Wideacre (Wideacre Trilogy) (92 page)

‘You don’t look well,’ said Lucy coolly. She cared nothing for me now. I could be dying and she would not care.

‘I am perfectly well,’ I said coldly. ‘You may go, Lucy. I shall not want you any more tonight. Are you and the valets and Lady Lacey’s maid going down to the mill?’

‘If we may,’ she said with a hint of insolence in her voice.

‘You may,’ I said, too weary to challenge her again. I had worn out any affection for me. I had worn out all the love that everyone had felt for me. I was still only a young woman but I had already lived too long. I had enjoyed my best years, the years when I was surrounded with love and everyone adored pretty Miss Beatrice. Now I was old and tired and longing for sleep. I swept past her, my silk train hushing behind me and rippling like a flood of green poison all the way down the stairs. I had lost my quick easy stride; I felt less like a pretty girl than a snail with its sticky trail over everything it touches.

They were waiting for me in the hall and the carriage was at the door. Harry, portly and pompous in his grey silk with a black
embroidered waistcoat and silver grey stockings. Celia, drained of colour in a navy silk dress, which made her strained face haggard in the yellowish storm light. John, handsome and meticulous as ever, and glowing with the knowledge that none of this could go on for much longer; that, like the storm, something was certain to break. Their faces turned to me as I came through the west-wing door and, in a sudden spurt of rebellion, I said to myself in horror, ‘My God! What have I done? I have planned my life and waded through blood; I have wilfully killed and accidentally killed and gone on and on with my heart growing harder and colder, so that this useless trio should live here in wealth and ease with clean consciences. So that I can see them every dreary day for the rest of my life. So that my long struggle should have as its goal seeing Harry, Celia and John every day until I die.’

I mastered my face with an effort and put my fingers to my forehead to smooth out the skin and the sudden expression of despair from my face.

‘I am sorry to have kept you waiting,’ I said. ‘Shall we go?’

Only Coachman Ben was there to drive us. The footmen were down at the mill released by dear Celia for a night out with the villagers. So John pulled in the steps and shut the door. The rocking of the carriage in the eerie light reminded me of my sickness at sea, and I pressed my lips together. Celia and John spoke in an undertone about the failure of their charity to make any real difference to Acre, and I heard again the rising note of panic in Celia’s voice when she said privately to John, ‘Whatever we do is simply not enough. However much we spend we seem only to delay a crisis. We solve nothing, and winter is coming.’

Her anxious voice set my teeth on edge and her words made me tense with foreboding. I bit my lips to keep my anger quiet.

The carriage rolled in the mill yard and a hundred pinched faces, greenish in the storm light, turned towards us. Celia alighted first, and there was a gentle murmur of called greetings for her. I came down the steps into a stony silence as cold as the millpond, but every woman dropped into a curtsy and every man doffed his cap or pulled his forelock. John was greeted with a few ‘Good days’, but Harry’s bluff shout, ‘Good day! Good harvesting!’ fell into an icy well of resentful silence.

‘Better get it over and done with,’ he said in a loud undertone to Celia, easing a finger under his tight stock.

‘Very well,’ she said. ‘Will you say grace?’

Harry looked abashed but strode over to the trestle table and waited until everyone was settled on a bench. Then he gabbled a string of Latin, which he may have understood once, and waved to Mrs Green at the kitchen door.

She marched out, her face set, carrying shoulder-high the great tray of sliced ham and chicken and beef, and crashed it on the table. Behind her came the Wideacre kitchenmaids all carrying great platters of cheeses and, behind them, the footmen with great loaves of our golden bread. There was no ripple of pleasure at the sight, no cheers as the enormous amounts were laid on the table. The heart was out of Wideacre. They were hungry; they were starving. And they had forgotten the taste of meat. There was no fighting. They were too exhausted to fight. Their good behaviour was partly a courtesy to Celia and John, but also because they had gone beyond fighting. They were resigned now to dying of hunger together, and there was no one sufficiently angry or sufficiently hopeful to grab his neighbour’s portion. The natural leaders of the village — old Tyacke and the three lads — were gone. All there was left were the miserable poor, enduring their hunger in silence. Expecting death this winter, and fearing it no more. They were so hungry — it gave me a shiver to see — they could not eat.

