Wideacre

9

Of course I lied.

The circumstances made it easy for me to lie. But first I waited, waited a month in the old Bordeaux hotel until I heard from Harry in England. I smiled when I opened the letter because it was as I had expected. Our loving mama had her boy home again and she was not going to let him go. Harry — in a boyish anxious scrawl — wrote me that there were problems with the land, much poaching of the coverts, a field we had wanted to lie fallow had been mistakenly ploughed, and one of the tenants had had a fire in his barn and needed a loan.

‘Mama seems quite overwhelmed by the work necessary to run the estate,’ Harry wrote. ‘I arrived to discover that she is suffering from very serious spells of breathlessness, which leave her quite weak. She had even concealed how bad they are from Dr MacAndrew. I think it impossible that I should leave her alone in charge again, so I beg you, poor darling Beatrice, to hire a courier and get your dear selves home either cross-country or sail.’

I nodded. I had known the estate would be too much for Mama. It was a full-time job for someone who knows and loves the land and a weak incompetent like Mama could be destroyed by the responsibility and the things that, naturally, are always going wrong. That was the risk I took when I could not bear to let Harry and Celia travel alone. Then I took another risk with Wideacre — leaving the estate in Mama’s feeble hands. Now I had to trust to luck that Harry would wreak no great damage before I came home. For Harry had to stay in England, and I had to stay in France until our son was born.

I took up a pen and cut absently at the nib until I thought of the things I needed to say. I started my letter to Harry and confined myself entirely to business. The field should be planted with clover since it had already been ploughed. The tenant should be granted a loan at 2 per cent interest to be paid in cash or in produce from his farm, with his stock as security. The gamekeeper must either be made to work harder, more effectively, or dismissed. Lord Havering would know where Harry could find another. But then my tone grew more intimate. I told him I missed him badly — which was true — and that France gave me little pleasure without him — which was half true — and that I was longing to return home — which was not true at all. Then I nibbled the top of the pen and wondered how to break the news to him that Celia was carrying his child.

‘However much I would wish it, my wishes come secondary for once!’ I wrote with a sweet little jest. ‘For Celia cannot travel, and the argument against her making the attempt is the only one that could stop me coming to you.’ Sufficiently winsome for anyone this, I thought, well aware that Harry might read it aloud to Mama, or Lady Havering. ‘I am deeply happy to be able to tell you that Celia is with child.’

I paused again. Celia’s health had to be sufficiently difficult as to prevent her travelling entirely, and yet not so frail that Harry felt her needs more pressing than Mama’s. I thought I could trust to Mama to keep Harry safe at home, but you never knew with my mama. She might be overwhelmed with tenderness for Celia and her unborn grandson and send Harry post-haste back to France in a spirit of inconvenient selflessness.

‘She is extremely well,’ I wrote, ‘happy in her mind and fit. However, she finds any motion of carriage or boat brings on severe nausea. The local accoucheuse — who speaks excellent English and is most attentive and helpful — advises us that Celia should not attempt any journey until she is past the third month of her time, when she anticipates the symptoms will have abated and we can come home.’

I filled another page with assurances that I was caring for Celia and that Harry need have no concern whatsoever, and that we would be setting out on our journey home within two months. I threw in a caution that he should not think of coming to meet us or coming back to France without writing to me first: ‘How unfortunate if our ships were to cross at sea, us coming home, you coming out!’ I wrote, and thought that should keep him fixed at home.

I envisaged that at the end of the time I had allotted Celia’s symptoms of nausea might improve, but then there would be the trouble of getting a ship. Then there would be the winter storms, and then we would be too near her time for us to consider a bumpy land journey or a slow sea voyage. I thought that if every letter sounded as if we were just about to set off, Harry would be happy to wait for us, and attract no blame from any friends and neighbours for lying snug at Wideacre while his wife and sister were in France. I knew I should have to do some clever lying in the letters — but I knew also that I could do it.

