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He made an effort at distant cold courtesy with Harry, but he could not bear to be physically near him. If Harry’s hand brushed his sleeve in passing John shrank as if from an infection. Harry disgusted him, and he loathed me. His hatred expressed itself in direct malice, in biting sarcasm, in concealed insult. All I could do against him was to torment him with my nearness, which reminded him of his past desire for me. He scarcely touched his food and I wondered, with malicious pleasure, how long his use of alcohol would be controlled under the twin pressures of his rage and enforced silence. He had a glass of wine, nearly untouched, at his place and I nodded to the footman to refill it.
Dr Pearce was a newcomer and sensed a little of the tension of this family party. But he was a man of the world and with interest and courtesy he encouraged Harry to talk about his farming experiments. Harry was proud of the changes taking place on our land, and the wealthier tenants were following his lead and making Wideacre known as a pioneer of the new techniques. I had my reservations, and my love of the old ways, and the reputation that Miss Beatrice held by the traditions and spoke for the poor did me no harm with the people on the land.
‘When I started farming at Wideacre there were barely two day labourers on the place, and we used ploughs which were unchanged from Roman times,’ Harry said, on his hobby-horse again. ‘Now we have ploughs that can cut a furrow nearly up to the top of the downs and there are fewer and fewer squatters and cottagers on Acre.’
‘Small benefit to us all,’ I said drily from the other end of the table. I noted how John tensed at the very sound of my cool, silvery voice and reached unconsciously for his wine glass.
‘The cottagers who used to live in the hovels around the village have now become day labourers or even live in the parish workhouse and work in the workhouse gangs. And your new plough has ripped up old, good meadows to make surplus cornfields, which will create year after year of corn glut. The price of bread tumbles; the corn is hardly worth selling for years in a row, and then in the first bad year there is uproar because the price suddenly soars.’
Harry smiled down the table at me.
‘You are an old Tory, Beatrice,’ he said. ‘You hate all change and yet it is you who keep the books. You know as well as I do what the wheatfields pay.’
‘They pay us,’ I said. ‘They profit the gentry. But they do little good for the people on Wideacre. And they have done no good at all for those we used to call our people – the ones who lived in the hovels we cleared away and kept their pigs on the common patch we have now enclosed.’
‘Ah, Beatrice,’ said Harry, teasingly. ‘You speak with two voices. When the books show a profit you are pleased, and yet in your heart you prefer the old wasteful ways.’
I smiled back, forgetting John, forgetting the tension, my mind on Wideacre. Harry’s was a fair comment. Our disagreement was as old as our joint management of the land. If I ever thought Harry’s new methods were a real danger to the peace and prosperity of Wideacre then I would stop him in the same second. And there had been plans of his that I had vetoed and we had heard no more of them. What concerned me, as one of the handful of gentry among the millions of poor, was that Harry’s schemes and the trend of the whole country were to profit the gentry more and more and to make the poor yet poorer.
‘It is true,’ I said smiling at Harry with a softness in my voice and a tender light in my eyes for my land. ‘I am but a sentimental farmer.’
John’s chair scraped harshly on the polished floor as he thrust it back abruptly.
‘Excuse me,’ he said, pointedly ignoring me, speaking only to Celia. He walked heavily towards the door and shut it with a firm click as if to emphasize his rejection of us, and the candlelit room. Celia looked anxiously at me, but my face never wavered. I turned to Dr Pearce as if there had been no interruption.
‘But you come from the higher, colder north where I think there is little wheat grown at all,’ I said. ‘You must find our obsession with the price of wheat and white flour odd.’
‘It is very different,’ he admitted. ‘In my county, Durham, the poor still eat rye bread; black or brown bread, it is. Nasty stuff compared to your golden loaves, I admit, but they fare well on it and it is cheap too. They eat a lot of potatoes and pastry dishes made with the coarse flour as well, so the price of wheat matters far less. Here I think the poor are wholly dependent on wheat?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Celia in her soft voice. ‘It is as Beatrice says. It is well enough when the price of corn is low, but when it rises there is real hardship, for there is no alternative food.’
