Wideacre (Wideacre Trilogy) (78 page)

‘Stop!’ I shouted. The stable lads looked up at my voice even as they were shutting the door to Celia’s carriage.

‘Stop!’ I said. ‘Wait!’

Celia’s head appeared at the window and I could see she was repeating the order to drive on to the coachman. I knew the coachman. I had given him a chance when Papa had been looking
for a new man only six years ago. I had told Papa then that Ben was one of those people that can charm horses into the shafts. I could not remember his surname. He had been ‘Coachman Ben’ to us for what seemed a lifetime. But he was Wideacre born and bred. I had given him his job. I paid his wages. I knew he would stop, and Celia would have to climb down out of the carriage; then, between us, Harry and I, we could pet her and bully her, and confuse her and mislead her until this show of courage and activity was knocked out of her. And I could carry on, ploughing my straight furrow, scything in my straight line. Whatever stood in my path.

‘Coachman Ben!’ I called in my clear tone. ‘Wait! I am coming down!’

I slammed the window shut and swirled round for the stairs. It took me less than a minute to be downstairs and through the west-wing door to the stable yard. But I heard the clatter of wheels as the coach rolled away, and I saw the lights go round the corner to the front of the house, to the drive, to Acre lane, and from there, if I guessed aright, to Bristol, to John.

‘Stop!’ I shrieked like a fishwife into the wind of the April night at the vanishing flickering lights. I gazed wildly round for a stable lad to send after them, to order Coachman Ben to stop. To tell him Miss Beatrice demanded his return this instant. But then my angry orders died on my lips and the rage in me died. I stood very still in the cool April night and shuddered from the cold that was in my chilled heart.

I knew why the coachman had not stopped.

I had remembered the coachman’s surname.

It was Tyacke.

He was Gaffer Tyacke’s nephew.

I turned on my heel and walked slowly, slowly back inside. Harry was still seated at the table, though he had been sufficiently disturbed to stop eating.

‘Where is Celia?’ he asked.

‘Gone,’ I said heavily, and threw myself into the chair at the foot of the table. Harry and I faced each other down the long length of the dining table, as we had the first night after our first lovemaking on the downs. That seemed very far away now, and very long ago. He pushed the decanter of port towards me and I
fetched a clean glass and slopped a generous measure in. I threw it off with one gulp. It warmed my throat and belly but it did not touch the cold weight of fear beneath my ribs. Who could have imagined that one afternoon of sweet passion on the downs could have led us down this road? Each little step had seemed so easy, so safe. Each little step had led to another. And now the youth who had filled me with irresistible desire was a plump, ageing Squire. Too stupid to lie to his wife. Too foolish to manage his own affairs. And the dazzling, dazzled, girl that I had been was gone. I had lost her somewhere. She had died a little in the fall that killed her papa. Then a little bit more in the trap that bit off Ralph’s legs. A little of her had been blown out like a candle when her mother had sighed her life away. And drop by drop, like an icicle growing, the girl that I had been had slipped away, and this ice that was my heart had been left.

‘I don’t begin to understand what is going on,’ said Harry petulantly. ‘Why was Celia so upset? Where has she gone? She can’t have gone calling at this hour, surely? Why did she not tell me she was planning to go out?’

‘There is no need to be quite so dense,’ I said sharply. ‘You can see perfectly well that Celia and I have had a quarrel. No one is asking for your support, so there is no need to pretend that you do not understand what it is all about. Celia would rather that Julia lost Wideacre than ran it with Richard in the sort of partnership that you and I have. I took offence at her tone and we had words. Now she has flounced off. I expect she is going to see John. I imagine she is going to tell him that we have spent his fortune and to ask him to help her to reverse all our trouble and to revoke the contract between Julia and Richard.’

Harry gaped. ‘That’s bad,’ he said. I pushed the decanter back to him and he poured himself a glass and returned it to me. The room stank of conspiracy. Harry did not know much, but he knew when his comfort and his wealth were in danger. And he knew that in any battle over Wideacre business he would be on my side.

‘They can’t do that without our consent, can they?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I said. ‘And they cannot persuade Charles Lacey to give back the MacAndrew money. So they can do nothing.’

