Wideacre (Wideacre Trilogy) (79 page)

‘Towel, please,’ I said to Lucy, and she fetched the coarse, linen wraps from where they were warming before the fire. I rubbed myself as hard as I could, until my pink skin stung, and then I brushed my hair free in a silky copper mane, soft as satin on my back. My body showed no signs of two pregnancies. My belly was flat and hard, my breasts round and still firm, my legs as long and as slim as ever with no disfiguring veins.

I smoothed my palm down from my neck, over the jutting swell of my breasts, down over my belly with the soft curls of hair between my legs. I was lovely still. And soon I should need a lover. A real lover, not a chore like Harry, but a man who would laugh with me and romp with me and hurt me and pleasure me. I turned with a sigh and snapped my fingers for Lucy to fetch my petticoats. The hard fighting loving I remembered were those passionate struggles I had with Ralph. God alone knew where I would find another like him. I supposed I should have to resign myself to missing him and longing for him.

And waiting. Waiting for this hard time to be done. Waiting for the profits to show on the land so that Wideacre could be eased, if only slightly, from this drag of debt that I had put on the land. Waiting for the great golden glut of corn to release the land and the people from this struggle for money. So that I could restore a little, instead of snatching away. So that people would forget this one bad year of my mastership of Wideacre and remember instead the good years that had followed each other, one after another, since I had run the land.

Today I should spend another morning in my office trying to make sense of the figures. Mr Llewellyn now had three mortgages on our land: the common land, the plantation, and Celia’s dowry lands. But to service the loan to him, when the beasts did so badly, I had borrowed from our bankers. Their rates were lower and I had been pleased with my cleverness at winning Wideacre a little breathing space. But they had the right to alter their rates as they pleased, and now I was paying more to borrow their money than the rate I was paying Llewellyn. I was in the ludicrous position of borrowing money to service a loan. And if I was late with either debt there were penalty clauses to meet.

Last month I had been forced to sell some fat lambs in an early market and had earned less than they deserved, because I was desperate for cash. This month, with Llewellyn’s repayments and the bankers’ loan both falling due, I would have to face the prospect of selling land — I could not keep on selling off stock out of season. There had to be some way to break free of this downward spiral of debt; yet I could see none. And I had no one to advise me. Only one man I knew understood the ways of the London money-men. Only one man I knew could tell me if it was indeed as I feared, that they were playing with me like a clever fisherman plays with a salmon; that, although I spoke privately to only two or three, they all heard my words; that the message was out: Wideacre was headed for ruin and some skilful fisherman could net it with a flick of his wrist. Only one man could advise me on this. And he was advising Celia on how the two of them could wreck my plans, as they drove home together.

I counted the days that Celia had been away as I went downstairs to breakfast. A day to get to Bristol, since she had started in the early evening. A day or two days to see John and to persuade Dr Rose to release him. Two days to drive home. Heads together in the carriage. Minds together, pitted against me. Planning my downfall, driving closer.

I thought four or five days, and I was right. On the afternoon of the fourth day since Celia had dashed from the house, the carriage came bowling up the drive: muddy, and with one lamp broken. And the two of them inside.

‘They are here,’ I said tersely to Harry. ‘You know what you have to do. We have talked it over, and I am sure you are right.
She had tried to meddle with our business. She dashed out of the house to go to another man, and that man my husband. She ran away like a mad thing. She has exposed the Laceys to comment in the county.’

Harry nodded. He was breathing fast and there was a certain brightness in his eyes. ‘She should be punished,’ he said, and I remembered his early training in bullying at his vicious school.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘She has been treated like porcelain by us all. Take her at once and take your pleasure on her. You are her husband. You have the right. Go and break her.’

He nodded again. ‘But no man could hurt Celia,’ he said, wanting to be convinced and loving to hear the words.

‘Any real man could,’ I said tempting. ‘You of all people could, Harry. Remember the little boys at your school? Besides, Celia may be precious to you but you cannot allow her to behave like this. She fled from you to John. If you want to keep her you had best show her who is Master. You are the Squire. You are her husband. You can do anything you like to her. But do not listen to a word she says. Just reclaim her.’

