Wideacre (Wideacre Trilogy) (77 page)

‘Run it together?’ she said. ‘How would they be joint heirs?’

I kept my voice steady and cheerful, but I was conscious of choosing my words with care. I felt awkward. I felt nervous. It was like taking a horse you do not know to a fence you do not know in a county you do not know.

‘As joint partners,’ I said lightly. ‘Like Harry and I do now.’

‘Like Harry and you,’ said Celia. ‘Like Harry and you,’ she repeated. She had turned back to me but her eyes were on the fire. Something in their hazy brownness made me wonder what she was seeing in a pile of glowing logs.

‘No,’ she said abruptly.

I jumped in unfeigned surprise.

‘What?’ I asked.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I do not give my consent, I do not wish it. I do not think it is a good idea.’

‘Celia, what are you saying?’ I said. I disliked the speed of her words. The breathlessness, the stillness of the little figure in the pale parlour.

‘I do not wish that this contract be signed,’ she said clearly. ‘I am Julia’s mother and I have a right to a voice in the decision on her future. I do not wish this to go ahead.’

‘Celia, why not?’ I asked. ‘Whatever are you thinking of, to stand against Harry’s intentions in this way?’

That did not stop her, though it should have given her pause. But her eyes were fixed on the fireplace as if reflected on the coals she could see Harry and me frantically coupling on that very hearth, as my mama had done.

‘It is hard to explain,’ she said. ‘But I do not wish Julia to be involved in the running of Wideacre in the way that you have been.’ I could hear the restraint in her voice, which came from
her anxiety not to hurt me. But I would have been deaf not to hear the certainty too.

‘Wideacre means so much to you, Beatrice, that you cannot understand that there is any other life open to a girl. But I should like Julia to love this place as her girlhood home, and to leave it with a light heart when she marries the man of her choice.’

‘But this way she is an heiress, Celia!’ I exclaimed. ‘She can marry the man of her choice and he can live here as John and I and you and Harry do. She will be joint owner of Wideacre. You could not bless a child with a better gift!’

‘You could! You could!’ said Celia, speaking fiercely though her voice was low. ‘The greatest blessing I shall give Julia will be to keep her free from the idea that Wideacre is the only place in the world to live. That it is the only thing in the world that could make her happy. I want her to be happy anywhere. I want her to be happy because she leads a good life and has a clean conscience and because she can freely give and freely receive love. I don’t want her to think that her life’s happiness is bound up with a handful of acres and a starving, miserable village!’

‘Celia!’ I gasped, and I stared at her in horror. ‘You don’t know what you are saying!’

‘I do,’ she said emphatically, looking at me directly now. ‘I have thought long and hard on this, Beatrice. I have thought about it ever since we came home to England. I should not want Julia to share her home with another couple, however dear they may be to her. When she marries I should want her to live with her husband and live with him alone. I should not want her to come into another woman’s house as I did, and to see her husband absorbed and working with someone else as I did. If she loved him with her whole heart I should want her to have all his time and all his love.’

‘But we have been so happy,’ I said weakly. ‘We all were so happy.’

‘There was something wrong!’ burst out Celia. She took three swift strides to my chair and pulled me to my feet to scan my face as if she would read my soul. ‘There was something wrong,’ she said certainly. ‘You know what it was and I do not. John knew what it was, but he could not tell me and I think it was that
which sent him half mad and made him drink. I can feel it everywhere I go in the house. I can breathe it in the air. And I do not want my child touched with one feather of it.’

‘This, this is nonsense,’ I stammered. I was overwhelmed by the memory of my mama’s sense of sin, of something dirty and black in the house that she could smell but not see. I had trusted my mama to be too much of a coward, too much of a fool, to track down the foul thing and look it in the face. When she saw it, the two-backed beast before the fire, she had died with horror.

But Celia might almost dare to track it into its very lair and face it. Armed with her love for her child and her courage, Celia might go where my mama’s nervous thoughts had failed her.

‘Stop it, Celia!’ I said abruptly. ‘You are distressed. We will talk no more of this tonight. If you really dislike the whole idea we will change it. But let us have tea now, and then go early to bed.’