At the Christmas party they had scrambled for food, clawing like savages, as wild as hungry animals. But now at the harvest dinner the sharp new hunger had gone from them. They could eat little or nothing. They had forgotten how to relish food; the tasty cheese and the sweet-cured ham had lost their savour. And their poor shrunk bellies could manage proper amounts of food no more. They were used to famine. And they could eat only little.

Instead they shamelessly folded great doorstep slices of bread and meat and cheese and stuffed wedges of food in every pocket and handy corner of their clothes. They took food like squirrels preparing for a hard winter — in enormous amounts. But even then they did not grab. They helped each other now, and the frailest older people were given their share by young men whose
own cheeks were pinched and white. Saddest of all was the way that these old people in their turn pressed extra pieces of meat on the mothers with small children. One girl, with a look of blank despair on her face, was pregnant, and with tender courtesy her neighbours on either side of the bench ensured she had wrapped up meat and cheese in her kerchief to take with her. They no longer grabbed food from each other’s mouths. They had learned the discipline of hunger, and they had been shocked by wintertime deaths. Now they shared, even when their own bellies rumbled and pained them.

The ominous dark sky billowed overhead but here on the lower ground we could not even feel the slight breeze that had blown at the Hall. We could see its passing in the way the treetops swayed and the pine trees moaned as it grew stronger. Then there was a crash like a thousand trees falling and the scene was suddenly frozen in a snowy glare and the thunder roared at us. Celia beside me suddenly swayed, and grabbed my arm.

‘I can’t stand this,’ she gasped. John instantly had an arm around her waist supporting her.

‘Get her away!’ he said abruptly to Harry, and supported Celia the few steps to the carriage. Coachman Ben, a hearty eater at the Hall kitchen, had not joined his hungry family at the table but came out of the purple shadows when he saw we were ready to leave.

‘We will be off then!’ said Harry, his voice like a foghorn above the rising wind. ‘We will say goodnight, and thank you for your labours.’

I stepped into the carriage and sat beside Celia. Her hands were as cold as ice and she kept twisting them in her lap as if she were trying to pull invisible rings off her fingers. She shuddered every now and then, and gasped. I thought then that we might have got away with it, but I had forgotten Harry’s infallible instinct for doing the wrong thing.

He climbed into the carriage and then turned to call from the open door.

‘So Wideacre is not so bad, hey?’ he shouted. ‘There’s not many estates left where they still bring the harvest in with a free dinner, you know!’

The rising wind moaned and the muffled voices moaned with
it. The hollow hungry despairing eyes lifted from the table and fixed themselves on Harry at the steps of the carriage, and me at the window as if they could burn us up with the hatred of their gaze.

‘What about the corn?’ yelled one voice, and the rabble’s chorus of hate swelled beneath it.

‘Wideacre grown should be Wideacre sold, Wideacre milled, Wideacre fed!’ they rumbled. At the kitchen door of the mill I saw Miller Green appear and his eyes met mine in a message of cold hatred.

Harry hesitated, as if to shout down the rising hum of voices, but I tweaked his jacket and said quickly, ‘Harry come!’ and he pulled in the steps and slammed the door. The carriage tipped as he slumped back in his seat opposite me. Celia was gasping like a beached salmon and her face was ashen in the darkness of the coach.

‘I cannot stand it,’ she said again.

‘What’s the matter?’ I asked, my voice arid.

‘I cannot stand living like this any longer,’ she said. Her eyes were burning. She grabbed my hand and held it so hard she hurt me.

‘I will not live like this,’ she said. ‘These people are dying of hunger. The children are starving and their arms and legs are like sticks. I cannot eat in the Hall while there is starvation in the village.’

The coach was wheeling around; we would soon be away. There was another flash of lightning and every detail of the death’s-head feast was as bright as white noon. They were still seated at the trestle and every great platter of food had been cleared; there was not even a crumb left behind. In one corner of the yard a hungry child was retching desperately, choked on his first decent meal in half a year. His mother was holding the little heaving body, tears pouring down her face. The young girls in stained and ragged linen were not flirting with the lads. They had laid their dirty weary heads on the table, or were staring dully into space as if they had no interest in courtship and love, with their hunger and the fear of hunger a hollow under their ribs.

