The Complete Wideacre Trilogy: Wideacre, The Favoured Child, Meridon
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I shuddered in one convulsive shiver, then took a deep breath. I gave the inside of my cheeks a good hard bite and, hidden in my lap, I pinched the palms of my hands with my sharp strong fingernails. Then I turned to John MacAndrew and smiled.
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I am silly to have been upset by him. He was a free-trader, a smuggler, and he wanted somewhere to store his kegs. When I said no he was abusive. I don’t know why I should let it upset me, but somehow it did.’
John MacAndrew nodded understandingly, but his eyes were sharp.
‘Why did you say no?’ he asked. ‘You’re surely not against them?’
‘I never was,’ I said slowly. But then my fear rose up and choked the truth out of me. ‘But I’ll have no lawless men on Wideacre,’ I cried passionately. ‘I’ll have no leaders of mobs, no attackers of property, no men who move and work in the night on my land, near my home. He may be a smuggler today, but who knows what he might do tomorrow? I’ll have no trained men led by a black horse riding the lanes near my house.’ I stopped with a sob, horrified at my outburst. I was too scared and shocked at myself either to retract or to try to reduce the impression I had so clearly given of fright and horror.
John’s warm hand covered mine.
‘Do you want to tell me why?’ he asked, and his voice was sympathetic and tender and low.
I exhaled, and it was almost a moan.
‘No,’ I said miserably. ‘No.’
We sat in silence then, the horses with their heads bowed and the reins slack, the late afternoon sun red among rosy, fleecy clouds, low over the sea.
‘I’ll drive you home then,’ said John and there was warmth and patience in his voice. I knew then that he loved me. That he loved me so much he was prepared to take on trust the things that I did, that should have warned him I was not the straightforward pretty girl I seemed. He could have guessed I had a secret, a hanging secret. But he chose instead to click to the horses and to drive me home in the sunset, which turned to twilight as we crested the downs at Goodwood and then to starlight along the sweet-smelling nighttime lanes of my land. We followed a new moon home, a slim sickle in the night sky, and when John MacAndrew lifted me down from the curricle I felt the ghost of a kiss on the top of my head.
He never pressed me for an explanation. Not through the final hot days of summer when the hay was stacked and the corn winnowed and the beasts weaned and growing fat, and there was less work on the land and more time for visiting and dancing and picnics.
When we went to Havering with Celia and Harry and Mama, John and I would find ourselves walking alone together in the ramshackle formal gardens, or in the overgrown shrubbery. When we went in to tea there would be a smile between Mama and Lady Havering, instantly wiped off their faces when John or I looked directly at either of them. If in the evening we rolled back the rugs and Mama played country dances and jigs on the Haverings’ grand piano, I would always dance the first and the last dance of the evening with my hands in John’s. Then, when we waited for our carriages in the night air, which turned cooler at the end of every sweet insignificant evening, he would tuck my wrap around my shoulders, and sometimes gather it around my neck, to brush the side of my cheek, pale and soft as a flower in the moonlight.
Then the carriages would clatter around from the stable yard and he would hand me into the chaise with a gentle pressure on my fingers to say a private goodnight among the general farewells. I would lean my head back against the silk cushions and feel the warmth of his smile, the gleam of his eyes, the touch of his hand on my cheek as the horses trotted home, and Mama sat beside me, her face smiling and at peace too.
But I was never so absorbed in this delightful, this easy, courtship that I forgot to hold on to Harry, to hold to the land. At least once a week I would climb the stairs to the room at the top of the house and take Harry into a shivering, private maze of pleasure and fear. The more often I did it, the less it meant to me, until my icy disdain of Harry’s plump pantings was real.
I knew now what my earlier passion for Harry had hidden from me. That although I had thought I had bedded him as a free woman I was as bound as if I were a slave. For it was not a free choice. I had wanted him because he was the Squire, not for himself. And now he was losing his fine, clear looks and becoming fatter and softer, I bedded the Squire, not Harry. And it was no free choice because I could not choose to say no. My safety and security on the land meant I had to keep my special, costly hold on its owner. I paid him rent as surely as the tenants who came to my round rent table with their coins tied up in a scrap of cloth. When I lay on my back, or strode round the rooms threatening him with every imaginable, ridiculous pain, I was paying my dues. And the knowledge galled me.
