Wideacre (Wideacre Trilogy) (90 page)

I scowled dreadfully. ‘I never meant Celia to take me seriously,’ I said. ‘It will have to be cancelled.’

‘As you wish,’ said Harry uncertainly. ‘But everything is prepared, and everyone seems to be planning to come. It might be easier to go through with it than to cancel outright.’

I nibbled the tip of my finger, lost in thought.

‘Oh, very well,’ I said. ‘If it is all planned, and Miller Green has not refused, I suppose it should go ahead. But it is odd, midway between the old ways and the new like this.’

‘Perhaps when they have brought the corn in they will all cheer up and have a good party,’ Harry said witlessly. ‘Perhaps it will be like that first wonderful summer.’

‘I doubt it,’ I said. ‘One never gets the same summer twice. And Wideacre is all different these days. And you are different. And I would not know myself.’ I paused, my voice had sounded so sad. ‘Anyway,’ I said briskly, ‘if it is all planned it will have to go ahead. And we can leave early if there is any unpleasantness.’

Harry went off to change and take coffee, a little soothed, and was able to pour out the tale of his wrongs to Celia’s sympathetic ear. But when she, prompted by a hard look from John, suggested that the men would not have been so rude if they had not been in despair, Harry was quickly up on his high ropes.

‘Now, Celia,’ he said, wagging a plump finger at her. ‘You must let Beatrice and me run the land as we see fit. If they have to tighten their belts in Acre for a few days that will do no great harm. It will give them an appetite for your harvest supper! Beatrice and I know best on this.’

Celia opened her mouth to reply, but then thought better of it. She shot a swift glance at John from under her eyelids. They needed nothing more. They understood each other so well. John now took up the debate, knowing, without being told, that Celia could not challenge Harry further than she had done.

‘Celia is right, you know, Harry,’ said John. He was hiding his distaste of Harry in his anxiety to get Harry to see reason about the land.

‘Celia and I have spent much time in Acre recently,’ said John. He spoke with his old incisive authority. ‘We have set in hand a system so the food we give is distributed first to the families with ill children, then to the old people, and then to the other families in need. But it is evident to me that we can do nothing effective while there is no long-term solution to the problem of poverty on Wideacre.’

‘No one denies that!’ said Harry. ‘It is a hard time for all of us who are dependent on the land.’ He took another cake and bit into it with resolution.

‘It’s not just “hard” in Acre,’ John said patiently. ‘There will soon be many deaths through starvation if nothing is done. The supply of food we have provided can keep some families going, but there are more of them in need than we can satisfy.’

‘That is because they insist on having large families,’ I said coldly. ‘They bear children with no idea how to support them. All you two have been doing is encouraging them to live in a fool’s paradise. While you give them free food they will never understand the way of the real world.’

John shot me a hard look. ‘This real world of yours, Beatrice,’ he said in a tone of detached interest, ‘this is the world where you can employ every man in Acre for hundreds of years, and then suddenly refuse to keep any, save two skilled workers, on the wage books?’

I said nothing.

‘This real world is one where there is no way of preventing the
conception of children and yet the bastards of Quality wear silk and can look forward to inheritances? Yet the legitimate children of the poor go hungry?’

I knew he was thinking of two bastards, two incestuous bastards, in this house. I said nothing again, but I shot a murderous glance at Harry who was licking his fingers and looking at John.

‘No wonder they do not understand the real world,’ said John, ‘for this real world of yours baffles me. I have never been anywhere like Wideacre and I have travelled all around England and Scotland. In less than a year this estate has gone from being one of the most profitable, happiest places in the county. Now it is in the hands of the creditors, and the poor are starving. Which picture is real? The reality you inherited, or this horror you have made?’

‘Now, now,’ said Harry, blustering after catching my look. ‘It is no use blaming Beatrice simply because we now farm in the way of everyone else. Of course we farm for maximum profit. Beatrice has simply employed the obvious methods.’

‘It seems to me that there is a choice,’ said John. He was still infuriatingly cool, as if he were conducting a debate at his university chambers. I walked to the fireplace, leaned one arm along the cool mantelpiece and watched him.

