Wideacre (Wideacre Trilogy) (5 page)

‘Dr Yately!’ my father said in a tone of convincing delight. ‘How good to see you! And what a surprise! I should have been home to meet you had I known you were coming.’

The tall man nodded and smiled and I gained a quick impression of a cool, astute man of the world. I dipped my curtsy and shot another look at him as I rose. This was no social call. He had come for a purpose and he was anxious to complete his mission. I saw his wary eyes assessing Papa, and I wondered what he wanted of us.

He had come, it was clear, to do Mama’s work for her. She still longed to have Harry home to fill the gap his absence had left in her life. Dr Yately, for reasons I could not yet guess, was ready to take the part of the pale wife against the Squire himself. For some reason, he was as anxious to be rid of Harry as Mama was to have him home.

I attended dinner in the girlish dress of maidenly pink and correctly said not a word except in reply to a direct question — and I had few of them. I sat facing my mother. It was one of my father’s foibles that a male guest should take the foot of the table and he the head. So Mama and I — equally unimportant — sat in silence while the men talked over our heads.

Dr Yately had evidently come to persuade my father to remove Harry from his expensive, exclusive school. But if he succeeded, he stood to lose a pupil who had taken every costly extra, who was likely to need a tutor from the school to attend him to university, and who might well choose to take that tutor with him to Europe on the Grand Tour. With the disappearance of Harry, Dr Yately could say goodbye to thousands of pounds of fees. So why should he want to be rid of him? What could Harry have possibly done that was too gross a secret for a frank
explanation to my father, and too shameful for Dr Yately simply to overlook and continue to pocket the fees?

The clever man knew his business. He kept off the subject of Harry but praised the roast beef and relished the wine (only our second-best claret I noticed). He clearly knew nothing about farming but he drew my father out to talk about some of the new techniques we might try. My father grew expansive, jovial. He even offered Dr Yately the chance of a few days’ hunting next season if he could take a holiday. Dr Yately was polite, but noncommittal.

Once Papa started melting towards the visitor and broached another bottle, Mama was in a hurry to leave the gentlemen together. With the sharp regret of a fourteen-year — old girl who had been on horseback all day, I watched some apple charlotte returning untouched to the kitchen. But Mama rose from the table and Dr Yately and Papa politely bowed us from the room and settled down to their port and talk.

My mother’s pale face was flushed with pleasure as she opened her workbox and handed me my embroidery.

‘Your brother Harry will come home as soon as term ends, and never go to that dreadful place again, if only your papa agrees,’ she said, elated.

‘So early?’ I asked, keenly defensive of my position. ‘Why? What has he done?’

‘Done?’ Her eyes met mine directly, no subterfuge in their pale shadows. ‘Nothing! Whatever could he do? It’s what those brutes of boys have done to him.’ She hesitated and chose a strand of silk.

‘When he was last home for the holidays he needed a chest plaster, do you remember?’ Of course I did not. But I nodded.

‘Both Nurse and I saw marks on his poor body. He had been beaten, Beatrice. He begged me to say and do nothing, but the more I thought of it the more certain I was he should be taken away from that school. I wrote to Dr Yately and he replied that he would see what was happening. Then he arrived here today!’ My mother’s voice was full of pride that she had taken action that had produced results, and dramatic results. ‘He tells me that Harry has been forced to join one of the boys’ gangs, and that in their games they have some shocking rules and punishments.
The worst boy — the ringleader — is the son of … ‘ She paused. ‘Well, never mind who, precisely. But it is someone the Doctor simply must not offend. This boy has established some sort of hold over Harry. He made him sit next to him in class, have his bed next to him in the dormitory and has teased and bullied him all term. Dr Yately says he cannot separate them and he suggests — Oh! I hope your papa agrees — that Harry is of an age when he could pursue his studies at home and learn about the estate at the same time.’

Unseen by Mama, my head low over my embroidery, I raised ironic eyebrows. Harry learn about the estate, indeed! He had lived here all his life and did not even know the exact lie of our borders. He had driven through Wideacre wood every Sunday, and yet he did not know where in the wood there was a nightingale’s nest, or where in the stream you could always find trout. If Harry was going to learn about the estate it was to be hoped he could find it in a book, for he had never even glanced from the library windows when he was last home.