And all the time my body grew rounder and rounder until I scarce could believe the shape of it, as fat as a tulip on a slender stem. We had left the hotel as soon as Harry was safely away and had taken furnished rooms on the outskirts of Bordeaux, south of the Gironde river. Every day I woke to the sight of reflected ripples dancing on my ceiling and the noise of fishermen and boatmen calling across the water.

The widow who owned the house believed me to be a young married Englishwoman and Celia my sister-in-law. So any later gossip might be confused by the nearness to the truth of the lies we told.

The rhythm of the early winter days exactly suited my lazy mood in the middle of my pregnancy. And when I got heavier and tired, I was glad to draw up the sofa to a good wood fire and sit with my feet up, while Celia sewed and sewed an exquisite layette complete for a prince, for the heir to Wideacre.

Her face lit up when I said graciously, one day, ‘He’s kicking. You may feel him if you want.’

‘Oh! May I?’ she said eagerly, and rested her gentle hand on the curve of my belly and tensed with anticipation. Then a tender smile passed over her face as she felt the hard knobbly movements.

‘Oh,’ she sighed in delight, ‘what a strong child she will be.’ A shadow crossed her face. Silly fool that she was, she had taken this long to think of Wideacre. ‘What if it is a boy?’ she asked. ‘An heir?’

My face was clear, my smile assured. I was ready for her. ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I may have said “he” but I know it is a girl.’ I was utterly certain in my lie, as I was utterly certain in my private conviction that I carried the heir to Wideacre in my belly. ‘It is a girl,’ I said again. ‘I promise you, Celia, a mother always knows what her child will be.’

The cold wind that had blown all winter so strongly off the sea died down, and there was an easy, early spring. I pined for Wideacre like an exiled convict and could barely acknowledge the beauty of this warm French season. It seemed too hot too suddenly; there were no long days of anticipation. But then my heart leaped when I looked at the calendar and realized that, all being well and the new heir being prompt, I might yet get to home in time to see our wild daffodils still blooming under the trees in the wood.

Madame had arranged for a midwife well known to her who had a good record of successful births and was called often to attend ladies of Quality. We also had the name of a surgeon in case of complications. To my surprise, I found I had a secret longing for the cool, straightforward competence of Dr MacAndrew, and smiled at the thought of what his response would be if he knew that the lovely Miss Lacey was preparing for her confinement in France. But when the old midwife rubbed oils into my swelling belly, and Celia hung dried flowers and herbs over the door, and tossed special dust on the fire, I found myself heartily impatient with these superstitions. I would much have preferred Dr MacAndrew to look at me in that clear, honest way and tell me if it was to be an easy labour or not. In his absence, I had to rest on the belief that the stupidest women I know have packs of brats, so surely I could manage just one.

When the time came, it was surprisingly easy — a tribute, the midwife said, to my early hoydenish galloping about on horses — so unlike a good French girl. I woke in the night all wet and said drowsily, ‘Good heavens, he’s coming.’ No more, but Celia had heard me even through the bedroom wall and was awake and with me in a second. She sent Madame for the midwife and got the little cradle and the swaddling bands ready, a pot boiling on the hearth and then sat calmly and helpfully at my head.

It was like heaving bales of hay, or pushing a great cart-horse round a stable. Hard work, and you know you are working, but for me there was no great pain. I screamed a few times, I think, but some part of my alert mind reminded me to keep any name off my lips.

Celia clung to my hand with a face as white as the baby’s layette as I sat up in the bed, curved over my belly where the muscles stood up as square as a box. I could actually see the outline of my son, my darling son, the heir to Wideacre, pushing his way bravely and rightly down the long journey of my body, ready to be born.

‘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.

