Wideacre (Wideacre Trilogy) (87 page)

‘I hope you do not think I am exceeding my position,’ he said nervously. ‘I hold no brief for improvidence. No one who knows me or my connections could ever doubt for a moment my proper feeling on the treatment and discipline of the poor. But I must speak to you about this wheat crop, Mrs MacAndrew.’

I smiled then, conscious of my power.

‘Speak then, Vicar,’ I said. ‘And I will do what I can.’

‘They are saying in the village that the crop is sold already,’ he said, his eyes on my nod of assent. ‘They are saying in the village that the whole of the crop, every wagonload, will be sent away to London.’ I nodded again. ‘They are saying in the village that they do not know where they will buy their corn to grind for flour to make bread.’

‘At Midhurst market, I assume,’ I answered coolly.

‘Mrs MacAndrew, there will be a riot!’ exclaimed the Vicar. ‘Of the three major suppliers of corn, two of you — Wideacre and the Havering estate — are sending grain out of the county. Only the little Tithering estate is selling locally. There will be hundreds of families needing corn and only one farm selling at Midhurst. The corn will simply run out.’

I shrugged, and made a little grimace. ‘Then they will have to go to Petworth, or Chichester,’ I said.

‘Can you not stop this?’ Dr Pearce’s tone was suddenly ragged with fear, his urbane smiling face suddenly naked with concern. ‘The whole village has changed almost overnight, it seems. The fences went up and the heart went out of it. Can you not take the fences down and restore the land? When I first arrived here, I heard from everyone that no one knew the land like you. No one loved the land like you. That you were the heart of Wideacre. Now all I hear is that you have forgotten your skills, forgotten that these people are your people. Can’t all this be restored?’

I looked coldly at him through the wall of glass that now separated me from everyone.

‘No,’ I said. ‘It is too late. They will have to pay dear for corn this year or do without. You may tell them that next year it will be better, but this year Wideacre has to sell to the London
market. If Wideacre does not prosper, no one prospers. They know that. I am ensuring their ultimate prosperity. The way of the world is that the poor survive only if the rich prosper. If the poor want to eat, the rich have to be enriched. That is the way the world is. And Wideacre is not nearly wealthy enough to be safe.’

Dr Pearce nodded. The opulent dinners at Oxford, his landed friends and family, the shooting parties, the dances, the balls, had been his world. He was one of those who do indeed believe the world is a better place for the rich becoming wealthier. And he had read a hundred clever books written solely to prove that point. He himself longed to increase his tithes on the back of our bumper crop. He belonged, like me, to the rich. And his eyes glistened, despite his concern, at my picture of an inevitable process whereby we gained and gained and gained, and no one could blame us or gainsay us.

‘It is the children,’ he said weakly.

‘I know,’ I said. I reached into a drawer in my desk and found a guinea. ‘Here,’ I said. ‘Buy the children some toys, or sweetmeats, or food.’

‘The coffins are so very tiny,’ he said, more to himself than to me. ‘The father generally carries it in his arms. It is so light, you see. They do not need pallbearers. For the children who are dying are so small, and when they die of hunger they are as light as babies by the time they die — little arms and legs like dry sticks. When they lower it into the grave it is such a little hole.’

I tapped the bundle of papers on my desk with a sharp click to recall him to his surroundings. He was gazing out of the window, but not seeing the budding tea-roses and the fat boughs of white sweet lilac.

‘Was there anything else?’ I asked abruptly. He jumped, and reached for his hat.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I apologize for troubling you.’ Then he kissed my hand without a shadow of reproach, and he was gone.

So that was the champion of the Acre poor! I watched his glossy bay cob amble down the drive, its plump haunches rolling. Small wonder they dreamed of revenge, of a man to ride like a devil before them to lead them against the people with plump faces who lived on dainties and drank only the very best of
wines. While the comfort-loving, biddable, Vicar of Acre stood between them and me, they had scant protection indeed. They must think, indeed by now they should know, that the whole of the world was against them. That for me, and for people like me — the ones who ate four times a day — the poor were there to work. And if there were no work? Then there was no need for them to live.

There was a knock at the door, and Richard’s nurse came into the room. ‘Do you wish to see Master Richard before dinner?’ she asked.

‘No,’ I said wearily. ‘Take him out for a walk in the garden. I can see him through the windows.’

She nodded, and a few minutes later I saw her stooping over my son, helping him to toddle from one bright rose bush to another, and patiently, repeatedly, putting a petal in his hand and then, reprovingly, taking it out of his mouth.

The thick glass of my office window muffled the sound. I could scarcely hear my son’s clear lisping voice. I could not make out at all the words he was struggling to say to express his joy at the gravel beneath his feet and the petal in his hand, and the sunshine on his face. Through the thick glass of the window all the colour seemed drained from the landscape. And the little flaws in the glass made him and his nurse seem a long way away. The window pane was like the lens of a telescope held the wrong way. As I watched him he seemed to recede even further. Further and further away from me. A little boy in the sunshine, too far for me to recognize as my own. And I could not hear his voice.

19

T
he news Dr Pearce took back to the village only confirmed their fears and when we drove to church, in summer silks and satins, the faces were no more surly than usual. Celia and I led the way, our trains hissing up the aisle to the family pew, followed by Harry and John, and then the two nurses with the children. Julia toddling slowly, and with many an unpredictable swerve, and Richard carried in Mrs Austin’s arms.

