Wideacre (Wideacre Trilogy) (91 page)

Tobermory shivered in the breeze, not because it was cold, for it carried no freshness, but it blew like the breath of a threat. It was as hot as if it blew from India with the black magic of distant dangerous places. Margery Thompson had the corn-dolly on her lap and was muttering to it as if she were nursing a baby, and
chuckling to herself. The others had finished piling the stooks and were looking at her curiously. The stooks were heaped in an unstable pyramid in the middle of the field, wanting only the corn-dolly to top it off and to mark the end of the harvest.

‘There. ‘Tis done,’ she said, and tossed it high in the air. She threw it accurately and it balanced on the top of the pile. The reapers moved forward, drawn by the old tradition as if they hardly knew what they were doing, their sickles sharp in their hands.

The game was that they stood some distance from the heap and shied their sickles at it. The sickle that stuck in the dolly belonged to Bill Forrester and he walked wearily towards the stooks to claim his prize and bring it to me. But when it was in his hand he flushed scarlet to the roots of his hair and chucked it, like a football, to the man next to him. They tossed the dolly down the line and then one skilful hand, I don’t know whose, sent it whirling into the air towards me. Tobermory threw up his head in fright and I tightened one hand on the rein and caught the dolly — faster than thought, which would have warned me to let it fall.

It was not one corn-dolly but two. It was two figures coupled. It was the two-backed beast Mama had seen before the fire. A piece of grey ribbon filched from me was round the neck of one of the dollies, and a scrap of linen to indicate Harry was twisted around the other. The head of wheat that had been such a good bawdy joke four seasons ago was now obscene. The phallic sheath of corn was stuck between the other dolly’s straw legs. She was meant to be me; he was meant to be Harry. The secret was out.

Not out as gossip, I thought, shaken to stillness by this horror made from good Wideacre wheat, that seemed to stink in my hand. But out of something sensed. Something as threatening and permeating as woodsmoke. Something as indescribable yet as certain as the feel of thunder on the way. Margery Thompson, the clever old woman, had listened with her inner ear, and made a joke that hit the mark. The truth had come to her despite herself. She had not spoken it of her own free will. She had just smelled the stink of lust and incest that lingered around my skirts, that Celia feared and Mama had sensed. And she had
fashioned a horror from good Wideacre wheat to show that everything was wrong.

I tore at the delicate bodies and dropped them to the ground beneath Tobermory’s hoofs.

‘You disgust me,’ I said to the thickening air over their heads. ‘You are scum. You deserve to be treated like pigs for you think like swine. The treatment you have had from me has been the best I could do. But now I shall feel nothing, nothing for you. If we are at war then well and good. I shall enclose all the common. Indeed I shall enclose and flatten Acre village itself. I shall clear my land of you altogether. And the good clean land will grow pure without your stinking cottages, and your fearful children, and your dirty minds.’

The men had hunkered down again, and only the women sighed like fir trees when the first breath of a storm moves the feathery tops. But they did not weep or call out. The baking air was draining us all, sucking the strength from us in unpredictable eddies of little hot whirlwinds.

‘Now go,’ I said. My voice was full of hate but cracked with weariness and the dryness of my tense throat. ‘Go. And when I come to the harvest dinner this afternoon remember that the man there who does not doff his cap to me and the woman who fails to curtsy is penniless, homeless, and jobless, from that moment.’

They sighed again like a forest when a woodland fire is taking hold, licking like a lover up the young saplings while the tops of the trees flutter as if to call for help.

I wheeled Tobermory round and left them in the stubble. The wagons were lumbering over the fields towards the pile of stooks and I could see John Brien in the leading cart.

‘I’m away to change,’ I said. ‘I will come down to the mill later.’

‘There may be trouble at the harvest dinner,’ he said warningly, his strange town face forever fearful on the land, sharp in this early gloaming. His face was greenish yellow from the uneasy storm light. I heard a crackle, sharp as fire, in dry bracken behind me, and his face was suddenly blazing like a white angel as the sheet lightning dropped like a shard of glass on the upper horizon of the downs.

