Wideacre (Wideacre Trilogy) (81 page)

No one would call me ‘Miss Beatrice’ with love in their voice. No one would call Harry ‘Squire’, as if it were his name. We would be newcomers. And no one would know our family went back to Norman times, and that we had farmed and guarded the same land for hundreds of years. We would be nobodies.

I shuddered, and pulled the bills towards me again. The ones from Chichester tradesmen I let run. Only the purveyors of the household did I pay regularly. I did not want Celia to learn from the cook or from a housemaid that the merchants were refusing to deliver until their bills were met. So that made a pile of bills that had to be paid at once. Beside them were a smaller pile of creditors’ notes that had to be met this month. Mr Llewellyn, the bank, a London money-lender, and our solicitor, who had advanced a few hundred pounds when I badly needed cash to buy some seedcorn. They had to be paid at once too. With them also was a note from the corn merchant, to whom we owed a few hundred guineas for oats, which we did not grow, for the horses, and a note from the hay merchant. Now we grew fewer meadows I was having to buy in hay, and it was costlier than I had believed possible. It would make sense to reduce the Wideacre stables, which were filled with underworked horses. But I knew that the first Wideacre horse on the market would be seen as a sign that I was selling up, and then the creditors would rush to be first with their notes. They would foreclose on me, in a panic not to be left with a dishonoured note-of-hand, and in their rush for little sums of money, Wideacre would bleed to death from a hundred minor stabs.

Each small, irresistible demand added to a total I could not meet. I had no money. I felt the creditors gather around me like a pack of nipping wolves and I knew that I must free myself of them, and free Wideacre of them, but I could not see how.

I shuffled the final pile of papers into a heap of debtors who could wait, who would wait. The wine merchants, who knew we had their bill’s worth of wine in the cellars, and who would be circumspect in their demands. The farrier, who had worked on the estate since coming out of his apprenticeship. The carters, who had been paid on the nail for years and years. The cobbler, the gate-mender, the harness-maker — the little men who could beg that their bills be paid but who could do nothing against me. It was a large heap of bills, but they were all for small sums. My failure to pay might ruin the little tradesmen, but they could not ruin me. They could wait. They would have to wait.

It made three tidy piles. It got me no further forward. I folded them up and stuffed them back into the drawer. I did not have to see them to remember that I was drowning in debt. I remembered it every waking moment, and my nights were full of dreams of strange men with town accents saying to me, ‘Sign here. Sign here,’ in a long dream of horror and fear of the loss of Wideacre. I slammed the desk drawer shut with sudden impatience. There was no one to help me, and I was alone with this burden. All I could hope for was the old magic winds of Wideacre blowing my way again and a warm wind blowing out of a hot harvest sun to make the land golden, and set me free.

I rang the bell and ordered that Richard be dressed for a drive and brought to me in the stable yard. I could not stay indoors. The land no longer loved me, I could not take Richard at a whirling trot down the drive and show him the trees with the confidence of my papa on the land he owned outright, but I could still go out. It was still my land. I might still escape the intractable, unanswerable sheets of bills by driving out under a clear blue sky with my son.

He came to me beaming, as he always did. Of all the children I have ever seen Richard was the most sweet-tempered. One of the naughtiest too, I admit. At the age when Julia used to hold her toes in her warm cradle and coo to the delight of her grandmama and Celia, Richard was heaving himself up with chubby arms,
and trying to climb out. Julia would play with a moppet in her cot for hours, but Richard would hurl it out on to the floor and then bawl for it to be returned to him. If you were fool enough to go to him he would play the same trick again. And again. Only a paid servant would return the number of times Richard thought necessary, before his dark eyelashes would close on that smooth and perfect cheek. He was the bonniest baby. The naughtiest, the sweetest, child. And he adored me.

So I caught him from his nurse’s arms and hugged him hard and smiled when I heard his crow of delight at my sudden appearance. I passed him up to her when she was settled in the gig and made sure she held him tight. Then I put his rattle in his grabbing little hands and swung up beside them.

