Wideacre

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‘Beatrice! Let me take you home.’

‘No, no,’ I said, maintaining the pretence. ‘You enjoy your ride. I shall go to Meg’s house and have some of her feverfew tea. That always cures them.’

I cut short his protests and anxiety by turning my horse back down the way we had come. I felt his eyes upon me and drooped in the saddle as if every step jolted my aching head. But once I was under the shelter of the beech trees, and out of sight, I sat up and swung along at a good pace back down the track. I took the short cut to Meg’s cottage – not up the drive but a neat little jump over the park wall – and then a brisk canter alongside the Fenny to where the little heap of a house slumbered in the sunshine. Ralph was sitting outside, his dog outstretched beside him, knotting a cord into a snare. At the very sight of him my heart twisted inside me. He heard the horse’s hoofbeats and laid his work aside. His smile as he walked to the gate to meet me was warm and easy.

‘Shaken off your high and mighty brother then?’ he asked. ‘I felt I was dirt on the road compared to him.’

I had no answering smile. The contrast between the two of them was too painful.

‘We rode on the downs,’ I said. ‘Near our places. I missed you too much. Let’s go to the mill.’

He nodded as if accepting an order and the smile had gone from his eyes. I tied the mare to the gate and followed him along the little path. As soon as he was inside the door he turned, took me in his arms and started to say something, but I dragged him down to the straw and said urgently, ‘Just do it, Ralph.’

Then my anger and my sadness melted as I felt the familiar, ever new pleasure starting to warm me. He kissed me hard with an anger and sorrow of his own, and then opened the front of my gown at the neck. With shaking fingers I untied the leather thongs at the front lap of his breeches while he fumbled among the layers of petticoats under my riding habit. I said impatiently, ‘Let me!’ and swept the habit and petticoats off over my head.

Naked, I spread myself under him and shivered with pleasure as his weight came down on me. We were panting like hounds, hard-pressed. My hands gripped his buttocks forcing him into me, and in some distant recess in my head I could hear my sobbing whimper of pleasure settle into a rhythm of sighs that matched the rocking of our loving bodies. Then the great half-door swung wide open and a white wall of brilliant sunshine fell on us like a physical blow. For a second we were frozen with shock and terror, Ralph twisting round and me peeping white-faced over his shoulder.

In the sunlit archway stood my brother, his eyes blinking in the gloom, peering at the sight of his naked sister impaled by lust on a dirty threshing floor. For a split second nothing moved, like an obscene tableau, then Ralph leaped off me. I rolled to one side, crouching for my clothes and Ralph hitched his leather breeches over his hard nakedness. Still no one spoke. The silence lasted a lifetime. I stood, my new riding habit clutched to my naked breasts, staring at my brother in a sort of terror.

Then Harry gave a choking cry and rushed at Ralph with his riding whip upraised. Ralph was heavier and taller, and had been fighting village lads since he could walk. He fended Harry off and Harry’s wild blows with the whip fell only on his arms and shoulders. But then a cut across his cheek slashed him into anger and he jerked the whip from Harry, thumped him hard in the belly and tripped him roughly to the floor. Harry thudded down on his back and a sharp kick from Ralph’s foot into the crutch made him scissor together in a ball. He cried out, I thought in pain, and I called urgently, ‘Ralph. No!’

But then my brother’s face lifted from the dusty straw and I saw his angelic smile and the haze of his blue eyes. My blood ran cold as I recognized Harry’s blissful expression of happiness as he lay in the dirt at Ralph’s feet and gazed slavishly up the length of his tall body and at the whip in his hand. He shifted his body in the dust and crawled towards Ralph’s bare feet.

‘Beat me,’ he said in a begging, childish voice. ‘Oh please, beat me.’

As Ralph’s incredulous eyes met mine in the dawning realization that we would escape scot-free, I knew at last why my brother had been expelled and the mark Dr Yately’s school had left on him for life.

Ralph’s light flicks of the whip slapped Harry’s well-cut jacket and breeches and Harry tightened his grip on Ralph’s naked foot and gave a sharp cry then a shuddering sigh of pleasure. The future Master of Wideacre sobbed like a baby with his face buried in dirty straw, his hands cupping a labourer’s foot. Ralph and I looked at each other in utter silence.

