Wideacre (Wideacre Trilogy) (6 page)

There could not be secrets between this wild and lonely woman and the Squire, my father. But once or twice when he had ridden fast from home, full of impatience with my mother and her small, fiddling ways, we had seemed naturally to drift towards the Fenny and the little cottage in the woods where Meg, the gypsy woman, swayed towards us with her barefoot dancing step and her eyes bright with knowledge.

She was supposed to be a widow. Ralph’s father, the black sheep of one of the oldest families in Acre, had been pressed into the Navy and disappeared: dead, or missing, or run away. The other men of the village followed her with their eyes like hungry dogs but she looked neither to right nor left. Only my father, the Squire, brought a smile to her eyes, and those dark eyes to his face. No other man was ever worth a second glance. So, although she had offers, oh, many, she and Ralph never moved from the dark little house by the river.

‘A hundred years ago she would have been burned for a witch,’ said my father.

‘Oh, really?’ said my unbewitching mother.

She did not seem surprised to see me at her garden gate alone, but then nothing surprised her. She nodded and brought me a cup of milk in the way of country hospitality. I drank, still sitting sidesaddle on my mare and, as I drained the cup, Ralph came like a midnight shadow from the woods. He had a pair of dead rabbits hanging from one hand and his dog, as ever, at his heels.

‘Miss Beatrice,’ he said in a slow greeting.

‘Hello, Ralph,’ I said graciously. In the bright daylight his night-time power had gone. His mother took my cup and we were alone in the sunlight.

‘I knew you would come,’ he said confidently. It was as if the sun had gone out. Like a mesmerized rabbit I gazed straight into his dark black eyes and could see nothing, nothing, but his eyes fixed on mine and the slow smile of his mouth, and the way a small pulse was beating quick under the tanned skin of his throat. The tall youth had all the power of last night. He carried it with him. He stood at my mare’s head and I was glad to be seated above him, at shoulder height in the saddle.

‘Oh, really?’ I said, in unconscious imitation of my mother’s frigid tones. Abruptly, he turned, and walked away from me, through the purple willowherb to the Fenny. Without thinking what I was doing, I slid from the saddle, hitched my horse’s reins to Meg’s ramshackle fence and followed him. He never glanced behind, he never waited for me. He walked as if he were quite alone, down to the riverbank, and then turned upstream to where the ruins of the mill stood, the deep millpond dark behind it.

The wide, arched door where they used to load the wagons stood open. Ralph never looked back and I followed him without a word inside. A half-floor for storing sacks stretched across the room, a rickety ladder leading up to it. In the warm gloom of the old building I could smell the fusty, safe odour of old straw and feel the thick softness of dusty chaff underfoot.

‘Want to see a swallow’s nest?’ Ralph offered nonchalantly.

I nodded. Swallows are lucky and their little mud and grass cup-shaped nests on beams or ledges under the eaves always pleased me. He led the way up the ladder and I followed unhesitatingly. When he reached the top he stretched out a hand to pull me up, and when I stood beside him, he did not let my hand go. His eyes met mine in a long, measuring stare.

‘There they are,’ he said. He pointed to the nest being built on a low beam under the roof. As we watched, a parent bird swooped into the barn with a tiny beakful of mud to add to the growing sides and swooped away. We watched in silence. Ralph let my hand go and slid his hand around my waist, drawing me closer. We stood side by side and his hand smoothed over the velvet of my gown up to the curve of my small breast. Without speaking a word, we turned together and he dipped his head to kiss me. The kiss was as gentle as the flight of the swallow.

His mouth brushed mine with soft, gentle touches. As he repeated them, I felt him tense, and the grip on my waist grew tighter. Swoony with pleasure, I found my knees giving way beneath me and I sank on to the dusty straw-strewn floor with my arms around him.

We were half children, half adult. I knew everything about mating animals, but nothing of kisses and lovemaking. But Ralph was a country lad and had been drawing a man’s wage and drinking with men for two years. My hat fell off as I tipped my head back to meet his kisses, and it was my hands that opened the neck of my gown to his exploring, clumsy fingers, and opened his shirt so I could press my forehead to his chest and rub my burning face against him.

Somewhere in the back of my mind a voice said: ‘Fever. I must have a fever.’ For my legs were too weak to rise and somehow I was trembling, trembling all over. In the core of my body, under my ribcage, was a fluttering, painful feeling. Down
my spine was a long, long shiver. Ralph’s smallest move made me shudder. When his forefinger drew a line from under my ear to the base of my neck, he could feel me tremble all over. ‘I must be ill,’ said my drowning consciousness. ‘I must be very, very ill.’

Ralph eased back from me and leaned on an elbow looking down into my face. ‘You should go,’ he said. ‘It’s getting late.’

‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘It can’t be two o’clock yet.’

I fumbled in my pocket for my silver watch, a miniature copy of my father’s, and opened it.

‘Three!’ I exclaimed. ‘I shall be late!’ I jumped to my feet, reaching for my hat and shaking the straw from my skirt. Ralph made no effort to help me, but leaned back against an old stook of straw. I buttoned the front of my gown, watching him covertly under my eyelashes. He pulled a straw from the stook and chewed on it, watching me, impassive. His dark eyes showed nothing. He seemed as content to be left as to be visited, as still as a secret pagan god left neglected in old woods.

I was ready to go and should have been hurrying away, yet the flutter under my ribcage had become some sort of ache. I did not want to leave just yet. I sat down again beside him and laid my head prettily on his shoulder.

