скачать книгу бесплатно
‘Don’t blame him, Beatrice,’ said Celia, instantly tender. ‘He had a long hard journey. He could not have anticipated that your mama would become ill so suddenly. He had been all this time away, and we have been with her every day and noticed nothing. Don’t blame him.’
‘No.’ I turned from the window back into the shaded room. ‘No. No one is to blame. We all knew Mama’s heart was delicate. I do not blame John.’
Around us were all the noises of Wideacre awakening, yet curiously hushed, as the servants scurried to prepare the house and pass the news among each other in shocked whispers. Celia and I closed Mama’s door, and went down to the parlour.
‘Coffee for you,’ said Celia tenderly, and rang the bell. As we sat in the parlour I could hear the heavy tread of Harry walking John up and down the library floor, marching him into consciousness. And then a muffled sound of choking as he forced the mustard and water down John’s throat, and then a horrid retching noise as John vomited on the emetic and brought up neat whisky. Celia grimaced and we moved to the window seat where we could hear the morning birdsong instead.
It was a perfect, breathless morning with the smell of the roses and the meadows hanging on the warm air like a message of renewal. The fresh leaves of the beeches, still silvered with dew, shimmered in the wood, and in the valleys that intersect the green horizon of the downs the mist was rolling like pale gauze. It was a land worth anything, any price. And I linked my fingers around my cup of coffee with conscious justification, and drank deep of the scalding liquid.
The parlour door opened, and Harry came in. He looked white and stunned, but better than I had hoped. At least he did not look guilty – which was what I had feared. He held out a hand speechlessly to Celia and she ran into his arms.
‘John is himself again,’ he said to me over Celia’s head. ‘He could have chosen a better time to drink, but he is sober now.’
Celia disengaged herself, and poured him a cup of coffee. Harry dropped into his chair by the hearth, where the embers of last night’s fire still smouldered.
‘I have seen her,’ he said briefly. ‘She looks very peaceful.’
‘She was,’ Celia assured him. ‘She said nothing. She just smiled, and fell asleep.’
‘You were with her?’ he said surprised. ‘I thought it was Beatrice?’
‘No,’ said Celia, and I lowered my eyelids to hide the gleam of satisfaction at my magical luck. ‘Beatrice went to bed after she woke me. I was with your mama when she died.’
I raised my eyes and saw John standing in the doorway listening. He had thrown a dressing-gown over his soiled linen and his face and hair were clean and wet from the soaking Harry had given him. He looked alert and awake. I tensed like a rabbit scenting a stoat.
‘She had no more than the proper dose?’ he said. His speech was still slurred and his head was weaving like a fighter who has suffered too many blows to the head.
‘As you ordered,’ I said. ‘Celia did as you said.’
‘Celia?’ he said. His pale eyes squinted against the bright sunlight. He put up one dirty hand to shield his face from the bright light of the Wideacre sun. ‘I thought it was you who was there, last night.’
‘Get to bed, man,’ said Harry coldly. ‘You’re still half foxed. You left Beatrice and me to nurse her, then Celia took my place. You yourself were little help.’
John stumbled to a chair near the door and stared at the floor.
‘Four drops,’ he said eventually. ‘Four drops, four-hourly; that should not have been too much.’
‘I don’t know in the least what you’re talking about,’ I said, and my voice was like a sharp stone skimmed over a frozen river. ‘You gave me a phial and told me to give it to her. Celia did so, and then she died. Are you telling us now you made a mistake?’
John squinted at me through his sandy lashes as if he was trying to see something in his memory that had escaped him.
‘I don’t make mistakes with medicines,’ he said flatly, holding on to that one certainty.
‘Then no mistake was made,’ said Harry impatiently. ‘And now get to bed. Mama has just died. You should show some respect.’
‘Sorry,’ said John inadequately. He stumbled as he rose to his feet. Harry, resigned, went to support him and nodded me to his other arm.