That silence lasted, it seemed, all summer. My brother no longer dogged my footsteps, walked in my shadow, hung around the stables while I watched my horse being groomed, trailed behind me when I walked in the garden, sat at my side in the parlour in the evening. Now he followed Ralph. My father was pleased that Harry should be out on our land and not wandering around the house or sitting indoors. Slowly Harry learned the fields, the woods and the River Fenny as he followed in Ralph’s footsteps as faithfully as Ralph’s new black spaniel puppy. As Ralph checked the coverts, scattered grain for the game birds, set wire-noose traps and noted the fox holes and the badgers’ dens Harry shadowed him, learning, in the course of his faithful pursuits, the secrets of Wideacre I had learned as a child.

I was free of him at last, but Ralph and I were impossibly awkward when we met in my brother’s silent, sharp-eyed presence. Even on the few days when I rode out early to see Ralph before Harry was up, we did not embrace with the old passion. I felt chilly and tense and Ralph was stoical and silent. I felt as if at any moment my brother might come upon us and might again crawl to Ralph’s feet for a beating. I could not even ask Ralph if he and my brother …? If on their long wanderings around the estate they, too, paused in sheltered hollows and …? Whether when Ralph’s untrained puppy rolled on its back after a beating, Ralph turned to Harry with the whip still raised and …? I could not. I could not picture the two of them together; I could not find words for the questions I longed to ask, but did not dare.

Perhaps I should have felt jealous, but I felt nothing. The magical summer of Ralph, the dark god, seemed to be over. It had ended like the magic it was, as soon as it had begun. It ended for me on the drive on that hot day when Ralph pulled his forelock to my brother and my brother had not even noticed. Ralph had taught me about pleasure, and to keep my heart well guarded, but there could be no future for us. He was one of our people, a servant, and I was a lady of Wideacre. When I rode to hounds on a hunter of my own, or took the carriage to church, or walked over our fields, I should not want to see Ralph slouching beside a hedge smiling at me with his secret, knowing smile. It was not jealousy but a sharp sense of caste that made me hate that smile when I saw it directed at my brother; when I saw the gamekeeper’s lad with the next Master at his beck and call.

So I saw little of Ralph in the following weeks and he did not seek me. He smiled that secret smile at me once when I was driving down the lane to Acre beside Mama in the carriage, and I thought I saw behind his velvety black eyes some message. It was as if he were waiting for something. For a chance to speak freely with me, for an opportunity to turn a long-considered idea into words. But he was a country boy and believed in waiting for the right season.

In any case, his time was taken up with a sudden increase in poaching. The price of mutton had soared sky high after an epidemic of foot rot in the spring, and even our own tenants were not respecting our coverts. Pheasant after pheasant went missing and at every meal Harry spoke of Ralph’s plans to catch the poachers and praised Ralph’s determination and daring.

It was a dangerous job. The penalty for poaching is death by hanging and the men driven to it are desperate men. Many a poacher has added murder to his crimes – clubbing down a gamekeeper who had recognized him. Ralph kept his guns constantly primed and carried a heavy stick. His two dogs – the black lurcher and the black spaniel puppy – scouted before and behind him, as much to protect their master as the pheasants.

At breakfast, dinner and tea we had enthusiastic accounts from Harry as to how the war against the poachers was going, and how Ralph’s assistance to the gamekeeper was making all the difference. Then when Bellings, the keeper, fell sick with the flux, Harry was urgent that Ralph be paid an extra two shillings a week and given the job until the older man was well again.

‘He’s very young,’ said my papa cautiously. ‘I think it might be wiser to bring in an older man until Bellings is well.’

‘No one knows the estate better than Ralph, Papa,’ said Harry confidently. ‘And although he is young he is fully grown and as strong as an ox. You should see how easily he throws me when we wrestle! I don’t think any other person could do the job better.’