Harry’s eyes were wide and blue and his breath came fast. He walked past a tray of cakes without even seeing them. He blundered to the front door alight with cruelty and lust. We heard the noise of the carriage draw up and Harry was at the door before Stride could be there. Celia tumbled out, not waiting for the steps. She was wearing the dress she had left in, and it was creased and shabby from travelling. She looked nothing like the Lady Lacey who had dominated Harry and me. She looked exhausted and a little afraid.

‘Harry?’ she said hesitantly and went up the steps towards him where he stood, unmoving, by the front door.

He was magnificent. He said not a word. He looked like some fat hero in the travelling theatre. His face was stony. She came beside him, and put her little hand on his arm.

‘Harry?’ she said again. He scooped her up into a hard grip and I saw her face blench white as he hurt her. Then, still without a word, he swept her into the house and up the main stairs to the first floor. I heard his heavy tread along the corridor to their bedroom, the door open and close, and the double click as he locked it. Then I turned back to the carriage. Whatever
was happening behind that door I cared not. Celia would be humiliated and would be forced down to face the mire of Harry’s twisted desires. If she refused him he could strike her or rape her. If she consented she would carry the filth of his perverse pleasure on her soul and never again would she meet John with unshadowed eyes or stand before me in my own office and lay down the law to me. She would be humbled to dust.

I smiled.

John caught that smile as he stepped down from the carriage. The sunshine was bright but he shivered as if a cold wind had blown down the nape of his neck. He was looking well. The strained, desperate look had gone from his face and he had put on weight and was lithe and fit again. The hollows under his eyes had gone, and the muscle that used to twitch in his cheek was still. His ordeal had graven two hard lines either side of his unsmiling mouth and two deep frown lines above his eyebrows, but his face was serene, strong. He was dressed immaculately with his usual neatness, in black with the whitest of linen, and a thick black travelling coat. I met his blue eyes and we measured each other in a long hard stare. He might have the look of the man I had loved, but we were sworn enemies. I said no word of greeting but turned on my heel and walked back to the parlour.

I poured myself a cup of tea and my hands were steady. Unbidden, the parlourmaid came in with another cup and a plate, and behind her, as if he had taken tea with me every day for the past five months, came John my husband. He shut the parlour door with a click and I wondered why that little noise should give me such a shudder of dread. I was alone with my husband.

‘Tea?’ I asked courteously. ‘Some cakes? Or some fruit bread?’

‘Let us have some straight talking, if you please,’ he said, and his voice was even and clear. He was cured of his terror of me, and of his need to drink when my shadow fell on him. I had lost my old power over John and I rose to stand by the mantelpiece so that I could casually rest my arm along it, to hide the fact that my knees were shaking with anxiety.

John moved into the centre of the parlour and dominated the pretty room. His driving coat with the great capes seemed too bulky for the small space. His high black polished boots seemed
to straddle the carpet. His hat on a chair filled the lady’s room with male power and male threat. I held on tight to the stone of the mantelpiece and kept my face impassive.

‘I have nothing to say to you,’ I said. My voice did not quaver. He would not know I was afraid. I guarded myself too well.

‘No, but I have some things to say to you,’ he said. I glanced towards the door. He would be able to catch me before I reached it. I thought about pulling the bell on the pretext of more hot water, but then I thought better of it. This was as good a time as any to face John. And he would have to be faced some time this day. Now I had him without Celia, without Harry, and tired from the journey. Also, with a warm flicker of relief, I felt my anger growing, and I knew that if he threatened me I would challenge him and beat him down. I was no longer the woman who could not move for grief and horror because children fled at her approach. I was a woman fighting for myself and my child, and my child’s inheritance and my own home. I had not desolated Wideacre, enclosed the fields and murdered the sweetest lads in the village, to collapse in a repentant heap because my husband looked hard at me with his pale blue eyes.

‘I know what you have done,’ he said. ‘Celia told me all she knew, and with the knowledge that I have, I could understand what you have done.’

‘What do you fancy I have done?’ I said, my tone icy.

