Wideacre Read online

  Of course it would end. If he went on down this road he would make a serious proposal of marriage and have to be seriously refused, and then this innocent, pleasurable time would be over. But while it lasted, while each day brought me a visit from him, or a book he had promised, the loan of his beloved Sea Fern for a treat, or a posy of flowers, I found I woke each morning with a smile and the recollection of some phrase he used, a mental picture of him. And I started my day in a small ripple of pleasure.

  I had never before been wooed by a man of my own class and so I was new to the trivial delights of a Quality courtship. The way he touched my fingers when I passed him a teacup, or the way his eyes would meet mine in a room full of people. I liked knowing that the second I came into a room, perhaps at one of the assemblies at Chichester, he would see me and make his way to me. Or if he were in a set preparing to dance I smiled at the secret knowledge that wherever I was in the room, whether before his eyes or behind him, he was acutely aware of my presence. Then, when tea was served, he would be at my chair with a little plateful of my favourite cakes and the eyes of the whole room on us both.

  I was so entranced by this courtship of tenths of inches, which progressed invisibly, slowly, that I relaxed my awareness of Celia and Harry. In this new, trivial pleasure I had forgotten my old agonized desire for Harry. In the certainty of my mastery of the land — now accepted by everyone — I no longer needed to dominate the Master of Wideacre himself. Harry could be my partner, my colleague. If I was secure on the land I did not need him as a lover.

  Of all people it was Celia, who had done so much to create this oasis of peace, who spoiled it. Of all people who suffered from it, it was she who lost as much as anyone. Of course, being Celia, the mistake came from love and tenderness. But if she had stayed silent that once, stayed silent for that one summer, it could all, even then, have been a different story.

  But not Celia. Her mama had tackled her about the separate bedrooms she and Harry occupied. My mama had mentioned the need of a son to follow the triumph of the angel baby. Her own honest conscience reminded her nightly at her prayer time that she had not done her duty by Harry since the baby he loved was not their child. But most importantly for Celia, for Harry and, of course, for me, was that she was learning to love him.

  Harry, viewed every day from breakfast to dinner, was neither tyrant nor monster. She heard him being reproved by bis mama for being late for lunch; she heard his sister mock his newfangled ideas on farming; she saw him accept reproof and teasing with unshakeable sunny good nature. The arrangement of their married life he accepted with unswerving cheerfulness. He never unlocked the adjoining door between their two bedrooms, although she knew he had the key. He always entered her room from the corridor and he always knocked first. When he greeted her in the morning he kissed her hand with respect, and when he bade her goodnight he kissed her forehead with tenderness. We had been home three months and he had never said a cross word in her hearing, or showed one spark of malice or one edge of spite. In growing amazement at her luck, Celia discovered she was married to one of the sweetest men ever born. Of course she loved him.

  All of this I should have foreseen as clearly as I saw Harry’s smile of tenderness when he watched her walking the baby. All of it I should have heard in the way her voice lilted when she spoke of him. But I saw and heard nothing until the late September day when Celia met me in the rose garden. She had a pair of ineffectual but elegant silver scissors in her hand and a basket, and a straw bonnet tied to shade her face. I was walking back from the paddock in my riding habit after checking one of the hunters, who I thought might have sprained a tendon. Celia delayed me on my way to the stable to order a poultice, to offer me a buttonhole of late-flowering white roses and I sniffed their creamy smell, smiling my thanks.

  ‘Don’t they smell like butter?’ I said dreamily, with the full fat flowers pressed to my face. ‘Butter and cream and a hint of something sharp like lime.’

  ‘You make it sound like one of Cook’s puddings,’ said Celia, smiling.

  ‘Quite right, too,’ I said. ‘She certainly should make a pudding of roses. How lovely to eat roses. They smell as if they would be melting and sweet.’

  Celia, amused at my sensual relish, sniffed a little bud to please me, and snipped another bloom and put in in her basket.

  ‘How is Saladin’s leg?’ she asked, noticing my dirty hands and the halter.