‘Well,’ said my papa tolerantly, his eyes on Harry’s bright face, ‘you’ll be the Master here when I am gone. Appoint a young keeper like Ralph and you will work with him for all your lives probably. I’m happy to take your advice on this.’

My eyes flickered to Papa’s face and then back to my plate. Only a few weeks ago Papa would have asked me what I thought. Then I would have praised Ralph to the skies, for I adored him. Now I was not so sure. He had my brother in utter thrall, and my ears had pricked up at the mention of their wrestling bouts. It sounded like Staveley all over again. And for some reason, I could not have said why, I feared the idea of Ralph having such a hold on Harry’s impulsive heart.

‘I need someone to check the sheep today,’ said Papa, looking down the table with his eyes equally on Harry and me.

‘I’ll go,’ said Harry, ‘but I must be done by dinner. Ralph has found a kestrel’s nest and I am going after it this afternoon before the hen lays a second brood.’

‘I’ll go,’ I said. ‘They’ll need to be checked for foot rot and you will not recognize the signs, Harry.’

Papa beamed, unconscious of the latent jealousy in my voice.

‘It seems I have two bailiffs then!’ he said, pleased. ‘What d’you say, ma’am?’

Mama smiled, too. At last everything was falling into what she saw as its proper place. Only I was still intractable.

‘Harry should go,’ she said sweetly. ‘I need Beatrice to cut some flowers this morning, and this afternoon she may come with me and pay some calls.’

My eyes flew to Papa’s face in an instinctive, silent appeal. But he was not looking at me. Now his son was home our easy, loving comradeship had taken second place. He was watching Harry learning his way around the land with as much love and interest as he had shown when he had been teaching me. There was pride as well as love in his eyes when he looked at his tall, golden son. He saw Harry growing, broadening and developing from the milksop mother’s boy into a young man. And he saw in him the future Master of Wideacre.

‘Harry can go then,’ he said with careless cruelty. ‘I’ll ride out with you, Harry, and show you what foot rot looks like. If Beatrice is right and you do not know, then it’s high time you learned. Wideacre is not all play, you know!’

‘I wanted to ride today,’ I said, my voice small and my face mutinous.

Papa looked at me and he laughed as if my disappointment and pain were funny.

‘Ah, Beatrice!’ he said with casual, worthless affection. ‘You must learn to be a young lady now. I have taught you all I know on the land. Your mama must teach you all you need to know in the house. Then you can rule your husband in and out of doors!’ He laughed again and Mama’s little tinkling laugh told me I had been beaten.

Harry learned to spot foot rot from Papa and he also used the time to persuade Papa that Ralph and Meg should be rehoused. When I heard him mention it at tea, I could not keep a still tongue in my head.

‘Nonsense,’ I exclaimed. ‘Ralph and Meg do very well in their little cottage. It’s practically rent-free as it is, and Meg is a sluttish housekeeper. The straw roof is blowing away because Ralph is too lazy to glean straw to rethatch it and Meg is too idle to care. They’ve no call to be rehoused. Meg would not know what to do with a good house.’ My father nodded his agreement, but he looked to Harry. The way his eyes strayed from me cut me to the bone. He was looking at his successor, his heir, measuring his judgement. My opinion as the daughter of the house might be right or wrong, it hardly mattered.

But Harry’s judgement mattered very much, for on him the future would depend. He was the male heir.

Papa had not ceased to love me. I knew that. But I had lost his attention. He had broken the thread of our constant companionship that had held me ever since he first took my pony on a leading rein and that had kept my mare to his horse’s shoulder ever after. Now there was another horse riding beside my papa: the future Squire’s.

I might ride my mare, or practise the piano, or paint little pictures, it hardly mattered. I was the daughter of the house. I was just passing through. My future lay elsewhere.

And while Harry had Papa’s ear, Ralph had Harry’s. And if I knew Ralph he would use that influence for his own ends. Only I could see clearly into Ralph’s mind. Only I knew the longing for the land. Only I knew how it felt to be an outsider in your own home, on your own land. Forever longing to belong and to be secure. Forever denied.

