Wideacre (Wideacre Trilogy) (74 page)

17

A
nd something had gone from me, too.

I could not hear the heartbeat of Wideacre any more. I could not hear the heartbeat; I could not hear the birdsong. As the spring warmed up, slowly, slowly, as if there was a lump of ice at the heart of England that year, I did not warm. The cuckoos were calling in the woods; the larks started to make small experimental upward flights and try their voices, and I did not warm. My heart did not sing. The spring, with all its bobbing wild daffodils in the woods, and its scattering of meadow flowers, with all the leaves and the sweetness, and the rushing of the Fenny, the Wideacre spring came, but I did not melt from my winter coldness.

I could not tell what was happening. I could neither hear nor see. Nothing, nothing in my life seemed real to me any more and I looked out on the greening, damp land as if I were looking through a wall of ice that would separate me for ever from the land I had loved, and the people I had known.

I spent much time gazing out through the window, through the glass pane. Looking incredulously at the greening woods, which were as bright and as fluttering as if everything was still the same, as if my heart still pattered to the tune of the steady thud of my home. I did not dare to go out. I was weary of driving and not yet released from mourning so I could not ride. But I did not even wish to ride. I did not care either to walk in the fields. The warm moist earth that caked on my boots seemed to pull me down like a bog of clay — not like Wideacre’s soft loam at all. When I was driving it seemed such an effort to turn the horse’s head, to click to him to trot, to hold him steady on the road.

And this spring the countryside was not so lovely; it was too bright. The colours of green this spring hurt my eyes with their vibrant growth. I squinted when I tried to look towards the
downs, and the sunshine put hard lines around my mouth and on my forehead where I found I was scowling.

There was no pleasure for me out on the land this spring, I could not tell why. And there was no pleasure for me in the village either. As I had ensured, no one noticed the lack of kindling from the enclosure. I had timed the fencing in of the common carefully. They should not have reproached me for that. No one went cold in the village that spring by my action. So I did not do all things badly.

But they gave me no credit. Just as that year with Ralph the greening of the shoots and the warming of the land had seemed all part of my magic, all part of my good blessings on the land, now everything that went wrong was laid at my door. The Sowers’ cow died and that had to be my fault, for she had not been able to graze on the good green shoots of the common. One of the Hills’ children fell sick, and that was my fault for my husband doctor was far away and they could afford no other. Mrs Hunter sat by a blackened grate and wept without ceasing for the shame that had taken her son from her. And because he had died calling for her and she could not go to him. That was my fault, they said. That was my fault.

And I knew that it was.

When I had to drive through the village I kept my head high and my eyes blazed with defiance. There was still no one who could meet my gaze then, and they looked away with surly faces. But when I saw Mrs Hunter through her cottage window, sitting motionless beside the black grate, and noted her chimney with no little swirl of smoke, I did not feel defiant. I did not feel ready to brazen out the disaster on my land. I just felt afraid, and comfortless and cold. I pulled up at the cobbler’s one chilly afternoon and called out, ‘Mrs Merry!’ to the group of gossiping women. Their faces turned on me were sulky and closed, and I remembered in disbelief the time when they would have called out ‘Good day’ and smiled, and crowded around the gig to tell me the village gossip. Now they stood in a circle like a gang of hanging judges and looked at me with cold eyes. They parted to let Mrs Merry come to the carriage and it struck me she came towards me dragging her feet. She did not smile to see me, and her face was guarded.

‘What is wrong with Mrs Hunter?’ I asked, gathering reins into one hand and fitting my whip into the stock.

‘No physical ill,’ said Mrs Merry, her eyes on my face.

‘What ails her then?’ I asked impatiently. ‘Her fire is out. I have driven past the cottage three days running and she is always sitting by the empty fireplace beside a cold grate. What ails her? Why don’t her friends go in and light the fire for her?’

‘She does not wish it lit,’ said Mrs Merry. ‘She does not want food. She does not want to speak with her friends. She has sat like that since last week when they sent her Sam Frosterly’s letter that Ned was dead. I read it to her, for she cannot read. She reached to the bucket and poured it over the fire and sat by the wet ashes till I left her. When I returned in the morning it was the same.’

My face stayed hard, but my eyes were despairing.

‘She will recover,’ I said. ‘It is just a shock for her to lose a son. Her a widow, and him her only child.’

‘Aye,’ said Mrs Merry.

A cold hard monosyllable from the woman who had delivered my child, who had been with me during that crisis of effort and pain, who had promised me she would not gossip, and who had kept that promise. The woman who had told me I was just like my papa in my care for Wideacre people.

‘It is not my fault, Mrs Merry,’ I said with sudden passion. ‘I did not mean it to happen like this, I did not plan this. I only had to increase the wheatfields; I did not dream the lads would pull the fences down. I meant them to have a fright with the soldiers and cease teasing me. I did not think they would be caught. I did not think Gaffer would go. I did not think he would be hanged, and Ned die, and Sam be sent far away. I did not mean this.’

Mrs Merry’s eyes had no pity.

‘You’re the plough that does not mean to slice the toad then,’ she said dourly. ‘You’re the scythe that does not mean to maim the hare. You go your own sharp way and do not mean to cut those who stand before you. So no one can blame you, can they, Miss Beatrice?’

