Wideacre

17

And something had gone from me, too.

I could not hear the heartbeat of Wideacre any more. I could not hear the heartbeat; I could not hear the birdsong. As the spring warmed up, slowly, slowly, as if there was a lump of ice at the heart of England that year, I did not warm. The cuckoos were calling in the woods; the larks started to make small experimental upward flights and try their voices, and I did not warm. My heart did not sing. The spring, with all its bobbing wild daffodils in the woods, and its scattering of meadow flowers, with all the leaves and the sweetness, and the rushing of the Fenny, the Wideacre spring came, but I did not melt from my winter coldness.

I could not tell what was happening. I could neither hear nor see. Nothing, nothing in my life seemed real to me any more and I looked out on the greening, damp land as if I were looking through a wall of ice that would separate me for ever from the land I had loved, and the people I had known.

I spent much time gazing out through the window, through the glass pane. Looking incredulously at the greening woods, which were as bright and as fluttering as if everything was still the same, as if my heart still pattered to the tune of the steady thud of my home. I did not dare to go out. I was weary of driving and not yet released from mourning so I could not ride. But I did not even wish to ride. I did not care either to walk in the fields. The warm moist earth that caked on my boots seemed to pull me down like a bog of clay — not like Wideacre’s soft loam at all. When I was driving it seemed such an effort to turn the horse’s head, to click to him to trot, to hold him steady on the road.

And this spring the countryside was not so lovely; it was too bright. The colours of green this spring hurt my eyes with their vibrant growth. I squinted when I tried to look towards the downs, and the sunshine put hard lines around my mouth and on my forehead where I found I was scowling.

There was no pleasure for me out on the land this spring, I could not tell why. And there was no pleasure for me in the village either. As I had ensured, no one noticed the lack of kindling from the enclosure. I had timed the fencing in of the common carefully. They should not have reproached me for that. No one went cold in the village that spring by my action. So I did not do all things badly.

But they gave me no credit. Just as that year with Ralph the greening of the shoots and the warming of the land had seemed all part of my magic, all part of my good blessings on the land, now everything that went wrong was laid at my door. The Sowers’ cow died and that had to be my fault, for she had not been able to graze on the good green shoots of the common. One of the Hills’ children fell sick, and that was my fault for my husband doctor was far away and they could afford no other. Mrs Hunter sat by a blackened grate and wept without ceasing for the shame that had taken her son from her. And because he had died calling for her and she could not go to him. That was my fault, they said. That was my fault.

And I knew that it was.

When I had to drive through the village I kept my head high and my eyes blazed with defiance. There was still no one who could meet my gaze then, and they looked away with surly faces. But when I saw Mrs Hunter through her cottage window, sitting motionless beside the black grate, and noted her chimney with no little swirl of smoke, I did not feel defiant. I did not feel ready to brazen out the disaster on my land. I just felt afraid, and comfortless and cold. I pulled up at the cobbler’s one chilly afternoon and called out, ‘Mrs Merry!’ to the group of gossiping women. Their faces turned on me were sulky and closed, and I remembered in disbelief the time when they would have called out ‘Good day’ and smiled, and crowded around the gig to tell me the village gossip. Now they stood in a circle like a gang of hanging judges and looked at me with cold eyes. They parted to let Mrs Merry come to the carriage and it struck me she came towards me dragging her feet. She did not smile to see me, and her face was guarded.

‘What is wrong with Mrs Hunter?’ I asked, gathering reins into one hand and fitting my whip into the stock.

‘No physical ill,’ said Mrs Merry, her eyes on my face.

‘What ails her then?’ I asked impatiently. ‘Her fire is out. I have driven past the cottage three days running and she is always sitting by the empty fireplace beside a cold grate. What ails her? Why don’t her friends go in and light the fire for her?’

‘She does not wish it lit,’ said Mrs Merry. ‘She does not want food. She does not want to speak with her friends. She has sat like that since last week when they sent her Sam Frosterly’s letter that Ned was dead. I read it to her, for she cannot read. She reached to the bucket and poured it over the fire and sat by the wet ashes till I left her. When I returned in the morning it was the same.’

My face stayed hard, but my eyes were despairing.

‘She will recover,’ I said. ‘It is just a shock for her to lose a son. Her a widow, and him her only child.’

‘Aye,’ said Mrs Merry.

A cold hard monosyllable from the woman who had delivered my child, who had been with me during that crisis of effort and pain, who had promised me she would not gossip, and who had kept that promise. The woman who had told me I was just like my papa in my care for Wideacre people.

‘It is not my fault, Mrs Merry,’ I said with sudden passion. ‘I did not mean it to happen like this, I did not plan this. I only had to increase the wheatfields; I did not dream the lads would pull the fences down. I meant them to have a fright with the soldiers and cease teasing me. I did not think they would be caught. I did not think Gaffer would go. I did not think he would be hanged, and Ned die, and Sam be sent far away. I did not mean this.’

Mrs Merry’s eyes had no pity.

‘You’re the plough that does not mean to slice the toad then,’ she said dourly. ‘You’re the scythe that does not mean to maim the hare. You go your own sharp way and do not mean to cut those who stand before you. So no one can blame you, can they, Miss Beatrice?’

I put out a hand towards Mrs Merry, the wise woman.

‘I did not mean it,’ I said. ‘Now they blame me for everything. But my son will set it to rights. Tell Mrs Hunter I will see that her lad is brought home to be properly buried in the churchyard.’

Mrs Merry shook her head.

‘Nay, Miss Beatrice,’ she said with finality. ‘I’ll carry no message from you to Mrs Hunter. It would be to insult her.’

I gasped at that, and dropped my hands on the reins. Sorrel started forward and I snatched the whip from the stock to flick him into a canter. As I pulled away from the women I heard the clatter of something against the side of the gig.

Someone had thrown a stone.

Someone had thrown a stone at me.

So I cared neither to drive in the woods, nor to walk in the fields, nor to go down the lane to Acre that spring. Harry came and went as he pleased. Celia continued her visits, and it was Celia who made the arrangements to bring Ned Hunter’s body home from the hulks at Portsmouth. And it was Celia who paid for his funeral and for the little cross over his grave. Celia and Harry were still met with a bob or a pulled forelock when they went into Acre. But I did not go to the village. Only on a Sunday morning during that warm wet spring did I go past the cottages with the staring windows. Past the smokeless chimney of Mrs Hunter’s little home. Past the fresh graves in the churchyard of Gaffer Tyacke, of Ned Hunter. And walked the long slow walk up the aisle of the church past the rows of pews where my people looked at me with eyes as hard as flints.

My work lay indoors that spring. John Brien did the riding and the ordering for me. Daily he came to my office and I told him what work needed doing, and he went off to supervise it. So the land that had never had a bailiff, that had always felt the print of a Master’s boot, was watched over and worked by a man who was not a Lacey, who was not even a farmer, but a town-bred manager; who was not even Wideacre born.

With the gang he ordered he had the common cleared and the fields planted with wheat. There was no more trouble from the village. He ploughed up the half-dozen meadows where the children played and the plough cut through the surviving marks of the village’s common plot. We planted wheat everywhere a plough could run. And still we were not making enough money.

