Wideacre (Wideacre Trilogy) (52 page)

‘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.