‘Say you love me before I go,’ I whispered.

‘Oh, no,’ he said without heat. ‘I’ll have none of that.’

In surprise I jerked my head back to stare at him.

‘You don’t love me?’ I asked, astounded.

‘No,’ said Ralph. ‘You don’t love me, do you?’

I paused, a cry of outrage on my lips. But I could not say I did love him. I liked the kissing very much, oh, so very much, and I would like to meet him again, here in the darkness of the old mill. Perhaps the next time I would slide my dress off and feel his hands and lips all over me. But he was, after all, Meg’s son. And he lived in such a dirty little cottage. And he was only the gamekeeper’s lad and one of our people. And we let him and Meg live in the cottage for practically nothing; it was almost charity.

‘No,’ I said slowly. ‘I don’t suppose I do.’

‘There are those who love and there are those who are loved,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘I’ve seen grown men weep like babies for
my mother, and she never look at them. Gentlemen, too. I’ll never be like that for a woman. I’ll never love and pine and fall sick for someone. I shall be the one who is loved, and gets the presents and the loving and the pleasure … and then moves on.’

I thought swiftly of my father, bluff and heart — whole, and of my mother’s stifled sighs and pining for the love of her son. Then I thought of the girls I had seen in the village follow a lad with their eyes and blush scarlet and grow pale. Of the village girl who drowned herself in Fenny pool when her lover went into service in Kent. Of the constant pain there is for a woman in loving, and wedding, and childbirth and the loss of looks and then the loss of love.

‘I shan’t be the one who loves either,’ I said firmly.

He laughed aloud.

‘You!’ he said. ‘Oh, you are like all the Quality. All you care for is your own pleasure and owning the land.’

Our pleasure and owning the land.
It is true. His kisses had been pleasure; wonderful swoony pleasure. Good food, a taste of wine, hunting on a frosty morning; these things are pleasure. But to own Wideacre is not pleasure; it is the only way to be alive. I smiled at the thought. He smiled kindly in return.

‘Oh,’ he said longingly, ‘you’ll be a proper little heartbreaker when you are ready. With those slanty green eyes of yours and your beechnut hair, you’ll get all the pleasure you want, and all the land, too.’

Something in his voice convinced me he was telling the truth. I would have all the pleasure, and all the land as well. My misfortune of being born a girl would not be my destiny. I could take pleasure, and I would take land, too, just like a man. And the pleasure I would have in courting would be far more than any man would have. Ralph had enjoyed our kissing, I knew, but his pleasure had been nothing to mine. I had been faint with delight at the feelings of my silky skin. My body was a perfect animal, so lithe and slim and sweet. I would get pleasure with any man I wanted. I would get the land, too. I wanted Wideacre with every waking thought, and breath, and dream. And I deserved Wideacre, too. No one cared for it as I did, or loved it as I did, or knew it as well as I.

But I looked at Ralph speculatively. I had heard something
else in his voice, and his eyes were no longer impassive; they were warm and sensuous again.

‘You could love me!’ I said. ‘You nearly do already.’

He threw out a hand in the way the lads do when they wrestle and want to surrender.

‘Oh, yes,’ he said, as if it hardly mattered. ‘And perhaps I could make you love me. But there would be no place for us. You belong at the Hall and I belong in Meg’s cottage in the woods. We can meet in secret and take our pleasure in dark and dirty places, but you will marry a lord and I will marry some slut from the village. If you want love, you must find someone else. I will take you only for pleasure.’

‘For pleasure then,’ I agreed, as seriously as swearing to a covenant. I turned my face to him and he kissed me solemnly as a binding pledge. I scrambled to my feet, but then I paused to look at him. Leaning against the stook of straw, he looked like some dangerous harvest deity. I smiled at him, almost shyly, and went back to stand before him. Lazily, he reached up a hand to me and pulled me down to him. I was in his arms once more; we smiled into each other’s eyes like equals, as if there were no Hall and no cottage. Then his hard mouth came down on mine and my hat fell off again.

I did not get any dinner that day.

But I was not hungry.

3

F
or three unbearable days, Mama, in a flutter of excitement over Harry’s promised return, had the landau out every day to take us into Chichester to buy new wallpaper for his room. The journal she read was full of the craze for the Chinese style, and Mama and I leafed through prints of dragons until my head spun with weariness and boredom. Three long days, while the early summer sun grew hotter and, somewhere, by the river, Ralph waited. Yet I spent every one of them in the drapers of Chichester choosing a new bedspread for Harry, selecting new brocades for the curtains and hangings in his room.

It was all for Harry, all for Harry’s return. When I asked if I might also have new curtains and hangings for my room, I met with one of Mama’s most hurtful rebuffs.

‘It hardly seems worth it,’ she said vaguely. She said no more. She needed to say no more. It was not worth the expense for the second child, in second place. It was not worth the expense to please a girl. It was not worth the expense to decorate a room for one who was merely passing through on her way to a marriage and another home.

I said nothing; but I begrudged Harry every penny. I said nothing; but I begrudged him every fraction of his unearned status. I said nothing; but I ill-wished him every morning of those three long days.

If I knew my brother at all, he would enjoy them for the first week, then forget them. But I knew also his sweetness, and that Mama would be repaid for her trouble in full by one of his tender, gentle smiles. Nothing would repay me for my trouble because I loathed days in Chichester, sitting idly in a shop while Mama played princess and hesitated between one shade of colour and another. Worse than all of this, for some reason I was ill.