I was reserving John’s fortune to buy off our cousin and I did not want to touch that for the lawyers’ fees. But as they dragged on and on, their bills steadily mounted. We had borrowed from Mr Llewellyn to cover the first three months’ bills, but then we also had the problem of meeting the repayments on the loans, and no extra money coming in until the wheat crop was sold, the wheat crop that had not yet shown green shoots.

Nothing was coming to my hands fast enough. I had consulted with Harry at the start of the plan, but now I dared not show him the real figures. We were paying out more on the repayment of the loans, and on the lawyers’ fees, and John’s medical bills, and on the new labour gangs and equipment and seed, than we were earning. We were drawing on our reserves of capital. We were drawing so heavily that I could start calculating how long it would be before the fortune my papa had so slowly and carefully amassed would be exhausted. Then we would have to sell land.

Enough there to keep me indoors, even when the swallows came and swooped low over the Fenny in the morning. Enough there to keep me waiting for the postman every morning in a frenzy of anxiety that today might be the day when Dr Rose would write one of his gentle, but increasingly confident letters saying, ‘I am so pleased to tell you that your husband has made a complete recovery. As I write he is packing his bags to come home!’

Every day I expected a letter announcing John’s return. Every day I prayed for the letter to tell me that our cousin had accepted the compensation and John’s fortune could be paid to him, and the legal work to change the entail could begin in earnest. Every morning I awoke with those two converging processes racing closer and closer together. And every day the postbag was brought to me in my office I opened it with dread, waiting to see if I had won or lost Wideacre for my son.

I had won.

On that sweet April morning with the daffodils nodding golden heads in the garden outside my window and the birds carolling to the spring sunshine, the postbag held a thick cream envelope with our lawyers’ crest embossed on the corner, and their pompous seal on the flap. With much self-congratulatory flourish they wrote to say that our cousin Charles Lacey had accepted compensation and was prepared to resign his rights to Wideacre. I had won. Richard had won. The horror and confusion of the past few months could slip behind me and would soon be forgotten. It would be as if this icy spring, this glassed-in shut-out spring had never been. Richard would be reared on the land as the future Squire. I should teach him all he needed to know about the land and the people, and he would bring in the harvest every year of his life. He would marry a pretty Sussex-bred girl of my choice and they would breed new heirs to the land. Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh. I would have established a line that could stretch down the centuries to the unimaginable future. And I had done it with wit and with cunning and with courage. I had done it, although I had lost the sound of my own heartbeat, of Wideacre’s heartbeat, of a voice of love from anyone. But I had done it.

I sat in silence with the letter in my hand and great floods of release and relief sweeping over me as tangible as the spring sunshine that warmed my face and my silk shoulder. I did not move for long, long minutes, savouring the time of victory. Only I knew what it had cost me, what it had cost Wideacre, what it had cost Acre village, to get us to this point where the way was clear for my son. Only I knew that. Even so, there were costs that I did not know, that I did not fully realize. I had won the land for Richard but this spring it had been dead to me. I could not be sure that my feeling for the land could come back to me. The people had turned against me; the grass was too bright a green, even the thrushes’ song failed to pierce the wall around me. But it might all be a price that had to be paid to put Richard into my seat. And I was paying and paying and paying, and now the reward was in sight.

I drew the embossed notepaper to me with a sigh and wrote to our bankers ordering them to realize John’s entire fortune, to sell all the MacAndrew shares and pay them into our cousin’s account. I enclosed the power of attorney document to forestall any query from them at such an extraordinary move. Then I drew another sheet of paper towards me and started a letter to the lawyers to tell them that they could now go ahead with the legal processes to change the entail to favour my son Richard and my daughter Julia as joint heirs.

Then I sat still, with the sunshine warm on my shoulder and gave myself a few silent moments to consider and reconsider what I was doing.

But I was as impatient as I had been when I had been fifteen and said, ‘Now.’ The price Richard might face, Julia might face, lived in the future. I could deal only with now. I owed it to myself. I owed it to my son that he should sit in the Squire’s chair. I was wilfully blind, I had to be wilfully blind, at the price I might be laying on him. The mortgages I had already accepted on the estate he would have to clear. The cost of working all his life with his sister would fall on him and her too. I would have done my duty by him, to her, to myself, and even in some odd way to my papa and the long Lacey line when I put the heir, the best heir possible, in the Squire’s chair. Future debts would have to be met in the future.

I blotted the letters, and sealed them, and then I wrote a third. To Mr Llewellyn. I offered him another mortgage on Wideacre: the new meadow lands we had enclosed near Havering. They had come to the estate as part of Celia’s dowry and if the worst came to the worst and we had to sell land, I should feel better about losing those newly gained fields. I could not have borne a mortgage on the fields I had ridden with my papa, even for his grandson. But we needed the money. The legal agreement would have to be signed and witnessed in the House of Lords itself and there were many pockets to be lined on the way, as well as legitimate fees to pay. The green shoots of wheat would have to be golden indeed this summer or we would face ruin.

‘Beatrice! You look so much better!’ said Celia, when I joined her and Harry for breakfast after my morning of shuddering relief.

‘I feel better,’ I said, smiling. Celia’s cook had sugar-roasted a ham with apricots, accompanied by little spicy beef pies. ‘What a wonder Mrs Gough is in the kitchen. I really do not begrudge her her wages.’

‘No, why should you?’ asked Celia, her brown eyes wide. ‘All London-trained cooks are expensive. I should think she is rather underpaid here.’

I smiled and shrugged. ‘No, don’t worry, Celia. I am not about to bring the parish labourers into the kitchen to cook your dinner. I have just been working on the accounts and cannot help pricing everything I see.’

‘They cannot be too bad, Beatrice, for your eyes are shining green again and they only do that when you are happy,’ said Celia observantly. ‘Have you had some good news?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I had a letter that made me very happy.’

Celia’s face lit up as if someone had given her a thousand candles.

‘John is coming home!’ she said, and her voice was full of joy.

‘No,’ I said, irritated. ‘John is not coming home. This good news was business news that you would neither understand nor appreciate. I have not heard from Dr Rose this month, but in his last letter he said that John still had much progress to make before he could come home.’

Celia’s eyes dropped to her plate and I guessed that tears were prickling under the downcast lids. When she looked up, her mouth was trembling slightly, both at the disappointment and at the sharp way that I had dashed her hopes.

‘I am sorry, my dear,’ she said. ‘It was thoughtless of me to jump to that conclusion just because you said you had some good news. I think of John and of your unhappiness without him so constantly that as soon as I saw you I thought it could only be his return that could make you so blooming again.’

I nodded ungraciously and turned my attention to my breakfast. Celia, I noticed, ate little and refused some fruit.

‘Shall you go to Bristol to see him?’ she asked tentatively. ‘It seems to have been such a long time. He left in the first week of December, and it is now mid-April.’

‘No,’ I said, and my voice was firm. ‘I feel I should obey Dr Rose’s advice on this. He said he would tell me the moment John could receive visitors. It would hardly help John if I were to go pushing in before he was ready to see me.’

Celia nodded submissively.

‘As you wish, my dear,’ she said tenderly. ‘But if you should change your mind, or when Dr Rose says you may go, you know that Richard would be perfectly able to do without you for a few nights. I should make sure that he was happy.’

