under him again fused into one passion of love and hatred. With my full force I slapped him as hard as I could on the right cheek and then struck him a violent back-handed blow on his left cheek.
Instinctively, he jerked back and lost his footing over a tussock of grass. I followed, and still guided by wordless anger, kicked him as hard as I could in the ribs. With a great groan of pleasure he doubled up on the grass and kissed the toe of my riding boot. I tore off my dress as he ripped his breeches away and flung myself like a wildcat on him. Both of us screamed as I rode him astride, like a stable lad breaking a stallion. I pounded his chest, his neck and his face with my gloved fists until the climax of pleasure felled me like a pine tree to lie beside him. We lay as still as corpses under our sky for hours. I had won.
7 (#ulink_183ae84b-3bf9-5e2c-8b8b-5734d05c5e7f)
The following day I went to call on Celia. Mama chose to come too and she and Lady Havering closeted themselves in the parlour with wedding-dress patterns and tea and cakes while Celia and I were free to wander in the garden.
Havering Hall is a bigger house than Wideacre – built on a different scale as a great showpiece, while Wideacre has always been a manor house extended and improved, but firstly a beloved home. Havering is large, rebuilt in the last century in the baroque style, which was popular then, with plenty of stone garlands and statuary niches and swags of stone ribbons over the windows. If you like that sort of thing it is said to be a fine example. I think it fussy and overdone. I prefer the plain clean lines of my home with the windows set honest and straight in the sand-coloured walls and no fancy pillars blocking the sunlight from the front rooms.
The gardens were laid out at the same time and they show the neglect even worse than the house. The paths were planned with a ruler and compass to follow straight lines around square and rectangular flower beds leading one, like a bored pawn on a gravel and grass chessboard, to the square ornamental pond in the centre of the garden where the carp are supposed to fin among flowering water lilies, and the fountains play.
In practice, the pond is dried out because it sprang a leak and no one had the wit to find the hole and have it mended. The fountains never played well because of low water pressure, and when the pump broke they stopped for ever. The carp benefited the herons but no one else.
The ornamental flower beds may still preserve their soldier-straight rows of flowering plants and the centre crowns of roses, but it is hard to tell for the towering weeds. They are the friendly wild flowers of my Wideacre childhood – rosebay willowherb, gypsy’s lace, wild foxgloves. But they look like a sign of the end of the world in these formal gardens. The ladies of Havering – Celia’s mama, herself and her four stepsisters – can see no solution but to wander around the garden saying, ‘Dear, dear’ at the greenfly and the suckers and the crumbling flower-bed edges. A week’s hard work by two sensible men would reverse the decay, and anyone but a fool would set them to it. But the ladies of Havering prefer to endure, with sad acceptance, the rack and ruin of garden and, more seriously, of farmland.
‘It is a shame,’ Celia concurred. ‘But the house is worse. It is so gloomy with the furniture under dust sheets and bowls out to catch the drips of water when it rains. And in winter it is really very cold.’