‘Then the damned fools riot,’ said Harry, with two-bottle bluster. “They riot as if we can help the rain spoiling the crop and making it too dear for them to buy.’
‘It’s not all chance,’ I said reasonably. ‘We do not profiteer and we do not hoard at Wideacre, but there have been some wicked fortunes made by withholding corn from the market, and by sending it out of the county. When merchants deliberately create a shortage they know full well that there will be hunger and then disturbances.’
‘If they would only go back to eating black bread!’ sighed Celia.
‘These are my customers!’ said Harry, laughing. ‘I would rather they stuck to white bread and went hungry in the lean years. The day will come when we have more and more land growing wheat and the whole country eats nothing but white flour.’
‘If you can grow it, and I say “if”, Harry, then good luck to you,’ I said. ‘But while I keep the books we will plant no more wheatfields. I believe the bottom will fall out of the market. It is all very well one farmer planting wheat, but every single Squire up and down the country is doing so. Come a bad year and there will be many wheat farms ruined. Wideacre will never be a one-crop estate.’
Harry nodded. ‘Aye, Beatrice,’ he said. ‘You are the planner. And we should not be boring Dr Pearce and Celia with this farming talk.’
He sat back in his chair and at a nod from me the servants cleared the plates. Dr Pearce and Harry chose cheeses from the board, and the great silver fruit bowl, piled high with our own produce, was placed in the middle of the table.
‘One would be foolish indeed to be bored with such work that produces such wonderful results,’ said Dr Pearce politely. ‘You eat like pagans in a golden age at Wideacre.’
‘I am afraid we are pagan,’ I said lightly. I took one of the plump peaches and peeled its downy skin to eat the sweet slimy fruit. ‘The earth is so good, and the yields are so high, that at harvest time I find it hard not to believe in magic,’
‘Well, I believe in science,’ said Harry staunchly. ‘And Beatrice’s magic goes well with my experiments. But, Dr Pearce, you would burn my sister for a witch if you ever saw her in a hayfield!’
Celia laughed. ‘It is true, Beatrice. Only the other day you were supposed to be taking Sea Fern to be shod and I saw him tied to the gate of Oak Tree Meadow and you in the middle of the field, with your hat off and your face tilted up to the sky with handfuls of poppies and larkspur in either hand. I was driving into Chichester with Mama and I had to point something out to her to distract her attention away from you. You looked like Ceres in a mummers’ play!’
I laughed ruefully. ‘I see I shall become a well-known eccentric and be jeered at by the apprentices in Chichester!’ I said.
‘Even I had not long arrived in Acre before I heard strange and ominous rumours,’ said Dr Pearce, twinkling at me. ‘One of your older cottagers, Mrs MacAndrew, told me that he always asks you to take tea and walk in the fields at sowing time. He swore it is a sure way to ward off rust mould on the seeds to have Miss Beatrice take a few steps behind the plough.’
I nodded at Harry. ‘Tyacke, and Frosterly and Jameson,’ I said certainly. ‘A few others like to believe it too. I think a couple of good seasons coincided with the time when I was first out on the land alone after my papa’s death, and that convinced them.’
A secret stab of nostalgia touched me at the memory of those good seasons. The first summer of my womanhood when I had met and loved with Ralph under the blue sky of a summer that seemed never-ending, and the second summer when Harry had been the Lord of the Harvest and brought in the corn like a Summer King. Then there was the third hot year and my third good lover, John, who had courted me, and kissed my hand and driven me miles around the estate on one sweet unlikely pretext after another.
‘Magic and science,’ said Dr Pearce. ‘No wonder your crops flourish.’
‘I hope it lasts,’ I said, without knowing what made me cast such a shadow over the conversation. A flicker of some premonition – as insubstantial and yet as ominous as woodsmoke on a distant horizon – touched me. ‘There is nothing worse than a bad year after a series of good ones. People become too confident, they expect too much.’