But my confidence was undermined by a shiver of unease. All Harry knew about Wideacre at the moment could be written in a chapbook. But once he was home at the request of Mama, and not because Papa needed him, he might become the son my papa had wanted; had sought in me. He might become, in truth, the heir.

The gentlemen did not come to the drawing room for tea and Mama sent me early to bed. After my maid had twisted my chestnut hair into one fat plait down my back, I sent her away and climbed out of my bed to sit on the window seat. My bedroom was on the second floor, facing east, overlooking the fat sickle of the rose garden, which curves around the front and east of the house and with a glimpse of the peach trees and fruit cages of the kitchen garden. Not for me the larger bedrooms in the front of the house, like Harry’s room, which faces south. Still, from where I sat I could see the garden in the moonlight and the wood pressing up to the garden gates. The cool night air carried countryside smells to me. The promising scent of growing meadows, damp with dew and the occasional warble of a restless blackbird. From the woods I heard the abrupt bark of a dog fox and from downstairs I could hear the rumble of my father’s
voice as he talked about horses. I knew then that the quiet man in black had got his way with Papa and Harry would be coming home.

A dark shadow crossing the lawn interrupted my thoughts. I recognized the gamekeeper’s lad, a boy of my age, built like a young ox, with a lurcher dog — a poacher’s dog to catch poachers — at his heels. He saw the candle in my window and came from the garden (where he had no business to be) to stand beneath my window (where he had no business to be), one hand casually on the warm sandstone wall. The silk shawl I had over my nightdress seemed too flimsy when I saw his warm eyes on me, and his smile as he gazed upwards.

We were friends, and yet not friends, Ralph and I. One summer, when Harry had been especially unwell and I had been left to run wild, I had found this unkempt boy in the rose garden and, with the haughtiness of a six-year-old, ordered him out of the gate. He tipped me into a rose bush with one hard shove as his reply, but when he saw my shocked, scratched face, he kindly offered to pull me out again. I took his proffered hand and, as soon as I was on my feet, I bit it as hard as I could and took to my heels — not to the Hall for shelter, but through the lychgate to the wood. This refuge was impenetrable to Mama and Nurse who were ignorant of the little animal pathways among the thickets, and were forced to stand at the gate, calling and calling, until I chose to reappear. But this stocky child wormed along the tracks as fast as I went, and arrived at a little hollow among brambles, roses and bushes on my heels.

His dirty little face was split in a broad grin and I grinned back. It was the start of a friendship that, childlike, lasted the summer and then stopped as quickly and as thoughtlessly as it had begun. Every day during that hot, dry summer I would escape from the busy parlourmaid, who had suddenly found my care added to her duties, and skip down to the woods. Ralph would meet me by the Fenny and all morning we would fish and splash in the stream, go on great expeditions all the way to Acre lane, climb trees, rob birds’ nests, or catch butterflies.

I was free because Harry was watched night and day by Nurse and Mama. Ralph was free from the day he could walk because his mother, Meg, a slattern in a tumbledown cottage in the
middle of the woods, had never troubled where he went or what he did. This made him a perfect playmate for me — and he taught me all the paths and trees of Wideacre woods in a great sweep around the Hall as far as my little legs could carry me in a morning.

We played like country children, speaking little and doing a lot. But the summer soon ended; Harry recovered, and Mama returned to her eagle-eyed scrutiny of the whiteness of my pinnies. Mornings were again given over to lessons, and if Ralph waited in the woods while the leaves turned yellow and red, he would not have waited for long. Very soon he had given up playing altogether and trailed around behind the gamekeeper, learning the skills of keeping game and killing vermin. Papa heard Ralph’s name as the handiest lad in the village for pheasant chicks, and by the time he was eight he was paid a penny a day in the season.

By the time he was twelve he was earning half a man’s pay but doing a man’s job in and out of season. His mother had come from nowhere; his father had disappeared, but that meant he was free of the family loyalty that kept poachers safe in Acre village. And his tumbledown house in the woods was an advantage too. They put the pheasant breeding pens all around the dirty little cottage by the Fenny and Ralph’s deepest sleep could always be broken by the crack of a twig near the game birds.