But they were not good enough for Harry. He calculated that if the water level were to be regulated at its source in a little steep-sided downland valley with a wall to hold back the growing river, then all the extra field space we allowed for flooding could be ploughed up and used. The empty extra curves around the riverbed, the water-meadows that flood twice a year, could all be put under his blessed plough to grow more and more of his damned wheat. So Harry listened courteously and politely to all the wise old men, and paid them no heed. My letters of excitable remonstrance he ignored, too. Too clever for his own good was Harry, and the old tenants sent their sons out to build his dam and fit its pretty little sluice gates and dig out its little channels, and they laughed behind their hands at the waste, and the cost and, I dare say, at what Miss Beatrice would have to say when she came home, and the rage she would be in.

What happened next could have been predicted by any fool except the fool who now squired Wideacre. The waters behind Harry’s, new-built dam backed up in the little valley far faster than he had anticipated. He had measured the flow of the Fenny, but not allowed for the fact that when the snow melts and we have heavy spring rains the whole land becomes wetter and there are streams where he had never guessed streams would flow. The swelling lake drowned a hazel coppice that was older than Wideacre itself, and waterlogged some good dry upland meadow fields. As the waters built up, the nice little sluice gates struggled to open and close to control the flood; the new plaster in the wall melted like springtime ice; the dam crumbled and a great wall of water, high as a house, thundered down the little valley towards Acre.

It knocked out the road bridge in the first splashy roaring collision and Harry could thank his fool’s luck that there were no small children sitting on the parapet or old men smoking and staring at the stream when that deadly wall of water ripped the sound old bridge out by its roots.

It spread then, a wide sweep of destruction as careless as a fan brushed across a table of ornaments. Crops, shrubs, bushes and even large shallow-rooted firs were bowled over in a broad swathe for twenty feet on either side of the banks. So Harry’s proud new wheat crop on the old water-meadows was ripped out of the earth before it had even rooted, and all his newly claimed fields were littered with mud and rubble and broken trees.

The flood hit the new mill with some of its force spent and, although the yard was flooded, the building had stood firm. Ground-floor windows and doors were staved in and some of the grain spoiled, but the new buildings were sound and strong. The old mill, where Ralph and I had met and loved, and Meg’s rickety hovel were swept away altogether. Only two walls of the mill were left standing and that sweet flowering green bank washed clean of our footprints. Even the straw he had picked off my skirts was gone, whirling downstream on the floodtide.

Then the worst of the flood was spent and the river returned to its banks. Harry wrote me that he had been greeted with anxious faces when he rode out the next day, but I knew there would have been smiles behind his back. Every scrounger on Wideacre would have profited from the Squire’s folly and the claims of flood damage would be sky high. Harry had to find the money and the workers to rebuild the bridge and the road; he had to compensate the tenants whose lands had been damaged and crops spoiled. He had to buy Mrs Green new glass for her windows and chintz for her curtains. When I read his doleful letter describing the damage and the claims he faced I had been hot with rage at his folly and the waste of it all. But now I was just as anxious to be home so I could set all to rights again.

Besides, there were things I could not ask Harry, but could only see for myself. How the young doctor was getting on, and whether Lady Havering had managed to catch him for one of Celia’s pretty sisters; if he remembered his passing liking for me. My heart stayed rock-steady at the thought of him — he was not a man who would excite or challenge me — and he could not gain me Wideacre — but his attention had flattered my vanity at a time when I needed a diversion, and he intrigued me. He was so unlike the men I knew — men of the land like squires, bluff farmers and county leaders. But my heart beat no faster at the thought of him. He had no mystery, no magic like Ralph. He did not hold the land and charm me like Harry. He could only interest me. But if he were still single, and still smiling with cool blue eyes at me, then I was happy to be interested.

I gazed out to sea where the waves followed each other like wandering, rolling hills and faced the principal question that awaited me at home: if the villains of the Kent attack had all been rounded up, sentenced and hanged; or whether one — just one, the leader with his two black dogs and his black horse — was still free. The question no longer woke me screaming every night, although the black horse continued to ride through my occasional nightmares. But the thought of my lovely strong Ralph swinging himself about on crutches, or worse still shuffling his body along the ground like a dog in the gutter, would always make me feel sick with fear and disgust. I took care to keep the picture from my mind, and if it came, unbidden, when I closed my eyes for sleep I took a good measure of laudanum and escaped.

