Wideacre

13

I spent the next week in a world of contented mothering as sensuously delighted as a feeding cat. I lived in a haze of daydreams with only one constant thought in my mind — how to force Harry to make his son the heir to Wideacre without revealing the truth of his parentage. I knew my pernickety brother well enough to know that he would be repelled at the idea of an incestuous child. Even my own pragmatic mind tended to shy away from the thought, and I sensed that any hint of my son’s true father would mean only disaster and the end of my plans and hopes. But somehow there had to be some way to give this perfect second child — my son, my boy — equal rights with my first child — Julia. The tangle of injustice and ill luck was the only flaw in my happiness during my moments of solitude. But for the rest I dreamed, and crooned, and sang over my baby, my son, my perfect son.

His fingernails were so delightful. Each tiny slender finger smaller than a twig was crowned with a perfect nail, even a little white tip to it. And each fingertip carried its own perfect little circle. And his tiny feet, so small and so plump and yet with such lovely little bones that one could feel through the firm flesh. And the sweet-smelling crannies of his neck, and his tiny ears curled like shells, and his perfect ooo of a mouth. When he was hungry and reached for my hard, oozing nipples his little face contorted and the mouth became a little triangle of longing. Then when he had sucked himself into a collapse of milky unconsciousness his upper Up showed the sweetest blister from sucking so hard.

I revelled in the hot June days so he could lie naked, kicking on my bed, while I patted him with powder, or rubbed him with oils after his bath. And I insisted, as Celia had done before me and at last I understood, that his little legs should not be strapped down with swaddling but allowed to be free. So the whole of Wideacre now ran to the schedule of two small tyrants instead of one: the perfect Julia, and the equally perfect Richard.

For Richard was to be his name. Why it came to my lips I never knew, except that Ralph’s name was in my mind as soon as I saw that jet-black wet head, so perhaps the ‘R’ was on my tongue before I could catch it. An odd slip for me, and I never make odd slips. But darling Richard made me careless. I dreamed for him, and planned for him, but for the moment I had lost my old angry, lying, cutting edge. I had the folly to fail to prepare for anything. I neither planned nor prepared what I should say if anyone challenged me about his age. For he was a plump, healthy baby, feeding every three or four hours, not a skinny early child at all. Celia said nothing. Whatever would Celia know? But the household knew — in the way that servants always do. And if they knew then Acre knew too — I understood without asking.

But ours is a country area. There are few marriages in the parish church that take place without a good round belly on the bride. For what is the point of a wife who cannot be shown to be fertile? The other way is the Quality way, but you end up with the bad bargain that Harry got — a barren wife and no hope of issue. Everyone in the village, just like everyone at the Hall, and, for all I know, everyone in the county, assumed that John and I had been lovers before our marriage and thought none the worst of me, or of him, for it.

Only Mama dared to face that trivial sin.

‘He’s such a big baby for his age,’ she said, looking at us both as I crooned over him as he lay on my bed, replete after a feed, his little milky face puffed up in delight. His eyes closed in his plump doze.

‘Yes,’ I said, absently, watching his eyes.

‘Did you mistake your dates, my dear?’ Mama asked, her voice low. ‘He seems so plump and well for a baby born so early.’

‘Oh, come, Mama,’ I said idly. ‘You must see perfectly well. He was conceived when John and I were affianced. I go by the old ways; he was conceived with my betrothed. There’s no harm in that.’

Mama’s face was a picture of disapproval.

‘There’s nothing morally wrong with it, Beatrice, I know,’ she said. ‘And if your husband has no objection it is not my place to make any complaint. But it is typical of your country childhood and your obsession with country values. I should not have dreamed of such a thing. I am glad you are no longer in my charge.’

And with that, she swept out of the room in high dudgeon, leaving me to laugh at her with Richard who neither laughed nor cried, but lay, somnolent in the sunshine, as if his mama could be a self-confessed strumpet every day of her life.