I nodded. ‘I know. Thank you, Celia,’ I said.

I need not have been in such a fret of impatience. While the April days grew warmer and longer and the green shoots that were to pay for my son’s inheritance grew stronger and taller, the lawyers in London started the process of hearings and counter-arguments that would take them to the House of Lords. The bankers raised their eyebrows at my letter, but were bound by the power of attorney. One fine morning in mid-April Charles Lacey received into his account £200,000: a fortune for any man. But worth every penny to me and to my son.

On Charles Lacey, who would have come to Wideacre as Master on Harry’s death, who could even have expelled me, I showered the wealth of the MacAndrew fortune and kept not a penny back for myself. Not a penny for Wideacre. In one profligate gesture, I threw the MacAndrew fortune into his lap and left Wideacre without protection, without emergency capital.

And I had to write to another London banker to inquire about another mortgage to buy new stock to replace those we had sold in a poor market. It might all be coming to my hand, but it was a near-run thing.

In Dr Rose’s Bristol home my husband was growing stronger. His hands stopped shaking and his eyes were losing their feverish brightness. Through the bars across his window he could see the treetops greening and hear the rooks cawing around beakfuls of twigs. He could hear the wood pigeons murmuring over and over. He did not yet know that he was a pauper. He did not yet know that I had ruined him. But as he gained weight and grew stronger, his mind was turning back to me with less dread and less terror.

‘He seems to have come to terms with the fact that the un-happiness of recent months was not wilfully caused by you,’ Dr Rose wrote to me, with his usual tact. ‘He speaks of you now as an ordinary mortal and not as some witch. I know how much this must have distressed you. You will be glad that the delusion passed so quickly.’

I smiled as I read. John’s restoration to normality might prove very fragile when he came back and found himself a beggar living on my charity. He should not even have a frank for a letter to his father unless I had seen the contents.

‘I think he will soon be ready to come home,’ wrote Dr Rose. ‘I have discussed this with him and he says he is certain he could live in a normal household again without needing to drink to excess. At present he is abstaining altogether, but he sees drink around him and is able to resist it. In your own household he might learn to take the occasional drink with family and friends. He is confident he could learn to manage this, and I believe he may be right.’

I nodded and turned the page.

John might no longer be half-mad with fear of me but he still would hate and despise me. I knew a certain squirm of fear at the thought of how much he must hate me now, now he had been bound and drugged and imprisoned at my command. And I hated him, and feared him too. If I had my way he should never come home, my quick clever husband with his keen blue eyes. He had all the power that men’s laws and men’s traditions could give him. I feared that. He knew what I was and he knew a great deal of what I had done, and I feared the bright daylight of his vision. If I had had my way he could have stayed incarcerated for ever. But I had chosen a bad doctor for that. Dr Rose was a good sympathetic practitioner. He had sided with me because my story was persuasive, my face beautiful, and my husband clearly demented. But he could not be asked to hold John for ever. John would have to come home.

And if I knew him, he would be coming home to hate me, and coming home to love Celia and her child. Before he arrrived I had to complete the plan that would give Wideacre to Richard. And it had to be done while I had Celia on her own. So she would gain neither support nor, worse, damning information from John. I would find the news of the entail and Julia’s and Richard’s partnership easier to force upon Celia if she had no help at all, not even the help of such a broken reed as my convalescent husband.

I took up my pen and drew a sheet of paper to me and wrote a swift and easy reply. ‘What wonderful news!’ I told Dr Rose. ‘My heart is overflowing with happiness.’ But I had to advise caution. My sister-in-law, who had been so distressed over John’s illness, was herself now unwell. I thought it better that John should wait in peace and quiet at Bristol until his affectionate family were restored to their usual harmony.

I signed with my confident scrawl and sealed it, and sniffed the hot wax with relish. Then I leaned back in my chair and gazed out of the window.

The glory of the Wideacre daffodils was lingering on, and the cherry-red shoots in the rose garden were hidden under great clouds of yellow. Paler and daintier, beyond the cultivated daffodils, were the wild ones: self-seeded in the paddock. As I watched, Tobermory bent his handsome head and nibbled at a bunch. He came up, a yellow bloom drooping from his mouth, looking like a clown and I wished I had Richard by me to show him the comical sight of the best hunter in the stables looking so silly. In the banks of the woods beyond the paddock the brown earth was green in lush patches with the new growth of moss and the tiny plants that struggle up to the spring sunshine. Everything was growing and greening and nesting and mating and in all the loud-singing sweet-scented world I seemed the only cold figure in a dark dress, alone indoors.

I jumped up from my desk in sudden impatience and tossed a shawl over ray shoulders and went out bare-headed into the garden. I walked through the rose garden, sniffing at the warm gusts of the light scent of the daffodils, which blew, tantalizing, into my face. Through the little gate into the paddock I strolled and Tobermory saw me and came trotting to meet me, his lovely neck arched and his head high.

I reached up to pat him and his gentle huge face came down to nuzzle at my pockets with soft lips, hoping for a titbit.

‘Nothing there,’ I said to him tenderly. ‘I forgot. I’ll bring you something later.’

The ice seemed to be melting around my heart as I walked on down to the wood and heard the burble of the Fenny, high and brown, full of spring run-off from the downs. The path has no bridge opposite the Wideacre gate, but there is a fallen tree trunk that serves the purpose for me, though Harry fears he is too heavy and Celia is too afraid. In the middle of it were the Hodgett children sitting dangling their legs over the flood, each equipped with a little stick and a line, hopeful for stickleback. They were the youngest three of the family from the lodge house. Sarah Hodgett had sworn she would have no more after the twins five years ago and had managed to hold to that promise, though often she and her husband looked strained.

‘Hello,’ I called, my voice as light as the blackbird preening his feathers in the sunshine.

It was as if a dark cloud had come over that sunny wood. The five-year-old twins, mere moppets with a tumble of brown curls and large scared blue eyes, leaped up so suddenly they nearly fell in the water. Their sister, a serious-faced seven-year-old, grabbed a child in each hand and rushed them along the tree trunk to the opposite bank.

‘Beg pardon, Miss Beatrice,’ she said and started to pull them away, down the path towards their home.

‘Don’t go!’ I called to them. ‘You’ve left your rods!’

The little girl was trailing, looking back at me, and I crossed quickly to the middle of the tree trunk and picked up the sticks and string and smiled encouragingly at her. ‘Don’t leave your tackle behind!’ I said in mock reproof. ‘How will you catch the salmon in season?’

The oldest child turned. Her eyes were wide with anxiety.

‘We weren’t after your salmon, Miss Beatrice,’ she said earnestly. ‘The little ‘uns were just playing fishing, we didn’t take anything. We didn’t break anything on your land, Miss Beatrice. We used to play here last summer, before we knew we weren’t allowed. The little ‘uns wanted to come here again. I’m sorry, Miss Beatrice, I’m sorry!’

I could scarcely understand this rush of words, and I jumped down from the tree trunk, the rods in my hand, to gather the children to me and tell them of course they could fish in the Fenny. That they should always have a right to the childhood I had lived. The perfect Wideacre childhood where the woods stretched farther than your little legs could go, and the river flowed faster than you could run alongside.

‘Come here,’ I said kindly, and started towards them.