But although Harry had lost his magic, the land had not. Wideacre that autumn glowed like a scarlet leaf of rowan. The summer heat lingered late and even in October John could take me driving with only a shawl around my shoulders. But when the frosts came in November I was glad, for the hard ground held the scent and in the hoar frost I could see the prints of foxes’ paws and the hunting season was open. I was back in the saddle for the first time after two long years of mourning and absence, and our hounds were mastered once more by Wideacre’s Squire, as they should be. Every day Harry and I checked them and talked of nothing but foxes and hunters and runs. It was Harry’s first season and he threatened to botch it badly. But his interest in breeding good animals meant that we had the fastest hounds in the county – you had to follow them at a gallop and jump whatever lay in your path – no time for niceties! So there would always be riders who would want to come out with us and lend a hand with the hounds. Shaw was a good keeper who knew the ways of foxes, and I was always at Harry’s side.
Between Shaw the keeper, and me, Harry made a reasonable fist of it, and our first day out in October was a long glorious run that started on the common and then chased in a great sweep over the fields back to the common and a kill on the edge of the park where the Wideacre woods are encroaching on the heather and bracken. He was an old dog fox that one. I swear I hunted him one season before with Papa. He got away then from the slower old-fashioned pack but now he was three years older and Papa was dead, and even unskilled Harry, who totally lacks a hunter’s instinct, could see that the wily animal was heading for a stream to lose the scent in the water.
‘Send them in, Harry!’ I yelled above the clamour of the pack and the thunder of hoofs, the wind whipping my words away.
The horn blasted, ‘Too-roo! Too-roo!’ and the horses leaped forward; the hounds spread out with their final full-cry killing run, and the old fox strained to a final burst of speed. He nearly made it too, but they had him at the side of the stream, and Harry waded thigh-deep among squealing, hungry hounds to cut the brush and pass it, still bloody, up to me. I nodded my thanks, and took the prize in my gloved hand. I have had the first kill of the season every hunt since I was eleven when Papa smeared my face with the disgusting, rank, sticky blood.
Mama had gasped then, when she saw me, as stained as any savage, and she had neared open complaint when Papa sternly told her that I was not to be washed.
‘The child smells of fox,’ Mama said. Her voice, tremulous with anger, had dropped to a whisper.
‘It is the tradition,’ Papa said firmly. That was enough for him and it was enough for me too. God knows I was not a squeamish little doll, but when he had rubbed the blood on my face from the base of the hot tail I had swayed in my saddle with sickly faintness. But I did not fall. And I did not wash.
I solved the problem in a way that, looking back, seems typical of my desire to please my papa and yet be true to myself. Papa had told me that the tradition was that the beastly blood stayed on until it wore off. I thought for some hours while the blood congealed into crusty scabs on my young skin, then I made my way down to the old sandstone drinking trough by the stables. I sat beside it, put my face to it, and rubbed the delicate skin of my cheeks and forehead against its rough sides until I was sore and scraped, but clean.
‘Did you wash, Beatrice?’ Papa asked me sternly when we met at breakfast the following day.
‘No, Papa, I wore it away,’ I said. ‘May I start to wash again now?’
His great lovable, loving shout of laughter rattled the sash windows and the silver coffee pots.
‘Wore it away, did you, my little darling!’ he roared, and then subsided into chuckles, wiping his eyes on his napkin. ‘Yes, yes, you may wash now. You have satisfied tradition; and that’s good. And you have got your own way too, and that’s comical.’
I seemed years away from this scene and from my papa’s love as I sat in the hard winter sunshine and accepted the brush from Harry. The smell of the warm freshly killed fox had brought it all flooding back to me, but it was all long gone. Long lost, and long past.
‘A good run, Miss Lacey,’ said one of the Havering boys, Celia’s step-brother George.
‘Yes, indeed,’ I said smiling.
‘And how you do ride!’ he said with worship in his eyes. ‘I can’t keep up with you! When you took that last hedge I had to shut my eyes. I was certain that low bough would sweep you off!’
I laughed at the recollection.
