The Complete Wideacre Trilogy: Wideacre, The Favoured Child, Meridon

‘Poussez, madame!’ yelled the midwife.

‘Poussez!’ shouted the widow.

‘They say “push”,’ breathed Celia, overcome by all this noise and healthy physical activity. I choked on a laugh, then forgot the comedy of it as a great driving wave of feeling swept my body and the darling boy another inch downwards.

‘Arrêtez! Arrêtez!’ shouted the midwife, and she bent down with a corner of a dirty apron and wiped something that was no longer me. Celia’s eyes filled with tears as we heard a tiny gurgling cry. My son, my heir, greeted the world with a yelp as with one last push and a wriggle and even a scrabble with his tiny feet, he swam free, and the midwife landed him like a beached fish on the bank of my suddenly flaccid belly.

I gazed at his eyes, so deep blue that even the whites of them were as blue as the early morning skies over Wideacre. I touched his wet head, dark but perhaps already with signs of a chestnut gleam from me. I looked at his tiny fingers, each one crowned with a perfect minute shell of a fingernail.

‘Vous avez une jolie fille,’ the midwife said approvingly, and busied herself with the sheets.

I gazed blankly from my tiny son to Celia’s concerned face.

‘She is a girl,’ said Celia gently, in awe.

I could hear the words neither in English nor in French. The baby that I had carried so carefully and so long, this baby, for whom I had laboured all night, was my son, was Wideacre’s heir. He was the end and triumph of my sinning and striving. This was my child, who would inherit by unquestioned right. This was my son, my son, my son.

‘A lovely girl,’ repeated Celia.

I turned on my side so roughly that the baby nearly fell but Celia’s hands were quick to catch her and hold her safe. The child set up a shriek as I jerked away and cried and cried in Celia’s arms.

‘Take the little brat away,’ I said with hatred, and cared not who heard me. ‘Take it away and keep it. You agreed. You wanted a girl all through. Now you have got one. Take her away.’

I did not repent all night, though I heard an insistent wail and the sound of Celia’s footsteps as she walked the hungry baby backwards and forwards across the floor of her room. I heard her hushing it with little songs in a voice that grew more and more thin as the night went on. I dozed at the sound, and then woke to anger and bitter disappointment. All my life I had been denied my rights at Wideacre. I, who loved the land best of all of us, who served it better than any of us, who had schemed and plotted and crippled for it, was disappointed again. One stroke of luck could have placed me for life as the mother of the heir of Wideacre. Whether I had kept the secret in my heart for my own comfort and pleasure, whether I had used it, or whether I whispered it one day to my growing son, only time would have shown. But now I had a paltry insignificant girl who would be supplanted by Celia’s first boy baby and who would be married away from Wideacre when grown, just as they still planned to marry me.

She was the death of my plans and I could not yet learn to bear the disappointment. The long, long wait for the birth and the struggle of labour to produce a miserable girl were too bitter a pill to swallow. In my vague, dozing dreams I grieved also with a strange sense of loss for the child that never was. The son I had made in my mind with pride and tenderness. And in my half-waking, confused thoughts I turned in need – not to the image of Harry, but to Ralph – and said indistinctly in my mind, ‘I have lost something too now. You are not the only one who has suffered for Wideacre. You lost your legs, but I have lost a son.’ There was comfort in this dream of telling Ralph of my pain, which only he would understand.

But into this dozing vision came the nightmare picture of a man on a big black horse and I sat bolt upright in my bed and shrieked myself into wakefulness.

It was daylight. Through the closed door I could hear the noise of breakfast being prepared and felt a sudden keen hunger for the hot croissants and strong black coffee Madame or Celia would bring to me. My body was sore: I felt as if I had been kicked in the groin by a stallion, and I was as tired as after a day’s hunting. But my belly was as flat as a milk pudding – disagreeably wobbly but I should soon cure that. I pulled up my shift to enjoy the sight of my thighs and knees, which had disappeared from sight around the moon of my belly months ago. And then I thanked the gods in genuine gratitude that my navel had retreated to be a perfect little dimple again, instead of the little molehill that had formed as the baby grew.

