Wideacre (Wideacre Trilogy) (83 page)

‘What can it be?’ Celia exclaimed. She soon had her answer. From the pretty wrapping rolled a flint stone. It was white, and the grey shards on it showed where the white had chipped away. It was a flint from the common where the villagers could no longer go.

I dropped it in my lap and reached for another parcel. It was another flint. Harry exclaimed and strode over to the table. He opened half-a-dozen, ripping at the papers and scattering the wrapping on the floor. They were all flint stones. My lap was soon full of them. I counted them mechanically. There was one for every cottage, or house, or shanty, on our land. The whole village and every poor tenant had sent me a flint for my birthday. They did not dare stone me. Only one pebble had ever been shied at my gig. But they sent me, wrapped in pretty paper, a lapful of flints. I stood abruptly and showered them to the breakfast parlour floor. They clattered on the wood like monstrous hailstones in a storm of ice. Celia’s face was aghast. John was looking at me with overt curiosity. Harry was champing on his words, speechless with rage.

‘By God!’ he spluttered. ‘I’ll have the troops into the village for this. It’s an insult, a deliberate calculated insult. By God, I’ll not let it pass!’

Celia’s brown eyes suddenly filled with tears.

‘Oh, don’t let’s talk like that!’ she cried out in sudden passion. ‘It is we who have brought this on Beatrice. It is our fault. I have seen the village getting hungrier and more despairing and angrier. And all I have done is to try and ensure the very poorest families survived the winter. I never challenged what you and Beatrice were doing, Harry. But now I see the result of it. We have been all wrong, Harry. All wrong.’

I looked at her, my face blank. Everywhere I went I seemed to hear echoes of the message that Wideacre had gone wrong, had gone badly wrong. Whereas I believed, I had to believe, that it was all coming right. With fifty flints on the floor around my feet I stared at Celia, reproaching herself for the sorrow and hardness that had come to the land, and at Harry, speechless with anger. And at John, staring at me.

‘There’s one you missed,’ he said quietly. ‘Not a stone, a little basket.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Celia hopefully. ‘A pretty little basket like the children make with reeds from the river.’

I looked at it dully. It was Ralph’s basket, of course. I had been waiting for it all day. Now it sat on the table and I noted with dark eyes that he had lost none of the skill with his ringers, even if he would never walk or run or jump again. It was exquisitely made. He had taken time and trouble to make his threat to me delightfully pretty, inviting.

‘You open it, Celia,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to.’

‘Are you sure?’ she asked. ‘It cannot be anything bad. Look at the work that has gone into this lid, and the exquisite little catch.’ She slid back the little splinter of wood that served as a bolt and lifted the latch. She raised the lid with gentle ringers and parted the straw packed inside.

‘How odd,’ she said in surprise.

I had expected a china owl, like the last present. Or some horrid trick like a model of a mantrap or a china black horse. But it was worse than that.

I had braced myself for months, knowing that my birthday
was coming, sensing Ralph somewhere near my land. I had expected some warning from him. Some coded threat. I had imagined all the forms that it could take. But it was worse.

‘A tinderbox?’ asked John. ‘A little tinderbox? Why would anyone send you a tinderbox, Beatrice?’

I drew a deep shuddering breath and my eyes turned to Harry, the plump pompous fool who was my only help and support in this hating world that I had made all around me.

‘It is the Culler,’ I said in despair. ‘He sends me that, to tell me he means to fire the house. He will come soon.’ And I reached out to Harry as if I were being swept down the Fenny on a flood tide and the waters were closing over my head. But Harry was not there. The mist was in my head and before my eyes again, and this time the greyness was not damp and cold, but hot.

And it smelled like smoke.

I took to my bed like some London miss in a decline. I could think of nothing else to do. I feared and hated the village and did not want to go there. I could not hear the heartbeat of the land so the woods and the downs were no comfort to me. I knew that somewhere, in some secret hollow, Ralph was hiding, watching the house with his hot black eyes. Waiting for me. My office and my maps, my rent table and my accounts were just so much paper that would blaze up if someone set a tinderbox to them. There was nothing for me to challenge so I stayed in bed. I lay on my back and looked at the great carved canopy over my head, at the profusion of fruit and flowers and animals and I longed for a land like that. Where good things grew and one could eat and enjoy without starving another. And I knew, in my secret, despairing heart, that Wideacre had been a land like that before I had gone mad, and lost myself, and lost the heartbeat, and lost the love, and lost the land. All I had left to cling to was the future, was Richard and Julia and the world they might make if I could keep Wideacre long enough to hand over to them. But I was lost.