‘I had my eyes shut too!’ I confessed. ‘I get so excited I forget to take care. I put Tobermory at the hedge without even seeing the tree. When I realized there was no room for us between the hedge and the low branches it was too late to do anything about it except keep my head down and hope we squeezed through. We just did, though I felt the twigs scratch my back.’
‘I hear you have been racing too,’ said George, nodding to John MacAndrew, who rode up to us. The sun seemed to shine with sudden new warmth, and we smiled into each other’s eyes.
‘Just a friendly race,’ I said. ‘But Dr MacAndrew rides for high stakes.’
George’s bright eyes flicked from one to another of us.
‘I hope you did not lose Tobermory!’ he said.
‘No,’ I said, with a private smile to John MacAndrew. ‘But I’ll not be betting blind against the doctor again.’
George laughed, and at last took himself off to compliment Harry on the run, and I was left alone with John. But it was the trained doctor, not the lover who spoke.
‘You’re pale,’ he said. ‘Do you feel unwell?’
‘No, I’m very well,’ I said, smiling to reassure him and to support the lie. Even as I spoke I felt a swimmy sensation of faintness and nausea.
‘I can see you are not,’ he said curtly. He dismounted and held out peremptory arms to me. I shrugged my shoulders and slid down from the saddle and let him lead me to a fallen tree. Once seated I felt better and drew a couple of deep breaths of the sharp autumn air, smelling the bright, cold exciting smell of dry leaves.
‘What’s wrong?’ he asked. He had not released my hand after leading me to the seat, and his sensitive fingers had discreetly taken my pulse.
‘Oh, let be,’ I said, and pulled my hand away. ‘I cannot afford a weekly consultation, doctor. I am queasy and headachey because we have harvested the first of the wine and I was tasting the young vintage last night. It tastes like vinegar; it needs a West Indian island full of sugar to make it sweet enough; it costs a fortune to produce and it leaves me with the vilest headache in the world – on account of the loss we have made on it all, and the damage it does to my liver.’
He laughed out loud at my ill humour, quite unoffended. Then kindly, sensibly, he left me alone. He moved off to chat with some of the others and I was free to lean back against a branch of the tree.
I had lied, of course. We had indeed drunk Harry’s bitter unsuccessful wine last night, but that was not the cause of my early-morning queasiness and my faintness, and the tenderness in my breasts. I was with child again, and I felt sick because of that nauseous, tiring condition, and worse at the idea of the condition. It cost me every ounce of courage to smile and joke with Harry and George and John MacAndrew with the sickness from this vile growth inside me.
I was not surprised George could not follow my lead. I had been riding for a fall. A good bruising tumble that would shake this parasite free and leave me blooded and clean and whole again. But Tobermory was too sure-footed and I was too good a rider. I had taken some incredible jumps and was still here in the autumn sunshine, as lovely as ever, as virginal-looking as Diana the huntress – but one month pregnant. My rage at the injustice of my continual fertility while Celia, the deserving wife, could only play host to my cuckoo made the nausea on my tongue taste like fire. In recapturing Harry’s slavish adoration, I had created another problem. This beastly, intractable, insoluble growth in my belly had not shaken loose on my hell-for-leather ride so maybe it was as strong a child as Julia had been, who had clung on through many a breathless, dangerous, thundering gallop and been born none the worse for it. I had not had the luck of a tumble. I should have to take some evil old peasant’s dirty mixture, and grit my teeth through the ensuing, solitary pain.
She took some finding, for with the disappearance of Ralph’s mother Meg from Acre no other old crone had emerged skilled in the necessary borderline arts. Ironically I found her by pretending to Mary, Mrs Hodgett’s pretty daughter, that I wanted a love potion. She looked to me like the sort of girl who would hardly need such magic either. But just as I had foreseen, she knew the name of an old dame who lived in a shanty hut on Havering Common.
Forewarned by my knowledge of the ways of the country, I expected a dirty hovel, but the old witch’s shanty was worse than the sties where we keep our pigs. Mud-floored, walled with slabs of turf and bits of bracken, and with branches of trees plugged with moss and turf for a roof. As soon as I entered the door, stooping under the low roof, I knew it was a mistake to come, and I did not believe she could do it. But there was nowhere else to go, and no other option to try. So I went through with it. The disgusting old witch produced a stone flask stoppered with a scrap of dirty cloth, and hid the silver shillings I tossed on the floor somewhere among her rags. I carried it home as if it were poison, and in the privacy of my bedroom drank the lot as she had told me.