Enwrapped in my mood of self-congratulation, I smiled with good humour as the door opened and Celia came in carrying my breakfast tray for me. Someone had gone to the garden and picked me white violets, and their cool, wet smell reminded me with piercing longing of the woods of Wideacre where the white and blue violets grow like pools at the roots of the trees. There also came the good smell of Madame’s deadly strong coffee, and the sight of the flaky skins of golden croissants and the bland, unsalted butter. I felt as hungry as if I had been fasting for a year.

‘Lovely,’ I said, and took the tray on my knees and poured a deep black cup of bitter coffee and fell on the croissants. Only when I had polished the plate with a licked forefinger to get every trace of the flaky crumbs did I notice that Celia looked pale and tired.

‘Are you unwell, Celia?’ I asked in surprise.

‘I am tired,’ said Celia, her voice low but with some strength behind her tone that. I did not yet understand. ‘All night the baby cried. She is hungry but she will take neither pap nor goat’s milk. The wet-nurse we were promised has gone dry and Madame is trying to find another this morning. I am afraid the child is hungry.’

I lay back on my pillows and watched Celia under my long eyelashes. My face was inscrutable.

‘I think you should feed her yourself,’ said Celia evenly. ‘You will have to until we can find another wet-nurse. I am afraid you have no alternative.’

‘I had hoped not to do so,’ I said, affecting hesitation, and testing the strength of this strange, purposeful Celia. ‘I wanted, for her sake and for all of us, to see as little as possible of her, especially in these early days when naturally I am rather distressed.’ I let my voice quaver a little, and watched like a hawk for Celia’s response.

‘Oh, Beatrice, I am so sorry,’ she said. ‘I was thinking, wrongly, only of her. Of course I understand you will not wish to see her until you are more accustomed to the idea. I let my concern for her overcome my deeper concern for you. Do forgive me, my dear.’

I nodded my head and smiled at her kindly, and waved for her to remove the tray. She did so and I snuggled down into the pillows with a sigh of blissful contentment, which she took for tiredness.

‘I will leave you to rest,’ she said. ‘Never fear about the little one. I shall find some way to feed her.’ I nodded. I dare say she would. Had it been a boy – my son, my longed for son – I would never have let some poor French peasant near him with her milk and her dirt. But a girl baby could shift for herself. Hundreds of babies thrive on flour and water; this wrong-sex brat could do so too. Hundreds more die on the diet, and in many ways this would be the easiest solution to the problem of this crying girl. To force Celia to keep a life-long secret would take all my ability, and cost all my goodwill with her. That effort and struggle would have been a small enough price to pay to see my son as heir of Wideacre, but to do it to place a miserable girl in a poor secondary position was a high price to pay for no benefit at all. The girl was no good to me; girls are never any good to anyone. I shut my eyes on the disappointment and dozed again.

When I woke my pillow was wet with tears, which had slid down my cheeks in dreamless sleep. When I felt the wet linen against my cheek the tears sprung again to my eyes. Wideacre was so far away from this little overheated room in this strange town. There were long seas of grey waves between me and home. Wideacre was far from me, and my undisputed ownership as distant as ever. The place haunted me and my sleep like a Holy Grail that I could seek, and wear out my life in the seeking, but never attain. I turned my head on the pillow and said one sad word, the name of the man who would have won Wideacre for me, ‘Ralph.’

Then I slept again.

Celia came in again at dinnertime with another pretty tray of delicious food. Artichoke hearts, breast of chicken, ragout of vegetables, a pastry, a milk trifle and some cheese. I ate everything with as good an appetite as if I had been walking the Wideacre fields all day. She waited until I had finished and then poured me a glass of ratafia. I raised my eyebrows in surprise but took the glass and sipped at it.

‘The midwife says you are to have a glass a day, and stout or small-beer in the evening,’ said Celia.

‘What on earth for?’ I said lazily, laying back against the pillows and enjoying the sweet taste against my tongue.

‘To make the milk,’ said Celia baldly.

I noticed for the first time that there were new lines of strain around her eyes, and a determined look in her face that I had never seen before. The flower-like face was no less pretty but the velvety brown eyes had a determination in them. I looked down to hide the gleam of amusement in my own green eyes. Celia was taking motherhood hard; at this rate she would loose her good looks by the time we were home, while I would be as sleek and relaxed as any pampered kitten.