If the corn rioters were all taken I could sleep in peace. He might well be dead already. He could have been executed in his disguise and no one ever thought to tell Wideacre, and certainly no one troubled enough to send the news to us in France. The figure who still haunted my darkest nightmares might be a ghost indeed, and I had no fear of dead men.

But if he were dead I felt I would mourn him. My first lover, the boy, then the man, who had spoken so longingly of the land and pleasure and the need to have them both. The clever youth who saw so young that there are those who give and those who take love. The daring, passionate, spontaneous lover who would fling himself on me and take me without doubt and without conscience. His frank sensuality had matched mine in a way that Harry never could. If he had only been of the Quality … but that was a daydream that would lead nowhere. He had killed for Wideacre; he had nearly died for it. All I had to hope was that the noose had done what the spring of the mantrap had half done, and that the love of my childhood, girlhood and womanhood was dead.

‘Is that — can that be land?’ asked Celia suddenly. She pointed ahead and I could see the faintest dark smudge like smoke on the horizon.

‘I don’t think it can be yet,’ I said, straining my eyes. ‘The captain said not till tomorrow. But we have had good winds all day.’

‘I do believe it is,’ said Celia, her pale cheeks flushed with pleasure. ‘How wonderful to see England again. I shall fetch Julia to catch her first glimpse of her home.’

And away down the hatch she went and came up with the baby, nurse and all the paraphernalia of infancy so that the baby could be pointed to the prow and face her homeland.

‘It’s to be hoped she’s more excited by the sight of her father,’ I said, watching this nonsense.

Celia laughed without a trace of disappointment. ‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘I expect she’s far too young to pay much heed. But I like to talk to her and show her things. She will learn soon enough.’

‘It won’t be for lack of teaching if she does not,’ I said drily.

Celia glanced at me and registered the tone of my voice.

‘You don’t … you don’t regret it, Beatrice?’ She stepped towards me, the baby against her shoulder. Her face showed concern for me and my feelings, but I noticed she had tightened her grip on the baby’s shawl.

‘No.’ I smiled at her suddenly scared face. ‘No, no, Celia. The baby is yours with my blessing. I only spoke thus because I am surprised to see how much she means to you.’

‘How much?’ Celia stared at me, uncomprehending. ‘But, Beatrice, she is so utterly perfect. I would have to be mad not to love her more than my life itself.’

‘That’s settled then,’ I said, glad to let the matter drop. It seemed odd to me that Celia’s instinctive, passionate love for the child, which had started at the news of my pregnancy, had flowered into such devotion. My enthusiasm for the boy I dreamed I carried blinded me to the prettiness of the girl who was born. But then Celia had wanted a child to love, any child. I wanted only an heir.

I got up and strolled across the gently rocking deck to gaze across the sea to England, which was becoming a darker smudge every moment. I leaned against the ship’s rail and felt, half consciously, the sun-warmed wood pressing against my breasts. Tonight, or at the latest tomorrow night, I should be in the arms of the Squire of Wideacre once more. I shivered with anticipation. It had been a long, long wait but my homecoming to Harry would make up for it.

The wind veered to an offshore breeze, the sails flapped and the sailors cursed as we neared land. The captain at dinner promised we would dock at Portsmouth in the morning. I dipped my head over my plate to hide the disappointment in my face but Celia smiled and said she was glad.

‘For Julia is most likely to be awake then,’ she explained. ‘And she is always at her best in the mornings.’

I nodded, my eyelashes hiding the contempt in my eyes. Celia might think of nothing but the infant, but I would be surprised if Harry so much as glanced in the expensive cradle when I was standing by it.