‘Don’t you two touch me!’ he exclaimed, and he spun on his heel for the door. The swift movement was too much for his spinning head and his knees buckled. He would have fallen but Harry grabbed him and I went unwillingly to hold his other arm. We marched him, sagging between us, up the stairs to the west wing and slung him on to his bed.
I turned to go but John grabbed at my wrist with sudden strength.
‘Four drops I said, didn’t I, Beatrice?’ he whispered. His eyes were suddenly bright with comprehension. ‘But I know too what she was talking about. What she had seen. What she found when she came for her novel. Beatrice and Harry. I told you four drops, but you told Celia the whole phial, didn’t you?’
I could feel the delicate bones in my hand starting to crack, but I made no effort to free myself. I had been readying for this since dawn and he could break my arm, but he could not defeat me. It hurt me still to lie so bold-faced, to the only other man who had loved me honestly, but I gave him look for look and my eyes were like green ice. Energy coursed through me for I was fighting for Wideacre. Against me, he was weak, just a drunk dreaming a nightmare.
‘You were drunk,’ I said bitingly. ‘So drunk you could not choose the medicine. You spilled your medical bag all over the library floor. Celia saw it this morning; the servants have seen it. You did not know what you were doing. You did not know what you were saying. I trusted you because I believed you were a great doctor, a truly great physician. But you were too drunk even to see her. If she had an overdose of laudanum it was you who put the drug in my hands and told me to give it to her. If she died because you gave her too much, then you are a murderer and should be hanged.’
He dropped my wrist as if it had scorched him.
‘Four drops, four-hourly,’ he panted. ‘I would have told you that.’
‘You remember nothing,’ I said with utter conviction, with utter contempt. ‘But what you should remember now, now you are sober, is that if there is any murmur of a question, any whisper of a question, about Mama’s death, it needs only one word from me and you will hang.’
His pale eyes were wide with abhorrence and he gazed up at me from the pillow of the big bed as if I smelled of sulphur from the very depths of hell.
‘You are wrong,’ he whispered. ‘I do remember; at least I think I remember it all. It is like a nightmare, so infamous I cannot believe it. But I do remember it, like a dream in delirium.’
‘Oh, fustian!’ I said, suddenly impatient. And I turned to leave. ‘I’ll send you up another bottle of whisky,’ I said with disdain. ‘You seem to need one again.’
And then I wavered.
All the time while I prepared for Mama’s funeral, arranged the ceremony, invited the guests, discussed the dinner menu with Celia and organized the servants into black trimmings, I wavered. In the week before Mama’s funeral my hand was on the doorknob to John’s bedroom, I think, once a day. I had learned to love him so recently; I loved him still, in some small corner of my lying heart, so very much.
But then I would pause and think what he knew about me. I would think with a shudder what would become of me if he spread his foul talk into Celia’s ears. If she and he together speculated about the father of Julia. And then my hand would drop from his door and I would turn away, my face hard, my eyes stony. He had seen into the depths of my crime. I saw a reflection of myself in his pale eyes that I could not bear. He knew the humiliating evil price I had paid to make myself secure on Wideacre and before him I was not just exposed and vulnerable. I was shamed.
So in all the bustle and confusion to plan and execute a respectable Wideacre funeral I did not forget to order Stride to take a fresh bottle of whisky up to Dr MacAndrew’s bedroom and study every midday and dinnertime. Stride’s eyes met mine with unspoken sympathy, and I managed a wobbly smile for him. ‘Pluck to the backbone’ was the verdict on me in the servants’ quarters, and although John had prompt service to his ring for a fresh glass, or more water to take with his drink, he was despised in the servants’ hall.
The rumour that his incompetence had caused Mama’s death had spread through the Hall and beyond to Acre village, and for miles around. It had reached the ears of the Quality through a thousand tattling maids and valets. When John wished to return to the normal world of visits and parties and dinners he would find doors closed against him. There would be no entry for him into the only world he knew unless I reintroduced him with all my charm and power.