The oldest child gave a piercing scream and started to run away from me, dragging the two little ones with her. The baby girl tumbled and fell and her sister snatched her up, an impossibly bulky burden, and staggered along with her, the little boy trotting alongside. I took three swift steps and caught the oldest child by the shoulders and turned her to face me. Her eyes darted wildly and were full of terrified tears.

‘What’s the matter?’ I asked. I was catching her fear and anguish and my voice was high. ‘What’s the matter with you?’

‘Don’t send the soldiers after us, Miss Beatrice!’ she howled in a collapse into her fear. ‘Don’t send the soldiers after us and have us hung. We didn’t do no harm. We didn’t break nothing or fire anything. Please don’t have us hung, Miss Beatrice!’

My hands dropped to my sides as if her bony shoulders had burned me. My head rolled back and my eyes shut as I tried to register, to understand this blow to my idea of myself as Miss Beatrice, the darling of Wideacre. While I staggered, with my eyes still shut, the little girl snatched the twins’ hands and hurried them away, down the little path to the cottage. And she would not feel safe until they were inside the garden with the gate shut. For out in the woods was Miss Beatrice, whose green eyes could see through walls to what the naughty children were doing. Who could ride down the fastest runners in the village — for who had ever gone quicker than Ned Hunter when he was running a race? Who could hang the most honest man in the village — for who had ever been cheated by Gaffer Tyacke? Out in the woods was Miss Beatrice, dressed in black like the witch she was, guarding the land she now said was hers, and that no one else should have. And little children had better play on the lane, or Miss Beatrice would be after them. And little children had better say their prayers or Miss Beatrice would come for them in the night. And little children had better make themselves scarce for fear that her shadow, her witch’s shadow, fall on them. And hadn’t they run when they saw me!

I stretched my hands out behind me and felt the rough bark of an oak tree under my icy fingers. I slumped backwards and leaned against it, my eyes looking sightlessly up to the branches and the blue sky beyond, where the courting birds criss-crossed with full beaks. Every time I thought I had reached the worst point of this year, another gulf opened up beneath my feet and I could do nothing but step bravely, bravely into it, and hold on to all my bright courage during the long nightmare tumble. Every little, necessary act I took seemed to be followed with the consequences of a tragedy. The slight decision to turn a little part of the common over to wheat had led me to this oak tree and this black wall of despair. I was hated and reviled on the land I loved by the people I still thought of as mine.

My fingers dug like claws into the bark to keep my legs straight and my mind conscious. But I felt so ill with misery and with this blackness that I could do nothing more than stand. I could not walk home. And for the first time in all my life I wished that I could just go to sleep, here if needs be, on the sweet damp earth of Wideacre. And never wake up to this pain and this loneliness again. I stood, leaning back against the tree, aching with sorrow, and as immobile as if my legs had been caught in a trap and my lifeblood was seeping away as I watched in horror. I did indeed feel that I was bleeding to death. All my wise, loving common sense for Wideacre had drained from me, and all I had left was the empty knowledge that any fool could have. That idiots like John Brien and Harry could have. Men who never heard the deep dark heart of Wideacre beating in the earth. And now I could hear it no longer.

The cold brought me to my senses. At some time I had slid down the trunk and was on my knees in the soft loam. My dress was stained and damp, and the sun had gone down. The chill spring evening awoke me like a jug of cold water over my head and I shook myself like a soaked puppy and clambered to my feet. My legs were useless with cramps and I hobbled across the felled tree like an old lady. I made my slow, chilled, awkward way home and felt like an old lady too. Not the proud matriarch of my fantasy with her children and grandchildren round her, and her line stretching down through the mists of time to rule Wideacre for ever. But a defeated, miserable crone, very near death. And ready for death. And longing for death.

A week later, the post came, and I thought of death no more. It was the deed of entail. The lawyers had finally done it. My eyes scanned it as if I would eat it with my hungry mind. It transferred the entail from Charles Lacey to Julia and Richard. And it provided that the first-born child from Julia’s marriage or Richard’s line, girl or boy, would inherit for ever. I smiled at that. Another girl might yet come to own Wideacre outright. If my first grandchild was a copper-headed girl with green slanty eyes, she would own the land and have to pay no price for it. She would inherit by acknowledged right, and ride over the land with no thought of a threat to her ownership. If she had my wits she would marry some poor Squire to give her children for Wideacre, and then pack him off to Ireland or America with half an unkept promise to follow. And if she was like me — but did not break her heart and her wisdom as I feared I had done — she would laugh out loud in her freedom and her spirits and her love of the land. And the people of Wideacre would laugh too — for joy at having a good Mistress, fair pay, and food on the table.

Pinned to the change of entail deeds was the contract that would bring all this about. One half-written piece of vellum trimmed with the usual rash of red seals and glossy ribbons. But simple enough paragraphs considering what they would bring. And considering what they had cost.

It said only that herein and hereinafter was a contract between Richard MacAndrew and Julia Lacey, now aged one year and two years. That the estate, hereinafter known as ‘the estate’, should belong to the two of them jointly, and be inherited, jointly, by the first-born child of the marriage of either party.

I held it in my steady hands and sniffed at the smell of the wax and felt the texture of the thick vellum between my fingers. The red ribbons along the bottom were silk and they felt soft and warm to the touch. I scarcely read the two paragraphs; I savoured instead the very existence of the piece of paper that had cost me so much.

I dipped my head and laid my face against the document. The vellum was warm, smooth but textured. The seals were scratchy like scabs along the bottom. The ribbons smelled faintly of perfume as if they had been bought by the yard in some haberdasher’s whose perfumes and powder were kept beside his silks. A tear rolled down my face and I lifted my head to wipe it so that it should not blot this most precious piece of paper. Only one tear, no more. And whether I was weeping for relief that this struggle was now over and I could rest a little or because I had succeeded, I could not have said. The haze of pain that had cut me off from Wideacre had also cut me off from myself, and I no longer knew whether I was winning or losing. I could only go on and on and on. The sharp plough in the furrow, the sharp scythe in the field. And whether it was a toad killed, or a hare maimed, or my own life-blood on the bright blade, I could no longer tell.

Then I rang the bell and ordered the carriage for Chichester that afternoon, and bade Stride tell Harry that I needed him to escort me into town to transact some business.

And even at this late, last, final fence, Harry would have jibbed.

‘Why don’t we wait for John’s return?’ he said pleasantly as we bowled down the hard high road to Chichester, through the pretty downland villages, and dragged more slowly around the steep slopes of the shoulder of the downs.

‘Well, we don’t know how long he will be, nor in what state,’ I said, my tone equally light. ‘I should rather get this signed and sealed while it is still fresh in our minds. Then we can tell Celia and John together as a surprise.’

‘Yes,’ said Harry hesitantly. ‘But it’s damned bad from John’s point of view, y’know, Beatrice. I know he’s keen on Wideacre but we have spent his entire fortune to make Richard the heir. I do wish we could have consulted him.’

‘Oh! So do I!’ I said emphatically. ‘But what could we do? If we had left it very much longer there would have been rumours about Celia’s barrenness, and that would have distressed her beyond belief. Those rumours would have made Charles Lacey increase his price because they would have made him hopeful of inheriting the estate. We simply had to go on with it when we did. John will understand. It’s the decision he would have taken.’

