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‘Very well,’ I said crossly. ‘But let be, Harry, you will tear my dress.’ I loosened my stays with quick fingers, and lifted my skirts and petticoats, and lay before the fire. With Harry in his mood of obstinate insistence I could see that the quickest, easiest way to resolve this conflict was to pay my dues swiftly. Harry was urgent and the whole tedious exercise should not take more than a few minutes. Already, at the mere sight of me, he was breathing heavily and his round face was rosy in the firelight. He had stripped naked from the waist down, and I lay back ungraciously to let him push, unwelcomed, inside me.
‘Oh, Beatrice,’ he said, and I smiled ruefully at the realization that he actually preferred my unenthusiastic coupling to Celia’s loving kisses in the Master’s bed. As his body started its well-known rocking pushes I surrendered myself to the easy, familiar pleasure. I raised my hips a fraction and felt him sigh as he eased in yet more deeply. Then I forgot my unwillingness as my body caught the rhythm of his movement, and waves flowed from the very central hot core of my body down to the very tips of my toes. I was caught in the easy seductive pleasure of the moment, deaf and blind to all else.
In the distant back of my mind I heard a sound quite different from Harry’s stifled groans, different from my light panting, the sound of a door opening … click … and then, too late, too late, one hundred years too late, I realized that the noise was the parlour door opening and the click was the latch dropping as my mother’s hand fell from the doorknob.
Everything moved so slowly that it seemed pointless to try to respond. My eyes opened as languidly as if they had pennies weighting the lids. With my brother still heaving up and down upon me, I met my mother’s gaze.
She was standing frozen in the parlour door, the candles from the hall illuminating as bright as daylight the scene before her. Harry’s humping, moonlike, fat, white buttocks, and my pale face, staring speechlessly at her over his velvet-jacketed shoulder. The disaster dawned on us all as slowly as sunrise.
‘I left my novel,’ she said stupidly, as she stared at the two of us, coupled before the dying embers of the fire. Harry was frozen. He still lay on me but his head was slewed round to face her, his blue eyes goggling, his red face sweaty.
‘I came to fetch my book,’ she said. Then the candelabra dropped from her hand and she reeled backwards into the hall as if the sight of us, her two children, meant instant death to her.
Harry gasped, like a punctured bladder of wind, but her collapse had released me from my trance. I moved as fast as I could, but still with nightmare slowness – as if I was drowning in the Fenny and struggling through green weeds under a roof of ice. In one sleek movement I slid up and off Harry and pulled my petticoats and dress down, and retied my laces.
‘Get your breeches up,’ I hissed at him, jolting him into life, and he scrambled to his feet and fumbled for his clothes. I strode to the door and nearly fell over Mama, who lay in a crumbled heap beside her smoking candles. In the cruel light of the hall she looked not white but green, as if she too were trapped in an under-river world of horror. Some random instinct made me feel for a pulse in her neck, and then for her heart. She looked like death, and I could feel no heart beating.
‘My God!’ I said incredulously. Then, in rapid decision, I said, ‘Harry! Help me carry her to her bed.’
Wig off and wild-eyed, Harry scooped the body of our mother in his arms. I preceded him up the stairs, the single candle flame making hobgoblin shapes of Harry and his burden all the way up. He laid her on the bed and we gazed in joint consternation at her pallor and her deathlike stillness.
‘She looks very ill,’ said Harry. In my trance of horror even his words seemed to come slowly, from a long way away.
‘I think her heart has stopped,’ I said coldly. ‘I could not feel it beat.’
‘We must get John,’ said Harry, and moved to the door. I put out a hand instinctively to stop him.
‘No, Beatrice,’ he said firmly. ‘Whatever else takes place we must safeguard Mama’s health.’
I let out a long, shuddering, silent laugh.
‘Oh, yes,’ I said. ‘You do your duty, you threepenny-halfpenny Squire.’ And I turned my face from his with utter loathing.