I was surprised.

I was bitterly surprised.

We came to Portsmouth harbour shortly after breakfast, and Celia and I were standing at the ship’s rails anxiously scanning the crowd.

‘There he is!’ called Celia. ‘I can see him, Beatrice! And there is your mama, too!’

My eyes hit Harry’s gaze with a shock like a horse shying. I held to the rail, my nails digging into the hard wood to stop myself from crying, ‘Harry! Harry!’ and stretching my arms out to him to bridge the narrowing gap between ship and shore. I gasped with the physical pain of demanding, hard sexual desire. I glanced beyond him to Mama leaning forward to look out of the carriage window and raised a hand to her, then found my eyes dragged back to my brother, my lover.

He was the first up the gangplank as soon as the ship was moored and I was first to greet him — no thought of precedence in my head. Celia was bent over the cradle collecting her baby anyway, so there was no reason why I should hang back, and no reason why Harry should not take me into his arms.

‘Harry,’ I said, and I could not keep the lust from my voice. I held out my hands to him and raised my face for a kiss. My eyes ranged over his face as if I wanted to devour him. He dropped a brief affectionate kiss off-centre on my mouth and looked over my shoulder.

‘Beatrice,’ he said. And then looked back to my face. ‘Thank you, indeed I do thank you for bringing them home, for bringing both of them home.’

Then he gently, oh so gently, set me aside with an unconscious push and walked past me — the woman he adored — to Celia. To Celia and my child he went, and put his arms around both of them.

‘Oh, my dearest,’ I heard him say softly, for her ears alone. Then he plunged his face under her bonnet and kissed her, oblivious of the smiling sailors, of the crowd on the harbour wall, oblivious, too, of my eyes boring into his back.

One long kiss and bis eyes were bright with love, fixed on her face and his whole face was warm with tenderness. He turned to the baby in her arms.

‘And this is our little girl,’ he said. His voice was full of surprise and delight. He took her gently from Celia and held the little body so the wobbly head was level with his face.

‘Good morning, Miss Julia,’ he said in a tender play. ‘And welcome home to your own country.’ He broke off and said aside to Celia, ‘Why, she is the image of Papa! A true Lacey! Don’t you think so? A very true-bred heir, my darling!’ And he smiled at her and, tucking the baby securely in the crook of his elbow, freed one hand so he could take her little hand and kiss it.

Jealousy, amazement and horror had first of all nailed me silent to the rail, but I found my tongue at last to break up this affecting scene.

‘We must get the bags,’ I said abruptly.

‘Oh, yes,’ said Harry, not shifting his gaze from Celia’s deliriously crimsoning face.

‘Will you fetch the porters?’ I said, as politely as I could.

‘Oh, yes,’ said Harry, not moving an inch.

‘Celia will want to greet Mama and show her the baby,’ I said skilfully and watched Celia’s immediate guilty jump and scurry to the gangplank with the child.

‘Not like that,’ I said impatiently, and called the nurse to carry the baby, straightened Celia’s bonnet and shawl, handed her her reticule and went with them, in a dignified procession, ashore.

Mama was as bad as Harry. She hardly saw Celia or me. Her arms were out for the baby and her eyes were fixed on its perfect little face, framed in the circle of pleats of the bonnet.

‘What an exquisite child,’ Mama said, her breath a coo of pleasure. ‘Hello, Miss Julia. Hello. Welcome to your home, at last.’

Celia and I exchanged knowing glances. Celia might be baby-struck but she had walked all night with the child almost every night since the birth. We maintained a respectful silence while Mama cooed and the baby gurgled in reply, while Mama inspected the tiny perfect fingers and held the satin-slippered feet with love. She raised her head at last and acknowledged us both with a warm smile.

‘Oh, my dears, I can hardly tell you what pleasure it gives me to see you both!’ As she said the words her eyes cleared of her passion for the baby and I saw some shadow pass over their pale blueness. She looked quickly, sharply, even suspiciously from Celia’s open flower-like face to my lovely lying one.

