Wideacre (Wideacre Trilogy) (56 page)

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.’