Sorrel trotted down the drive and Richard waved the rattle at the flying trees and at the flickering shadows and sunlight. On either side of the silver toy were little silver bells and they tinkled like sleighbells and made Sorrel throw up his head and step out faster. I drove at a spanking pace down the drive and then up to the London road. We were in time to see the mailcoach go by in a whirl of dust and Richard waved to the passengers on the roof and a man waved back. Then I turned the gig and we headed for home. A small enough outing, but when you love a child your world shrinks to a proper size of little delights and little islands of peace. Richard brought me that. If I loved him for nothing else, I would have loved him for that.

We were nearing the turn of the drive when he choked. A funny sound, unlike his usual open-mouthed barks of coughs. He gave an open-mouthed retching, a sort of gasping for air, a sound unlike anything I had ever heard before. I hauled on the reins and Sorrel skidded to a halt. My eyes met those of his nurse in mutual bewilderment and then she snatched the rattle from his hands. One of the tiny tinkly silver bells on the end was missing. He had swallowed it and he was gasping, reaching for his life’s breath around it.

The gig lurched as I grabbed him and laid him over my knees, face down. Without knowing why, I slapped him hard on the back and then grabbed his little feet and held him upside-down with some vague memory of his birth and the little choking noises he had made then.

He squawked some more, but no little silver bell fell on to the floor of the gig. I half flung him back at his nurse and cracked the whip at Sorrel, and shouted, ‘Where’s Dr MacAndrew?’

‘In the village, with Lady Lacey,’ she gasped, and clutched Richard to her shoulder.

The noises he was making were more painful now, more shocking to hear. He was retching and choking and his little gasps were less and less effective. He was getting no air. He was dying, in my gig, on Wideacre land, on a sunny morning.

I lashed Sorrel and he put his head down and went from his well-bred canter into a wild gallop. The gig bounced and bobbed like a boat on flood water but I held to the speed, not checking. The wind streamed into my face, I could scarcely see. But one glance at my son told me that none of this rush of air was finding its way into his little body. His gasps were quieter and he was hardly coughing at all. His lips were blue.

‘Where in the village?’ I yelled above the noise of Sorrel’s thundering hoofs and the creaks of the speeding gig.

‘At the vicarage, I think,’ shrieked Mrs Austin, her face as white as her collar, clinging to Richard in fear for him, and in terror at the headlong pace.

We whirled into the village and I saw nothing, but heard the slap of a hen, neck broken under the gig’s wheels. I pulled Sorrel up so hard he half reared as he skidded to a halt, and I flung the reins at Mrs Austin and snatched Richard from her. It was too late. Too late. He was fighting for his breath no more.

I ran up the garden path to the front door, his body limp in my arms, his eyelids as blue as his lips, his little chest so still. The door was opened as I ran, and Dr Pearce’s startled face was there.

‘Where’s John?’ I said.

‘In my study,’ said the Vicar. ‘What is wrong …?’

I slammed open the door and scarcely saw Celia, Mrs Merry and old Margery Thompson bent over the table. I saw only John.

‘John,’ I said, and held out the limp body of my son to him.

He had never touched him, though Richard was now nearly a year old. But now he snatched him from me, taking in the blue eyelids, the blue lips, in one fast raking glance.

He laid the child on the table. Richard was limp; his head banged on the wood as if he were already a corpse. John was patting his waistcoat pocket for a little silver penknife he carried.

‘What?’ he asked, monosyllabically.

‘The silver bell, off his rattle,’ I said.

‘Buttonhook,’ he said to Celia. She was beside him, her eyes on my son’s face. He took Richard’s chin in one hand and forced it brutally upwards until the delicate skin of his neck was tight. And then he cut his throat.

My knees buckled beneath me and I slumped in a chair. For one crazed moment I thought my husband had killed my son, but then I saw him jam the stem of one of Dr Pearce’s pipes in the little hole and I heard a rasping breath. He had slit a hole in Richard’s windpipe and Richard was breathing again.

I dipped my head in my hands, unable to look, then peeped through my fingers to see John staring down Richard’s mouth, with his right hand outstretched towards Celia, as imperious as any Edinburgh surgeon.

She had rummaged in her reticule and come out with a slender pearl-handled buttonhook and a little crochet hook. She put the buttonhook flat in his palm and stood beside him. Without a second’s hesitation she took Richard’s pale face in her own two hands and straightened him so that the pipe stem was not obstructed. His lips were turning pink again. John bent low, and probed down the tiny throat with the buttonhook. Behind me in the doorway Dr Pearce’s boots suddenly creaked as he shifted his weight in the silent horror of the room.