‘They do indeed,’ said Dr Pearce quickly, confirming Harry’s view of him as a hard-headed realist, and my view of him as an unimaginative, pompous man. I knew too well what would follow: a tirade against the poor, their unreliability with rent and tithes, their ceaseless fertility, their unreasonable demands. If Celia and I withdrew now, there was a chance that Harry and Dr Pearce would have finished by the time they came to the parlour for tea. I nodded at Celia, and she left some grapes on her plate and rose with me. Stride went to the door, but Harry put him aside with a gesture and held the door for us both. I let Celia precede me and knew I had read the gesture aright when I saw Harry’s warm eyes on me. The talk of the land had reminded him of my power and my beauty. He had buried his horror and fright with his mama, and tonight we would be lovers again.
14 (#ulink_363e30d0-c4b8-5ec4-8a58-ab43f811c851)
It was easier to meet him than I had dared to imagine. John’s abrupt departure from the dinner table had signalled, as I had hoped, a return to hard drinking. I had hardly aided his resolution against alcohol, for when he had flung himself into his study in the west wing he had found the dew forming on two icy-fresh bottles of whisky, a pitcher of cool water to mix with a dram, and a plate of biscuits and cheese to bolster the illusion that he was merely taking a small glass with a meal. Casually, as if blind to his own hands, he had broken the seal on one of the bottles and poured a measure, the merest drop, and diluted it well. One taste undid his resolve and he had drunk nearly all of one bottle by the time I came, clear-headed, to peep in on him. He was asleep in his chair by the log fire. The smartness of his early-morning appearance had faded from him the way a poppy crumples after only a few hours. I looked long and hard at him as he lay, mouth half open, snoring softly. His suit was rumpled, his fair hair sticky with sweat from the nightmare that tossed his head and made him occasionally moan in torment. He had biscuit crumbs in his cravat, and the sour smell of whisky on his breath.
No pity touched me. This was a man I had loved, and who had poured on me weeks and months of lawful, generous loving. But he had execrated me, and he threatened my safety at Wideacre. The blackness of my sin had half destroyed him; now I wished it had killed him outright. If he continued drinking at this pace it would indeed have proved a fatal wound, and I would be at peace once again. I held my silk skirts out so the whisper of the fabric did not prompt a sweet dream of remembered happiness, and I stepped slowly and carefully to the door. I locked it from the outside, and he was safe in my power.
I was safe too.
Then I climbed the third flight of stairs to the room at the very top of the west wing, and set a taper to the logs in the grate, and to the candles. I opened the other door that connects with the main part of the house where Harry waited, shirtsleeved and barefoot, in patient silence lit only by the light of his bedtime candle.
We held each other like lovers, not like the fierce sensual enemies we so often were in that room. With my husband drunk and dreaming horrors downstairs, and someone, some enemy, perhaps even an enemy I knew well, sleeping and plotting less than fifty miles from me, I did not feel like a storm of passion with Harry. I needed some loving; I needed some kissing; I needed, with all my frozen, frightened heart, some tenderness. So I let Harry take me in his arms and lay me on the couch as if we were tender lovers, and then he kissed me and loved me with tenderness. In many ways this gentle, marital exchange was the most perverse and infamous act of all that we did.
But I did not care. I cared for nothing, now.
Afterwards, we lay sprawled in an easy tangle on the couch, watching the firelight flickering, and drinking warm claret. My chestnut hair was spread in a tangle across his warm soft-haired chest. My face rested against the plump column of his throat. I was tired; I was at peace. I was bruised but not pained. Any woman in the world would have been deeply satisfied and ready for sleep.
‘Harry,’ I said.
‘Yes?’ he said, rousing himself from his half-doze, and gathering me closer into his warm hug.
‘There is something I have been waiting to tell you for some time, Harry,’ I said hesitantly. ‘Something that I am afraid may grieve you, but something you have to know for the good of Wideacre.’