I felt suddenly, superstitiously afraid. Afraid of her knowledge, of her awareness. She knew the smell of birth, and I still bled in secret, a strange, sweet-smelling flow that I feared she could sense. She could not know; yet as she looked so hard at me I felt hahf naked, as if she was noting the new plumpness of my neck, of my breasts, of my arms. As if she could see beneath my gown the tight swaddling around my breasts. As if she could smell, despite my constant meticulous bathing, the sweet smell of leaking milk. She looked into my eyes … and she knew. In a brief exchange of silent looks she knew. She saw, I swear she saw, a woman who had shared a woman’s pains and pleasure, who had, like her, given birth to a child; who knew, like her, the pain and the work and the triumph of pushing out, into the uninterested world, a magical new life that you have made. Then she looked hard at Celia and saw a girl, a virginal pretty girl, quite unchanged from the shy bride. Virtually untouched.

She knew, I could sense it. But her mind recoiled. She could not put the knowledge into her conventional frightened mind that her instincts were telling her as clear as a ringing bell. Her eyes saw my plumpness and Celia’s strained thinness. Her senses smelted the milk on me; her own motherhood recognized that mark on me: a woman who has given birth, who has taken her part in the creation of life, and her eyes slid from me to Celia.

‘How tired you must be, my dear,’ she said. ‘Such a long journey after such an experience. Sit down and we will soon be home.’ Celia had a kiss and a seat beside Mama in the carriage, and then Mama turned to me.

‘My dearest,’ she said, and the fear and unspeakable suspicion in her eyes had gone. She was too weak, she was too much of a coward to face anything unpleasant; the secret horror of her life would always escape her. ‘Welcome home, Beatrice,’ she said, and she leaned forward and kissed me, and held my plump fertile body in her arms. ‘It is good to see you again, and looking so well.’

Then Harry joined us and he and I loaded the failing wet-nurse into Mama’s carriage, and watched the luggage and the servants into the second chaise.

‘How well you have managed,’ said Harry gratefully. ‘If I had known when I left you … But I never should have gone at all if I had not known that you would manage, my dearest Beatrice, whatever happened.’

He took my hand and kissed it, but it was the cool kiss of a grateful brother and not the warm caress he had given to Celia. I scanned his face, searching for a clue to his change towards me.

‘You know I would always do anything to please you, Harry,’ I said ambiguously, the heat still in my body.

‘Oh, yes,’ he said equably. ‘But any man would feel the care of his child, his very own child, to be something special, so precious, Beatrice.’

I smiled then. I could see into his heart. Harry, like Celia, was baby-struck. It would be a tedious period while it lasted but they would grow out of it. I very much doubted if Harry’s infatuation would last the length of the journey home, cooped up in a carriage with a squalling, underfed, travelsick baby, an inexperienced mother and a foreign nurse.

But I was wrong.

It lasted the long journey. Their passion for the baby proved so demanding that the journey took long extra hours while the coach dawdled at walking speed behind Harry and Celia who believed the infant’s travelsickness would be relieved by a walk in the fresh air. I strolled ahead. Mama stayed, imperturbable, in the coach.

Despite my rising irritation with Harry, I could be angry with no one when I walked in the lanes of Wideacre with the great chestnut trees showering crimson and white petals on my head from their fat candle flowers. The grass grew so green — so brilliant a green it made you thirsty for the rain that had made it that astonishing colour. Every hedge was bright with greenness, every north-facing tree trunk was shadowed with the deep wet greenness of moss or the grey of fat lichen. The land was as wet as a sponge. All along the hedgerows there were the pale faces of the dogroses and the white flowers of the blackberry bushes. In the better cottages, vegetables were thriving and flowers edging the garden paths made even the smallest houses look bright and prosperous. The grass, the pathways, even the walls were speckled with summer flowers growing with irresistible joy in the cracks and crannies.