Eight years is a lifetime in childhood, and I had almost forgotten the summer when the dirty little urchin and I had been inseparable. But somehow, when I was mounted on my pretty mare, with my tailored habit and tricorn hat, I felt awkward riding past Ralph. When he pulled his forelock to Papa and nodded to me I did not feel easy and gracious as I said, ‘Good day.’ I did not enjoy stopping and talking with Ralph, especially if I was riding alone. And I did not like now the way he leaned, so self-possessed, against our wall and looked up at me, illuminated by my candle.

‘You’ll take cold,’ he said. His voice was already deep. He had filled out in the past two years and had the solid strength of a young man.

‘Yes,’ I said, shortly. I did not withdraw from the window for that would somehow have been a concession to his advice … and an acknowledgement that I was conscious of his eyes on me.

‘Are you out after poachers?’ I asked, unnecessarily.

‘Well, I’m not going courting with a dog and a gun,’ he said in the slow drawl of the downs. ‘A fine lass I’d get with a gun and a trap, don’t you think, Miss Beatrice?’

‘You’re too young to think of courting,’ I said dictatorially. ‘You’re no older than me.’

‘Oh, but I do think of courting,’ he said. ‘I like to think of a warm, friendly lass when I wait alone in the woods on a cold night. I’m not too young for courting, Miss Beatrice. But you’re right, we are the same age. Are girls of near fifteen too young to think of loving and kisses on warm summer nights?’

His dark eyes never left mine, and they seemed somehow to shine in the moonlight. I was very glad — and yet somehow sorry — that I was safe in the house, high above him.

‘Ladies are,’ I said firmly. ‘And the village girls would know better than to think of you.’

‘Ah.’ He sighed. The country silence filled the pause. His dog yawned and stretched out on the gravel at Ralph’s boots. Contradictorily, I wished with all my heart that he would look at me again in that shining, hot way, and that I had not called myself a lady and reminded him that he was nothing. His head dropped and his eyes no longer stared up at me, but were fixed on the ground. I could think of nothing to say; I felt awkward and foolish and also sorry, sorry, sorry, to have been arrogant to one of our people. Then he shifted his weight and hefted his gun over his shoulder. Despite the shadows I could see he was smiling, and that he needed my pity not at all.

‘A lady is the same as a village girl in the cold, or in a quiet hayloft, or in a little hollow of the downs, I reckon,’ he said. ‘And if fifteen is old enough for me, I reckon it’s old enough for you, too.’ He paused. ‘My lady,’ he added, and his voice made it into an endearment.

I choked with shock, and while I said nothing like a fool, Ralph whistled to his dog, a black dog, his shadow, and left me without even a by — your — leave. He walked like a lord across his own acres, a dark shape in the shadowy garden, over our lawn and through the little gate to our woods. I was stunned at his impertinence. Then, with a sudden spurt of rage, I bounced from my window seat to go down to the Squire, who should have
him whipped. Dragging on my wrapper, I was halfway to the door before I paused. For some reason, I could not think why, I did not want Ralph whipped — or thrown off Wideacre. He should certainly be punished, but not by my father, nor the gamekeeper either. I, alone, should find some way to wipe that insulting, warm smile from his face. I went to bed planning revenge. But I could not sleep. My heart was thudding so loud. I was surprised it should beat so fast with rage.

In the morning, I had all but forgotten him. It meant nothing, nothing at all, that I chose to ride in the direction of his home. I knew he would have been watching for poachers in the woods all night, and so would be home till noon at least in the horrid, damp cottage near the disused mill on the River Fenny. The flow had never been reliable there, and my father’s father had built a new mill to grind our corn further upstream. The old mill had fallen into disrepair and the tiny worker’s cottage alongside seemed to be sinking into the boggy ground. The woods grew close to the back door of the low-roofed shack, and as Ralph grew taller I believe he must have stooped all the time indoors. It was a two-roomed place, more a hovel than a cottage.

His mother was a dark, large-boned woman with wild, dangerous looks like his. ‘A gypsy of a woman,’ my father called her with relish.

‘Really?’ said my fair-haired mother coldly.

We often rode this way, my father and I. He would stop outside the poor cottage and Meg would come out to him, stooping under the low eaves, her skirt held high above the mud, barefoot, her strong brown ankles splashed and dirty. But she met my father’s eyes with a proud, bright smile like an equal, and brought him home-brewed ale in a rough cup. When he tossed her a coin she caught it as if it were her due, and sometimes I saw the hint of a smile of understanding between them.