The fiction that he had been conceived by John before our marriage was so persuasive that I did not trouble myself about John’s return and what he might think. I knew little of babies, and I thought that three weeks in infancy would make little difference. I could scarcely remember the first days of Julia, but I had a recollection of her filling out once she got to England and looking much the same from birth till then. And the success of the deception with Julia had made me confident. I had done it once. I had spoken vaguely of a baby coming early, of the inaccuracy of a young bride’s calculations. It had been done easily and without challenge. I did not think it would be so different with Richard. I could see no reason why my husband, however clever and skilled, should be able to distinguish between a strapping boy child born a little later and one born three weeks early. Some extra days and he might have been sure of nothing.

But he came early.

He came earlier than we expected. He was with us inside the week, travelling post like a demon and bribing the coach boys to ride day and night and not stop for food. He hammered up the drive in a filthy post-chaise and thundered into the house and into the parlour. Mama was at the piano, Celia with Julia on her knee, and I was seated in the window seat with Richard in the wooden cradle rocking beside me. John was white with fatigue, smelling of whisky, his face dirty, and shabby, with beard. He looked around incredulously as if he could not believe the existence of this scented parlour, this domestic peace. Then his red-rimmed eyes focused on me.

‘Beatrice, my love,’ he said, and was down on one knee beside me, one arm around my waist, his chapped dry mouth hard on mine. The door behind him slammed as Mama and Celia whisked out to leave us alone.

‘My God,’ he said with a deep tired sigh. ‘I had imagined you dead, or ill, or bleeding, and here you are, as lovely as an angel and as well.’ He raised his eyes and scanned my clear face. ‘You are indeed well?’ he said.

‘Oh, yes,’ I said, tenderly and low. ‘And so is your son.’

He gave an exclamation and turned to the crib, a smile of wonderment half hovering around his tired mouth. Then the half-smile was wiped from his face and he bent over the cradle with eyes that were suddenly hard.

‘Born when?’ he asked, and his voice was cold.

‘June the first, ten days ago,’ I said, trying to keep my voice even; as a man crossing a frozen river tries to spread his weight by sliding.

‘Some three weeks premature, I think?’ John’s voice was as sharp as a shard of cracking ice; I felt myself beginning to tremble with unexpected fear.

‘Two or three,’ I said. ‘I am not utterly sure …’

John lifted Richard from the cradle with expert, unloving hands, and unwrapped his shawl. Ignoring my half-hearted protest he undressed him so swiftly and skilfully that the baby did not even cry. He pulled gently at the little legs and on the hands, and he prodded the rounded belly. His taper doctor’s fingers encircled the plump wrist and the betraying chubby knees. Then he wrapped the baby in the shawl again and put him gently back in the cradle, holding the head steady until the child was safe. Only then did he straighten and face me. As I saw the look in his eyes the thin ice broke beneath me and I plunged down into an icy blackness of discovery, and ruin.

‘That baby was carried full term,’ he said, and his voice was a splinter of frozen glass. ‘You had him in your belly when you lay with me. You had him in your belly when you married me. You doubtless married me for that very reason. That makes you a whore, Beatrice Lacey.’

He stopped, and I opened my mouth to speak, but no words came. All I could feel was a pain in my chest as if I was drowning in icy water trapped under a low ceiling of ice in a frozen river.

‘You are something else, too,’ he said, his voice flat. ‘You are a fool. For I loved you so much I would have married you and taken on your child if you had asked it of me. But you preferred to lie and cheat and steal my good name.’

I put my hands up as if to ward off a blow. I was ruined. My son, my precious son was ruined too. I could find no words to protect us, nothing to make us safe.

He took half-a-dozen hasty steps to the door and opened and shut it quietly. My nerves cringed, waiting for the slam of the door to the west wing but none came. A hushed click of the library door was all. Then the house was as silent as if we had all been frozen in time, and the ice of my sin had killed even the warm heart of Wideacre.

I sat without moving as a finger of sunlight moved slowly across the room mirroring the sun’s slow afternoon pace across the sky. It failed to warm me, and I shivered even while I felt my silk dress grow hot. Every one of my senses was on edge to hear movement in the library, but I heard nothing. The peaceful tick of the parlour clock was as gentle and as regular as a heartbeat, the louder clicking of the grandfather clock in the echoing hall subdivided the slow seconds.