‘You said John would be pleased,’ Harry said petulantly. ‘You said Celia would be pleased too.’

‘How could I have guessed they would not be?’ I said. ‘I dare say John would have been happy enough about it. But not if Celia bursts in on him with tales of his being robbed behind his back in order to benefit your daughter.’

‘She would surely never say such a thing!’ protested Harry. ‘She knows I would never do such a thing. Celia is too loyal to turn against me so.’

‘Yes, but I think she caught something of John’s madness from him,’ I said. ‘By the time they took him away she was almost ready to believe that I was having him locked up out of spite, or perhaps even to gain his fortune. Madness, of course.’

‘Of course,’ said Harry uneasily.

‘I don’t think either of us realized how close those two had become,’ I said. ‘Celia spent a great deal of time with John after Mama’s death. They were always talking in the parlour or wandering together in the rose garden.’

‘She loves him dearly,’ Harry said stoutly.

‘I hope she does not love him too dearly,’ I said. ‘It would be a terrible thing if her loving nature had led her astray. If she was even now thinking not what would make you and your child happy but worrying about John and the MacAndrew fortune.’

Harry was aghast. ‘That’s just not possible,’ he said.

‘No, I’m sure it is not,’ I agreed swiftly. ‘It is just that this dash of Celia’s off to Bristol looks so much as if she was joining forces with John against us. Against you and me and Wideacre.’

Harry reached for the decanter again, and buttered himself a biscuit with fingers that trembled.

‘This is all madness!’ he burst out. ‘Nothing has been right since Mama died! John went crazy and now, as you say, Celia is behaving most oddly too. If I have any nonsense from Celia about business arrangements you and I have seen fit to make, I shall be very clear with her indeed. She knows nothing about the land. Indeed, I have been happy to let her know nothing about the land. But she cannot now try to interfere in perfectly proper business affairs.’

‘That is right, Harry,’ I said. My tone was calm but I was panting with relief. ‘You have been too sweet, too gentle with Celia, if she thinks she can dash off into the night without even
taking her maid, to speak to your brother-in-law, my husband, about our personal and confidential affairs.’

‘Indeed, yes!’ said Harry. ‘I am most displeased with Celia. And when she comes home I will tell her so.’

‘Good,’ I said. ‘I think it needs to be said.’ I paused. Harry was seething in his chair, stimulated with temper. I knew what would come next and I resigned myself to a tedious hour or two in the room at the top of the stairs. I knew the signs in Harry. We were together in the secret room seldom these days, for I had my security on the land through the money and through the lawyers, and Harry was too lazy and too idle to think of it often, but it still held its old lure for him. He poured himself another glass and reached a hand out for my glass. I half stood to slide it to him and as he leaned forward to pour his eyes were on my breasts.

‘Mmm, Beatrice?’ he said, slumping back in his chair. I smiled a heavy-lidded lazy smile at him.

‘Yes, Harry?’ I said.

‘With both Celia and John away …” He let the request trail off. His breathing was shallow and a little faster. I shot him one unwinking look from under my dark eyelashes. A look that was both a challenge and an invitation.

‘I will go and light the fire,’ I said. ‘Ten minutes, Harry.’

He gave a sigh of anticipation and buttered another biscuit. I slid from the room like a snake and closed the door softly. ‘Carry on eating like that, Harry,’ I thought wryly, ‘and you will be dead within three years. Then my son Richard and my daughter Julia will be joint heirs, and I will be their guardian and the only Master of Wideacre until I hand over to my darling son. And neither Celia nor John will be able to stop me.’

I did not send an express letter post-haste after Celia. I did not send a footman riding after her to catch her. If quiet, conventional, mousy Celia could whirl out of the house with only a shawl over her head like some demented peasant woman, then she could travel non-stop, and no letter could reach Dr Rose before she did. With Coachman Ben Tyacke driving, no footman with my order would make him stop and turn against the order of Lady Lacey. And, given that Ben was a Tyacke and had loved
his uncle dearly, the fact that I wished Celia to return would be enough to make him whip up the horses.