  ‘I’m on my way to order a poultice,’ I said.

  Some movement in the first floor of the Hall caught my attention and I stared at the house. Someone was going down the corridor with a great pile of clothing and bedding, followed by someone else with another pile, and someone behind with yet another. As I watched, they passed one window and then another in an extraordinary procession.

  I could have asked Celia, but it did not occur to me that she might know what was going on inside the house when I did not. So I said, ‘Excuse me,’ and went with quick steps to the open front door and up the stairs to the corridor. The place was in utter confusion with bedding everywhere, a wardrobe blocking the door of Celia’s bedroom and a great heap of Harry’s clothes on Mama’s bed.

  ‘What is this?’ I asked the chambermaid. She was half buried under a heap of Celia’s starched petticoats and dipped a curtsy to me like a linen basket falling.

  ‘Moving Lady Lacey’s things, Miss Beatrice,’ she said. ‘She is moving into your mama’s room with Master Harry.’

  ‘What?’ I said incredulously. The pile of linen bobbed again as the girl curtsied and repeated what she had said. I had heard her the first time. It was not my ears that had failed to hear, but my mind that could not believe what I was hearing. Celia and Harry moving into Mama’s bedroom together could mean only one thing; that Celia had overcome her fear of Harry’s sexuality — and that was not possible.

  I spun on my heel and clattered down the stairs again and out into the sunlight. Celia was still snipping roses like an ignorant cupid in the Garden of Eden.

  ‘The servants are moving your things into the master bedroom to share with Harry,’ I said baldly, and waited for her start of shock. But the face she turned to me under the broad brim of her sunhat was utterly untroubled. She even had the hint of a smile playing around her lips.

  ‘Yes,’ she said calmly. ‘I asked them to do it this afternoon while you were all out. I thought it would cause you all less inconvenience.’

  ‘You ordered it!’ I exclaimed incredulously, and then I bit the inside of my lip and stopped.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Celia calmly and then her eyes flew to my face. ‘I thought it would be all right,’ she said anxiously. ‘Your mama has no objection and I did not think I should have confirmed it with you. I hope you are not offended, Beatrice? I did not think you would be affected in any way at all.’

  Words of complaint died in my mind as I recognized that Celia would think precisely that — that I could hardly be affected if she chose to sleep in the same bed as her husband. But that bed was the great master bed of Wideacre where Squires and their Ladies had lain for years. In that bed Celia became the first lady on the land, and that affected me. In that bed, in Harry’s arms, she became a true wife to him and the pleasure of his nights. And that affected me. As his Lady, as his lover, she made me redundant. And the spectre of a suitor riding towards us to take me away was too real for me to risk losing Harry’s need for my company.

  ‘Why are you doing this, Celia?’ I said urgently. ‘You do not have to do this, you know. Just because my mama, or your mama, are anxious for another grandchild, there is no need to do this. You have years ahead of you, you do not have to rush into Harry’s bed this summer. You are the mistress of your own house now. You do not have to do any duty with is repugnant to you, to which you object.’

  Celia’s cheeks flushed as pink as the rose in her hand. And she was definitely smiling, though her eyes were turned down.

  ‘But I do not object, Beatrice,’ she whispered very low. ‘I am
very happy to say I do not object.’ She paused and her cheeks flushed more rosy than ever. ‘I do not object at all,’ she said.

  From some recess of lies in my soul I found a smile and pinned it on my wooden face. Celia gave a little gasp of a laugh and turned from me and went out of the garden. At the gate she paused and shot me a quick, loving smile. ‘I knew you would be so glad for me,’ she said so low I could hardly hear her. ‘I think I can make your brother very happy, Beatrice, my dear. And at last now it is truly my happiness to try.’

  Then she was gone; loving, light-stepping, exquisite, desirable, and now desiring. And I was lost.