I could wait no longer. I crept from the room and listened outside the library door. There was no sound, but the room was full of a presence. I could sense him, like a deer senses a waiting hound. I stood stock-still, my eyes wide with fear, my breath unconsciously shallow. I could hear nothing. My mouth was dry with terror… so I went in. I am, after all, my father’s daughter. Afraid as I was, my instinct was to face it and go on into it. I turned the doorknob and it yielded. It opened a crack and I froze in fright, and then, when nothing happened, pressed it open a little further so that I could peep into the room.

He was in the winged armchair with his filthy riding boots on the velvet cushions of the window seat, staring sightlessly over the rose garden. One hand was loosely clasped around a glass and a bottle of the MacAndrew whisky was rucked into the cushions of the chair. The bottle was nearly empty; he had been drinking on his journey and now he was drunk. He turned to stare at me as I walked into the centre of the room, my ivory skirts hushing on the Persian carpet. His face was a stranger’s — a mask of pain. There were lines I had never seen before on either side of his mouth and his eyes looked bruised.

‘Beatrice,’ he said, and his voice was a gasp of longing. ‘Beatrice, why did you not tell me?’

I stepped a little closer and my hands moved out to him, palms outspread as if to say I had no answer.

‘I would have cared for you,’ he said, his eyes luminous with tears, the skin on his cheeks shiny where tears had spilled over and dried. The lines on either side of his mouth as deep as wounds. ‘You could have trusted me. I promised you I would care for you. You should have trusted me.’

‘I know,’ I said, my own voice breaking on a sob. ‘But I did not know. I could not bring myself to tell you. I do so love you, John.’

He gave a moan and shifted his head on the back of the armchair as if my love for him confirmed and did not ease his pain.

‘Who is the father?’ he asked dully. ‘You were lying with him while we were courting, weren’t you?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘No, it wasn’t like that.’ Under his agonized stare my eyes dropped to the floor. I could see every thread in the carpet under my feet, every strand of the pattern. The white wool gleamed like a fresh-clipped sheep, the blues and greens as bright as kingfisher wings.

‘Is it something to do with the china owl?’ he asked abruptly, and I jumped at the sharpness of his perception. ‘Something to do with the sailor on the beach that day? The smuggler?’ he demanded. His eyes bored into me. He had all the pieces of the puzzle in his hand, but he could not see how to put them together. Our happiness and our love were in pieces too, and I could not see how to mend them. Just then, in that cold room by the empty grate, I would have given all I owned to have his love once more.

‘Yes,’ I said with a shuddering sigh.

‘Is it the gang leader?’ he asked. His voice was very low, as tender of my feelings as if I were one of his patients.

‘John …’ I said imploringly. His quick mind was taking me helter-skelter down a road of lies and I could not see where I was going. I could not tell the truth. But I had no lie that would satisfy him.

‘Did he force you?’ John asked, his voice very, very gentle. ‘Did he have some power over you, perhaps Wideacre?’

‘Yes,’ I breathed, and I glanced at his face. He looked as if he were on a rack. ‘Oh, John!’ I cried. ‘Don’t look at me like that. I tried to be rid of the baby but it would not die! I rode like a mad woman. I took some horrid stuff. I did not know what to do! I wish, I wish I had told you!’ I dropped on my knees beside his chair and covered my face in my hands and wept like a peasant woman by a deathbed. I did not dare so much as touch his hand on the arm of the chair. I could only kneel beside him in an agony of misery and loss.

In the haze of my grief I felt the kindest touch of all the world. His hand on my bowed, curly head. I raised my face from my hands and looked at him.

‘Oh, Beatrice, my love,’ he said brokenly.

I shifted so I could put my wet cheek against his hand. He turned his hand palm up to cup my face and I laid my face along it, my eyes searching.

‘Go now,’ he said gently, and there was no anger but a lifetime of sorrow in his voice. ‘I am too tired and too drunk to think straight. I think this is the end of the world, Beatrice. But I do not want to speak of it until I have had time to think. Go now.’

‘Will you go to your room and sleep?’ I asked tentatively, anxious for his comfort and dreading the lines of fatigue and pain on his face.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I will sleep here. But ask them not to disturb me. I want to be alone for a while.’

I nodded as I heard the dismissal of me in his voice and got to my feet with a little sob of pain. He did not touch me again, and I went, slow-paced, towards the door.