They treated me like an invalid. The cook dreamed up delicate little dishes to tempt me. But I had no appetite. How could I have? I had eaten hearty on days when I had roamed the land like a gypsy and come home dog-tired and starving. They
brought Richard in to see me, but he would not sit still beside me, and the noise he made hurt my head. Celia sat by my bed by the hour, sewing in the window seat with the warm May sunshine lighting her brown hair, or reading a book in companionable silence. Harry came in, clumsily tiptoeing, twice a day. Sometimes with a sprig of hawthorn for me or bluebells. And John came in, night and morning, with a cool hard look at me on his entrance. A phial of laudanum if I asked for it, and an expression in his pale eyes that was sometimes akin to pity.

He was working against me. I knew it without having to steal his letters or check the postbag. He had been in touch with his father, and with his father’s sharp Scottish lawyers, to see if they stood a chance of reclaiming what was left of his fortune. To see if they could disinherit my son. But I knew I had tied that rock-solid. I trusted my lawyers to have forged a contract that could be broken only by the signatories. And while I held Harry in the palm of my hand, Wideacre was safe for my son. And John could do nothing against me. But he stopped hating me throughout May while I lay in my bed dozing the warm days away. He was too good a doctor. All he could do, all his disposition and training and habits forced him to do, was to watch me and note the paleness in my cheeks and the shadows under my eyes, and the way I stared sightlessly at the wooden ceiling of my bed.

Under my pillows in the great bed were two things hidden. One, hard and square, was the tinderbox. I had taken the flint from it, and the tinder, for I had a fear now of fire, and every night I would insist that Harry went around the fireplaces of the Hall to check that they were all safely doused. Inside it I kept a twist of curl-paper with a handful of Wideacre earth in it. It was the earth I had clenched in my hand all the trembling walk home; I had kept it in the bottom of my jewel box all these long years. Now I put it with the tinderbox the Culler had sent me. Ralph’s earth in the Culler’s box. If I had been the witch they called me, I would have made magic with them. And the magic I would choose would have made me a girl again and this pain and hunger and death would not have been.

I lay like a tranced princess in a daydream of death. But Celia, pitying, forgiving Celia, laid little plans for me and tempted me from my bed.

‘Harry said the wheat was looking very well,’ she said one morning towards the end of May as she sat in the window seat of my bedroom and gazed over the rose garden and paddock to the woods and the high, high downs behind.

‘Yes?’ I said languidly. I did not even turn my head. Above me was the carved roof of the bed showing corn standing tall, fat sheep, cows in calf and a tumble of fruit and sheaves of wheat from a great twirly shell. A carving to bless the master of the land with a constant reminder that the land was fertile and easy.

‘It is high and silvery-green,’ Celia said. Somewhere, among the mist in my mind, the shape and colour of the rippling fields came back to me.

‘Yes,’ I said with more interest.

‘He says that the Oak Tree Meadow and Norman Meadow are growing a crop the like of which has never been seen in the country. Great fat heads of wheat and straight tall stalks,’ said Celia, her eyes on my suddenly brightening face.

‘And the common field?’ I asked, raising myself a little in bed and turning to look at Celia.

‘That is doing very well,’ said Celia. ‘It is so sunny there, that Harry says it will ripen early.’

‘And the new fields we enclosed up to the slopes of the downs?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know,’ said Celia slyly. ‘Harry did not say. I do not think he has been up that far.’

‘Not been up that far!’ I exclaimed. ‘He should be up there every day. Give those damned idle shepherds one chance and they’ll let the sheep in to graze it down to the root to try and show us that the downs should be left for sheep! Let alone the rabbits and the deer. Harry should be checking the fences around the corn fields every day!’

‘That is bad,’ said Celia ingenuously. ‘If only you could go and see for yourself, Beatrice.’