‘Ralph’s a first-rate man,’ Harry said firmly. He had lost most of his quiet diffidence but still had his gentle voice and manners. He was openly disagreeing with me, without a thought in the world that I might be irritated or angry. ‘It would be a shame to lose him and there are many landlords who would pay him more and house him better, too. I think he should have the Tyacke cottage when the old man dies. It’s a handy cottage and near to the coverts.’

I nearly exploded with anger at my brother’s stupidity. ‘Nonsense! Tyacke’s cottage is worth £150 a year and the entry fee to a new tenant is £100. We can’t throw money like that away on Ralph’s convenience. We could repair his old cottage or move him into a small cottage in the village, but the Tyacke cottage is out of the question. Why, it’s practically a house! What would Ralph or Meg want with a front parlour – they’d only use it to keep the pheasant chicks in.’

My mother, stone-deaf to the discussion, heard only the tone of my voice and it roused her from her habitual indifference.

‘Beatrice, decorum,’ she said automatically. ‘And don’t interfere with business, dear.’

I ignored the caution, but my father nodded at me to be silent.

‘I’ll consider it, Harry,’ he said. ‘Ralph is a good man, you’re right. I’ll look into it. He’s reliable with pheasants and foxes and we need to keep him on the estate. Beatrice is right that the Tyacke property is a handsome cottage, but Ralph does need something more than that shack by the stream. Full of ideas Ralph is. Why, he’s even got one of those mantraps for the woods. He knows his job and he works hard. I’ll consider it.’

My brother nodded and smiled at me. There was no malice or triumph in his smile. His friendship with Ralph had brought him a new confidence but no arrogance. His smile was still that of a cherubic schoolboy, his eyes still the clear blue of a happy child.

‘He will be pleased,’ he said serenely.

I realized then that this was Ralph’s idea, Ralph’s arguments, Ralph’s very words. He had given me pleasure and possessed me, but he held my brother in the palm of his hand. Through my brother he could influence my father and I knew, because I knew Ralph, that he was after more than the pretty little Tyacke cottage to rent. He was after land, and then more land. More to the point, he was after our land. Few people ever move more than five miles from the village where they are born. Ralph was born on Wideacre land; he would die here. If he wanted land, it was our land he was after. The cottage was just a first step for him and I could not imagine where his hunger would end. I understood it as clearly as I understood myself. I would have done anything, committed any crime, any sin, to own our fields and woods. With a growing fear I wondered if Ralph also had the same desire, and how my besotted brother would ever stand against him.

I excused myself from the table and slipped out to the stables, ignoring my mother’s murmured instructions. I needed to see Ralph, no longer as a lover needs to see the man she loves, but to see if I could feel in him the passion for the land that he had seen in me. If he wanted Wideacre as much as I wanted it – the serene and lovely house, the warm gardens, the folds of the hills and the rich, peaty earth with the silver traces of sand – then my family was lost. Harry’s enthusiasm would admit a cuckoo that would throw us mercilessly to one side and claim the golden kingdom for himself. My mare trotted swiftly down the track to the cottage that was suddenly not good enough for Ralph, and then shied, nearly unseating me, as a bush near the path swayed and rustled.

‘Ralph!’ I said. ‘You nearly had me off!’

He grinned. ‘You should ride on a tighter rein, Beatrice.’

I turned the head of my horse and urged her forward so I could see what Ralph was doing. He was pegging out the jaws of a huge mantrap, a vicious weapon, on to the ground. It yawned like a great clam, custom-made in a London workshop for the protection of the gentry’s sport. Nearly four feet wide, made of sharpened, spiky iron with a spring as quick as the crack of a whip.

‘What a horrid thing,’ I said. ‘Why aren’t you putting it on the path?’

‘I can see the path from the cottage,’ said Ralph. ‘They know that. Just here, before the path bends, they creep through the bushes to get to the pheasants roosting. I’ve seen the prints of their boots. I reckon this will give them a welcome they weren’t expecting.’

‘Does it kill a man?’ I asked, visualizing the jaws snapping shut.