Thus they found me, still as a statue, gazing down into Mama’s cold face, not touching her. Harry had half carried John up the stairs, John still reeling from fatigue and blind with drink. Harry had said nothing, merely shaken John awake and poured water over him. His real self was still unconscious in a whisky-aided morass of misery. But his professional training burned like a clear torch inside the collapse of his self. God knows it is the truth, and an odd truth; I loved him especially then when his self-discipline surfaced from the sea of fatigue, alcohol and misery, and guided his red-rimmed eyes over Mama’s greenish face and placed his shaky hands on her pulse.
‘Out, Harry,’ he said. His breath was foul with exhaustion and drink, but no one could have gainsaid him. ‘Beatrice, my bag is in your office. Fetch it.’
Harry and I fled the room like thieves, Harry to the parlour to set the rug straight, and to tidy up; I to the west wing for John’s medical bag. I straightened my dress as I went, but I had not time to clear my mind. It took me valuable seconds to find it, and then I returned, through the door into the hall, up the arching stairs to Mama, where she lay murmuring to the pillows and to the unresponsive roof of her four-poster bed, over and over, ‘Harry, Harry, Harry.’ I knew with some clear-sighted coldness that she knew what she had seen, and that her voice, her cracked hoarse voice, was calling her son back from the abyss of hell, back from the dark tunnel of sin, back from the embrace of his sister, back from his adult life, to be her boy, her curly-haired sinless child again.
‘Harry,’ she said in a moan, ‘Harry, Harry, Harry.’
In a sudden terror I looked from her to John. His eyes were blank, impassive. He had not yet put his skilled, his knowledgeable mind to what she was saying.
‘Harry!’ said my mother, in her dreamy monotone.
‘Beatrice.’
John’s eyes upon me were blank with incomprehension, but I knew it would not last. He would find his way to the centre of the maze. I had chosen this clever, loving man because he was the best I had ever met: the best suited for me, the cleverest mind to meet mine, the wittiest brain to grapple with mine. Now I had launched his wits against me, and I could not tell where he would make landfall.
‘I only wanted my novel,’ said Mama, as if that explained everything. ‘Oh Harry! Beatrice! No!’
But John was thinking only partly of what Mama was saying; he was also watching her breath, the movement of her hands across the sheets as they plucked at the counterpane in a ceaseless, worried gesture.
‘She has had a shock,’ John said to me, as if I were a medical student in the Royal Infirmary interested in diagnosis. ‘It nearly proved too much for her, and I do not know what it was. But she is deeply disturbed. If she can be kept from thinking of it, whatever it is, for one, maybe two or three days, it is possible that she will come to face whatever she fears without her heart stopping. It will be a close thing, but I think it can be done.’
He took a phial from his worn bag and a delicate medicine glass with a little spout to help a patient drink. He unstoppered the phial and counted the drops into the glass. His trained, disciplined skill kept his hand steady, though I could see the sweat on his face at the effort.
‘One, two, three, four,’ he said meticulously, with the alcohol slurring his words. ‘She’s to have four drops, every four hours. D’you understand me, Beatrice?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
He scooped Mama’s limp body into one arm and expertly fed her the glass, and then laid her back on the pillows, straightening the covers across her and smoothing the pillows beneath her twisting head.
‘Harry! Harry! Harry!’ she called, but her voice was a little quieter.
‘You will have to sit up with her; you, or Harry,’ he said carefully. ‘In four hours, not before, she may have four more drops. In four hours, not before, four more; until she sleeps naturally without seeming disturbed. Do you understand?’
‘Yes,’ I said again, my voice empty of feeling.
‘Any more, and her heart will simply stop,’ he said, warning me. ‘She cannot take any more. She needs rest. But too much laudanum and she will slip away. Do you understand?’
‘Yes,’ I said again in the same monotone.
‘Four drops, four-hourly,’ he said again. His repeated instructions, the insistent moaning from the bed, the knowledge of my sin and the trap closing in around me made the bedroom like a deep pit. The candles on the bedside table guttered and the shadows of the room wavered towards me. My husband could not meet my eyes. My brother, who had been taken with me in sin, was nowhere to be seen. And in the bed beside me, my own mother droned like a lunatic.