‘No, I won’t stop here, and I won’t have the tea tray, and we won’t go to bed until I understand more. How was Charles Lacey compensated? What are the terms of the contract?’

‘Oh, my!’ I said lightly. ‘Business, then? Well, very well, if you wish it.’ I snowed her under then, with rack-rents and revisions of tenancies, and long leases made short, and cottagers’ rights, and enclosure acts and the price of corn. How to sell when it is standing in the field, how to gamble on the growth and on the rise of the market when other farmers have poor crops. I even threw in the battle I had won over the water rights until her unlearned head spun.

‘So we have changed our farming system slightly to make greater profits, and we used the MacAndrew money too,’ I finished.

She nodded only to clear her head; there was no assent there. She could not have understood a word of the garble.

‘John’s money?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That is Richard’s contribution, as it were, towards being made heir of Wideacre, jointly with Julia.’

‘You have used John’s money without his consent?’ she asked. Her voice was even but her face was appalled.

‘As a loan merely,’ I said with assurance. ‘The whole idea of
the power of attorney is to safeguard the patient’s interests. Obviously it is in John’s interests — and mine as his wife and the mother of his son — that he should get maximum interest. The loan he has made to Wideacre is paying far more than the MacAndrew Line dividends. And it secures Richard’s future, too.’

‘You have used John’s money without his consent and committed his son to Wideacre without him knowing?’ she asked incredulously.

‘Of course,’ I said, challenging her, face to face. ‘Any proper parent would be delighted, as Harry and I are, that the entail can so be changed.’

She smoothed a hand over her forehead as if to wipe away the confusion. It was ineffectual.

‘That is a matter for John and you,’ she said, her mind in a whirl. ‘I cannot think it right. I cannot believe that Harry could have so used John’s entire fortune, and that while he was ill, but if the contract is not signed, perhaps it can all wait until John returns from hospital?’

‘Perhaps, perhaps,’ I said soothingly. ‘I am not exactly sure. Harry has been making the arrangements, not I. I undertook only to reassure you, that although Harry was grieved to understand that you are barren there should be no unhappiness between the two of you, because he has found this way around that sorrow. That your lovely little girl can inherit her father’s land.’

‘You plan that she and Richard will be joint owners?’ Celia repeated slowly. ‘That she and Richard should grow up together on the land, learning about the land together?’

I nodded.

‘And you and Harry would take them both out on the estate, looking at the land and learning to farm. And all the time they would be growing closer and closer. And only you and I would know that they are not just partners, and not just cousins, but half-brother and half-sister?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But Celia …’

‘But we would not be able to tell them that!’ she said. ‘They would be best friends and playmates and business partners. They would think they were first cousins, but they would be close kin. They would learn to love each other, and their interests would
lie together. How could they then turn aside from each other and learn to love the people they will be betrothed to marry? How can my Julia have the life I had hoped for her and planned for her as a girl of Quality if she is an heiress from the age of two in a partnership with a boy who is neither husband nor distant relation?’

She spun on her heel so she did not face me and buried her face in her hands.

‘It is a nightmare,’ she said. ‘I cannot tell what it is but some danger is threatening Julia from this. I do not know what!’

‘You are being foolish, Celia,’ I said coldly. I took her shoulders in a firm grip and felt a shudder run through her like a terror-struck foal. ‘Wideacre is a family business,’ I said levelly. ‘Julia would always have had obligations to meet on the estate. She will simply work with Richard as Harry and I work.’

That reassurance tripped her control.

‘No!’
she said, and it was nearly a scream. ‘No! I forbid it! You gave her to me and said that she should be
my
child. I claim my right as her mother to decide her future. She shall not be with Richard as you and Harry are, for I am afraid of something about you and Harry, even if I have no words for it but only a dread that chills and frightens me when I wake in the night. I do not know what I am afraid of, and I make no complaint against either of you. But I am afraid, Beatrice! I am afraid for Julia! I do not want her to be part of another brother-and-sister partnership.
No.
I do
not
give my consent. I shall tell Harry.’