All I could count on was John’s instability, on Celia’s confusion and despair, and on Dr Rose’s prejudice against the two of them, which I had instilled without even planning to do, but which now came, like the witch they called me, unbidden to my hand. I could do nothing, I decided, as I sat back in my morning bath before my bedroom fire. Lucy had rung for more cans of hot water and took them from the footman at the door and poured the scalding jugful down my back. My toes were resting on the rounded lip of the bath, my body curled in the boiling sweet-scented water.

‘Miss Beatrice, you will scald,’ said Lucy predictably as I waved for another hot jug.

‘Yes,’ I said happily and felt the near-unbearable heat wash around me. My ten toes were rosy pink with heat; my buttocks and body would be scarlet. After a night of beating and threatening and cursing Harry into a frenzy of whimpering pleasure I felt a certain need to boil myself clean. I might have all the crimes of Wideacre on my copper-curly head — and a few I had not done as well — but at least I lacked Harry’s confused messiness. When I needed that sweeping flood of sexual pleasure all I wanted was an honest man to tumble me in bed or grass. Harry seemed to need an unending repertoire of threats and promises and a cupboardful of tricks. And his plump heaving body filled me neither with lust nor hatred, but with a certain cool disdain that excited him all the more. I waved for more hot water. I felt a need to scrub and scald Harry’s wet kisses off my skin.

I had done nothing, and I could do nothing, I thought, as Lucy poured the water, and at my gesture massaged the back of my neck with sweet perfumed soap right up to the damp hairline in hard slow circles.

‘Mmmm,’ I said in pleasure, and closed my eyes.

At the very, very worst Celia and John would come home a pair of avenging angels to destroy Wideacre and the garden of deception I had grown here. John had guessed that Harry was Richard’s father, and Celia’s secret — that Julia too was my child — would be another piece in the jigsaw. The two secrets together would ruin me.

But I looked at that prospect with my fighter’s gaze. I thought I might survive it. John was fresh from the cool sanity of a well-run asylum, unready for the craziness of his real life. I had established him as insane, I might be able to tar Celia with the same brush. Theirs was an insane tale. No one would believe it. It would be far more convincing to claim that their guilt and desire had driven John to drink and overset Celia’s senses. That together they had dreamed of a nightmare world of terror: of monsters in mazes, of toads crushed beneath a plough, of wounded hares. It was nonsense. No one would believe them if I could hold my head as proud as a queen and face down every truth as the vilest calumny.

But I did not think they would put the two halves of the picture together.

‘Don’t stop,’ I said to Lucy, who obediently moved the piping cloth over one shoulder and then the other.

John was fighting with one hand tied behind him because of his tenderness to Celia. I knew that. I had watched him in his first days of horror-stricken knowledge when he wavered between drunken despair, hatred for me, and horror at the web that enmeshed us all. If he had been going to expose me to Celia, to wreck her marriage, to break her heart with the disgusting truth of her beloved husband, he would have done it then. But he did not. Not even when he was writhing in a strait-jacket on the floor of her parlour had the secret escaped him. He was not shielding me. He was protecting Celia from the horror that undermined her life so that the very ground beneath her feet was an eggshell cover over a maze of sin. Celia herself might expose me to John in her first gabble of panic, but I could trust my cool steady husband to see the full picture and yet keep his own counsel.

And I did not fear Celia. If she returned alone or decided to act alone I did not think she would expose me. She had given her word of honour and I imagined that would count for much with her. She had loved me once and that might make her pause. She loved respectability as much as my foolish mama, and to expose me would be my ruin and the shame of the Laceys. But more than all of that, more than everything, was her total love for Julia, which, I imagined, would transcend every other thing. If
she exposed me as Julia’s mother, even in my shame I could claim Julia and take her away. Whatever pain and confusion boiled in Celia’s mind I knew, as I knew my own clear-headed calculations, that she would never risk losing Julia. One hint of that danger and Celia would withdraw.

I bent my knees so that the hot water washed over my soaped shoulders and rinsed me clean. I had them both. They both loved and so they were both vulnerable. Compared to that bondage of devotion I was free and unbound. My love for Richard neither contained nor controlled me. I still went my own way. I might plot for him, but I would not sacrifice myself for him. But Celia and John were not their own masters. And as such I did not fear them.