‘It is impossible to find a replacement wet-nurse locally and I have been forced to send to the cure who is in charge of the Magdalen house. Poor girls go there to have their babies and the children are taken away at birth,’ said Celia. ‘I have sent Madame’s stable boy with a message, but it is unlikely we will find one immediately. Meanwhile the child cries and cries for your milk. She will accept neither cow’s milk, goat’s milk, flour and water or plain water.’

I stole a glance at Celia, still untouched by her news. But the look on her face disturbed me. I realized with a sudden shock that we had stumbled on an instance where she might be stronger than me. She was defending this troublesome brat as if it were, indeed, her own. Some reasons, perhaps the months of preparation and waiting, the anxiety to please Harry with the early arrival of the baby, her own tender loving nature and her need for something to love, had all combined to make her fall in love with the child as soon as it was born. She had held it newborn in her arms. Hers was the first voice it heard speaking in tones of love. Hers were the first arms that rocked it, the first lips that touched the wet, delicate little head. She felt all that a first-time mother should feel for her child. And now she was defending it. She was fighting for the life of her child and she looked ready to ride over anyone who threatened it. I watched her in open curiosity. This was not the easy biddable girl I had trained like a well-bred puppy. This was an adult woman with total commitment to another being – and that made her strong.

In this matter she was even stronger than me.

‘Beatrice,’ she said firmly. ‘You have to feed this child. She will not trouble you. I shall bring her and take her away as soon as she is fed, and I ask nothing more than you do this every few hours until a wet-nurse is found.’

She paused. I still said nothing. I was ready to agree. Indeed, why not? It would not greatly spoil my figure, which I was certain would soon be as firm and lovely as ever. It would make me appear to be a sensitive woman. But I hesitated because I was curious to see how strong this new Celia was.

‘It will be no more than a few days,’ she said. ‘But if it was a year, Beatrice, I would still ask, I would insist that you did this. The child is mine; I accept responsibility, so I must ensure that she is fed. And you alone can provide what she needs.’

I smiled an easy smile.

‘Of course, Celia, if that is what you want,’ I said generously. ‘I did not offer only because I thought you and Madame had everything so well arranged.’ I could have laughed aloud at the look of relief on Celia’s face.

‘You may bring her in,’ I said graciously. ‘But stay to take her away again. I shall want to sleep.’

Celia shot from the room like an arrow from the bow and returned with the little crying bundle. Her hair was deliriously soft and brown, formed into one peak of a curl on the top of her head – but, of course, that might change. Her deep, deep blue eyes would probably change, too. She gazed into my face as if she would see into my soul, and I amused myself by trying to outstare her. I have outstared cats and dogs and men. But these blue, blue eyes were impossible; they had the blank stare of madness and made me uncomfortable after a while, and a little afraid. Her hands were like shrivelled starfish, impossibly tiny; and her feet, like little crumpled leaves, peeked out from under the swaddling cloths. She smelled of a smell I recognized on myself – the sweet strong smell of birth. I controlled – with no great effort – a passing sense of our oneness, this tiny dot and I. But she was not a son. She would be of no use, and in any case I would have shrunk from a relationship which had already drawn lines of care and worry on Celia’s face and put shadows under her eyes.

I put the little bundle to my breast and held her awkwardly. Celia’s hands flew out from her sides involuntarily, but I saw her control the instinct to help, choosing to wait and see. Neither of us knew exactly what we were doing, but the baby was a fighter and at the first scent of my nipple she lunged forward. Her mouth made a sideways triangle of longing pointing at the nipple where a white drop already stood. I could feel a strange ache inside my breast and then a great ease and satisfaction as the baby took hold. She snuffled and huffed in a tiny sneeze, gave a brief, outraged cry of protest at the delay and then hurried on. Her eyes rolled and then lidded as she settled to a steady rhythm of sucking. My eyes met Celia’s over the head of Celia’s baby and we smiled.

‘What shall you call her?’ I asked casually.

Celia leaned forward to touch the tiny head and laid a finger on the little dent in the skull where one could see the pulse beating, strong and determined.