‘There is always trouble,’ I said wearily. ‘We can always arrest some young lads. We can always hang another old man. They can start trouble but we always finish it. I have men from Chichester to guard the corn tonight and till it is threshed. And Mr Gilby will send guards with his wagons. I do not fear Acre’s spite. And tomorrow I shall speak with you about expelling them all from Acre and firing the village. I want it no more. I need it no more.’

His weasel eyes glinted at the prospect of violence to the people he despised.

‘I shall see you at the mill,’ I said. ‘Make haste to get this load into the barn. I think the rain will hold off, but when it comes it will be a great storm.’

He nodded and cracked his whip at the horses but he need not have hurried. I was right about the rain. It held off for all of my wearisome ride home when I could scarcely breathe the hot air. I felt as if someone was holding a damp muffler over my mouth and if I could have breathed I would have screamed for help.

Even inside the Hall the light made everything strange. Celia’s parlour was an undersea green, and her face was white coral, a drowned virgin. Her eyes were like brown hollows in her head and when she poured my tea her hands were shaking.

‘What’s the matter, Celia?’ I asked.

‘I scarcely know,’ said Celia. She tried to laugh but the lilt in her voice had a hard edge. John was alert, his eyes on her strained face.

‘Are you unwell?’ he asked precisely.

‘No,’ said Celia. ‘I suppose it is just this horrid weather. This endless threat of storm that never comes weighs and weighs on me. I feel hot and then shivery. I have been down in Acre today and it feels all wrong there too. Some of the women seemed to be avoiding me. I feel certain that there will be trouble over the grain wagons, Beatrice. The air is full of threat. I feel almost fearful. I feel that something most dreadful is going to happen.’

‘It’s going to rain, that’s what’s going to happen,’ I said drily, to shake Celia out of her fancies. ‘It’s going to pour. We had better take the carriage to the harvest dinner and not the landau.’

She nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I ordered the coach. One does not have to be as weather-wise as you, Beatrice, to feel this storm
coming. I feel like a cat with my fur rubbed all the wrong way. I have felt thus for days. But I fear more than a storm. I fear the mood of Acre.’

‘Well, I shall soothe my nerves with a bath and a fresh dress,’ I said with pretended indifference. But I knew I had John’s eyes on my face, and I knew my eyes were dark with fear at Celia’s forebodings. ‘And then, I suppose, we will have to go. When did you plan we should be there, Celia? The carts will be unloaded within an hour.’

‘As soon as you wish,’ she said absently. As she spoke there was a rumble of thunder along the heads of the downs. Another flash, so bright it stabbed our eyes, lit the room with a blaze of blue and then vanished, leaving us blinking in total blackness. Celia laughed at her jump, but her voice had a high note of hysteria.

‘I will be quick then,’ I said. But I could not move fast. The air was too thick for me. It quivered around me with meanings and resonances with a stink of horror I could not face. I swam through it to the door and tried to smile casually at them. My teeth were bared in an awkward grimace and my eyes were dead and cold. John moved to open the door for me, and his fingers brushed my hand.

‘You are icy cold, Beatrice,’ he said, his professional interest kindled, but malice in his voice. ‘Have you a fever? Or are you, too, afraid of this storm? Do you also feel the tension, the hatred all around us?’

‘No,’ I said wearily. ‘I have been bringing in the corn for what seems like all my life. I have been out in the fields every day. While you two sit in the parlour and plot against me, and drink the tea my labour has paid for, I am out there in the baking sunlight trying to save Wideacre. But I would not expect anyone to understand that.’

‘I say, steady on,’ said Harry, roused at last from the plate of cakes on the little table before him. ‘You know why I cannot help, Beatrice. They pay no mind to me, and I cannot bear insult.’

My lips curved in a disdainful smile. ‘No reason why you should, Harry,’ I said. ‘I go out and bear it for you. For all of you.’ In my mind I saw again the obscene dollies and the
wheathead cock and the crafty skill of the making, as they seemed to roll over and over with their perverse passion, falling from the stook in the middle of their thrust.

‘I am tired,’ I said with finality. ‘Please excuse me, all of you. I should go and wash my ill-temper away.’

But I should have known better than to hope for decent service while there was a party starting at the mill. Every one of the kitchen staff had taken leave without one word of permission from me. The cook had taken a day off and gone to Chichester with Stride in the gig. Only Lucy was left to serve me and she complained bitterly about every hot water can she had to lug up the two flights of stairs and along three corridors.