  Harry’s strong points were not imagination or fidelity. With Celia as pretty and wholesome as a peach beside him in his bed every night he would forget the sensuous delights we had shared. She would become the centre of his world and when Mama suggested a marriage for me, Harry would enthusiastically endorse the idea, thinking every marriage as perfect as his own. I would have lost my hold on Harry when his one desire was his lovely wife. And I had lost the one hold I had on Celia that I thought secure: her terrified frigidity. If she could giggle at the thought of Harry in her bed, she was no longer a child one could scare with a bogeyman. She was a woman and she was learning her own desires. In Harry she would find a loving tutor.

  I stood alone in the garden swinging the halter. Somehow I had to salvage some grip on Harry out of this slide into domestic bliss. Celia could give him love; she was overflowing with tenderness and the need to love someone. She was far more loving than I ever could be, would be, would ever want to be. Celia could give him pleasure — a night with her sweet kisses and delicate lovely body would be more than most men get in a lifetime, outside their dreams.

  But there had to be something I could do that she could not. There had to be some hold I could keep on Harry even if he was an uxorious husband and a besotted lover. I had held Harry in my thrall for two years and I knew him better than anyone. There had to be some string in my hand that I could pull to set him dancing to my tune. I stood like a statue of Diana the huntress: tall, proud, lovely and hungry, while the September shadows lengthened across the garden and the sun burned low over the roof of Wideacre making the stone slates rosy in the light. Then the swinging halter stilled and my head came up and I smiled into the burning face of the setting sun. I said softly to myself one word: ‘Yes.’

  11

  The top floor of the west wing, the third, was used as a store room. It is a long, low room that runs the length of the house with windows at either end facing north over the common and south over the garden. When I was a young girl with more energy than outlets, I used to come up here on wet days and shout and sing and dance where no one could hear me. The ceiling is shaped to the roof and the windows set into the roof under gables, so low that I had to stoop to see out of them after my eleventh year. It had been filled with the old furniture banished from the rest of the house, but once that had been polished and set in my rooms this attic store room was empty of all but my papa’s old saddlery equipment and his other things.

  I had kept it as a retreat, and the new use I planned would not draw any attention to it. I cleared the saddles I had been working on from the saddle rack and it stood like a vaulting horse in the middle of the floor. Papa’s coats and his boots, his notebooks on breeding and his diagrams of saddles I packed away in a chest. But I kept his hunting knife and his great long-thonged whip.

  Then I called in the Acre carpenter and ordered him to fix two stout hooks to the wall at a man’s shoulder height, and another two at floor level.

  ‘I hope I’ve done right, for if I don’t know what they be for, I can’t tell if they’ll serve,’ he grumbled.

  ‘That’s perfect,’ I said, looking at them. I paid him once for his trouble and once for his silence. A good bargain. For he knew that if he broke it I would know and he would never again work in Sussex. When he had gone I tied leather thongs to the hooks. The room was perfect. It already had a large chaise-longue near the fireplace and no one would notice if I added a candelabra from my other rooms and scattered a few sheepskins on the floor. I was ready.

  I was ready, but I could not make a start. It was hardly reticence, but I could not find in myself the necessary confidence or the necessary mania to do it. In this thing I was serving Harry’s peculiar tastes and not my own more simple ones. I needed an event to spur me on to action. Even when Celia came downstairs to breakfast too late to pour my coffee, with shadows under her eyes but with a smile like a happy child, I still made no move. A week passed and I was ready, but still unready. Then Harry said to me at supper, ‘May I speak with you afterwards, Beatrice? Will you sit with me while I take port?’

  ‘Certainly,’ I said with equal formality. I waited while Celia and Mama withdrew from the room and took the seat at the foot of the table. The butler poured me a glass of ratafia and set the decanter of port at Harry’s hand, and left us.

  The house was quiet. I wondered if Harry remembered another evening, like this one, when we had sat in silence as the house creaked and the flames flickered and died in the stone fireplace, and we had melted into each other on the hard wooden floor. But then I saw the smile on his boyish mouth and the happy clear eyes, and I realized he did not remember at all. It was other kisses and another body that wanned him now. His lovemaking now took place in the Master’s bed; our passionate, furtive exchanges belonged to the past.