‘Well, if you’re certain,’ Harry said comfortably. The carriage rocked slightly as he settled back in his corner. Harry was gaining weight alarmingly fast. He would have nothing in the Wideacre stables that could carry him if he continued to eat at his present rate and spend lazy afternoons with the children on his knee or taking them for little walks around the garden. And if his heart was weak like Mama’s, it must be strained.

‘But there’s no reason why we should not wait for his return to sign the contract,’ Harry said, still uneasy. ‘It looks so odd, Beatrice. It says “signature of Julia Lacey’s parent or guardian”, and there I put my name. And then it says “signature of Richard MacAndrew’s parent or guardian”, and there’s my name as well! Anyone who did not know us would think we were up to some sort of cheat.’

‘Yes, but everyone knows us,’ I said easily. ‘It is so obviously the most sensible and best arrangement for everyone, there could be no slurs cast on it. The only person who loses at all is Charles Lacey and even he has been well compensated.’

Harry chuckled at the thought. ‘Poor old Charles, eh?’ he said. ‘He must have started to get hopeful, d’you think, Beatrice?’

‘Yes,’ I smiled. ‘You outwitted him finely then, Harry!’

‘We did,’ said Harry generously.

‘Well, it was your excellent “idea that started the plan,’ I said. ‘And now it is coming to fruition. How well you have ordered the future, Harry! What a certainty of happiness lies before the two children.’

Harry nodded and gazed out of the window. We were coming off the high ground now, dropping down a thickly wooded road which leads to Chichester from the north. The de Courcey mansion stood behind high walls on our left, other great houses further down the road. Then there was the sprawl of little cottages of the poor. Then the wheels were rattling on the paved roads and we were among the town houses of the prosperous Chichester townsfolk with the spire of the Cathedral towering over it all.

Harry’s pride in his own quick wits walked his legs up the steps to the attorney and moved his hand across the precious piece of paper until he had signed it, as it had to be signed, in two places.

‘It looks a little odd,’ said our solicitor, presuming on our long relationship to challenge our actions. ‘Is it imperative that it be done without the signature of Dr MacAndrew?’

‘My husband is ill,’ I said, my voice low. The solicitor nodded. A grey man in a shady office, even he had heard the gossip, and had pitied me, the prettiest girl in the county, married to a drunkard. ‘We felt we should press on without him,’ I said. ‘We cannot tell when he will be well enough to come home again.’ I stopped because my voice had become hoarse with suppressed tears.

The solicitor pressed my hand. ‘I do beg your pardon, Mrs MacAndrew,’ he said kindly. ‘I wish I had not voiced my concern. Think no more of it, I beg of you.’

I nodded and gave him a sweet forgiving smile on parting when he took my hand in a warm handclasp and bent and kissed it. I drooped ever so slightly down the stairs and then laid my head against the cushions of the carriage as if I were weary. Harry saw my face and took my hand comfortingly in his.

‘Don’t be too sad, Beatrice,’ he said. ‘John will soon be better, I am sure. Perhaps you two can be happy again. Celia is certain there is a future for the two of you together. And whatever happens to your husband, you and your son at least are safe on Wideacre.’

I nodded and returned the squeeze of his hand.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We have done a good day’s work today, Harry!’

‘Indeed, yes,’ he said. ‘When shall we tell Celia?’

I thought fast. I did not want to tell Celia, but equally I knew I never would be ready to tell her. When we announced the joyful news of the change of entail and the inheritance of Julia and Richard as contracted partners I anticipated opposition from her. She knew of them only as half-brother and sister, both of them my children. She could not know, would never guess, that they were both sired by her husband. But she did not like their intimacy. And she did not like my touch upon Julia.

‘Let me speak to Celia first, Harry,’ I said, considering. ‘She is bound to be distressed to learn that you know she is barren. I think it would be better if I told her that although you know, you are not troubled, because you have so cleverly found a way to make Julia your heir.’

Harry nodded. ‘Whatever you think best, Beatrice,’ he said. ‘You sort it out as you please. All I can think of is my dinner. How cold these April evenings are. D’you think there will be soup?’

‘Almost certainly,’ I said equably. ‘I shall speak to Celia in the parlour after dinner, Harry, so you may sit long over your port. Don’t come in until I send for you.’

‘Very well,’ he said, obediently. ‘I shall have some cheese with my port. I shall be in no hurry to leave, I can assure you.’

Harry’s cheese proved to be so potent that Celia actually suggested that we withdraw as soon as it arrived at the table.

‘I agree,’ I said, laughing. I got to my feet and pocketed an apple from the fruit bowl. ‘I would rather have my fruit in the parlour than share a table with that cheese, Harry!’

Harry chuckled, quite unrepentant.

‘You are far too nice,’ he said. ‘Go and have your talk. Celia, I think Beatrice has some good news for you which I know will make you happy.’

Celia’s eyes flashed to my face and her ready smile illuminated her.

‘Oh, Beatrice, is it John?’ she said as soon as the parlour door had closed behind us.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Not yet. But the last letter I had was most encouraging. Dr Rose was talking in terms of months rather than an indefinite stay.’

Celia nodded, but the light had died from her eyes. She looked bitterly disappointed. I could not help wondering, with the spice of my habitual malice, if Harry’s increased interest in food, and his growing bulk, was turning him from the golden prince of their early married life into a dreary, unexciting gourmand. And whether John’s thin tension, his desperate grief, his nervous, passionate struggle against his drinking and against my control of him had inspired a love in Celia that was more than sisterly.

But I was not ready to tease that truth out of Celia. I had to take a most difficult fence, and all the thought and care I had put into the approach might not carry me safe over.

‘It is good news though,’ I said. I crossed to the fire and sat in the winged armchair beside it. I pulled up a footstool and lifted my feet up so they felt the warmth of the fire. Celia sank into a chair opposite, her eyes on my face. In the flickering firelight and lit by a branch of candles behind her she looked like some young serious schoolgirl. Far too young to be enmeshed in this complex conspiracy of lies and beguiling half-truths. Far too serious to be able to break away and be free when I had her in my grasp.

‘Harry knows that you are barren, and he has despaired of having a male heir,’ I said baldly.

Celia gave a little gasp and her hand flew to her cheek as if the pain in her heart was toothache.

‘Oh,’ she said. Then she was silent.

‘But he has hit on the most wonderful plan to sign the estate over for Julia,’ I said. ‘It was all his idea, but I have helped with it, of course. We kept it from you in the early stages because we needed to discover first if it could be done. But it can be done. It is possible for Harry to buy the entail from our cousin Charles Lacey and to entail it instead upon Julia. She and Richard are jointly to inherit Wideacre, and to run it together.’

Celia’s face was a picture of amazement, then dawning horror.

‘Run it together?’ she said. ‘How would they be joint heirs?’

I kept my voice steady and cheerful, but I was conscious of choosing my words with care. I felt awkward. I felt nervous. It was like taking a horse you do not know to a fence you do not know in a county you do not know.

‘As joint partners,’ I said lightly. ‘Like Harry and I do now.’

‘Like Harry and you,’ said Celia. ‘Like Harry and you,’ she repeated. She had turned back to me but her eyes were on the fire. Something in their hazy brownness made me wonder what she was seeing in a pile of glowing logs.