I put out a hand towards Mrs Merry, the wise woman.

‘I did not mean it,’ I said. ‘Now they blame me for everything. But my son will set it to rights. Tell Mrs Hunter I will
see that her lad is brought home to be properly buried in the churchyard.’

Mrs Merry shook her head.

‘Nay, Miss Beatrice,’ she said with finality. ‘I’ll carry no message from you to Mrs Hunter. It would be to insult her.’

I gasped at that, and dropped my hands on the reins. Sorrel started forward and I snatched the whip from the stock to flick him into a canter. As I pulled away from the women I heard the clatter of something against the side of the gig.

Someone had thrown a stone.

Someone had thrown a stone at me.

So I cared neither to drive in the woods, nor to walk in the fields, nor to go down the lane to Acre that spring. Harry came and went as he pleased. Celia continued her visits, and it was Celia who made the arrangements to bring Ned Hunter’s body home from the hulks at Portsmouth. And it was Celia who paid for his funeral and for the little cross over his grave. Celia and Harry were still met with a bob or a pulled forelock when they went into Acre. But I did not go to the village. Only on a Sunday morning during that warm wet spring did I go past the cottages with the staring windows. Past the smokeless chimney of Mrs Hunter’s little home. Past the fresh graves in the churchyard of Gaffer Tyacke, of Ned Hunter. And walked the long slow walk up the aisle of the church past the rows of pews where my people looked at me with eyes as hard as flints.

My work lay indoors that spring. John Brien did the riding and the ordering for me. Daily he came to my office and I told him what work needed doing, and he went off to supervise it. So the land that had never had a bailiff, that had always felt the print of a Master’s boot, was watched over and worked by a man who was not a Lacey, who was not even a farmer, but a town-bred manager; who was not even Wideacre born.

With the gang he ordered he had the common cleared and the fields planted with wheat. There was no more trouble from the village. He ploughed up the half-dozen meadows where the children played and the plough cut through the surviving marks of the village’s common plot. We planted wheat everywhere a plough could run. And still we were not making enough money.

I was reserving John’s fortune to buy off our cousin and I did
not want to touch that for the lawyers’ fees. But as they dragged on and on, their bills steadily mounted. We had borrowed from Mr Llewellyn to cover the first three months’ bills, but then we also had the problem of meeting the repayments on the loans, and no extra money coming in until the wheat crop was sold, the wheat crop that had not yet shown green shoots.

Nothing was coming to my hands fast enough. I had consulted with Harry at the start of the plan, but now I dared not show him the real figures. We were paying out more on the repayment of the loans, and on the lawyers’ fees, and John’s medical bills, and on the new labour gangs and equipment and seed, than we were earning. We were drawing on our reserves of capital. We were drawing so heavily that I could start calculating how long it would be before the fortune my papa had so slowly and carefully amassed would be exhausted. Then we would have to sell land.

Enough there to keep me indoors, even when the swallows came and swooped low over the Fenny in the morning. Enough there to keep me waiting for the postman every morning in a frenzy of anxiety that today might be the day when Dr Rose would write one of his gentle, but increasingly confident letters saying, ‘I am so pleased to tell you that your husband has made a complete recovery. As I write he is packing his bags to come home!’

Every day I expected a letter announcing John’s return. Every day I prayed for the letter to tell me that our cousin had accepted the compensation and John’s fortune could be paid to him, and the legal work to change the entail could begin in earnest. Every morning I awoke with those two converging processes racing closer and closer together. And every day the postbag was brought to me in my office I opened it with dread, waiting to see if I had won or lost Wideacre for my son.

I had won.

On that sweet April morning with the daffodils nodding golden heads in the garden outside my window and the birds carolling to the spring sunshine, the postbag held a thick cream envelope with our lawyers’ crest embossed on the corner, and their pompous seal on the flap. With much self-congratulatory flourish they wrote to say that our cousin Charles Lacey had accepted
compensation and was prepared to resign his rights to Wideacre. I had won. Richard had won. The horror and confusion of the past few months could slip behind me and would soon be forgotten. It would be as if this icy spring, this glassed-in shut-out spring had never been. Richard would be reared on the land as the future Squire. I should teach him all he needed to know about the land and the people, and he would bring in the harvest every year of his life. He would marry a pretty Sussex-bred girl of my choice and they would breed new heirs to the land. Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh. I would have established a line that could stretch down the centuries to the unimaginable future. And I had done it with wit and with cunning and with courage. I had done it, although I had lost the sound of my own heartbeat, of Wideacre’s heartbeat, of a voice of love from anyone. But I had done it.

I sat in silence with the letter in my hand and great floods of release and relief sweeping over me as tangible as the spring sunshine that warmed my face and my silk shoulder. I did not move for long, long minutes, savouring the time of victory. Only I knew what it had cost me, what it had cost Wideacre, what it had cost Acre village, to get us to this point where the way was clear for my son. Only I knew that. Even so, there were costs that I did not know, that I did not fully realize. I had won the land for Richard but this spring it had been dead to me. I could not be sure that my feeling for the land could come back to me. The people had turned against me; the grass was too bright a green, even the thrushes’ song failed to pierce the wall around me. But it might all be a price that had to be paid to put Richard into my seat. And I was paying and paying and paying, and now the reward was in sight.