Harry waited, undisturbed. He knew we would not have made love if Wideacre had been endangered by any immediate threat. He knew that my love of the land would always take first place in my mind. He waited to hear what might come next.
‘It is about the entail,’ I said. ‘I am concerned that Wideacre is still entailed on our cousin as the next male heir. If anything, God forbid, should happen to you, Celia, Julia and I would all be homeless.’
A slight frown furrowed his complacent face.
‘It’s true,’ he said. ‘I have thought of it once or twice. But there is plenty of time, Beatrice. I do not ride like you do! I may have a boy next time and then he will inherit. I do not think the entail is a pressing problem for us.’
‘I was afraid you did not know,’ I said. I turned over to lie on my belly and reared myself up on my elbows to look into his face. ‘I was afraid Celia had not told you. I do not blame her. It was, perhaps, not made very clear to her in France after the birth of Julia. I fear she is barren, now, Harry. The midwife said it was a miracle she had conceived at all, and that she doubted very much if she would ever have another child. She has some fault in her body that makes her infertile.’
I paused to let the new information sink in.
‘After the birth I told her, as gently as I could, but I did not want to upset her, so possibly I did not make the situation sufficiently clear. The truth is, Harry, the honest truth’ – I widened my hazel eyes at him in a perfect mimicry of a candid gaze – ‘the truth is that I fear Celia will never conceive another child, and that you will never have a son and heir for Wideacre.’
Harry’s happy rounded face fell. He believed me.
‘This is a blow indeed,’ he said, and I could feel him groping for the words to express his thoughts, for some way to make sense of this new view of the world where there would be no son to follow him and, when he died, Wideacre would pass from his direct line to strangers.
‘I thought Celia might have fully understood, and might have told you,’ I said delicately. ‘But it is a bitter thing for both of you to know: that when you die Wideacre will go to our cousin. Little Julia and, indeed, Richard will be homeless.’
‘Yes,’ he said, as the picture struck him. ‘Having been reared on Wideacre, to have to leave it!’
‘If only one could change the entail!’ I sighed at that remote possibility. ‘If only we could find some way to make our two children secure in their home for ever.’
‘I have heard of them being reversed,’ Harry said doubtfully. ‘But it costs an impossible sum of money and involves one in compensating the heirs, as well as the legal fees of changing it. Few estates could bear that sort of cost, Beatrice, certainly not Wideacre.’
‘The cost if we do not change it would be far greater,’ I said. I sat up, naked, and crossed over to the fire to throw an extra log on the embers. I turned and smiled at Harry, the firelight throwing flickering lights and shadows on my smooth warm skin. ‘I cannot bear the thought of our children miserable and exiled from Wideacre when we are gone, because we failed to provide for them. The two of them – so near each other in age, so like you and me – forced out with no home to go to.’
‘Well, they’ll hardly be homeless,’ said Harry prosaically. ‘Julia will inherit my capital and her mother’s dowry, and Richard will be one of the MacAndrew Line heirs. Enough cash there to buy the estate many times over, I should think.’
‘Which would you rather have, money or Wideacre?’ I asked spontaneously, forgetting for a second the way I wanted the conversation to tend.
Harry considered. The fool that he was, he needed time to think. ‘Well,’ he said in careful, doltish judgement, ‘if one had a fortune one could buy places as fine as this. You are Wideacremad, Beatrice, but there are some very pretty properties in Kent or even in Suffolk and Hampshire.’
I bit the inside of my cheeks hard. Then I waited until I knew no reckless scornful words would come. Then, and only then, I said in a voice as smooth as silk, ‘That’s true, I dare say, Harry. But if your little girl is anything like me she will pine and die if she has to live anywhere out of sight of the Wideacre downs. Small comfort a fortune will be to her then, when she has to buy some other hills, and her distant cousins turn her out of the home where she has lived all her life. She’ll think you are an uncaring father then, and she will curse your memory, that you failed to provide for her, although you loved her so much.’