It was as bad as I had feared. I was ill that night and had a day of retching, and the flux, but no little mess of half-made child came away. I still carried it with me. We seemed utterly inseparable. I was exhausted by the pregnancy and by the forty-eight hours of illness but I still had to ride back to that dirty cottage and see what the old witch could do now.
The true answer was nothing – except another bout of illness. She recommended another try, even put her stale mouth to my ear and assured me that a blunt knife pushed gently inside, as she would promise to do, would cause no pain, or hardly any pain at all, and would free me from the incubus. But I had had enough. I suspected, rightly I think, that for the fees I could pay she would continue trying until the baby was indeed dead – or until I was. I did not trust her dirty room where she mashed the weeds she called herbs. And I emphatically did not trust her with a rusty knife. So I had done with her, and when I felt well enough to think straight again – which took four miserable days – I put my mind to other possible means.
I thought, of course, of Celia. Dear little Celia, so sweet and so loving. I remembered her instant acceptance last time, and her loving response to Julia. It was a possibility that she might be glad of another child. My head lifted, and the glint of a smile crossed my face. It was another chance for me to put my child in the heir’s cradle. If I could have avoided the pregnancy, I would have done so. If I could have lost the child I would have done so. But if he was hanging on, determined to grow, then he could inherit the earth indeed – or at any rate the fairest, sweetest corner of it.
I was more cautious this time. My pride and my peace had been dealt a stinging blow by the birth of a useless girl. Never again would I worship my own swelling body, seeing in its new shape the certainty of my future. But I could not suppress a little rising smile, at the thought that having had one girl, surely the chances were greater that this time my brother and I had bred true – had conceived a son.
I could not wait. I had conceived in September, and it was already mid-October – I dared not. Celia had to be told and some plan to explain our departure from Wideacre had to be cobbled together, and it had to be done quickly. I called out to one of the grooms who had followed the hunt with a spare horse. He touched his cap, and lifted me into the saddle. I told him to tell the Master that I was tired and would hack gently home, and I left without saying goodbye.
But I had not reckoned on John. He forced no farewell or explanation from me, but when I glanced back at the ring of huntsmen under the sweeping trees I saw that Sea Fern was standing to one side, away from the bustle of the hounds and the round of silver flasks. He was watching me ride away, and in the tilt of his head I saw not the blind gaze of the lover but the hard, analytical scrutiny of the professional man. I straightened my back in the saddle, conscious of his eyes upon me, and thought yet again that Celia and I would have to hurry. It would be tedious indeed to be off on my travels again, and difficult to arrange. But Wideacre, with the hard sharp eyes of Dr MacAndrew on me, was unsafe for any secret.
I waited to be sure I could have Celia to myself for a good period of time, and after dinner asked her to come to my office on the pretext of some brocades I wanted her to help me choose. The parlourmaid served us Bohea tea at the great rent table and Celia smiled at the contrast of the pretty red porcelain against the heavy masculine furniture of the room.
‘Well, it is an office,’ I said, half apologetically. ‘If I had the labourers into my parlour they would break those delicate chairs and tread mud on the carpet.’
‘I don’t know how you can do it,’ murmured Celia, glancing at the ledgers piled on one side of my desk. ‘I should think it is so difficult to work out where all the money is coming from, and where it is being spent! And so boring!’
‘I find it hard, certainly,’ I said, telling an easy lie. ‘But I am happy to do it for it frees Harry from the worry of it. But, Celia, I really asked you to come here because I wanted to talk to you alone.’
Her velvet-brown eyes were instantly concerned.
‘Of course, Beatrice,’ she said. ‘Is there anything wrong?’
‘Not with me,’ I said firmly. ‘It is you I wanted to talk about. My dear, we have been home for four months, and you have shared a room with Harry for nearly two. I just wondered if you had noticed any signs to tell you that you might be expecting a child?’
Celia’s little face flushed as scarlet as a poppy and her eyes fell to her clasped hands in her lap.
‘No,’ she said very low. ‘No, no signs, Beatrice. I cannot understand it.’
‘Are you quite healthy?’ I asked her, with affected concern.