‘Can do,’ said Ralph, unconcerned. ‘Depends on his luck. In the great estates in the north they stake them out round the walls and check them once a week. If a man is caught, he may bleed to death before the keeper comes round. Your father wouldn’t allow such a thing here. If the man is lucky, he has two broken legs; if he is unlucky and it has cut a vital path of blood, he bleeds to death.’

‘Won’t you be there quick enough to save him?’ I asked, repelled by the weapon spread like a deadly invitation in the leaves.

‘Nay,’ Ralph drawled, unconcerned. ‘You’ve seen me cut a deer’s throat. You know how quick an animal dies when the blood is gushing. It’s the same with a man. But chances are they’ll just walk a little slowly for the rest of their days.’

‘You’d better warn your mother,’ I cautioned.

Ralph laughed. ‘She was away as soon as she saw it,’ he said. ‘She’s fey, you know. Said it smelled of death. Begged me to have nothing to do with it.’ He glanced at me sideways. ‘I sleep alone here during the afternoons and I watch at night.’

I ignored the unspoken invitation, though a prickling on my skin reminded me of what a long afternoon in Ralph’s cottage would have meant in the time that had gone.

‘You’re very thick with Master Harry,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘He’s learning his way round the woods,’ he said. ‘He’s got no feeling for the land like you, but he’ll make a good enough Squire in time with the right bailiff.’

‘We’ve never had a bailiff,’ I said swiftly. ‘We don’t have bailiffs at Wideacre.’

Ralph, still kneeling, gave me a long, cool look. His eyes were as bright and sharp as the teeth of the trap.

‘Maybe the next Squire will have a bailiff,’ he said slowly. ‘Maybe that bailiff will know the land well, better than the Master even. Maybe that bailiff will love the land and be a good Master to it, better than the Squire himself. Isn’t that the Master the land should have? Isn’t that the sort of man you’d like to see here, at your side?’

I slid off my mare and hitched the reins to a low branch, carefully away from the trap.

‘Let’s walk to the river,’ I said. ‘Leave that.’

Ralph kicked a few more concealing leaves over the trap and turned to follow me. I swayed towards him as we walked and my cheek brushed his shoulder. We walked in silence. The River Fenny, our river, is a sweet clean trout stream you can drink in safety over every inch of our land. The salmon reach this far in summer, and you can always have a trout or a bowlful of eels for half an hour’s netting. The pebbles here are golden and the river is a streak of silver in the sunlight with mysterious amber pools under the shades of the trees. We watched the endless flow of water over the stones and said in unison, ‘Look! A trout!’ and smiled that we should speak together. Our eyes met in a shared love of the trout, the river and the sweet Sussex earth. The days of absence slid away from us, and we smiled.

‘I was born and bred here,’ Ralph said suddenly. ‘My father and his parents and their parents have been working this land for as long as we can trace back. That gives me some rights.’

The river babbled quietly.

A fallen tree trunk spanned the river. I stepped on to it and sat, my legs dangling over the water. Ralph balanced down the trunk and leaned against one of the branches looking at me.

‘I can see my way clear now,’ he said quietly. ‘I can see my way clear through to the land and the pleasure. D’you remember, Beatrice, when we spoke that first time? The land and the pleasure for both of us.’

A trout plopped in the river behind him, but he didn’t turn his head. He watched me as close as my owl watched me at night, as if to read my thoughts. I looked up, a slanting, sliding glance out of the corner of my tilted eyes.

‘The same land and the same pleasure. We share them both?’

He nodded. ‘You’d do anything to be Mistress of Wideacre, wouldn’t you, Beatrice? You’d give anything you owned, make any sacrifice there was, to be the Mistress in the Hall and be able to ride over the land every day of your life and say, “This is mine.”’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘But you’ll be sent away,’ he said. ‘You’re not a child any more. You can tell what your future will be – sent to London and married to a stranger who will take you far away, perhaps to a different county. The land, the weather and the farming will be all different. The hay won’t smell the same; the earth won’t be the same colour. The milk and cheese will taste different. Harry will marry some high-bred girl who will come and queen it here and take your mother’s place. You’ll be lucky if you’re allowed a visit once a year at Christmas.’