‘There is the choice between saying the important thing in life is to make as much money as possible and saying the important thing is trying to live without abusing other people. Perhaps even to try to make their lives a little better. You and Beatrice — forgive me, Harry — seem to be committed to profit at any price. I find I don’t admire that.’

John’s look at Harry and me was like a lance on a gangrenous wound. He made me feel filthy. I gave an affected sigh.

‘Really, John, for a nabob’s son your moral obligations to profit sit rather oddly! You can enjoy the luxury of a conscience because someone else did the dirty work of earning the wealth for you. You were born and bred to a massive fortune. It is easy enough for you to despise wealth.’

‘I
had
so much,’ he corrected me, a gleam in his eyes. ‘You had better pray I do despise wealth, Beatrice. For I have my wealth no longer.’

Celia leaped to her feet, then checked herself. She had been
about to run from the room but she hesitated and turned to Harry.

‘We all seem to be talking about different things and even quarrelling,’ she said sadly. ‘But while we talk things get worse and worse in Acre. Harry, I do implore you to stop this headlong dash for profit and at least give the poor the chance to buy Wideacre wheat at a proper price.

‘We all know that forestalling the market is wrong. Your papa never did it. You promised that you would never do it. Please, please, sell the wheat to the village.’

‘Now, Celia!’ said Harry, falling back on the reliable weapon of a loud-voiced bluster. ‘Are you accusing me of breaking my word? Are you challenging my honour?’

‘Oh, no!’ she said. ‘But …’

‘That’s enough!’ said Harry, with a bully’s abruptness. ‘Beatrice is running the land as we see fit. And I shall go harvesting another year, when Acre has come out of this fit of the sullens. This conversation is closed.’

Celia dropped her eyes to the coffee jug and I saw a single tear fall like a raindrop on to the silver tray. But she said nothing. And John, after one compassionate glance at her downcast face, said nothing more. I waited until I was sure they were completely silenced and then I went back to my office. I had work to do.

At last the prospects seemed to be brightening. The fields were being cut faster than ever before and I was out every day in a fever of impatience to get the job done.

Not only could I see the chance of a great bounty on the way for Wideacre, and a chance to be free, utterly free, of the creditors but I also felt a storm in the air. It prickled on the horizon. I felt it on my skin. The skies were clear, I could not wish for clearer. But I could feel the clouds massing against me, somewhere over the horizon.

The days were hot, too hot. They had lost their honest summertime heat and were sultry, threatening. Tobermory’s neck was streaked with sweat even while he stood in the shade and the flies buzzed ominously low about his head. The men in the field suffered as it became hotter and damper. One day a reaper fainted — Joe Smith, old Giles’s son. He fell on his sickle like a fool and the line broke as they ran around him. I rode over. It was a nasty wound, open nearly to the bone.

‘I’ll send for the Chichester surgeon,’ I said generously. ‘Margery Thompson can bind it up for now, and I will send for the doctor to stitch it for you.’

Joe looked up at me, white with shock, his dark eyes hazy.

‘I’d rather have Dr MacAndrew if I may, Miss Beatrice,’ he said humbly.

‘Get in the wagon then,’ I said with sudden temper. ‘It’s going up to the Hall. I think your beloved Dr MacAndrew is in. If he’s out doing good deeds in Acre you can sit in the stable yard and wait for him. I hope you don’t bleed to death while you are waiting.’

And I wheeled Tobermory and trotted back to my patch of shade by the hedge, and watched them help Joe into the wagon. He was in luck, John was in the garden and saw him as soon as the wagon drew up in the stable yard. He treated him for free and with such skill that Joe was out gleaning two days later. Another proof of John’s skill. Another reason for them to love him. Another enemy of mine.

I was surrounded by them. I worked all day in a field full of men who hated me and women who feared me. I slept at night with only a door between me and a man who wished for my death. And I woke every dawn to know that somewhere, out on the downs, was another enemy who was planning my death, who was readying himself to come for me.

The weather seemed to hate me. The heat held but there was no wind. The wheat barely rustled before it was cut down. In the hot humid days there was utter silence. The men did not talk in the fields; the women did not sing. Even the little children, twisting the stalks for tying the stooks, played and spoke in whispers. And if I rode Tobermory over towards them, they backed away with silent mouths agape, black stubs of teeth showing, and melted, like diseased fox cubs, into the hedgerow.