He was not even summoned as a doctor to the yeoman farmers’ homes or to the Chichester and Midhurst tradesmen. Even the families of the middling sort had heard the gossip and there would be black looks for him in every village for a hundred miles around: for his drunken incompetence with Lady Lacey, and for grieving Miss Beatrice, the darling of the county.
My grief for a few days was real indeed. But as my fear of him and my sense of shame about his knowledge grew, I found I became colder and colder towards him. By the day of Mama’s funeral, only one week after I had threatened him with a hanging if he tried to betray me, I knew I hated him, and I would not rest until he was off Wideacre and silenced for good.
I had hoped he would be drunk on the day of the funeral, but as Harry handed me into the carriage John came out of the front door into the bright June sunlight. He was meticulously dressed in a neatly cut suit of black, his hair perfectly powdered, his black tricorn trimmed with black ribbon. He was pale, pale and cold, despite the hot sun. Or at least he shivered when his eyes met mine. But he had taken no more than he needed to face the day, and to judge from the hardness in his eyes, he was determined to see it through. Beside him, Harry looked plump and bloated and self-indulgent. John came towards the carriage steady-paced like some white-faced avenging angel, and stepped in to seat himself opposite me, without a word to any of us. I felt a touch of fear on my heart. John drunk was a public humiliation for me, his wife. But John sober and vengeful could ruin me. He would have every legal right to order and control me. He could legally watch my every movement. He would know if my bed had been slept in. He had a legal right to come into my room, into my bed, at any time, day or night. Worse, and even more unbearable – I clasped my black-gloved fingers in my lap to keep them from trembling – he could move away from Wideacre and sue me for public divorce if I refused to go with him.
In stealing his name for my fatherless child I had also robbed myself of the freedom any man, married or single, could take for granted. Both my days and nights had to be lived under the supervision of this man, my husband, my enemy. And if he wished he could imprison me, beat me, or take me from my home with the full blessing of the law of the land. I had lost even the limited privilege of my spinsterhood. I was a wife – and if my husband hated me, then I faced the certainty of a miserable future.
He leaned forward and patted Celia’s little hands clasped over her prayerbook.
‘Do not be too sad,’ he said tenderly. His voice was hoarse from the lack of sleep and the continual drinking. ‘She died a peaceful, easy death, and while she lived she had great happiness in your company and with little Julia. So do not be too sad. We could all hope for a blameless life of love as she had, and a peaceful, easy death.’
Celia bowed her head and her black-gloved hand returned John’s touch.
‘Yes, you are right,’ she said, her voice low with the effort of controlling her tears. ‘But it is a sad loss for me. Although she was only my mama-in-law I felt I loved her as much as if I had been her daughter.’
I felt John’s hard, ironic gaze on my face at this artless confession from Celia. Behind my veil my cheeks burned with rage at him, and at this whole sentimental conversation.
‘Just as much,’ John agreed, his eyes still hard on me. ‘I am sure Beatrice thinks so too, don’t you, Beatrice?’
I struggled to find a tone of voice that was free from either the rage or the fear I felt at this deliberate baiting of me. He was sliding like a clever skater on the thin ice of the truth. He was daring me; he was frightening me. But I had some power too, and he had best remember it.
‘Yes, indeed,’ I said levelly. ‘Mama always said that she was so lucky in the choices that Harry and I made. Such a lovely daughter-in-law, and so fine a doctor for a son-in-law.’
That hit him, as I had known it would. One word from me and his university would scratch his name from their records. One word from me and it would be the hangman’s noose for him and not all his clever spite could save him. He had best remember that, if he drove me to it, I would face down the scandal and the gossip that an accusation of murder would cause, and I would publicly claim that he overdosed Mama while he was drunk. And no one could gainsay me.
He sat back in the carriage beside Harry, careful not to let any part of his coat touch him. And I saw how he bit his lips to keep them from trembling, and clasped his hands to keep them still. He needed a drink to keep his private world of horrors at bay.
