Wideacre (Wideacre Trilogy) (51 page)

‘You’ll do,’ she said, as I would speak to a brood mare. And as calmly as I could wish she unpacked some darning and sat at the foot of the bed until I needed her aid.

It did not take long.

‘Mrs Merry!’ I said urgently. Celia flew to hold my hand, but my eyes sought the knowing smile of the wise woman.

‘Ready now?’ she asked, rolling her dirty sleeves up.

‘It is … it is …’ I gasped like a floundering salmon as the power of birth once again grabbed my rigid heaving belly like an osprey and shook me in its talons.

‘Push!’ yelled Mrs Merry. ‘I can see the head.’

A spasm overwhelmed me, and then I paused. Another great thrust and I could feel Mrs Merry’s skilled, grimy ringers poking around, gripping the baby, and helping it to force its way out. Then another shove of muscle and flesh came, and the thing was done, and the child was free. A thin burbly wail filled the room and from behind the closed door I heard a ripple of exclamations as every servant who could possibly be in the west wing heard the cry.

‘A boy,’ said Mrs Merry, swinging him by his ankles like a newly plucked chicken and dumping him without ceremony on the quivering mound of my belly. ‘A boy for Wideacre; that’s good.’

Celia’s guileless, suspicionless eyes were on the new baby.

‘How lovely,’ she said, and her voice was full of love and longing, and unshed tears.

I gathered him up into my arms and smelled the sweet strong unforgettable smell of birth on him. In a rush, suddenly, scalding tears were pouring down my cheeks and I was sobbing and sobbing. Weeping for a grief I could name to no one. For his eyes were so very dark blue and his hair so very black. And in my tired and foolish state I thought he was Ralph’s baby. That I had
given birth to Ralph’s son. Mrs Merry scooped him out of my arms and bundled him, wrapped in flannel, towards Celia.

‘Out of the room altogether,’ she advised briefly. ‘I’ve a hot posset brewing for her that will have her right as a trivet. It’s good for her to have a weep now — it gets it out early rather than later.’

‘Beatrice crying!’ said Mama with amazement in her voice as she bustled into the room and stopped still at the sight of me face down amid the rumpled sheets.

‘It’s all been too much for her,’ said Celia gently. ‘But look at Baby. What a miracle. Let’s settle him down and come back to Beatrice when she is rested.’

The door closed behind them and I was alone with my sudden inexplicable sorrow, and with sharp-eyed old Mrs Merry.

‘Drink this,’ she said, and I choked on a herbal posset that smelled sweetly of mint, lavender and, probably most fortifying of all, gin. I drained the mug and the tears stopped rolling down.

‘A seven-month-old child, eh?’ she asked, eyeing me, bright with her secret knowledge.

‘Yes,’ I said steadily. ‘Brought on by a fall.’

‘Large baby for seven months,’ she said. ‘Came fast for a first, too.’

‘What’s your price?’ I asked, too weary to fence with her and too wise to try to lie.

‘Nay,’ she said. Her face creased with her smile. ‘You’ve paid me all you need by calling me in. If the bright young doctor’s wife sticks to the old ways then half the ladies of the county will do so too. You’ve given me my living back, Miss Beatrice. They won’t be so quick to call in Mr Smythe when they know I delivered you on my own.’

‘You know I keep to the old ways in everything I can. In conception too,’ I said with a smile and dawning confidence. ‘And what I say on Wideacre is law. There will always be a cottage for you on my land, Mrs Merry, and always a place laid for you in my kitchen. I don’t forget my friends … but I hate gossip.’

‘You’ll hear none from me,’ she said firmly. ‘And there’s none that can swear to the age of a child at birth. Not even that clever young husband of yours could do so. And if he’s not back
inside a week or so, I should think there would be no telling — Edinburgh-trained or no!’

I nodded, and leaned back against the pillows while she changed the wet sheets skilfully, without disturbing me, and then turned and patted the pillows behind me.

‘Fetch my son, Mrs Merry,’ I said suddenly. ‘Bring him in to me, I need him.’

She nodded, and went heavily from the room and came back with a bundle of blankets slung carelessly over her shoulder.

‘Your mama and Lady Lacey wanted to see you, but I said not yet,’ she said. ‘Here’s your lad. I’ll leave you alone together to get acquainted, but you lie quietly in bed. I’ll come and fetch him shortly.’

I nodded, but I scarcely heard her. His blue eyes looked into mine unseeing. His face was a crumpled moon with neither shape nor structure. His only clear features were his mass of black, black, hair, and those piercing, near-violet eyes. I threw the covers back and stepped barefoot on to the cold floorboards and walked across to the window with him in my arms. His body was tiny, as light as a doll, fragile as a peony. I flung the window open and sighed as the sweet-scented, flowering, fruiting smells of a Wideacre early June breathed into the room. Before me the rose garden was a mass of dense pink and crimson and white, the heady perfume swelling up the sun-warmed stones of the house to my window. Beyond the garden the paddock gleamed emerald with the lush summer growth, ankle-deep, knee-deep grass. And behind the paddock the grey trunks of the beech trees supported a shifting cloud of melting greenness mixed with the deep, almost violet, splashes of the copper beeches. Above and beyond the tossing heads of the trees were the pale squares of the highest fields on the flanks and shoulders of the downs, and then above them, higher than one can imagine, higher than one remembers, the great head of the downs and the rolling crescent of the green line of horizon that encircles Wideacre.

‘See this?’ I said to the baby, and faced his little lolling head outwards. ‘See this? All this is mine and it will, one day, be yours. Other people may think they own it, but they do not. It is mine, and I endow you with it. And here starts a new battle to make sure that you own it, my son, in full. For you are the heir,
you are the son of the Squire, and the son of the Squire’s sister, and so you own it doubly. But more than that: you own it because you will know it and love it as I do. And through you, even after my death, the land will be most truly mine.’

I heard Mrs Merry’s heavy tread in the corridor outside my room and I slammed the window shut and leaped back to bed like a naughty schoolgirl. I paid the price in faintness when I was back on the pillows, but my son, my lovely son, was taken to Mama and Celia and I was left to blissful sleep and dreams of a future that suddenly seemed so much more of a challenge, and yet so much brighter.

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.