‘I thought so,’ she said miserably. ‘But yet I do not seem able to conceive. Harry says nothing, but I know he must be wondering about an heir. Mama suggested eating a lot of salt and I have done so, but it seems to make no difference. What makes it worst of all, Beatrice, is that you and I know that I did not even conceive Julia. I have been married a full year, and not conceived a child.’
I wrinkled my forehead, my eyes warm with concern.
‘My dear,’ I said, ‘perhaps you should take some medical advice. John MacAndrew or, if you preferred, a London specialist?’
‘How can I!’ Celia exclaimed. ‘Any doctor would be certain to ask about the conception of the first child and I cannot tell him that I have no first child when Julia is in the nursery, and Harry believes her to be his!’
‘Oh, Celia!’ I said. ‘This is what I feared. But what will you do?’
‘I can see nothing that I can do,’ she said. She reached in the pocket of her little silk pinny and brought out a handkerchief, a tiny scrap of lace. She wiped her wet cheeks and tried to smile at me, but her lower lip trembled like a child’s.
‘I pray and pray,’ she said low. ‘But my prayers are not answered. It is a dreadful thought that because of my inadequacy Wideacre will pass to your cousins. If I had known that I would so fail Harry as a wife I should never have married him. I would have spared him that disappointment.’ She ended with a little sob and pressed her handkerchief to her mouth.
‘But I know so little of these things, Beatrice,’ she said. ‘And I cannot ask my mama. A year is not so very long, is it? I could just have been unlucky so far?’
‘No,’ I said, squashing that hope as firmly as I could. ‘I believe that most women are most fertile in the first year of their marriage. Since you have not conceived yet, I think it is unlikely that you ever will.’
I gave her a pause for her to wipe her eyes again, her head bowed under the sentence I had delivered. Then I held out a ray of hope.
‘What if I were to conceive again, and we were to go away and I were to give you the child?’ I said, musing aloud.
Her tear-filled eyes came up to my face and she managed a watery giggle.
‘Really, Beatrice!’ she said. ‘You are too shocking!’
‘I know,’ I said impatiently. ‘But I am thinking of you, you and Harry. If I were to be betrothed, or even married, I would be prepared, indeed I would be happy to solve your most dreadful problem by giving you my child.’
‘No,’ she said, with a determined shake of her head. ‘No, it would never work. It could never work. It could not be arranged.’
‘These are just details,’ I said, containing my impatience. ‘I say it could be arranged. I could arrange it. Would it not be a relief to you to be able to bring another baby home to Wideacre? And if it were a boy you could bring an heir home to Harry!’
She looked at me doubtfully, and I felt a glimmer of confidence and hope.
‘Can you be serious, Beatrice?’ she asked.
‘I am hardly likely to joke, when your life and your marriage are in such desperate crisis,’ I said, trying to overwhelm her with despair. ‘I see you are miserable; I see Harry anxious. I see that Wideacre will be taken from Harry’s line and given to distant cousins. Of course I am serious.’
Celia rose from her chair and came to stand behind me. She put her arms around my neck and leaned over the back of my chair to rest her damp cheek against my hot one.
‘That is so very good of you,’ she said with emphasis. ‘Very generous, and very loving, and very like you and your sweet nature.’
‘Yes?’ I said. ‘So we could do it?’
‘No,’ she said, sadly and softly. ‘We could not.’
I turned in my chair to look up at her. Her face was sad, but she was resigned to her sadness.
‘I could not, Beatrice,’ she said simply. ‘You have forgotten that to carry out such a deception I should have to lie to Harry. I would put another man’s child in Harry’s home and that would be a betrayal of him as surely as if I had been unchaste. I could not do it, Beatrice.’
‘You did it before,’ I said crudely. She winced as if I had struck her.
‘I know I did, and that was wrong,’ she said simply. ‘In my fear of marriage and in my concern for you I committed a most dreadful sin against my husband whom I now love more than anything else in the world. I should not have done it, and sometimes I think that my punishment is not only to live with the consciousness of that sin, but also to have to live with my barrenness. I try to atone for it by loving Julia as well as if she were indeed my own precious daughter, and by never lying again to Harry as long as I live. But I know well that I should not have done it. And I should never do such a thing again, whatever the temptation.’