All four of us gazed dumbly out of the windows as the tall trees of the drive slid past, and then the fields, and then the little cottages of Acre village. The funeral bell was tolling, one resounding stroke after another, and in the fields I saw the day labourers pulling off their hats and standing still as we drove by. As soon as the carriage was past they set to work again and I was sorry for the old days when every man on the estate would have had a day’s paid holiday to pay his respects to the passing of one of the gentry. But the tenants, even the very poorest of cottagers, had given up a morning’s work to crowd into the church to be present at Mama’s funeral.
She was all there was left of the old Squire, my papa, and with her sudden, unexpected death, the land and the house now belonged to the young generation. There were plenty in the church and in the graveyard to say that Mama’s death was the passing of the old days and old ways. But there were even more who said that my papa lived on while I ruled. That on Wideacre at least there was no need to fear change and an uncertain future, for the real power at Wideacre did not rest with the Squire who, gentry-like, was mad for change and profit, but was with the Squire’s sister, who knew the land like most ladies know their own parlour, and was more at ease in a meadow than a ballroom.
We followed the coffin into church for the heavy, ominous service, and then we followed it out again. They had opened the Wideacre vault and Mama was placed next to Papa, as if they had been a loving, inseparable couple. Later on, Harry and I would erect some sort of monument to her beside the marble monstrosity already in place on the north wall dedicated to Papa. The Vicar, Pearce, reached the end of the service and closed the book. For a moment I forgot where I was, and I threw up my head like a pointer scenting the wind, and said, with a landowner’s fear in my voice, ‘I can smell burning.’
Harry shook hands with the Vicar, and nodded to the sexton to close the vault. Then he turned to me.
‘I don’t think you can, Beatrice,’ he said. ‘No one would be burning stubble or heather at this time of year. And it is too early for accidental wood fires.’
‘I can,’ I insisted. ‘I can smell burning.’ I strained my eyes in the direction of the west wind. A glow on the horizon, little larger than a pin head, caught my eye.
‘There,’ I said pointing. ‘What’s that?’
Harry’s eyes followed the direction of my finger and said in doltish surprise, ‘Looks like you are right, Beatrice. It is a fire! I wonder what it can be? It looks like quite a wide area – too big for a barn or a house fire.’
Other people had heard me say, ‘There’ and had seen the ominous redness on the skyline – pale in the sunlight but bright enough to be seen all these miles away. I listened to the murmur and I was quick – perhaps too quick – to identify something more than the usual country curiosity. The cottagers behind me had a tone almost of satisfaction in the low gossiping voices. ‘It’s the Culler,’ they said. ‘The Culler promised he would come. He promised it would be this day. He said it would be seen from Acre churchyard. The Culler is here.’
I turned sharply, but the group of closed faces revealed nothing. Then there was a clatter of hoofs and a sweating shire-horse came thundering down Acre street, still harnessed for work, with a little lad bouncing like a cork on its broad bare back.
‘Papa! It’s the Culler!’ he called in ringing tones which brought the murmur to silence.
‘They’ve fired Mr Briggs’s new plantation, Papa! Where he enclosed the old common land and drove the cottagers off. Where he planted his five thousand trees. The Culler has fired the new wood, and there will be nothing left but blackened twigs. Mama told me to come and fetch you at once. But the fire will not touch us.’
His papa was Bill Cooper, indebted to us for a mortgage for his farm, but an independent man, not a tenant. He felt my eyes upon him and sketched a bow in farewell and strode towards the churchyard gate. I hurried after him.
‘Who is this Culler?’ I asked urgently.
‘He’s the leader of one of the worst gangs of bread rioters and corn rioters and arsonists the county has ever seen,’ Bill Cooper said, leading the horse to the lychgate for easy mounting. Forgetful of my new black silks I held the horse’s head while he climbed the gate and heaved himself up on to the broad back, behind his son. ‘The leader is nicknamed the Culler because he says gentry stock is rotten and should be culled.’
He looked down at me and saw my eyes darken and mistook my fear for anger. ‘Begging your pardon, Miss Beatrice – Mrs MacAndrew, I should say. I am only telling you what my labourers told me.’