John shut his bag with an effort, and stumbled towards the door.
‘No more than four drops, no sooner than four hours. Do you understand, Beatrice?’
‘Yes,’ I said again.
He staggered from the room to the stairs. The clocks chimed midnight in an ominous chorus as he gripped the polished handrail to keep himself from falling. I held high the candelabra to light him down. His bag banged against each carved stairpost and nearly overset him. He staggered to the library door and nearly fell when it yielded under his hand. I set down the candles and glided downstairs like a ghost.
‘Watch Mama,’ I said to Harry, who stood, like an overstaying guest, at the parlour door. He nodded, in dumb misery, and I waited until he had climbed the stairs to Mama’s room and shut the door, and then, for the second time that day, I gathered every scrap of courage I had, and opened the library door to face my husband.
He was back where he had been all day. But he had a fresh bottle of whisky gripped between his knees, a fresh glass of the amber liquid in his fist, his filthy boots up on the window-seat cushion, his head rolling on the armchair wings.
‘What could have caused Mama’s attack?’ I asked, approaching the chair lit only by icy moonlight pouring in from the eerie silver landscape.
He looked at me, his face as puzzled as a small child who wakens in a darkened room and does not know where he is.
‘I do not know,’ he said. ‘She keeps saying, over and over, “Beatrice” and “Harry” as if you two could help her. But I do not know what she means. Nor why she should keep saying, “I only came to fetch my novel.” Do you understand that, Beatrice?’
‘No,’ I said, hoping that my lie, my certain lie, would carry the weight I needed. ‘I do not know, John. Something has obviously upset her, but I do not know what it can be. I do not know what she was reading.’
He turned his face from me then, and I knew that he had forgotten his patient and remembered his wife.
‘Go now, Beatrice,’ he said piteously. ‘You know I long to forgive you and make all well between us, but I am exhausted. I have cared for your mama as well as I am able. Her condition is stable; there is nothing more I can do for her tonight. I promise you she will live. I promise you I will speak to you tomorrow. But right now I feel that I must be alone. I must mourn. I came home a man full of dreams and I cannot tolerate the sudden change. Everything in my life is upside down. Give me a little time. Just give me tonight and I will be myself again.’
I nodded, and bent to kiss his forehead.
‘I am sorry,’ I said, and I told no lie. ‘There is much that I have done wrong – how much you may never know. But I am sorry for the grief I have caused you. I love you, you know that.’
His hand touched mine, but he did not take my fingers in his firm grip. ‘I know it, Beatrice. Now grant me a little time alone. I am drunk and tired and I cannot talk.’
I bent and kissed him again, and then I walked as silently as I could from the library. At the door I paused and looked back at him. He was in his own private world of drink and fatigue. As I watched he poured himself another glass of whisky and took a deep draught, holding the spirit in his mouth to savour it. The world seemed very unfair and bitter to me then. If only there could have been a different path to Wideacre.
But I could not sit in a library and say I needed time to think. Upstairs my mother moaned on her bed and my brother listened in mounting fear. Outside the land called and called for a clear master to rule it. I could never rest. There was always work to do for me.
Harry was sitting with Mama, his face as white as hers.
‘Beatrice!’ he said, as soon as I entered the room. He drew me away from the bed and spoke in a frantic undertone. ‘Beatrice, Mama knows! She saw us! She is talking in her sleep, and she knows! Whatever shall we do?’
‘Oh, stop it, Harry!’ I said abruptly, too exhausted to soothe his conscience while my husband needed to rest from the sight of me, and my mama’s heart stopped at my approach as if I were an angel of death.
‘Stop it, Harry! It is all bad enough without you playing queen o’ the may.’
Harry gaped at me and at the hard tone of my voice, and I pushed him ungently from the room. ‘One of us has to sit with Mama and give her laudanum,’ I said tersely. ‘I’ll stay up with her till three or four, then you can do the rest of the night. Go now, and sleep.’