‘Beatrice,’ he said softly, and I turned at once.

‘This is the truth?’ he asked, scanning my face. ‘It was the smuggler, and he forced you?’

‘Yes,’ I said. There was nothing else I could say. ‘As God is my witness, John, I was not willingly unfaithful to you. I would never have betrayed you if it had been my own free choice.’

He nodded then, as if my oath might serve us as a stepping stone across his river of grief, where we could meet on some safe shore. When he spoke no more to me I went quietly out of the room.

I went out. I threw on a shawl and went out bare-headed without bonnet or cap on my chestnut coils of hair. Of course I went outside. Whenever my heart is aching I walk through the rose garden, through the little gate into the paddock, past the horses who come so loyally and lovingly to greet me and nuzzle my pockets for titbits, through the lychgate into the wood and on down to the Fenny. I walked without stopping in my silk shoes, which were stained and muddy by the time I came home, and with my fine afternoon tea gown dragging in the meadow grasses.

I walked with my head high and my hands in fists, with tears drying on my cheeks. I walked as if I were out taking the air, a young wife taking time to be alone to savour her joy at the safe return of her adoring husband. Counting her blessings: a healthy first-born son, a husband who had driven like a maniac to come to her, and a secure and beautiful home. But I was not counting my blessings; I was mourning my loss.

For I loved John. I had loved him as my equal — my equal in rank, something Ralph and I had never had, for I never lost my sense of Ralph’s gypsy blood. I loved him as my equal in wits — something I never had with Harry, whose book learning seemed to make him slower rather than quicker. My lean, lovely quickwitted husband had won me body and mind, and that had been a new pleasure to me, which I thought I would never cease to enjoy. And now our peace hung on a thin thread of my own spinning, and a breath of truth could snap it in two. I had won no security on Wideacre, though I had done everything a woman could do to keep myself safe inside its lovely borders. When I paid my rent with Harry, those dark nights had brought me to bed with a child, and that child would be my undoing. My husband could cast me off and I would be sent away in shame, or he could take me away, away from Wideacre.

The pain that had been knocking against my ribs with every step I took rose in my throat then and I groaned and leaned my head against the trunk of a tree. A great spreading horse chestnut tree. I rubbed my forehead on the comforting rough bark and then turned around and leaned my back against it and looked upwards. Against the blue sky of a June afternoon the pink fat candles of the flowers glowed as sweet as icing on one of Harry’s puddings.

‘Oh, John,’ I said sadly.

And there seemed no other words.

Of all the people in the world I would have willingly seen him hurt last of all. He might reject me; we might never again be lovers. I could not believe that it would be me who caused him such unbearable pain. I could not believe that things could not come right between us. My face was still warm from his kiss of greeting; I could still remember the feel of his arms holding me hard against him in his passion and relief at seeing me. It was too soon, far too soon for me to start thinking that this man might turn against me, might cease to love me.

I stood beneath the broad branches and felt the chestnut flower petals drift down on my hair, and brush my cheeks like more tears. I could almost have thrown Wideacre — house and land — into the sea rather than break the heart of that good man who loved me. Almost.

I waited for the comfort that the wood always gave me. I glanced towards the Fenny to see its eternal shimmer between the sweet greenness of the summer trees. I closed my eyes to hear better the loving coo of the wood pigeons, and the distant call of a cuckoo far away, somewhere up on the downs.

But the old easy magic of the land did not work that day, did not ease my sadness. In the library the man I loved and trusted was tumbling into sleep rather than face me and the child I had hoped he would love. And the only way I knew back into his heart and his trust was a massive lie that I would have to find the nerve and the wit to make stick when he was sober and awake again. So I retraced my steps home, dry-eyed and white-faced, and with my heart still crying inside me.

I dawdled through the rose garden and plucked one of the early roses, a white rose, creamy as milk, with dark shiny leaves. I kept it with me when I went back indoors and laid it on my dressing table when my maid plaited and powdered my long chestnut hair. When I went down to dinner, as regal as a queen, I held it between my fingers and pricked my hand on its sharp thorns when I felt the tears rising.