‘Why have I not heard of him?’ I asked, my hand still on the reins.
‘He is only lately come into Sussex from another county,’ said Bill Cooper. ‘I only heard of him myself yesterday. I heard Mr Briggs had a note nailed to one of his fine new trees. It warned him that landlords who put trees before men have no right to the land – that the cull of the landlords is starting.’
He tightened the reins and kicked the horse forward. I could feel Harry, Celia and John all staring at my back in astonishment, as I clung to the reins and barred the way. But I had no time for conventions. I was driven by a fear I needed to lay at rest then and there on that sunlit Saturday morning.
‘Wait, Cooper,’ I said peremptorily. ‘What sort of a man is he supposed to be?’ I asked. I kept the horse from moving on with a hard hand on the bit, and kept my satin shoes well away from its heavy, shifting feet.
‘They say he rides a great black horse,’ said Bill Cooper. ‘They say he used to be a keeper on an estate, that he learned the ways of the gentry then, and started to hate them. They say his gang would follow him to hell. They say he has two black dogs which go with him everywhere like shadows. They say he is a legless man; he sits oddly on his horse. They say he is Death himself. Miss Beatrice, I must go … he is near my land.’
I loosed him. My hand fell powerless from the bridle and the horse brushed past me so close I had the sting of its coarse tail in my face. I knew him, the Culler. I knew him. And the glow of his fire was on Wideacre’s horizon. I swayed, my eyes on the unnatural glow, and my lungs, hair and clothes full of the smell of his smoke.
Celia was at my side.
‘Beatrice are you unwell?’ she asked.
‘Get me to the carriage,’ I said, miserably. ‘I need to be home. I want to be through the lodge gates and behind the front door and in my bedroom. Get me home, Celia. Please.’
So they said I was too distressed at the loss of Mama to shake hands with all the mourners at her funeral, and the kindly respectful faces lined the lane as our carriage drove off. Surely there was no one here who would hide or shelter a gang of desperate men, enemies to the peace of the land? I reassured myself. Not one of my people, not one of them would hide the Culler on Wideacre land. Whatever their private mysterious loyalties and codes of peasant honour, they would surely turn a criminal like the Culler over to a Justice of the Peace if ever he came near my sweet peaceful boundaries. He might burn up to the very parish bounds, hidden and helped by people glad to see their masters humiliated, but on Wideacre I held hearts as well as wealth in my hands. While I was loved the Culler had no chance. Not even if he was Wideacre-born and bred himself. Not even if he had known and loved Wideacre as well as I.
A sob of fear escaped me, and Celia’s arm came round my shoulders and held me tight.
‘You are tired,’ she said tenderly. ‘You are tired, and there is no need for you to do any more work for today. You need not take dinner with the guests. You have worked so hard with all the planning and work for this day. There is no need for you to do anything more but rest, my dear.’
Indeed, I was weary. Indeed, I was horribly afraid. My bright, brave relentless courage and anger seemed all burned up like Mr Briggs’s woods, leaving nothing but black and smoky ground where no birds sing. With the Culler’s work making an ominous grey smudge on the horizon there would be neither rest nor peace for me until he was taken. My head dropped to Celia’s shoulder and she patted my back. Under my lashes, behind my veil, I stole a swift glance at my husband, sitting opposite me. He was scanning my pale face as if to read the very depths of my soul. Our eyes met, and I read his sharp, trained, professional curiosity. I shivered uncontrollably in the bright sunlight. The day, which had started so bright and with such a promise of heat, was clouding over and grey thunderclouds blurred with the smoke on the horizon. With the Culler less than a hundred miles from my home and John MacAndrew in my bed, I was endangered indeed.
And the stimulus of my fear, my collapse, was acting on John like a dram of whisky. His own horror was forgotten when he saw the look on my face, when he saw my terror. At once his clever, analytical brain shook free from nightmare, shook free of drink.
He suddenly leaned forward.