‘No,’ she said abruptly.

I jumped in unfeigned surprise.

‘What?’ I asked.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I do not give my consent, I do not wish it. I do not think it is a good idea.’

‘Celia, what are you saying?’ I said. I disliked the speed of her words. The breathlessness, the stillness of the little figure in the pale parlour.

‘I do not wish that this contract be signed,’ she said clearly. ‘I am Julia’s mother and I have a right to a voice in the decision on her future. I do not wish this to go ahead.’

‘Celia, why not?’ I asked. ‘Whatever are you thinking of, to stand against Harry’s intentions in this way?’

That did not stop her, though it should have given her pause. But her eyes were fixed on the fireplace as if reflected on the coals she could see Harry and me frantically coupling on that very hearth, as my mama had done.

‘It is hard to explain,’ she said. ‘But I do not wish Julia to be involved in the running of Wideacre in the way that you have been.’ I could hear the restraint in her voice, which came from her anxiety not to hurt me. But I would have been deaf not to hear the certainty too.

‘Wideacre means so much to you, Beatrice, that you cannot understand that there is any other life open to a girl. But I should like Julia to love this place as her girlhood home, and to leave it with a light heart when she marries the man of her choice.’

‘But this way she is an heiress, Celia!’ I exclaimed. ‘She can marry the man of her choice and he can live here as John and I and you and Harry do. She will be joint owner of Wideacre. You could not bless a child with a better gift!’

‘You could! You could!’ said Celia, speaking fiercely though her voice was low. ‘The greatest blessing I shall give Julia will be to keep her free from the idea that Wideacre is the only place in the world to live. That it is the only thing in the world that could make her happy. I want her to be happy anywhere. I want her to be happy because she leads a good life and has a clean conscience and because she can freely give and freely receive love. I don’t want her to think that her life’s happiness is bound up with a handful of acres and a starving, miserable village!’

‘Celia!’ I gasped, and I stared at her in horror. ‘You don’t know what you are saying!’

‘I do,’ she said emphatically, looking at me directly now. ‘I have thought long and hard on this, Beatrice. I have thought about it ever since we came home to England. I should not want Julia to share her home with another couple, however dear they may be to her. When she marries I should want her to live with her husband and live with him alone. I should not want her to come into another woman’s house as I did, and to see her husband absorbed and working with someone else as I did. If she loved him with her whole heart I should want her to have all his time and all his love.’

‘But we have been so happy,’ I said weakly. ‘We all were so happy.’

‘There was something wrong!’ burst out Celia. She took three swift strides to my chair and pulled me to my feet to scan my face as if she would read my soul. ‘There was something wrong,’ she said certainly. ‘You know what it was and I do not. John knew what it was, but he could not tell me and I think it was that which sent him half mad and made him drink. I can feel it everywhere I go in the house. I can breathe it in the air. And I do not want my child touched with one feather of it.’

‘This, this is nonsense,’ I stammered. I was overwhelmed by the memory of my mama’s sense of sin, of something dirty and black in the house that she could smell but not see. I had trusted my mama to be too much of a coward, too much of a fool, to track down the foul thing and look it in the face. When she saw it, the two-backed beast before the fire, she had died with horror.

But Celia might almost dare to track it into its very lair and face it. Armed with her love for her child and her courage, Celia might go where my mama’s nervous thoughts had failed her.

‘Stop it, Celia!’ I said abruptly. ‘You are distressed. We will talk no more of this tonight. If you really dislike the whole idea we will change it. But let us have tea now, and then go early to bed.’

‘No, I won’t stop here, and I won’t have the tea tray, and we won’t go to bed until I understand more. How was Charles Lacey compensated? What are the terms of the contract?’

‘Oh, my!’ I said lightly. ‘Business, then? Well, very well, if you wish it.’ I snowed her under then, with rack-rents and revisions of tenancies, and long leases made short, and cottagers’ rights, and enclosure acts and the price of corn. How to sell when it is standing in the field, how to gamble on the growth and on the rise of the market when other farmers have poor crops. I even threw in the battle I had won over the water rights until her unlearned head spun.

‘So we have changed our farming system slightly to make greater profits, and we used the MacAndrew money too,’ I finished.

She nodded only to clear her head; there was no assent there. She could not have understood a word of the garble.

‘John’s money?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That is Richard’s contribution, as it were, towards being made heir of Wideacre, jointly with Julia.’

‘You have used John’s money without his consent?’ she asked. Her voice was even but her face was appalled.

‘As a loan merely,’ I said with assurance. ‘The whole idea of the power of attorney is to safeguard the patient’s interests. Obviously it is in John’s interests — and mine as his wife and the mother of his son — that he should get maximum interest. The loan he has made to Wideacre is paying far more than the MacAndrew Line dividends. And it secures Richard’s future, too.’

‘You have used John’s money without his consent and committed his son to Wideacre without him knowing?’ she asked incredulously.

‘Of course,’ I said, challenging her, face to face. ‘Any proper parent would be delighted, as Harry and I are, that the entail can so be changed.’

She smoothed a hand over her forehead as if to wipe away the confusion. It was ineffectual.

‘That is a matter for John and you,’ she said, her mind in a whirl. ‘I cannot think it right. I cannot believe that Harry could have so used John’s entire fortune, and that while he was ill, but if the contract is not signed, perhaps it can all wait until John returns from hospital?’

‘Perhaps, perhaps,’ I said soothingly. ‘I am not exactly sure. Harry has been making the arrangements, not I. I undertook only to reassure you, that although Harry was grieved to understand that you are barren there should be no unhappiness between the two of you, because he has found this way around that sorrow. That your lovely little girl can inherit her father’s land.’

‘You plan that she and Richard will be joint owners?’ Celia repeated slowly. ‘That she and Richard should grow up together on the land, learning about the land together?’

I nodded.

‘And you and Harry would take them both out on the estate, looking at the land and learning to farm. And all the time they would be growing closer and closer. And only you and I would know that they are not just partners, and not just cousins, but half-brother and half-sister?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But Celia …’

‘But we would not be able to tell them that!’ she said. ‘They would be best friends and playmates and business partners. They would think they were first cousins, but they would be close kin. They would learn to love each other, and their interests would lie together. How could they then turn aside from each other and learn to love the people they will be betrothed to marry? How can my Julia have the life I had hoped for her and planned for her as a girl of Quality if she is an heiress from the age of two in a partnership with a boy who is neither husband nor distant relation?’

She spun on her heel so she did not face me and buried her face in her hands.

‘It is a nightmare,’ she said. ‘I cannot tell what it is but some danger is threatening Julia from this. I do not know what!’

‘You are being foolish, Celia,’ I said coldly. I took her shoulders in a firm grip and felt a shudder run through her like a terror-struck foal. ‘Wideacre is a family business,’ I said levelly. ‘Julia would always have had obligations to meet on the estate. She will simply work with Richard as Harry and I work.’

That reassurance tripped her control.