He would have argued, but I gave him another two-fisted shove. ‘Oh, go, Harry!’ I said. ‘I am sick of this night, and I am sick of you. Go and sleep now, so that I can sleep later, and in the morning we will find some way out of this coil. But for pity’s sake go now.’
Some tone of desperation in my voice cut through Harry’s old-maidish flappings, and he kissed my clenched fists without another word, and disappeared down the corridor to his bedroom. I turned on my heel and went wearily back into Mama’s bedroom like a prisoner walking to the scaffold.
She was tossing on her pillows and moaning in horror. Now and again she would say ‘Harry!’ or ‘Beatrice!’ or ‘No! No!’ but the laudanum kept her from saying more. It was no pleasant vigil I spent there beside the shadowy bed. Downstairs my husband dozed and drank rather than look at me. Along the corridor Harry crept into the sheets longing for Celia’s sinless honest warmth. In her bed my mama’s heart struggled to keep beating despite its deadly knowledge. Only I was awake that night. Like a witch I sat in the moonlight and in the shadows and watched the silvery light make a magic path across the floor from my chair to Mama’s bed. I gathered power around me from the sleeping black land outside the windows, and I waited for the moment when it seemed right to move.
The moon’s slow pace across the clear sky made a river of light on the floorboards linking Mama and me for the last time. Then I trod lightly down that eerie track and looked at her. She stirred as if she felt my green-eyed gaze on her, but she did not wake. I watched her pale face and heard her rattling, gasping breath, and smiled a gentle smile of certainty. I checked the clock, in another hour she would be ready for her next dose. I would wake Harry.
I slid like a ghost from the room to tap at his door, but it was Celia, not Harry, who opened it.
‘Harry is asleep,’ she said in a whisper. ‘He told me that your mama is ill. Can I come and sit with her?’
I smiled like a woman possessed. It was all coming easily to my hand just as the moonlight had shown me the way to Mama’s bed.
‘Thank you, Celia. Thank you, my dear,’ I said gratefully. ‘I am so weary.’ I had the phial of laudanum in my hand with the little medicine glass. ‘Give her all of this in half an hour’s time,’ I said. ‘John told me exactly what to do before he went back to the library. He said to be sure she takes all of it.’
Celia took the laudanum bottle and nodded her comprehension.
‘I will make sure she does,’ she said. ‘Is John still weary?’
‘He is rested now,’ I said. ‘He was wonderful with Mama, Harry will tell you. And so clear with his instructions!’
Celia nodded. ‘You go and sleep now,’ she said. ‘I will call you if there is any change, but you need your rest, Beatrice. Go and sleep now, and I will give her the laudanum just as John directed.’
I nodded my acquiescence and left Celia at Mama’s door. I went soft-footed down the stairs. I paused outside the library door to hear a stertorous breath. I pushed the door open cautiously, and went in.
Daylight was making the windows shady grey and I could just make out the wreck of the man who had once been proud to love me. He was still in his chair, but he had vomited, staining his plum travelling jacket and his riding breeches. At some time he had smashed his glass on the stone fireplace and instead drunk from the bottle, for it was almost drained dry. It had at last put him soundly to sleep. His medical bag was tumbled on the floor beside him, the pills and the little bottles spilling out of its open mouth.
Keeping my eyes fixed on his sprawled, sodden, stained body I held my skirts outwards and stepped backwards, slowly, slowly and silently, until I could close the door and turn the key to lock him in. I wanted no loyal housemaid or young footman cleaning up Miss Beatrice’s young husband before she saw him, to spare her pain.
Then, my silken evening gown whispering around me, I glided through the connecting door to the west wing, to my room.
My maid was long since abed, for I encourage no one to wait up for me past midnight. So I shifted for myself and slid out of my gown and sweaty petticoats. Half a lifetime ago, these had been pulled to my waist to enable me to couple with Harry. Now they seemed soiled in the ancient past, and I left them: gown, stays, petticoat, stockings and all, in a heap on the dressing-room floor.