I said nothing. The picture was too clear, all too likely. Ralph had been planning while I had been dreaming. Everything he said was right. I would be sent away. Harry would marry. Wideacre would not be my home for ever; I would be far away in some unknown part of the country. Perhaps, even worse, I would have to live with some fashionable husband in London and never smell new-mown hay again. I said nothing, but I hurt inside and I was afraid.

The bedroom my mama would not redecorate for me, the warning my papa had given me, the love they both showed for Harry all told me, as clear as a tolling bell, where I was going. I was on my way to exile, and all my will and all my passion could not save me.

Ralph turned his head from my shocked face and watched the stream. The slim, silver trout was finning gently, nose pointing upstream as the sweet water flowed all over him.

‘There is a way to stay here and be the Lady of Wideacre,’ he said slowly. ‘It is a long and crooked way, but we win the land and the pleasure.’

‘How?’ I said. The ache of loneliness in my belly made my voice as quiet and as low as his. He turned back to me and sat beside me, our heads together like conspirators.

‘When Harry inherits you stay beside him. He trusts you and he trusts me,’ Ralph said. ‘We cheat him, you and I. As his bailiff, I can cheat him on his rents, on his land, on his harvests. I tell him we have to pay more taxes and I bank the difference. I tell him we need special seed corn, special animals, and I bank the difference. You cheat him on his accounting. In his wages for the house servants, the house management, the home farm, the stables, the dairy, the brewery. You know how it could be done better than I.’ He waited and I nodded. I knew. I had been involved in the running of the estate since my earliest years when Harry was away at school or staying with relatives. I knew I could cheat him of a fortune in the household accounts alone. With Ralph acting with me I calculated that Harry would be bankrupt inside three years.

‘We ruin him.’ Ralph’s voice was a whisper, mingling with the clatter of the stream. ‘You’ll have a jointure protected, or probably a dower house protected, or funds. Your income is safe, but we make him bankrupt. With the money we’ve saved I buy the estate from him. And then I’m the Master here and you’re what you deserve to be, the Mistress of the finest estate and house in England, the Squire’s Lady, the Mistress of Wideacre.’

‘And Harry?’ I asked, my voice cold.

Ralph spat contemptuously to the riverbank. ‘He’s clay to anyone’s moulding,’ he said. ‘He’ll fall in love with a pretty girl, or maybe a pretty boy. He could hang himself or become a poet. He could live in London or go to Paris. He’ll have some money from the sale; he won’t starve.’ He smiled. ‘He can visit us if you like. I don’t think of Harry.’

I smiled in return, but my heart was beating faster with mingled hope and anger.

‘It could work,’ I said, neutrally.

‘It would,’ he said. ‘I have been many nights planning.’

I thought of him, hidden among the ferns in the woods, his dark eyes staring brightly into the darkness, watching for poachers and yet looking beyond the shadows to the future when there would be no cold, uncomfortable nights. When other men, paid men, would do his watching for him, and he could drink and dine and stand before a roaring fire and speak of the slackness of servants and the problems with rent rolls, and the state of the crops, and the incompetence of the government; and gentlemen would listen to him and agree.

‘It would work, except for one thing,’ I said.

Ralph waited.

‘My father’s healthy, strong as an ox. He could sire another son tomorrow and provide the child with trustees and guardians. Apart from that possibility, Harry may be fascinated with you now, but I doubt you’ll hold him for twenty years. My father’s forty-nine. He could live another forty years. By the time he’s dead, I’ll have been married thirty-five years to some fat old Scottish nobleman with a pack of barefoot children, maybe future dukes and duchesses, and probably grandchildren on the way too. Harry’s wife, whoever she may be, will have settled in nicely, growing fat and comfortable with two new heirs out of short clothes. The most you can hope for is Tyacke’s cottage. And the most I can hope for’, my voice quavered on a sob, ‘is exile.’

Ralph nodded. ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘That’s the difficulty. It would work, but it would only work now, this summer. If it’s to happen it’s got to be done while Harry’s at a loose end, trailing around after me, or mooning around after you. In love with both of us and afraid of both of us. It has to be now while we are land-hungry and love-hungry. I don’t want to wait, Beatrice.’