‘No!’ she said, and it was nearly a scream. ‘No! I forbid it! You gave her to me and said that she should be my child. I claim my right as her mother to decide her future. She shall not be with Richard as you and Harry are, for I am afraid of something about you and Harry, even if I have no words for it but only a dread that chills and frightens me when I wake in the night. I do not know what I am afraid of, and I make no complaint against either of you. But I am afraid, Beatrice! I am afraid for Julia! I do not want her to be part of another brother-and-sister partnership. No. I do not give my consent. I shall tell Harry.’

I leaped for the door and spread my arms so that she could not get past me.

‘Celia, wait,’ I said. ‘Don’t dash out to Harry like that while you are distressed. He will think it most odd. He will think we have quarrelled. Calm yourself and consider what you mean to say. If you do not want Julia to be joint heir with Richard she can always sell him her share when they are older, or he can sell his. There is no need for you to become so upset over this, Celia.’

She had heard none of it. She was looking at me as if she had seen me for the first time. She was looking at me curiously, with disbelief, as if there were some mark scrawled on my face, or as if I had spiders crawling in my hair, or some other horror.

‘Stand aside, Beatrice,’ she said. Her voice was low and hard. ‘I want to speak with Harry.’

‘Not while you are so overwrought,’ I pleaded, and I did not move.

‘Stand aside,’ she said again. And I remembered her before the library fireplace with two smashed bottles of whisky dripping from her hand.

‘You will distress Harry,’ I said. ‘He planned this to make you happy.’

‘Stand aside,’ she repeated, and her eyes flickered towards the bell pull. For one brief moment I wondered if she could face the scene of the butler coming and her ordering him to push me out of the way by forcing open the door. But I saw the look on her face and knew I was arguing with a woman on the edge of hysteria.

‘Beatrice, I have asked you three times,’ she said and her voice was tight with control that might break at any moment. I feared Celia in a panic more than I feared her when she could judge to speak or be silent. If she screamed out that Richard and Julia were brother and sister then I would be irreparably lost. But if she kept herself under control, and if I went with her, I might manage this scene still.

I opened the parlour door for her with a little ironic bob curtsy and followed, hard on her heels, as she swept across the hall to the dining room. A footman was coming through the door from the kitchen bringing more biscuits for Harry, and I scowled at him so he turned on his heel and went back behind the baize door again. Celia saw nothing, heard nothing. She flung open the dining-room door and made Harry jump with the bang. He had a plate before him heaped with cheese and biscuits, and the flagon of port by his hand. He had butter on his chin. I could trust him as far as I could flick water.

‘I do not consent to this arrangement,’ said Celia in her high, hard voice. ‘The documents are not to be signed. I do not wish it for Julia.’

Harry’s blue eyes were wide with surprise.

‘But it’s done!’ he said simply. ‘We signed them this afternoon. The entail’s changed, and Richard and Julia are joint heirs.’

Celia opened her mouth and screamed, a thin wail like a small animal trapped. She stood motionless, her eyes on Harry’s face, his cheeks still full of biscuits. I was frozen too. I could not even think what I could say to stop Celia’s mouth. But her horror and her fear of the unknown thing that hid in the corners of Wideacre and that one could almost feel breathing among us kept her wordless.

Her mouth still open, she gave a little whimper like a child with a finger trapped in a door. Her eyes rolled from Harry, motionless at the head of the table, to me, silent behind her. She found one word in her panic-stricken mind. She said, ‘John.’ Then she picked up her silk skirts in her hands and whirled from the room.

Harry bolted his mouthful and looked wildly at me.

‘What’s the matter?’ he demanded. ‘What’s wrong with her?’

I shrugged. My shoulders were stiff and I could feel the gesture was wooden. My face must have been as white as a sheet. I could feel the control and the power slipping through my fingers like the sands of the common.

‘Listen!’ I said. I heard the door to the west wing bang and straight away thought of my desk and the incriminating bundle of Celia’s letters to John, which had never reached him. Without a word to Harry I dashed after Celia and to my office. The room was in darkness; she was not there.

I called sharply, ‘Celia!’ but I had no answer. I could not think where she might be. I checked my west-wing parlour but although the candles and the fire had been lit there was no Celia weeping on the pretty sofa. I ran up the stairs to my bedroom, to John’s room; I even glanced into the nursery to see my son sleeping like a tousled angel. But no Celia. Then I heard the sound of wheels on the paving stones of the stable yard and ran to the window. The coach was out and Celia was stepping inside.

‘Celia!’ I called. ‘Wait!’ With fumbling desperate fingers I struggled with the catch and the window swung open.

‘Stop!’ I shouted. The stable lads looked up at my voice even as they were shutting the door to Celia’s carriage.

‘Stop!’ I said. ‘Wait!’

Celia’s head appeared at the window and I could see she was repeating the order to drive on to the coachman. I knew the coachman. I had given him a chance when Papa had been looking for a new man only six years ago. I had told Papa then that Ben was one of those people that can charm horses into the shafts. I could not remember his surname. He had been ‘Coachman Ben’ to us for what seemed a lifetime. But he was Wideacre born and bred. I had given him his job. I paid his wages. I knew he would stop, and Celia would have to climb down out of the carriage; then, between us, Harry and I, we could pet her and bully her, and confuse her and mislead her until this show of courage and activity was knocked out of her. And I could carry on, ploughing my straight furrow, scything in my straight line. Whatever stood in my path.

‘Coachman Ben!’ I called in my clear tone. ‘Wait! I am coming down!’

I slammed the window shut and swirled round for the stairs. It took me less than a minute to be downstairs and through the west-wing door to the stable yard. But I heard the clatter of wheels as the coach rolled away, and I saw the lights go round the corner to the front of the house, to the drive, to Acre lane, and from there, if I guessed aright, to Bristol, to John.

‘Stop!’ I shrieked like a fishwife into the wind of the April night at the vanishing flickering lights. I gazed wildly round for a stable lad to send after them, to order Coachman Ben to stop. To tell him Miss Beatrice demanded his return this instant. But then my angry orders died on my lips and the rage in me died. I stood very still in the cool April night and shuddered from the cold that was in my chilled heart.

I knew why the coachman had not stopped.

I had remembered the coachman’s surname.

It was Tyacke.

He was Gaffer Tyacke’s nephew.

I turned on my heel and walked slowly, slowly back inside. Harry was still seated at the table, though he had been sufficiently disturbed to stop eating.

‘Where is Celia?’ he asked.

‘Gone,’ I said heavily, and threw myself into the chair at the foot of the table. Harry and I faced each other down the long length of the dining table, as we had the first night after our first lovemaking on the downs. That seemed very far away now, and very long ago. He pushed the decanter of port towards me and I fetched a clean glass and slopped a generous measure in. I threw it off with one gulp. It warmed my throat and belly but it did not touch the cold weight of fear beneath my ribs. Who could have imagined that one afternoon of sweet passion on the downs could have led us down this road? Each little step had seemed so easy, so safe. Each little step had led to another. And now the youth who had filled me with irresistible desire was a plump, ageing Squire. Too stupid to lie to his wife. Too foolish to manage his own affairs. And the dazzling, dazzled, girl that I had been was gone. I had lost her somewhere. She had died a little in the fall that killed her papa. Then a little bit more in the trap that bit off Ralph’s legs. A little of her had been blown out like a candle when her mother had sighed her life away. And drop by drop, like an icicle growing, the girl that I had been had slipped away, and this ice that was my heart had been left.

