Wideacre (Wideacre Trilogy) (21 page)

I smiled and pressed her little hand.

‘You always seem so grown up and confident,’ she said shyly. ‘I used to watch you and your papa setting off hunting, and wished so much that I could know you better. And the great horses you rode! When I think now of living in Wideacre Hall, I feel’ — she gave a little gasp — ‘quite frightened.’

I smiled gently at her. Although she had lived all of her adult life in Havering Hall, as the unwanted stepdaughter and stepsister, she had seen little of country society, and had played no great part in the life of the Hall. She was nervous, of course, and it occurred to me that she might want Harry merely as the lesser of two evils.

‘Harry will be beside you,’ I said comfortingly.

‘Oh, yes,’ she agreed. ‘But gentlemen can be so …’ She paused. ‘Marriage is so …’ and she stopped again.

‘It’s a big step for a girl,’ I said helpfully.

‘Oh, yes!’ she said with such emphasis in her soft voice that I racked my brains to think what was behind all this flutter.

‘There is the new position — as the Lady of Wideacre,’ I said, biting my tongue on the pain that the title would go to this baby.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That is rather frightening, but …’ There was something more, something else.

‘Harry seldom drinks to excess,’ I said at random thinking of her stepfather.

‘Oh, no!’ she said quickly, and I had drawn a blank there, too.

‘I am sure he loves you very, very much,’ I said. Envy made me faint as if I had an illness. But it was true. I was sure he did, damn her.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That’s the trouble really.’

I recovered rapidly. The trouble?
What
trouble? ‘The trouble?’ I repeated.

Her head with the pretty little bonnet bowed low. I saw a tear drop on her figured satin and one gloved finger covered the spot.

‘He’s so …’ She couldn’t find the word and Lord help me I couldn’t think what could be wrong.

‘He’s so …’ She tried again, and I was dumb.

‘He’s so … unrestrained …’ she got out. ‘I suppose it is because he is interested in farming … but really …’

I nearly gasped aloud at this revelation. While I had been aching and longing for Harry and trembling at his touch, this little ice maiden had been refusing his kisses and shrinking from an arm around her waist. Envy made me physically queasy, but my face must not show it.

‘I expect men always are,’ I said, imitating her awed whisper. ‘Is he always like that?’

‘Oh, no!’ she said. The deep brown eyes flickered to my face. ‘The last two Sundays, he changed. He tried to kiss me …’ — her voice dropped even lower — ‘on the mouth! Oh, it was horrid.’ She broke off again. ‘Something else, too.’

I remembered with every cell of my sensuous body the warmth of Harry’s body against mine, my lips opening beneath his and my tongue seeking his mouth. His hand tightening and pressing my breast. That had caused the change.

‘He forgot himself,’ said Celia with some little determination. ‘He forgot who I am. Young ladies do not…’ She paused. ‘And certainly they do not let gentlemen touch them — in that way.’

I caught my breath in a hissing sigh. It had to have been the evening in Mama’s parlour that had made the difference. I had pressed his hand to my breast. I had opened my mouth to him. He had gone from me to Celia hot with desire and tingling with the touch of his first woman — and cold, unloving little Celia had rebuffed him.

‘Did you tell him so?’ I asked.

‘Of course,’ she said. The brown eyes opened wider and she stole another glance at me. ‘He seemed angry,’ she said. Her lower lip trembled. ‘It made me rather afraid … for later.’

‘Don’t you want him to kiss you?’ I burst out.

‘Not like that! I don’t like kisses like that! I don’t think I ever will! I don’t see how I can learn to bear them. Mama and Step-Papa don’t behave like that; they … they have an arrangement.’

The whole world knew that Lord Havering’s arrangement was a ballet dancer in one of the London theatres when Lady
Havering put her foot down after two children and four miscarriages.

‘You would like that with Harry?’ I asked. I couldn’t believe my ears.

‘Oh, no,’ she said miserably. ‘I know one cannot, until there is an heir. I know there is nothing to be done. I shall just have to … I shall just have to …’ She gave a piteous little sob. ‘I shall just have to endure it, I suppose.’

I took her hand in my firm clasp.

‘Celia, listen to me,’ I said. ‘I will be a sister to you in October, and I will be a friend to you now. Harry and I are very, very close — you know how we run the estate together — he will always listen to me because he knows I have his interests at heart. I will be a friend to you, too. I shall help you with Harry. I can talk to Harry and no one but you and I need ever know what you have told me. I can make it all right between the two of you.’

Celia raised her eyes to my face.

‘Oh, if you would!’ she said. ‘But won’t Harry mind?’

‘Leave it to me,’ I said. ‘I make only one condition.’ I paused and the cherries on her little bonnet trembled. I realized that to escape Harry’s embraces she would promise me anything.

‘The condition is that you always tell me everything about you and Harry, everything.’

The cherries bobbed as she nodded vigorously.

‘Should you change in your feelings to him, or should he change to you, you will tell me at once.’

The cherries bobbed again and she held out her hand.

‘Oh, yes, Beatrice. Let’s shake hands on the bargain. I promise you shall always be my best and closest of friends. I will always confide in you and you shall have thousands of favours from me. Anything you want that I can give shall be yours.’

I smiled and kissed her cheek to seal the agreement. She had only one thing that I wanted — that I would ever want — and she was far along the road to giving it me, my heart’s desire, my brother Harry.