Mama and Celia were ready to tease me at John’s absence. Celia had ordered his favourite meal of wild duck cooked in limes, and I advised that we eat without him and save his portion for him to dine later.

‘He is exhausted,’ I said. ‘He has had a long, long journey, and no company save a crate of his papa’s whisky. He left his valet behind him several stages back, and his luggage will not yet have reached London. He has ridden too fast, too far. I think we had better leave him to rest.’

I kept the white rose beside my plate all through dinner. In contrast with the greenish purity of the deep centre the napery seemed cream, and the candle flames yellow. The talk flowed easily between Harry, Celia and Mama, and I had only to say an occasional word of assent. After dinner we sat before the fire in the parlour while Celia played the piano and sang, and Mama stitched, and Harry and I sat before the fire, and watched the flames together.

When the tea tray came in, I murmured some excuse and left the room. John was still asleep in the library, sprawled in his chair. He had drawn his favourite chair up to the window and had set a table beside it with a glass and the bottle to hand. From where he was sitting he would have seen me walking to the wood and had perhaps understood the droop of my shoulders and my unusual slow pace. If he had felt any ache of love then, he had drowned it well. The bottle was empty, and rolled under his chair dripping a stain of whisky on the priceless Persian carpet. His head was tipped back on the cushions and he was snoring. I spread a travelling rug from the chest in the hall over his outstretched legs. I tucked the folds around him as tenderly as if he were mortally ill, and when I was certain he would not wake I kneeled beside him and placed my cheek to his stubbly unshaven dirty face.

There was nothing more I could do.

My heart ached.

Then I straightened, pinned a calm and confident smile on my face and went back to the candlelit parlour for my tea. Celia was reading a novel aloud to us and that saved me from conversation. Then, when the clocks in the hall and in the parlour chimed eleven o’clock in a clear duet, Mama sighed, and straightened up from the remorseless work of the altar cloth.

‘Goodnight, my dears,’ she said, and kissed Celia who rose to sketch a curtsy. Then she dropped a kiss on the top of my head, and pecked Harry’s cheek as he held the door for her.

‘Goodnight, Mama,’ he said.

‘Are you off to bed too, Celia?’ I asked.

Though a wife of two summers, Celia still knew her place.

‘Shall I?’ she asked the air midway between Harry and me.

‘Go and warm my bed,’ Harry smiled at her. ‘I need to talk some business with Beatrice. But I won’t be long.’

She kissed me, and tapped Harry’s cheek with her little fan as he held the door for her too. Then he returned to his seat at the fireside beside me.

‘Business?’ I asked, cocking an eyebrow at him.

‘Hardly,’ he said with a knowing smile. ‘I thought, Beatrice, that you might have recovered from the birth by now. I was thinking about the room at the top of the stairs.’

A great weariness flowed through me.

‘Oh, no, Harry,’ I said. ‘Not tonight. Physically I am well, and we will meet there soon, but not this evening. John is home, and Celia is waiting for you. We will meet there perhaps tomorrow night.’

‘Tomorrow John will be rested and you will have no time free from him,’ Harry said. He looked like a spoilt child denied a plaything. ‘Your only free time for weeks is likely to be tonight.’

I sighed with weariness and distate for Harry’s selfish, insistent lust.

‘No,’ I said again. ‘It is not possible. The room is cold and in darkness. I have not ordered a fire. We will meet there in the near future, but tonight is not possible.’

‘Here then!’ said Harry, his face lighting up. ‘Here before the parlour fire. There is no reason why we should not, Beatrice.’

‘No, Harry,’ I said, with rising irritation. ‘John is asleep in the library but he could wake. Celia is waiting for you upstairs. Go to Celia, she wants you.’

‘But tonight I want you,’ said Harry stubbornly, and I saw the mulish look around his soft mouth. ‘If we cannot go to the room we need not do so, but then I want you here.’

The last event I wanted to crown this long lonely day was a romp with Harry on the hearth rug, but the prospect seemed unavoidable.

‘Come on, Beatrice,’ he said, boisterous as a puppy, and he kneeled at my feet and hugged around the waist with one arm, and fumbled in my silk skirts and petticoats with the other.

‘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.’

‘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 wç 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 son 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.

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 son 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.