Yes, Harry and I had a score to settle. No man would walk past me to another woman and not regret it, but on that long, slow journey home I felt, as I felt for the rest of the summer, that I first had to come home to Wideacre; that Harry was the least important issue in this homecoming. That Harry and I could wait until I had met the land again.

Come home I did! I swear not a cottage on our estate but I banged on the door and pushed it open and smiled, and took a cup of ale or milk. There was not one house but I inquired after children, and checked profits with the men. Not one new hayrick did I miss, not one springing field with the soil so rich and wet did I neglect. Not even the seagulls wheeling above the ploughshares saw more than me. My horse was at the door every morning, and while Harry was up early keeping baby hours, I was off to brood like a laying hen over the land.

I loved it still — infinitely more now that I had been elsewhere, now that I had seen the pitiful dry French farms and the ugly rows of vines. I loved every fresh, easy fertile acre of it and I loved the difficult hill fields and the plough-free downs as well. Every day I rode and rode until I had quartered the estate like a hunting barn owl and marched its borders as if it were Rogation Day every day.

Mama protested, of course, at my riding out without a groom. But I had unexpected allies in the happy couple.

‘Let her go, Mama,’ said Harry easily. ‘Beatrice is beating the bounds; she’s been long away. Let her go. She’ll take no harm.’

‘Indeed,’ Celia assented in her soft voice. ‘Indeed she deserves a holiday after all she has done.’

They smiled on me, the soft foolish smile of doting parents, and I smiled back and was off. Every step of the paths, every tree of the woods I inspected, and I never rested for one day until I knew I had the estate firmly back in my hand.

The estate workers welcomed me back like á lost Stuart prince. They had dealt with Harry well enough for he was the Master in my absence, but they preferred to speak to me, who knew, without being told, who was married to whom, who was saving a dowry and who could never marry until a debt was paid. It was easier to talk to me for so little needed saying, while Harry, in his awkward, helpful way, would embarrass them with questions where silence would have been better, and with offers of help that sounded like charity.

They grinned slyly when they confided that old Jacob Cooper had a brand-new thatch on his cottage, and I knew without being told more that the reeds would have been cut, without payment, from our Fenny. And when I heard that it had been a remarkably bad year for pheasants, hare and even rabbits, then I knew without being told that they had all taken advantage of my absence to be out with their snares and their dogs. I smiled grimly. Harry would never see such things for he never noticed our people as people. He noticed the tugged forelock, but never saw the ironic smile beneath. I saw both, and they knew it. And they knew when I nodded my head that the sparkle in my eyes was a warning against any one of my people overstepping the line. So we all knew where we were. I was home to take the estate, the people, and every greening shoot back in my hand. And it seemed to me, on every hard daily ride, that the estate, the people and even the greening shoots were better for my return.

I rode everywhere — down to the Fenny to see the marshy water-meadow where the yellow flags were blooming, rooted into the two crumbled walls that were all that remained of the derelict mill. My horse was knee-deep as I urged her up to look. The building where a girl and a lad had lain and talked of love would never shelter lovers again.

It seemed so very long ago now that it felt as if it had happened to someone else, or that I had dreamed it. It could not have been me that Ralph had loved and romped with and rolled with and ordered and plotted with and risked his life for. That Beatrice had been a beautiful child. Now I was a woman afraid neither of the past nor of the future. I gazed unemotionally at the ruined barn, and at the new marshy empty meadow and was glad to feel nothing. Where there had been regret and fear there was now an easy sense of distance. If Ralph had survived, even if he had survived to lead a gang of rioters, he would be far away by now. Those days on the downs and the secret afternoons in the mill would be almost forgotten to him, as they were to me.

I turned my horse homewards and trotted through the sunny woods. The past was behind me, the River Fenny flowed on. I had a future to plan.