‘I’ll go,’ I said without thinking, and tossed back the covers and slid from my bed. The three long weeks in bed had made me weak, and my head swam when I leaped up. But Celia was at my side, and when Lucy came into the room they had my pale grey riding habit laid out for me.

‘Shouldn’t I still be in black?’ I asked, pausing at the sight of the pretty dress in the lighter material.

‘It has been nearly a year,’ Celia said, temporizing. ‘One would not wish to be lacking in attention but it is far too hot for your black velvet riding habit, Beatrice. And you always looked so lovely in this one. Wear it today, you are not going off the estate, and you will feel so much better in it.’

I needed no persuasion but slid the silk skirts over my head and buttoned the smart jacket. Lucy brought the little velvet cap that matched the outfit and I piled my chestnut curls into it carelessly, and pinned it securely. Celia gave a half-sigh as I stood before the mirror.

‘Beatrice, you are so beautiful,’ she said earnestly. I turned and looked at myself in the mirror.

My eyes looked back at me, the mouth curved in my quizzical smile. As I grew older and harder I had lost the magical prettiness that had been mine when Ralph loved me, and my beauty was like a luminous sunbeam in a dark barn. But the new lines around my mouth and the little trace of lines above my nose on my forehead from scowling had not robbed me of the beauty that comes to women with clear, lovely bones under smooth, glowing skin. I would be a beauty from now until the day of my death. Nothing would ever rob me of this. But in many ways it was changing. In some ways it was soured. The new lines did not matter, but the expression did.

Ignoring Lucy and Celia, I stepped closer to the mirror so my reflected face and my real one were just inches apart. The bones, the hair, the skin were as perfect as ever. But the expression had changed. When Ralph had loved me, my face was as open as a poppy on a summer morning. When I had desired Harry my secrets did not shadow my eyes. Even when John followed me, and courted me, and held my wrap for me after dancing, the smile on my mouth showed warm in my eyes and turned his heart over when he saw me. But now my eyes were cold. Even when my mouth was smiling, or when I was laughing, the eyes were as cold and sharp as splinters. And my face was closed in on the secrets I had to carry. My mouth had new lines because the lips pressed together, even in repose. My forehead had new lines because I frowned so often. With surprise I realized that when I
was old, my face would fall into the expression of a discontented woman. That I should not look as if I had enjoyed the best childhood anyone could have, and a womanhood of power and passion. I might think I had made a life to give me every sort of pleasure. But my face when I was forty would tell me that my life had been hard and my pleasures all paid for.

‘What is the matter?’ asked Celia gently. She had slipped from her window seat and come to stand beside me, her arm around my waist, her eyes on my face.

‘Look at us,’ I said, and she turned to look in the mirror as well. It reminded me of the day we were fitting for her wedding and my bridesmaid’s dress, so long ago at Havering. Then I had been a pattern for any man’s desire, and Celia had been a pale flower. Now as we stood side by side I saw she had worn the years better than I. Her happiness had put a bloom in her cheeks, a constant upturning of her mouth. She had lost the scared look she had worn at Havering Hall, and was ready to laugh and sing like a carefree bird. The battle she had fought and won, over John’s drinking, against her husband and Lord, Harry, and against her best friend, me, had put an aura of dignity around her. She still had her childlike prettiness, but she had cloaked that vulnerable girlishness with the dignity of knowing her mind when others did not. And being able to judge, and judge rightly, when those around her were ready to do wrong. She would be an old lady beloved for her charm, but also for her uncompromising moral wisdom.

It was not in Celia’s nature to be unforgiving, but she would never forget the selfishness I showed and Harry showed when John trembled at the sight of a bottle, and we drank before him and praised the wine. She no longer depended on me, and she would never trust me again. There was a little distance between us that not even Celia’s loving spirit would attempt to bridge. And as she watched my eyes in the glass I could no longer predict with certainty what she was thinking.

‘I think you could ride to see the wheat crop,’ she said temptingly. ‘I do think you could, if you wanted to, Beatrice.’

‘Yes,’ I said, smiling. ‘It has been nearly a year. I should love to ride up to the downs again. Tell the stables to get Tobermory ready for me.’

Celia nodded and took her dismissal from the room, pausing only to gather her sewing. Lucy handed me my grey kid gloves and my whip.