As I passed up the aisle, my grey silk rustling around me, my new bonnet of twilled satin tied with a silky fat bow framing my face, I could feel a stir of unease like a wind in the top of the pine trees on a still summer’s day. I slid my eyes to one side and then another and what I saw made me draw in my breath in horror.

On the pew sides, all the way down the church, I could see the callused hands of our workers. As they heard my heels tap on the stones of the aisle, they all clenched into a protective fist, with the index finger crossing the thumb. The sure defence against a witch. The one-handed secret sign of the cross. I walked, smoothly, stately, between the avenue of pagan fists. I looked neither to left nor right again. But their hatred and their fear of me followed me like a court train on a ball dress.

Once I was inside the pew, and the door safely closed behind us, all anyone could see of me was the grey silk bow on the top of my bonnet. I dropped my head on my hands then as if in prayer. But I had no prayers. I was just resting my burning forehead against my icy fingers and trying to blot out the sight of all those honest dirty hands making the sign of the cross against me. Trying vainly to ward off the evil they thought I carried with me.

Dr Pearce preached a good sermon. I listened, stony-faced. His theme was that wonderfully ambiguous instruction of rendering unto Caesar, and he made a persuasive case for resting content
under the civil authorities — whatever they chose to do to their people. I doubt if any of his parishioners heard a word. There was a continual clatter of the dry coughs that indicate consumption, and a muffled choking from a child with pleurisy. A hungry baby cried unceasingly at the back of the church, a thin despondent wail. Even in the richly panelled, well-cushioned Wideacre pew there was no peace. Even when the Vicar told us, his uncertain eyes on Harry and me, that the word of the Lord said we might always do as we pleased.

After the final psalm I walked down the aisle again. Conscious, at every step, of the dull, resentful eyes on my face, and the rare warm glances directed at Celia, half a step before me. We no longer lingered in the churchyard to say good day to the tenants. That tradition had somehow vanished. But while we walked to the carriage I saw, from the corner of my eyes, the rotund figure of the miller, Bill Green, burst from the church porch and march determinedly towards the carriage.

‘Miss Beatrice!’ he called. ‘Good day, Squire, Lady Lacey, Dr MacAndrew,’ he said in an afterthought, recollecting his manners. Then his anxious eyes were on my face again as I settled myself in the carriage.

‘Miss Beatrice, I need to speak to you. May I come to the Hall today?’

‘On a Sunday?’ I asked, my eyebrows raised in genteel disapproval.

‘I have called on many a working day and you have been too busy to see anyone from Acre,’ said Miller Green, breathlessly. ‘But I must have speech with you, Miss Beatrice.’

The other parishioners were coming from the church door, staring curiously at the miller, whose usually happy face was now strained. One hand on my carriage door, begging for one moment of my time.

‘Very well,’ I said with my new dislike of the Acre poor when they were all together in a group staring at me. ‘Very well. Come to the Hall at three this afternoon.’

‘Thank you,’ he said. He stepped back with a little bow and I saw that his plump cheeks were sagged and that his bright skin colour had gone. He looked sallow and ill.

I did not need a visit from him to tell me what was wrong. I
had seen this meeting coming from afar off, as soon as Harry and I agreed to send Wideacre corn out of the county.

‘This will ruin me, Miss Beatrice,’ Miller Green said desperately. ‘If Acre people have no corn they will not bring it to me for the grinding. If your tenant farmers sell all their corn in the grain they will not use my mill to make flour. If you send the whole crop out of the county, where am I to buy my grain to grind for flour to supply the bakers who buy from me?’

I nodded. I was sitting at my desk, the window to the rose garden open behind me. The two children were playing in the paddock and John and Celia were strolling behind them, watching Richard’s nurse steering him along the footpath towards the wood. Celia’s cream parasol was an echo of the daisies, cream roses, and rare white poppies. I had seated Miller Green at the rent table and ordered him a glass of small beer, but it stood beside him, untouched. He twisted and turned on the chair like a dog with fleas. He was a proud man, a rising man. But now he was a man in a panic. He could see his plans and his newly won prosperity sliding away from him as water slides over his millwheel.

‘Miss Beatrice, if you do not want the millwheel, which your grandfather built, to lie idle, if you want the poor to eat, if you want our lives here to go on at all, you must, you must, reserve some of the crop for sale locally,’ he said desperately. ‘Miss Beatrice, there’s me and my wife and our three lads, all three working on the parish gang now for poor parish rates. Little money coming in from them, and much shame for them. If we lose the mill, it will be the workhouse for us, for we will be penniless and homeless in one night.’

I nodded again, my eyes towards the garden. John and Celia had reached the gate to the wood. With tender patience they turned back towards the house so that the children should have the smooth grass of the paddock under their tottery feet. I saw Celia nod, her little bonnet tip in emphasis, and saw John throw his head back to laugh at her. I could not hear them. The window was open but there was still a wall of glass all around me. The glass made it possible for me to watch my son learning to walk holding another woman’s hands, with utter indifference; to tell this good man, this old friend, that he would indeed have to go
to the workhouse and die in poverty and sorrow; to tell him that my will was as strong and unstoppable as the grinding stones of the mill. And that he and all the grasping, desperate, poor of Acre should be crushed and powdered so that a little boy, just learning this day to walk, should ride tall over the land.