‘Oh, don’t say that!’ said Harry, moved as I knew he would be by the prospect of Julia’s future reproaches. ‘I would we could do something about it, Beatrice, but I can’t for the life of me see what.’
‘Well, let us decide on it at least,’ I said. ‘If we decide to aim for the entail, let us set our hearts on it and we will find a way to the money necessary.’
Harry shook his head. ‘You don’t understand, Beatrice,’ he said. ‘We could never raise the sort of capital needed to make such a change. Only the wealthiest families in the kingdom can do such things. It is simply beyond our scope.’
‘Our scope, yes,’ I said slowly. ‘But what about the scope of the MacAndrew fortune?’
Harry’s blue eyes widened. ‘He never would?’ he said, hopefully. ‘He would never pour all that money into Wideacre!’
‘Not at the moment,’ I agreed. ‘But he might change his mind. He might consider investing. If we had even half the MacAndrew fortune behind us I think we could consider the change, work out the costs, explore ways and means.’
Harry nodded. ‘I’m game,’ he said. ‘I’d be prepared to sacrifice some of my experimental projects and go for more high-return wheatfields instead of the things I wanted to do. The profit from them could go directly into a fund for buying the entail. We could save for it, Beatrice, and if the worst came to the worst we could always mortgage some land and pay it off later.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I would hate to do that, but it would be worth it in this instance.’
‘But you would have to give up your defence of the cottagers and their rights, Beatrice,’ said Harry, earnestly. ‘There is a hundred acres of common land we could enclose and put under the plough and thousands of pounds to be made if we raised the rents. You have set your heart against those measures, but if we needed to raise money, and a lot of money, then we would have to do things we would not do otherwise.’
I hesitated then, thinking of the lovely rolling common land where the heather grows thigh-high on the sandy light soil, where the little streams run on beds of white sand down the miniature valleys. Of the hollows where the bracken grows in green sweet-smelling peppery fronds where, if you sit still, a dark-eyed snake will come out to bask in the sunshine beside you. Of cold nights when I had walked alone in the empty space under the stars and seen the sharp hoofprints of deer on the loam and seen them moving, soft as shadows, under the great branches of the oak and beech trees. If Harry had his way, all this would be burned and hacked and cleared, and smooth square fields of featureless wheat would grow where the silver birches had shivered and the tall firs had swayed in the wind. It was a big price to pay. Greater than I had thought I would ever have to meet. But it was to get my child into the Master’s chair and my blood into the line of Squires.
‘And we will have to use the gang labourers on the parish,’ said Harry, a certain hard relish in his voice. ‘It is sheer waste employing our tenants or people from Acre when we can get all the day labour we need by contracts with the parish. We pay them cash when they work, and nothing when they do not. We would save hundreds of pounds over the year if we left the poor of Acre to find their own work and did not keep them on our books.’
I nodded. I could feel the face of Wideacre changing as I looked into the future. Acre village would be smaller, with fewer cottages. Those that survived would be more prosperous. But the little cottages, where families survived on winter work from us and on casual harvest work, would go. They lived the best lives people could have. In winter they took casual work from us, hedging or ditching or helping with snowed-in sheep or cattle. They lived then on their summertime savings and relied on vegetables from their patch and the milk from the cow they kept on the common. They would keep a pig there, eating acorns from the oak trees, and a couple of hens to run in the lane of Acre.
In spring and summertime they would earn good money sowing seed, moving the beasts, haymaking, harvesting. They would work outrageous hours for two or three days dawn to dusk in the rhythm of the land, and then all of a sudden the work would stop. The fields would be cut, the barns overflowing, the haystacks built, and the whole village would go on a glorious drunken holiday that would last two or three days, until the next job needed doing.
None of them would ever be wealthy. None of them would ever own land. But they lived a life that many a wealthy city-bred man might envy. They worked when they chose and they rested when they chose, and while they would never be rich they seldom feared poverty.
The hens that ran in the lane and the cow on the common were a safe shield against hunger and want. They knew that if they faced a death or an illness in the family there was always a place for the whole family in the Wideacre kitchen, and where a word to Miss Beatrice would see an apprenticeship for the oldest son, and a job for the oldest daughter at the Hall.