‘You have had two incestuous bastards sired by your brother,’ said John, his voice as cold as mine. ‘One you passed off on Celia who presented it to Harry as her own. One you tried to fob off on me. Then you had me committed to a lunatic asylum — oh, yes, that is what it was, thank you, my dear — so you could rob me of my fortune to buy your son into the inheritance and to lock your two children in partnership on the land.’

My knuckles gleamed white as I gripped the mantelpiece. But I said not a word.

‘What I shall do is to untangle this thread of sin and deceit and set us all free of you,’ John said. ‘Some of your legal contracts and agreements will be breakable, and I shall break them,’ he said. ‘The children should be cleaned of the taint of you, and of this damnable land. Celia shall be freed of this morass of sin and
complicity you have tricked her into. And she may save Harry from you.’

‘You are ready to hang then?’ I asked drily. ‘I promised you I would swear you had killed Mama. The noose would be round your neck the second you speak one word against me. You are tired of life then, John? You are ready for death?’

His eyes met mine without a shadow of dread and with a dawning coldness down my spine, along my shoulders, I realized I had lost that hold on him too.

‘I’ll take my chance,’ he said, and his eyes met mine with a strength that was greater than my own. ‘I’m prepared to stand trial to expose you, Beatrice. No court in the land could try me for manslaughter, or even murder, without hearing why your mama’s heart stood still on that night. Then you would be exposed to the world as an incestuous whore, as the mother of two bastards, and a thief. Are you ready for that, my pretty wife?’

‘You won’t get your money back,’ I said spitefully. ‘You’ve lost that for ever. It’s in Charles Lacey’s hands and if I know him it’s already half spent.’

‘No,’ he acknowledged. And he was not looking at me, but out of the window, towards the green line of the horizon. ‘No, but I can save the children from you … and Celia.’

‘A strange way to free them,’ I said harshly. ‘To free them with your death. I might be shamed, but Celia would have nowhere to live but here. Harry might be disgraced but he would still be Squire. We would all live on here without you. Are you ready for a death that changes nothing?’

‘It is not I who am ready for death, Beatrice,’ he said. He had turned back and was looking at me, hot with hatred, but with a sharp interest. His eyes were those of Dr MacAndrew again, the quickest-witted physician ever to come out of Edinburgh. ‘I see it on you,’ he said acutely. ‘You have lost yourself somewhere down this weary evil road that you have travelled. The life has gone out of you, Beatrice.’

He reached my side in two quick strides and took my chin in his hand. I suffered him to turn my face to the light and my green eyes were scornful, but I was biting the inside of my cheeks to hide my fear.

‘Yes, you are as lovely as ever,’ he said dismissively. ‘But you have lost a sparkle from your eyes, and there are lines around your mouth that were never there before. What is it, my dear? Have your dirty steps in filth bogged you down so deep you cannot get free? Has the land turned against you? Can you no longer magic the yields you need? Or is it that the people spit on the ground when you pass and curse your very name for the damage and the death that you have brought to Wideacre?’

I broke free of his grip and turned to the door. My hand was on the latch when he called my name.

‘Beatrice!’

I turned, as if I had hoped he might say something gentle to me. Or at least something that would give me a clue to hold him in my grip again.

‘Death is coming for you, and you are ready for it,’ he said quietly. ‘As I drove home with Celia I thought I should come home and kill you, to free us all from the horror that is you. But I will not need to make my hands stink with your blood. For Death is coming for you, and you know you are fit to die. Don’t you, my pretty Beatrice?’

I turned without a word and left the room. I walked with my head high, my steps long, my skirt shushing round me with every dancing stride. I walked like a lord on his land all the way down the corridor to my office, and then I shut the door behind me and leaned against the panels. At once my knees buckled and I slid down the door into a heap on the floor. I rested my face against the panels. The wood was cold and ungentle to the aching cheekbones where the skin felt too tight.

Death was coming for me, John had said so; he had seen it in my face. And I knew how Death was coming. He was coming on a great black horse with two black dogs, one running before, one following behind. He was coming on horseback, for he had no legs to creep along behind me. He would ride up to me, Death, and I would see his face before I died. Death was coming for me. The rich people, the gentry who feared for their lives and their property called him Death; the poor people who followed him called him the Culler. But I would look in his face and call him ‘Ralph’.