  ‘I have to speak with you about something which makes me very happy,’ said Harry. ‘I do not think it will come as a surprise to you. Actually, I do not think it will come as a surprise to anyone.’

  I turned the delicate stem of the glass between my forefinger and thumb, my mind blank.

  ‘Dr MacAndrew has approached me, as the head of the house, for my permission to ask for your hand in marriage,’ said Harry pompously.

  My head snapped up, my green eyes blazed.

  ‘And you said?’ I shot the question at him.

  He stumbled in his surprise. ‘I naturally said “Yes”, Beatrice. I thought… we all thought… I was certain that…’

  I leaped to my feet and the heavy old chair scraped the polished floor.

  ‘You gave your consent without consulting me?’ I said, my voice icy but my eyes green fire.

  ‘Beatrice,’ said Harry gently. ‘Everyone has seen how you like him. His profession is unusual, of course, but he is of excellent family and his fortune … is remarkable. Of course I said he could speak to you. Why ever should I not?’

  ‘Because he has nowhere to live!’ I blazed out, my voice almost a sob. ‘Where does he propose I should live, may I ask?’

  Harry smiled, reassuringly. ‘Beatrice, I don’t think you realize how very, very wealthy John MacAndrew is. He plans to return home to Edinburgh and I believe he could buy all of Holyrood Palace for you if you had a mind to it. He certainly has the money to do it.’

  My mind, ice-sharp with anger, caught at once at the crucial point. ‘So I am to be married and packed off to Edinburgh!’ I said, outraged. ‘What of Wideacre?’

  Harry, still confused at my rage, tried to reassure me. ‘Wideacre will survive without you, Beatrice. You are all a Squire could be, and more, God knows, but this must not stand in your way. With your life and happiness taking you away to Scotland, Wideacre is the last thing you should have on your mind.’

  If I had not been in such a blind rage that made me want to shriek and weep I should have laughed aloud. The idea of my life taking me to some pretentious town house in Edinburgh or my love for some sandy-haired stranger taking me from Wideacre was comically funny — if it had not been stark horror. All horror.

  ‘Who knows of this plan?’ I said, fiercely. ‘Mama?’

  ‘No one, except myself,’ Harry said, hastily. ‘I spoke first of all to you, of course, Beatrice. But I believe I may have mentioned it to Celia.’ His half-smile revealed that my future exile had been the topic of some marital chit-chat in the master bed.

 
; ‘But I had no idea, Celia had no idea, that you would be anything but deeply, deeply happy, Beatrice.’

  His voice, so controlled, so soothing, so much the chocolate smooth voice of powerful men who marry; and bed, and dispose of women down the long centuries, while women wait and wait for land, snapped the remainder of my control.

  ‘Come with me,’ I ordered, and grabbed a candelabra from the dining table. Harry exclaimed, looked around for rescue and seeing none followed me. In the hall we could see the parlour door ajar and hear Mama and Celia’s gentle voices as they sewed the altar cloth. I ignored it and turned to the great sweep of shallow stairs, Harry following, bemused but obedient. I led him up the first, then the second flight, then up the narrow stairs where my candles were the only dipping, flickering light.

  We reached the locked door to the west-wing store room.

  ‘Now wait,’ I said and unlocked the door with the key from my pocket and left him standing outside without even a light. In haste I slid from my evening gown into the green riding habit I had worn as a girl when Harry had first come home from school and caught me, on that hot afternoon, naked on the floor of the old mill barn. The long line of buttons down the close-fitting jacket I left open from throat to navel. I was naked underneath. In my hand I held Papa’s old hunting whip — a long black thong of leather coiled wickedly and efficiently, the handle black ebony with silver inlay.

  ‘Come in,’ I said in a voice Harry would not dare to disobey.

  He pushed open the door and gasped as he saw me, tall and angry in the flickering light of the candles. He gasped again when he took in the deep shadow down the front of my gown, and the saddle rack, and the hooks on the wall, and the sensuously cushioned divan and the scatter of thick sheepskin rugs.