‘This is my little Julia,’ she said with calm certainty. ‘Soon I shall take her to her home.’

I left it a week or two, and then I wrote the letter I had been planning in my mind:

Dearest Harry,

I am very proud and happy to tell you that your child has been born, prematurely, but safely. You have a girl and Celia is planning to call her Julia. Celia’s delicate health has kept us anxious to the last, and when she felt her pains start two weeks early I was afraid. But we had a good midwife and help from our landlady here, and Celia was in labour for less than a day. The baby was small, of course, but she has gained weight apace with her good wet-nurse, and by the time we are home you will not be able to tell the difference between her and a child carried full term.

That much at least was true, I thought, as I wryly added some persuasive details to the picture, and dictated a little note from Celia, supposedly recovering from childbirth, scribbled at the end of my letter.

I knew little enough of babies but I was fairly certain that if we were not home until Julia was a month or so old, no one would be able to swear an oath as to her age. Besides, the truth was too outrageous for anyone to guess. If anyone thought her a little plump, a little alert for a premature baby, the doubt would be cast on Celia and Harry – who would be assumed to have been early lovers – not on me. And Harry, who alone knew that he had not been in Celia’s bed until that night in Paris, would hardly tell the age of a baby from looking. The dates I had offered tallied with that one, pleasureless night.

In a hurry, in a foreign land, under pressure, and certain that the child in my womb was the son and heir to Wideacre, I had contrived as best I could. I sealed the envelope and laid it on my bedside table for Celia to take to the post. I could do no more. I had to leave the rest to the old fickle gods of Wideacre, who so often blew good fortune my way, as my reward for fidelity to the land, and trust to Celia to play her part when we arrived, and get me safe home.

And she did. With an assurance that I had seen in her only once before – on that disastrous Channel crossing – Celia quietly organized the new wet-nurse, myself, squalling baby Julia and herself, on a packet sailing for England in a shorter time than seemed possible.

I was glad enough to be organized. I felt curiously exhausted. Although I had rested like a spoilt princess both before and after the birth, I still felt tired and moped in the little French pension. I could hear the baby crying at night through the wall, and although I relished the thought that it was not I who was having to light my candle in the darkness and blunder about to make the little thing comfortable, and it was not I who was walking, walking with it until it fell asleep, I still found that insistent, demanding little wail could call me out of the deepest sleep and set my breasts aching.

I was a divided woman. My body had always been in complete and harmonious tune with my mind. But now, still plump and flaccid at the waist, with disgusting pale pink lines at the hips where my skin had stretched – it did not seem like me at all. And the way my eyes opened and my muscles tensed when I heard the baby cry at night! And the way my tightly bound breasts ached to give milk! It was all wrong, all unlike me. It seemed all part of the tirelessly, tediously blue French sky, and the wrong-smelling land and the strange bread and the stinky cheeses, and all the things that should have been a Wideacre spring and yet were so unlike home.

The sea was reassuringly calm for most of the trip, and I enjoyed the salt smell and the breath of wind from the south and I even learned to bear the heaving of the ship. My body had slowly lost its rounded shape and started to regain its familiar smooth sleekness, which reassured me that I was also returning to my true self. The early bright sun put summertime gleams of copper into my chestnut hair and started to dust my nose with the slightest of freckles. I was still a trifle plump around the neck and my breasts were fuller and heavier, but when I stripped naked and gazed at myself in a little mirror in the heaving cabin I thought it unlikely that anyone would ever guess I had given birth – not even Harry when he explored every inch of my naked body with his eyes and hands and tongue.

As soon as Celia had found the wet-nurse I had turned the child over to her and bound my breasts. I told Celia that the milk had stopped at once and indicated my new slimness as evidence. It was only partly true. When I heard the hungry wail my breasts ached and the tight, tight bindings grew wet around the hard nipples. If Celia had so much as dreamed I had milk, she would have had the baby fed, and well and happy again. But even as I oozed milk in a warm, unstoppable richness, I met her eye blandly and swore I was dry.

The horrid pink scratches of stretch marks were fading to a near-invisible whiteness as Madame had promised they would, and the shadows under my eyes went as soon as I insisted that the baby, wet-nurse and Celia all move cabins to take them out of earshot of my best state room.