6

I
came home from that drive my head full of anything but turnips. Celia’s inarticulate murmurs about Harry’s courting had made my head throb with jealousy and longing. She might be happy to hand over to me the control of her married life, but it was still her downcast eyes that Harry watched, even when I was near by. And when we stood side by side looking at the turnip field, he had bent his head low to see her pale prettiness under her parasol.

I left her in the parlour and went to my room to take off my bonnet. I looked at myself in the little mirror but my reflection gave me scant joy. If Harry preferred sugar and cream then my clear strong beauty would help me little. My green eyes looked blankly back at me, dark with desire. I could not believe, I could not make my mind believe, that any man would refuse me if I set my heart on him. I sighed and pressed my forehead against the cool glass and longed and longed for Harry.

My skirts hissed as I turned from my room and went downstairs. Celia might not want his love, but she had it. And while I flinched at the sight of his courtesy to her and his gentle words to her as she sat sipping tea, it was worse to be in my room alone, knowing that downstairs he was beside her on the sofa. I might spend more hours with him but never, never could I sit, my eyes downcast, and feel his gaze scanning my face. Never could I look up in the delicious certainty that my eyes would meet his. We were much together, but our magical moments were few. We were always interrupted; Mama was always coming in and out and her eyes were sharp on her beloved son.

At the turn of the stairs I paused. Some careless maid must have left the back-stair door open and one of the stable cats had sauntered in and was sitting, proud as punch, in the first-floor corridor. Mama was ill whenever she was in a room with a cat
and it was a house rule that all the stable cats were locked firmly out. I should have to rush this one back to the yard and then air the corridor, or she would have one of her painful gasping attacks when she could not breathe and her face went from white to yellow. Her heart was delicate and last time she had suffered an attack the London specialist had warned her most strongly against risking another. So the rule against cats was rigidly enforced and I should save someone a dismissal if I got the animal away before Mama came up to change.

But as I went towards it something made me pause. And then I stopped stock still. I had no idea in my head, nor the shadow of a plan. But my passion for Harry moved me as if I had no will of my own. I was in the grip of such a longing to be alone with him that my aching sensuous body moved as if of its own volition. I feared Mama’s sharp eyes, her instinctive knowledge of me. The way she could almost smell my warm sighs. The cat’s eyes met mine, green to green, with a key to Mama’s absence as clear as a spoken word between us. Then my hand was on the latch of her bedroom door and the door yielded to my half-conscious touch. Like some obedient familiar the cat stretched and walked, tail proudly high, into the master bedroom and I shut the door behind it. I still could not be sure what I had done. I still could not have said whether I had let the cat in, or if the cat had let itself in with my hand only opening the door. Cat, Mama, Harry and I seemed caught in a web of someone else’s spinning. I was as unthinking as the cat itself. I went down to the parlour with my face as clear and calm as the Fenny on a summer’s day, and my eyes as opaque as the cat in my delicate mama’s bedroom.

I sat beside Celia and even accompanied her on the piano and sang a little duet with her, her thin warble keeping my richer voice more or less in key. Then Harry and she sang a folk song and I took the moment to excuse myself from the parlour and go back upstairs.

The blessed thing had made puddles all over the floor which I had to wipe up. But it had curled up on Mama’s bed and sunned itself on the pillow where her head would lie that night. I picked it up by the scruff of its neck and swept down the back stairs with it and set it on its feet outside the stable door. It gazed at me unwinkingly as if it knew we shared a secret — a discreet conspirator.

We retired early that night but I was disturbed around midnight by the sound of a door banging and running feet. Mama’s maid was probably carrying her a hot posset from the kitchen and a warming pan for her chilled feet. I half thought about getting up to see if I could help her, but my bed was too warm and I was too sleepy to move. Even as I thought I really should go to her, I fell asleep.

When I visited her in the morning the blinds were down and the room reeked of camphor and lavender water. She lay absolutely still on the great bed, her face white on the pillows where the cat had slept and licked its matted dirty fur.

‘I am so sorry, dear, but I cannot speak. I feel so ill, so very ill,’ said Mama in a thread of a voice. ‘Please tell Harry not to be concerned. I shall be better soon.’

I gave a small murmur of sympathy and bent over and kissed her. Her face was strained with pain and she was as white as her sheets. My own head ached in sympathy when I saw the skin drawn tight across her forehead, and my own heart thudded in fear when I heard how her breath rasped and saw her lips tremble. But my eyes gave away nothing, like the cat’s. I had planned nothing. I was guilty of no premeditated crime. The deceiving, unreliable old gods of the land had set magic at work on Wideacre and all I could do was to follow blindly wherever they were leading me. The insistent pull of my longing for Harry had brought the cat to wait for me outside my mother’s bedroom. Now she struggled for breath in a darkened room. Her pain made me ill. Ill with sympathy for her, and ill with anxiety on my own account.

‘Mama,’ I said weakly. I needed a smile from her to reassure me that this was only a passing illness. That although she looked as white as death she was still breathing, her fluttering heart was still working. She would be recovered in a few days, she would still have time to love me. She might still turn from her adoration of Harry and learn to value me. I might still become her beloved, her perfect child.

She opened her eyes wearily and saw my anxious face.

‘It is all right, Beatrice,’ she said with a hint of impatience. ‘Go to your breakfast and go out if you wish. I only need rest.’