But if I went down Harry’s mean narrow road then Wideacre would be like any other estate where the poor pulled their forelocks as the carriages went by, and then pulled faces when they were gone; where the faces of the children were white and thin, and those of their mothers were old with worry. Wideacre poor led trouble-free lives because we kept to the old ways. Unchallenged traditions ruled the use of the land and the easy holidays. The common was open to all – even the poaching was a ritual game played with little malice. But Harry’s way would mean the common enclosed, the footpaths shut, the cow and pig without grazing. The poor would become poorer. And the very poorest of them would drop through the old traditional supports – and they would starve.
But the end of the road was security for my son. The end of this road was his inheritance. I would have ridden roughshod over every mother in the land – Mary, Joseph, and Baby Jesus too, if necessary – to get my son in the Squire’s chair.
‘It has to be,’ I said. ‘I see that.’
‘That’s generous of you!’ said Harry enthusiastically. ‘I know how you love the old ways, Beatrice, and they have served us well. It is generous of you to be ready to give them up, and all for little Julia’s sake, too.’
‘Yes,’ I said. I settled back on the couch and wrapped a silk shawl around my naked shoulders. The touch of the cloth was soft on my skin and warm. As I shrugged at the thought of the cottagers who would be homeless and hungry the folds slipped, and Harry leaned forward to kiss one bare shoulder. I smiled at him. He had to go further yet, this night.
‘But it still would not be enough,’ Harry said. ‘To buy out the heir we would have to offer a massive sum of capital. We could start a fund certainly. But we would be unlikely to make enough money quickly enough.’
‘I know,’ I nodded. ‘It has to be the MacAndrew money.’
Harry frowned. He was slow but he was not stupid.
‘John would hardly agree,’ he objected. ‘It is to secure Julia’s future certainly, and I hope that while she lived and ruled Wideacre there would always be a home for the three of you, but there is no reason why John should put his private fortune into a scheme that gains him or his child nothing.’
I smiled. One always had to take things so slowly with Harry. But he generally got there in the end.
‘Unless we could find some way of making Richard and Julia joint heirs,’ I suggested tentatively. ‘They could run Wideacre as we do, you and I, together. Everyone can see how well that works, perhaps they too could learn to work together.’
Harry smiled, and traced a line of kisses from the sweet round of my shoulder along the clear line of my neck and up to behind my ear.
‘Well, yes, Beatrice,’ he said softly. ‘But you and I have a rather special way of deciding business matters.’
‘They could be partners,’ I murmured, lazily, as if I could think of nothing but the rising warmth and pleasure of his kisses. I lay back on the couch, the shawl falling from my nakedness, my eyelids half closed, and my eyes behind them as sharp as green glass.
Harry’s movement to kiss a new line, from the fascinating bones at the base of my neck down between my warm tumbled breasts, was arrested at that thought.
‘Julia and Richard?’ he said in sudden surprise.
‘Yes,’ I said, pushing his face down to my soft belly, still slack from the birth of my son. ‘Why not?’
Harry kissed me, absently, his mind turning over this seed of an idea that could secure Julia the benefit of inheriting one of the sweetest estates in Sussex, which would keep Wideacre in his line.
‘You know, Beatrice,’ he said. ‘That’s a rather good idea. If John would accept a half-share of the estate as a return for loaning the capital to buy out Charles Lacey and change the entail we could arrange a contract to make them joint heirs.’
‘That is wonderful,’ I said, catching his enthusiasm as if I had not been planning this ever since I had recognized myself in little Julia, and felt Richard’s rights to the land as sharply as I felt my own.
‘How wonderful, Harry, if our two children could rule here after we are gone!’
Harry beamed. ‘To give Julia Wideacre would be worth almost any sacrifice,’ he said tenderly. ‘And to give your son an equal share in our home makes me almost as happy, Beatrice.’