‘That’s enough, Lucy,’ I said finally when I felt rested and brave again. ‘Now tell me again, who is in the house?’

‘Only the valets, Lady Lacey’s maid and me,’ said Lucy. ‘All the others have gone down to the mill. There’s a cold collation laid for your dinner.’

I nodded. In the old days the staff shared in every party and feast that the village could dream up. Sometimes they begged permission to borrow the paddock for Wideacre’s own sports events. But now the easy uncounting, uncalculating days were past.

‘I’ll dock them a day’s pay,’ I said while Lucy draped a towel around my shoulders, unpinned my hair and brushed it in long sweeps. She nodded. Her eyes meeting mine in the mirror were cold.

‘I knew you would,’ she said. ‘They knew you would. So they asked Lady Lacey, and she said they might go.’

I met her gaze with a long hard look that I held until her eyes dropped to her hands.

‘Warn them not to push me too far, Lucy,’ I said, my voice even. ‘I am tired of impertinence in the fields and house. If they push me too far they may be sorry they ever started. There are many servants looking for places, and I no longer have much attachment to people born and bred on Wideacre.’

She kept her eyes on the tumbled silk of my copper hair and brushed it in steady even sweeps. Then she deftly bunched it into one hand and twisted it into a smooth knot on the top of my head.

‘Beautiful,’ she said grudgingly. I looked at myself in the glass. I was lovely. The days in the field had bronzed me into my usual summer honey and now that the strained weary look had gone from my face I once more looked like a pretty twenty-year-old. The colour was back in my cheeks and there was a dusting of tiny freckles over my nose and upper cheekbones. Against the honey tea of my skin my hazel eyes gleamed greener than ever. My hair, burnished with the sun, was bronze as well as copper, and some of the curls around my face had even been sun-bleached to red-gold.

‘Yes,’ I said coldly, acknowledging like her the physical perfection of the oval face in the glass.

‘I’ll wear the green silk,’ I said, rising from the glass and dropping the damp towel on the floor for her to stoop and pick up. ‘I’m sick of greys and dark colours. And no gentry will be there.’

Lucy opened the wardrobe and shook out the deep green sack dress. A matching green stomacher tied tight at the front and a wide swaying panel shimmered loose at the back.

‘Good,’ I said, as she slid it over my head and tied the stomacher tight. ‘But I cannot breathe in here. Open the window, Lucy.’

She threw open the casement window but the heat and the damp air flowed in like a river of steam from a kettle to scorch the inside of my mouth and nose. Involuntarily I gave a little moan.

‘Oh, if only this weather would break,’ I said longingly. ‘I cannot breathe this air. I cannot move in this heat. Everything is so unbearably heavy all around me!’

Lucy looked at me without sympathy.

‘It’s affecting the children, too,’ she said. ‘Master Richard’s nurse asked if you would step into the nursery when you were changed. He is fretting and she thinks he may be cutting a tooth.’

I shrugged my shoulders. The fresh silk was already feeling too warm and sticky.

‘Ask Mr MacAndrew to go,’ I said. ‘I have to get ready to go to the mill. Mr MacAndrew will know what to do, and Richard minds him.’

Lucy’s eyes met mine and I read her instant condemnation of a woman who would not go to her own child when he was in pain and calling for her.

‘Oh, stop, Lucy!’ I said wearily. ‘Just tell him to go to the nursery at once, and then you come back and powder my hair.’

She went, obediently enough, and I moved to the window to try to breathe. The rose garden was drained of colour. I could not even remember how pretty it used to be before this nightmare light closed in. The green grass of the paddock was grey and ghostly looking. The scarlet roses in the garden looked green and sickly. The belly of the storm was leaning on the rooftop of the house and I looked up to a ceiling of purple clouds as billowing and claustrophobic as a tent. It stretched from the top of the downs to the top of the common without a break, without a chink to admit either light or air. The only light was the great dropping wall of sheet lightning that cracked as if the back of Wideacre had broken in two on the rack of my plans. The white light burned my eyes. I was still dazzled while Lucy powdered my hair and handed me my wrap.

‘I’ll take nothing. It’s too hot,’ I said. The merest touch of the pure wool on my fingers had me sweating and itchy.