‘Who is this Culler?’ he asked, his speech clear. ‘What is he to you?’
I shuddered again, uncontrollably, and turned my face in to Celia’s warm shoulder. Her hand tightened comfortingly around me.
‘Not now,’ she said gently to John. ‘Don’t ask her now.’
‘Now is the only time we might hear the truth!’ said John brutally. ‘Who is the Culler, Beatrice? Why do you fear him so?’
‘Get me home, Celia,’ I said, my voice a thread. ‘Get me to bed.’
When the carriage drew up to the steps I let Celia lead me to my bedroom and tuck me up in bed as if I were a feverish child. I took two drops of laudanum to keep the clank of the mantrap, the clatter of a falling horse, and the sad soft sigh of my mama’s last breath out of my dreams. Then I slept like a baby until suppertime.
The will had been read in the afternoon, and most of the mourners had dispersed, concealing their pleasure or disappointment at the little bequests as well as they could. Mama’s small capital was divided equally between Harry and me. She never owned any land, of course. The earth beneath her feet, the rocks beneath the earth, the trees above her head and even the birds that roosted in them never belonged to her. In her girlhood she had lived in her father’s house. In her womanhood she had lived in her husband’s home, on his land. She never earned a penny, she never owned a farthing that she could in truth call her very own. All the money she left was no more hers than the jewels she had passed on to Celia when Celia married Harry. All she had ever been to Wideacre, to the bank account, to the jewels, to the house, to the land, was a tenant.
And all landlords despise their tenants.
But her rich poverty made the will a simple matter and the reading was over and done by teatime. By the time I emerged for supper at nine o’clock there were only John and Harry and Celia and I to dine with Dr Pearce, the Acre Vicar.
It was the first time that John had been in company since his return home and the night of Mama’s death, and for once I blessed Harry’s doltish insensitivity to other people’s feelings and to the tension in the room. Though slightly subdued by the day, he chatted loudly and easily to Dr Pearce as the three stood before the library fire. No one who looked at Harry, tumbler of sherry in hand, warming his breeches before the fire, would be able to believe that he had ever dragged John out of a stupor of alcohol in this room. Or that he had ever thrown his sister on the hearth and taken her with passionate desperation. But, to judge from John’s tense shoulders and scowl, he could imagine both events. Celia remembered his drinking bout too, and I saw her brown eyes anxiously straying to John’s face and to the glass in his hand. He turned aside from the window to smile down at her with a suddenly lightened face.
‘Do not look so anxious, Celia. I shall not break the furniture.’
Celia blushed rosily, but her loving brown eyes met his directly. Anyone looking at her could have seen her honest affection for him, her concern for his health.
‘I cannot help being anxious for you,’ she said. ‘It has been a most difficult time. I am glad you feel able to be with us today. But if you should change your mind and wish to dine alone in your room I should be happy to order a tray for you.’
John nodded his thanks. ‘That is thoughtful of you, Celia, but I have been enough alone,’ he said. ‘My wife will need my company and support, you know, in the days and weeks ahead.’ He said ‘my wife’ as one might say ‘my disease’ or ‘my snake’. His sarcastic voice was hard with detestation when he looked at me. No one, not even little loving Celia, could have mistaken his meaning, and thought his pretended concern sincere. Even Harry paused and glanced curiously at the three of us. John standing, his back to the room; Celia, her sewing falling unnoticed, looking up at him, her colour fading; and I, bent over the round table in the centre of the room, affecting to turn the pages of the newspaper, but as tense as a whip. John turned to the decanter and poured himself another full glass. He tossed it off as if it were medicine.
Then Stride announced supper and broke up the scene, and I enjoyed a small revenge, walking past John, so close that my train swept his legs, to claim Harry’s hand to lead me in to supper. Harry sat at the head of the table; I took the foot: Mama’s old place. Celia sat where she had been placed since her marriage, on Harry’s right, and John sat beside her with Dr Pearce opposite them. John’s nearness to me made me icy with affront, but I could tell it sickened him.