I leaped for the door and spread my arms so that she could not get past me.

‘Celia, wait,’ I said. ‘Don’t dash out to Harry like that while you are distressed. He will think it most odd. He will think we have quarrelled. Calm yourself and consider what you mean to say. If you do not want Julia to be joint heir with Richard she can always sell him her share when they are older, or he can sell his. There is no need for you to become so upset over this, Celia.’

She had heard none of it. She was looking at me as if she had seen me for the first time. She was looking at me curiously, with disbelief, as if there were some mark scrawled on my face, or as if I had spiders crawling in my hair, or some other horror.

‘Stand aside, Beatrice,’ she said. Her voice was low and hard. ‘I want to speak with Harry.’

‘Not while you are so overwrought,’ I pleaded, and I did not move.

‘Stand aside,’ she said again. And I remembered her before the library fireplace with two smashed bottles of whisky dripping from her hand.

‘You will distress Harry,’ I said. ‘He planned this to make you happy.’

‘Stand aside,’ she repeated, and her eyes flickered towards the bell pull. For one brief moment I wondered if she could face the scene of the butler coming and her ordering him to push me out of the way by forcing open the door. But I saw the look on her face and knew I was arguing with a woman on the edge of hysteria.

‘Beatrice, I have asked you three times,’ she said and her voice was tight with control that might break at any moment. I feared Celia in a panic more than I feared her when she could judge to speak or be silent. If she screamed out that Richard and Julia were brother and sister then I would be irreparably lost. But if she kept herself under control, and if I went with her, I might manage this scene still.

I opened the parlour door for her with a little ironic bob curtsy and followed, hard on her heels, as she swept across the hall to the dining room. A footman was coming through the door from the kitchen bringing more biscuits for Harry, and I scowled at him so he turned on his heel and went back behind the baize door again. Celia saw nothing, heard nothing. She flung open the dining-room door and made Harry jump with the bang. He had a plate before him heaped with cheese and biscuits, and the flagon of port by his hand. He had butter on his chin. I could trust him as far as I could flick water.

‘I do not consent to this arrangement,’ said Celia in her high, hard voice. ‘The documents are not to be signed. I do not wish it for Julia.’

Harry’s blue eyes were wide with surprise.

‘But it’s done!’ he said simply. ‘We signed them this afternoon. The entail’s changed, and Richard and Julia are joint heirs.’

Celia opened her mouth and screamed, a thin wail like a small
animal trapped. She stood motionless, her eyes on Harry’s face, his cheeks still full of biscuits. I was frozen too. I could not even think what I could say to stop Celia’s mouth. But her horror and her fear of the unknown thing that hid in the corners of Wideacre and that one could almost feel breathing among us kept her wordless.

Her mouth still open, she gave a little whimper like a child with a finger trapped in a door. Her eyes rolled from Harry, motionless at the head of the table, to me, silent behind her. She found one word in her panic-stricken mind. She said, ‘John.’ Then she picked up her silk skirts in her hands and whirled from the room.

Harry bolted his mouthful and looked wildly at me.

‘What’s the matter?’ he demanded. ‘What’s wrong with her?’

I shrugged. My shoulders were stiff and I could feel the gesture was wooden. My face must have been as white as a sheet. I could feel the control and the power slipping through my fingers like the sands of the common.

‘Listen!’ I said. I heard the door to the west wing bang and straight away thought of my desk and the incriminating bundle of Celia’s letters to John, which had never reached him. Without a word to Harry I dashed after Celia and to my office. The room was in darkness; she was not there.

I called sharply, ‘Celia!’ but I had no answer. I could not think where she might be. I checked my west-wing parlour but although the candles and the fire had been lit there was no Celia weeping on the pretty sofa. I ran up the stairs to my bedroom, to John’s room; I even glanced into the nursery to see my son sleeping like a tousled angel. But no Celia. Then I heard the sound of wheels on the paving stones of the stable yard and ran to the window. The coach was out and Celia was stepping inside.

‘Celia!’ I called. ‘Wait!’ With fumbling desperate fingers I struggled with the catch and the window swung open.