From my cupboard I chose a light morning wrapper, as pink and promising as the rising sun, which I could see warming the rose garden. It was going to be a hot day. It was going to be a long hard day, and I would need my wits about me. The water in the ewer was cold, of course, but I splashed it on my face and all over my shivering body. Of all the people in this sleeping house I would need to be the most awake, the most alive. This day would be a trial in which my claim to Wideacre could turn on the flip of a coin. I would neglect nothing that would make me more alert, or stronger.
I slid on the cold silk wrapper, wrapped a shawl around my shoulders, and settled in my chair to wait. It must have been about an hour since I had left Celia, but I was too wary to creep back to the main part of the house to listen. I was wise enough, and controlled enough, to sit with my feet resting on a little stool, and wait for events to turn the way I had ordered. Then I heard a door bang, and the library door rattle, and Celia’s voice sharp with fear calling for my husband.
‘John! John! Wake up!’
I heard her bang the door to the west wing and I tore open my bedroom door to greet her on the stairs as if I had leaped from my bed on hearing her call.
‘What is it?’ I demanded.
‘It is Mama,’ she said desperately. ‘I gave her the laudanum as you said, and she seemed to fall asleep. But now she seems too cold, and I cannot find her pulse.’
I held out my hands to her, and she gripped them hard, her face absurdly young and anxious, then we turned and fled down the stairs together.
‘John?’ I asked her.
‘I cannot wake him, and he seems to have locked himself in,’ she said, despairingly.
‘I have a spare key,’ I said, and opened the door and flung it wide so Celia could see the chaos.
The morning light picked out the stains on John’s clothes and the splashes of vomit on the stone fireplace and on the priceless rugs. In his doze he had knocked over the final bottle and his head lay in a pool of sour-smelling whisky. The chair was kicked over, and there was manure from his boots on the window-seat cushions. My husband, the light of the healing profession, lay like a dog in his vomit, unstirring even when we erupted into the room calling his name.
I strode over to the bell and rang a loud peal, and then picked up a jug of water and threw it into his face. He rolled his head in the wet and groaned. From the servants’ quarters I heard a clatter of pans and hurrying footsteps, and from above I heard Harry pattering barefoot down the corridor and down the stairs. He and the scullery maid arrived together.
‘Mama is worse, and John is drunk,’ I said to Harry, conscious that every word would be relayed to Acre village and far beyond by the girl.
‘Go to Mama,’ Harry said authoritatively. ‘I’ll wake John.’ He bent over my husband, and hauled him into a chair. ‘A bucket of cold water,’ he said to the girl, ‘fresh from the kitchen pump, and a couple of pints of mustard and warm water too.’
‘Then wake the stable lads and Stride,’ I said to her as I went towards the stairs. ‘Tell one of the lads to ride to Chichester. We need a competent doctor.’
I ignored Celia’s gasp and went up to Mama.
She was dead, as I knew she would be.
She had not suffered, and I was glad of that, for Papa’s death had been hard and brutish, and Ralph had a long vigil of agony. But this last and, I hoped, final death for Wideacre had been easy drugged sleep. She was lying on her rich, lacy pillows in her fancy new white and gold bed. The drug had seen her on her way smiling at pleasant visions. Under the massive overdose given her by the loving hands of her sweet daughter-in-law she had slid away from the nightmare truth of our lives into a palace of hallucination where nothing could ever disturb her again.
I kneeled at the bedside and put my forehead to her hand, and shed a few easy tears on the embroidered sheet.
‘She is gone,’ said Celia, and she knew there was no doubt.
‘Oh, yes,’ I said softly. ‘But so peacefully, Celia, I have to be happy she went in such peace.’
‘Although I ran for you and for John, I knew it was too late,’ said Celia quietly. ‘She was just like this then. I think she must have died as soon as I gave her the medicine.’
‘John said her heart might not survive it,’ I said. I rose to my feet and mechanically straightened the smooth covers, and then went to open the window and draw the curtains. ‘But I wish to God he had sat with her.’