Not even the birds sang in the heat. You would think they shared Wideacre’s baking despair and were silent for sorrow. Only in the cool ominous dawns and in the uneasy twilight would they start up and their voices sounded eerie, like the whine of a whipped dog.

The light seemed wrong to me, as well. I was coming half to believe that it was my eyes and senses that were deceiving me,
tricking me into fearing a storm when I so desperately needed a settled calm. But if I had mistrusted the prickle down my sweaty spine, and the wet smell of the heavy air, I could not be wrong over the brightness of the day. It stung my eyes. It was not the brightest honest yellow heat of a Wideacre midsummer, but something with a sickly dark core. A bluish light, a purple light hung over us. A sun like a red wound in a yellowing sky. When I opened my eyes in the morning I shuddered instinctively as if I had a fever. I dressed in my hot full-skirted habit with no joy. The sky was like an oven above me, and the ground as hard as iron beneath my feet, all the moisture baked from it. The Fenny was shrunk so small I could not hear its ripple from my bedroom window, and when it flowed through Acre it stank with the slops thrown into it, and the cattle fouling it. I too felt desiccated: as dry as an old leaf, or an empty seashell when the smooth little wet animal that lived inside it is dead.

So I hurried the reapers. I was there first in the field every morning, and last to leave every night. I rode them as I would a sluggish horse and they would have kicked out if they had dared. But they could not. Whenever they halted the line to wipe their heads or to rub the stinging sweat from their eyes they would hear me call, ‘Reapers, keep moving!’ And they would groan and grasp the handle of the sickle — slick with sweat and turning painfully even in their callused hands. They did not murmur against me. They had not even breath enough to curse me. They worked as if they just longed for the whole miserable job to be done, the harvest in, and winter to bring cold starvation and quick death to end it all.

And I sat high on the sweating horse, my face white and strained beneath the cap that cast no shade on my eyes, and knew that longing for myself. I was bone-weary. Tired with days and days of watching and worrying and driving them, and driving myself. And tired with a deep inner sickness that said to me as slowly and as firmly as a funeral bell, ‘All for nothing. All for nothing,’ as if the words made any sense at all.

But we were nearly done. The stocks were piled in the centre of the field awaiting the wagons, and the men had collapsed, gasping in the airless shade of the hedge. The women and the old people stacking the stooks were nearly finished, and the men
watched their bent-backed wives and parents with lack-lustre beaten eyes, without the strength to help them.

Margery Thompson, who had been at the vicarage when John saved Richard’s life, had ceased her work already. I watched her under my eyelashes, my attention suddenly sharpened with unease. She had seated herself on the bank by the hedge and was twisting stalks of corn on her lap. It is the tradition on Wideacre that the last stook, the last one of the whole harvest, is a corn-baby, a corn-dolly. Woven by the cleverest old woman, the doll represents the leader of the harvest. Season after season I had loaned my ribbons to make the circle of magic between the harvest and me complete. I had seen a little corn-dolly Beatrice triumphant at the top of the pile of stooks. In the year Harry brought in the harvest the corn-dolly was bawdy, with a scrap of linen for its shirt and a head of wheat between the stalk legs, grotesquely erect, and everyone had roared. Harry had taken that one home, grinning, and hid it from Mama. The corn-dollies they had made for me were pinned on the wall of my office. Proof, if ever I was near forgetting, that the world of papers and debts and business was the pretend life, and the real world was the corn and the goddesses of the fertile earth.

The corn-dolly tradition had slipped from my worried, money-mad mind, but as I watched the old woman’s nimble fingers moving so cleverly and so quickly among the stalks I knew a twinge of dread warning me of some fresh disaster, that some magic against me was brewing.

The clouds had come out from hiding at last and were piling up on the horizon like great walls, blocking out the eerie sunlight and making a premature dusk. It had held off long enough to save me. As long as the wagons came safely through, and took Wideacre’s corn to the richest market in the world, the rain could pour down and wash Acre and all Wideacre into the Fenny for all I cared. I had done what I set out to do, and I cared little if the storm drowned me.