‘Too big,’ said John, straightening up. ‘What else?’

Without a word Celia took one hand from steadying Richard’s head and offered John the crochet hook. He smiled, without looking away from my son.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Perfect.’

Everyone in the room held their breath. Mrs Merry, who had sneered at the clever young Edinburgh-trained man, Margery Thompson, the village gossip, Dr Pearce and me. John poked down Richard’s tiny throat with the slender silver hook and only he and Celia seemed unaware of the agony of tension in the sunlit study.

There was a thin, incongruous tinkle. The little bell knocked
against Richard’s milk teeth as John drew it out. And then, there it was, suspended on the silver hook.

‘Done it,’ John said, and he pulled his silk handkerchief from his pocket, pulled out the pipe stem from my baby’s throat, tied the handkerchief in a bandage around his neck and turned him on his front on the hard table. Richard retched and coughed, a wheezy hacking cough, and began, hoarsely, to cry.

Celia said, ‘May I?’ to John and, at his nod, scooped my son into her arms and laid his head on her shoulder. She patted him on his back and whispered loving words while he wept for the confusion and the pain in his throat. Beside his curly head her face was alight with pride and love, and she met John’s look with her heart written in her eyes.

‘You were good,’ he said, sharing the credit. ‘The buttonhook was too big. We would have lost him if you had not thought of the other.’

‘You were good,’ she said. Her eyes met his in frank love. ‘Your hand was steady as a rock. You saved his life.’

‘D’you have some laudanum?’ John asked Dr Pearce, not taking his eyes from Celia’s bright face.

‘No, only a little brandy,’ said the Vicar, watching the two of them as intently as the rest of us.

John grimaced. ‘Very well then,’ he said. ‘He needs something. He’s had a nasty shock.’

He took Richard from Celia’s arms as gently as a father and held the glass for Richard to sip. When the child squirmed he held his face still and tipped down the little measure with one practised gesture. Richard was soothed at once, and when Celia took him back into her arms, his head nodded on her shoulder and he dozed.

Celia and John looked at each other for a brief, magical moment, then John turned to me, and the spell was broken.

‘You have had a shock too, Beatrice,’ he said coolly. ‘Would you like a glass of ratafia? Or port?’

‘No,’ I said dully. ‘I need nothing.’

‘Did you think you had lost him?’ asked Mrs Merry. ‘He looked so blue!’

‘Yes,’ I said desolately. ‘I thought I had lost him, the next Squire. Then all this, all this, would have been for nothing!’

There was a silence. They all turned shocked faces to me. Every one. Every one of them looked at me as if I was an exhibit in some show of freaks.

‘You thought of him as the Squire?’ asked John, incredulous. ‘Your baby was dying in your arms, and you thought that your work would go for nothing?’

‘Yes,’ I said. I stared at the empty fireplace. Not caring what they thought of me. Not caring for anything, anymore.

‘If he had died, what would have become of Wideacre? The entail specifies them both. I have put everything on the two of them. And then I thought he was dead.’

I dropped my face into my hands and I shuddered with deep soundless sobs. No one put a hand out to comfort me. No one said one kind word.

‘You are shocked,’ said Celia at last, but her voice was cold. ‘I came in the carriage. You can go home in it. John can drive me in your gig. Go home now, Beatrice, and you can put Richard to bed when you get home. Then you can rest yourself. You cannot know what you are saying. This has been a shock for you.’

I let her walk me to the carriage and help Mrs Austin with Richard. Then I saw her step back from the window and Coachman Ben drove me home with my son’s warm sleepy body in my arms.

As the trees of the drive flickered past the window, green in the April sunshine, I remembered the look that had passed between Celia and John when he had praised her quickness in thinking of the crochet hook, and she had praised his skill. And I thought also that when she said, ‘Your hand was steady as a rock,’ she had spoken not for his ears alone. She had praised him, and restored him as a first-class doctor. She had told that quiet room, and thus the village, and the wider world outside the village borders, that Dr MacAndrew was indeed the best doctor that the county had ever seen. She had restored John to society. The trick that I knew he could never have done alone, that I had sworn I would never do for him, Celia had done with one easy sentence.