It had taken less than a year to turn the thriving, jolly, noisy,
courting, wedding, bedding village of Acre into a graveyard for the walking dead with hollow eyes and sad faces. They looked ready for the workhouse. They looked like labourers fit for the new workhouses where they like quick fingers, no strength, but a dogged determination to get through the day, to collect the penny to buy a crust of loaf and some gin to get through another despairing night.

These were the walking dead from Harry’s great vision of the future. I had known it would be like this. I had killed them.

The carriage rolled forward, and another flash of lightning cracked over our heads and made the horses shy. The villagers saw my white face staring from the window, and Harry’s fat head near mine. They saw the horror but no pity in my eyes. From the back of the yard I saw an arm swing and I jerked back from the window in an instinctive reaction. The stone smashed into the glass and splinters and shards shattered into the coach like ice. Celia’s fine silk and mine were sprinkled with splinters of glass and John and Harry’s boots crunched on the shards on the floor of the coach.

A scratch on the back of my hand welled red, and I dabbed at it with a ribbon, feeling a sliver of glass dig deep into the cut, but feeling no pain.

Neither pain nor resentment, while the coachman whipped up the frightened animals and Harry exploded with rage. Celia hid her face in her hands and wept like a comfortless child. The carriage swayed, the horses near bolting in their fright at the thunder and the wind lashing the trees. Over the noise of the rumble of wheels was the louder rumble of thunder as it rolled around the top of the downs, but still it did not rain. Through the jagged hole of the window hot air blew in my face making me gasp with the stifling heat of it.

‘If only it would rain,’ I said absently.

‘Rain!’ Celia cried out, and her gentle voice was harsh. ‘I wish it would rain a flood and sweep the whole of this cruel country away and Wideacre with it!’

‘I say!’ said Harry feebly. ‘You’re upset, Celia, and no wonder! Villains they are! I’ll have the whole village cleared! I’ll not have them on my land!’

Celia turned on him, her eyes blazing. ‘It is we who are the
villains, not they!’ she said, half stammering in her rage. ‘How could you, how
could
you, have let such a life come about? On your own land, Harry! We treat the poor worse than a northern coal baron! We feed the horses in our stables with more care than those little children are fed! We should be the ones who are chased by soldiers in the wood and hanged. It should be us who go hungry, for it is the four of us who let this plague of unhap-piness loose on Wideacre. John and I are to blame as well as you, for we stood by and tried to help in foolish little ways. But it is you and Beatrice who are most at fault, Harry, for you should never have farmed in this way that kills people. You are ploughing lives into Wideacre, not seaweed. You are sowing our downfall, not seeds. And I will not have it!’

The carriage stopped outside the Hall and Celia pushed past me, swung open the door and jumped down in a shower of glass. I would have grasped Harry’s hand for a few urgent words but John swept him in after Celia and there was no time to prompt him.

‘We farm Wideacre in the only way there is to produce a good yield,’ said Harry defensively, standing before the empty grate of the parlour. The thunder rumbled outside in a nightmare contradiction, half drowning his words.

‘Then we must content ourselves with less yield,’ said Celia sharply. She was riding the storm of her anger. Her moral force was based on her certainty of being right. Celia never spoke as a stratagem; she only ever spoke out when her stern, unswerving conscience told her she must.

‘Yields are hardly a matter for you, my dear,’ said Harry, with a warning note in his voice.

‘They are when the carriage is stoned with me inside!’ Celia retorted, her colour blazing in her cheeks. ‘They certainly are when I cannot pray in my parish church because behind me there are hungry people, dying people, facing starvation.’

‘Now!’ said Harry, raising his voice. ‘Now, I won’t have this, Celia.’

I nodded at John. ‘Come,’ I said, and turned towards the door.

‘Oh, no,’ said John not moving. ‘This is not a private affair between Harry and Celia that they should settle in privacy. This
is an issue that concerns us all. Like Celia I cannot live here while this starvation goes on. Another winter is coming, and the last one took famine within a hair’s breadth of that village. I won’t leave this room until we have decided to restore the common plots for vegetables and you have agreed to open up the common land again.’