In fact, they slept little. While I strolled on deck, or sat in the sunshine watching the blue waves slide by under the prow, or leaned over the stern to watch the wake gleaming white and vanishing like a disappearing chalk lane in the distance, Celia, as often as not, was pacing with the baby in the hot cabin below.

Apparently the baby did not like the seafaring life, and the French girl hired as wet-nurse had temporarily dried up during her bout of seasickness. Her milk would flow again provided the baby was put often to the breast, but in the meantime it was once more hungry and once more turning its nose up at pap and water. When I saw Celia’s face after a day of nursing the retching wet-nurse and a night of walking with a fretful baby, I nearly laughed aloud. If I had no other reason in the world to avoid motherhood, one glimpse of Celia’s wan face would have convinced me. She looked years older than the shy bride who had left England nine months ago. She truly looked the part of a woman who had given birth prematurely. She looked as if she had born triplets at least.

‘Rest, Celia. Rest,’ I said, patting the seat beside me and stroking my skirts in to make a space for her.

‘I can only sit for a minute while she sleeps,’ Celia said, perched on the edge of the bench, her ears alert for any noise from below.

‘What ails the child?’ I asked casually.

‘Nothing new, I think,’ said Celia wearily. ‘First the movement of the boat upset her. Then the milk began to fail and she grew hungry. Now I think the milk is coming through again and she did well at the last feed and then slept well.’

I nodded amiably, but with little interest. ‘Wideacre air will soon set her to rights,’ I said, thinking more of myself.

‘Yes, indeed,’ said Celia happily. ‘And the sight of her papa and her home. I can hardly bear to wait, can you, Beatrice?’

My heart leaped at the thought of Harry and home.

‘No,’ I said. ‘How very long it has been since we were at home. I wonder how everything is.’

Unconsciously I leaned forward to stare at the horizon as if to create a purple hump of land out of the flat line of sea meeting sky by sheer effort of will. My mind rolled over the problems and people I had left behind. First and foremost was Wideacre, but I already knew from Harry’s detailed letters that the spring sowing had gone well, that it had been a mild winter and the winter forage had lasted out, so no animals had been killed because of lack of feed. The tenant farmers were convinced that turnips could be used as a winter-feed crop now we had proved on the Home Farm that the beasts could eat them through the winter. The French vines Harry had brought back from Bordeaux had been planted on our south-facing slopes of the downs, and seemed no more gnarled and dead-looking than they did in France, so perhaps they would take.

On the debit side, without me to restrain him, Harry had suffered from two bouts of his experimental madness. One mattered little: the ploughing up of some old fields that could soon return to grass. The loss there was the goodwill of the people who used the footpath across them, and of the neighbouring farmer whose lane was impassable after the ploughing. Harry had ignored the advice of the old labourers, and had planned to plant an orchard on Green Lane Meadow. He soon found out that the lush green grass was thriving there because of an unusual clay bed. His ploughshares stuck as if he were farming in Devon, his trees wilted and the sticky mud turned to rock in the sunshine. The entire hundred-acre meadow was ruined for that year and the investment in young trees, money and time would have to be written off as one of the prices paid for Harry’s inexperience. It made me angry that I had not been there to prevent it, but glad, very glad, that the cost had been no higher. The wise old labourers, and even the young lads, would be shaking their heads over the young Squire’s folly, and there would be many whispers wishing Miss Beatrice would hurry up and come home.

Harry’s other nonsense could have cost lives, and that I found hard to forgive. He had some textbook clever ideas for controlling the flow of the Fenny, which, since time began, had been wide and fast and prone to flooding in springtime, and slow and sluggish in summer. Since everyone (everyone except Harry, of course) knows this, all the farmers whose lands run alongside the Fenny are ready for the spring floods and winter high water, too. In the flatter fields they leave unploughed the great dried-out ox-bows where the flood waters can overspill and roar and loose their speed and power before rejoining the main torrent. In an average season we may lose a sheep or a silly calf, or once – I remember – an ill-guarded child, in the flood. But this is no mountain torrent. It is just the sweet Fenny. It can be managed; it can be watched in the old, sound ways.