‘I don’t begin to understand what is going on,’ said Harry petulantly. ‘Why was Celia so upset? Where has she gone? She can’t have gone calling at this hour, surely? Why did she not tell me she was planning to go out?’

‘There is no need to be quite so dense,’ I said sharply. ‘You can see perfectly well that Celia and I have had a quarrel. No one is asking for your support, so there is no need to pretend that you do not understand what it is all about. Celia would rather that Julia lost Wideacre than ran it with Richard in the sort of partnership that you and I have. I took offence at her tone and we had words. Now she has flounced off. I expect she is going to see John. I imagine she is going to tell him that we have spent his fortune and to ask him to help her to reverse all our trouble and to revoke the contract between Julia and Richard.’

Harry gaped. ‘That’s bad,’ he said. I pushed the decanter back to him and he poured himself a glass and returned it to me. The room stank of conspiracy. Harry did not know much, but he knew when his comfort and his wealth were in danger. And he knew that in any battle over Wideacre business he would be on my side.

‘They can’t do that without our consent, can they?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I said. ‘And they cannot persuade Charles Lacey to give back the MacAndrew money. So they can do nothing.’

‘You said John would be pleased,’ Harry said petulantly. ‘You said Celia would be pleased too.’

‘How could I have guessed they would not be?’ I said. ‘I dare say John would have been happy enough about it. But not if Celia bursts in on him with tales of his being robbed behind his back in order to benefit your daughter.’

‘She would surely never say such a thing!’ protested Harry. ‘She knows I would never do such a thing. Celia is too loyal to turn against me so.’

‘Yes, but I think she caught something of John’s madness from him,’ I said. ‘By the time they took him away she was almost ready to believe that I was having him locked up out of spite, or perhaps even to gain his fortune. Madness, of course.’

‘Of course,’ said Harry uneasily.

‘I don’t think either of us realized how close those two had become,’ I said. ‘Celia spent a great deal of time with John after Mama’s death. They were always talking in the parlour or wandering together in the rose garden.’

‘She loves him dearly,’ Harry said stoutly.

‘I hope she does not love him too dearly,’ I said. ‘It would be a terrible thing if her loving nature had led her astray. If she was even now thinking not what would make you and your child happy but worrying about John and the MacAndrew fortune.’

Harry was aghast. ‘That’s just not possible,’ he said.

‘No, I’m sure it is not,’ I agreed swiftly. ‘It is just that this dash of Celia’s off to Bristol looks so much as if she was joining forces with John against us. Against you and me and Wideacre.’

Harry reached for the decanter again, and buttered himself a biscuit with fingers that trembled.

‘This is all madness!’ he burst out. ‘Nothing has been right since Mama died! John went crazy and now, as you say, Celia is behaving most oddly too. If I have any nonsense from Celia about business arrangements you and I have seen fit to make, I shall be very clear with her indeed. She knows nothing about the land. Indeed, I have been happy to let her know nothing about the land. But she cannot now try to interfere in perfectly proper business affairs.’

‘That is right, Harry,’ I said. My tone was calm but I was panting with relief. ‘You have been too sweet, too gentle with Celia, if she thinks she can dash off into the night without even taking her maid, to speak to your brother-in-law, my husband, about our personal and confidential affairs.’

‘Indeed, yes!’ said Harry. ‘I am most displeased with Celia. And when she comes home I will tell her so.’

‘Good,’ I said. ‘I think it needs to be said.’ I paused. Harry was seething in his chair, stimulated with temper. I knew what would come next and I resigned myself to a tedious hour or two in the room at the top of the stairs. I knew the signs in Harry. We were together in the secret room seldom these days, for I had my security on the land through the money and through the lawyers, and Harry was too lazy and too idle to think of it often, but it still held its old lure for him. He poured himself another glass and reached a hand out for my glass. I half stood to slide it to him and as he leaned forward to pour his eyes were on my breasts.

‘Mmm, Beatrice?’ he said, slumping back in his chair. I smiled a heavy-lidded lazy smile at him.

‘Yes, Harry?’ I said.

‘With both Celia and John away …” He let the request trail off. His breathing was shallow and a little faster. I shot him one unwinking look from under my dark eyelashes. A look that was both a challenge and an invitation.

‘I will go and light the fire,’ I said. ‘Ten minutes, Harry.’

He gave a sigh of anticipation and buttered another biscuit. I slid from the room like a snake and closed the door softly. ‘Carry on eating like that, Harry,’ I thought wryly, ‘and you will be dead within three years. Then my son Richard and my daughter Julia will be joint heirs, and I will be their guardian and the only Master of Wideacre until I hand over to my darling son. And neither Celia nor John will be able to stop me.’

I did not send an express letter post-haste after Celia. I did not send a footman riding after her to catch her. If quiet, conventional, mousy Celia could whirl out of the house with only a shawl over her head like some demented peasant woman, then she could travel non-stop, and no letter could reach Dr Rose before she did. With Coachman Ben Tyacke driving, no footman with my order would make him stop and turn against the order of Lady Lacey. And, given that Ben was a Tyacke and had loved his uncle dearly, the fact that I wished Celia to return would be enough to make him whip up the horses.

All I could count on was John’s instability, on Celia’s confusion and despair, and on Dr Rose’s prejudice against the two of them, which I had instilled without even planning to do, but which now came, like the witch they called me, unbidden to my hand. I could do nothing, I decided, as I sat back in my morning bath before my bedroom fire. Lucy had rung for more cans of hot water and took them from the footman at the door and poured the scalding jugful down my back. My toes were resting on the rounded lip of the bath, my body curled in the boiling sweet-scented water.

‘Miss Beatrice, you will scald,’ said Lucy predictably as I waved for another hot jug.

‘Yes,’ I said happily and felt the near-unbearable heat wash around me. My ten toes were rosy pink with heat; my buttocks and body would be scarlet. After a night of beating and threatening and cursing Harry into a frenzy of whimpering pleasure I felt a certain need to boil myself clean. I might have all the crimes of Wideacre on my copper-curly head — and a few I had not done as well — but at least I lacked Harry’s confused messiness. When I needed that sweeping flood of sexual pleasure all I wanted was an honest man to tumble me in bed or grass. Harry seemed to need an unending repertoire of threats and promises and a cupboardful of tricks. And his plump heaving body filled me neither with lust nor hatred, but with a certain cool disdain that excited him all the more. I waved for more hot water. I felt a need to scrub and scald Harry’s wet kisses off my skin.

I had done nothing, and I could do nothing, I thought, as Lucy poured the water, and at my gesture massaged the back of my neck with sweet perfumed soap right up to the damp hairline in hard slow circles.

‘Mmmm,’ I said in pleasure, and closed my eyes.

At the very, very worst Celia and John would come home a pair of avenging angels to destroy Wideacre and the garden of deception I had grown here. John had guessed that Harry was Richard’s father, and Celia’s secret — that Julia too was my child — would be another piece in the jigsaw. The two secrets together would ruin me.

But I looked at that prospect with my fighter’s gaze. I thought I might survive it. John was fresh from the cool sanity of a well-run asylum, unready for the craziness of his real life. I had established him as insane, I might be able to tar Celia with the same brush. Theirs was an insane tale. No one would believe it. It would be far more convincing to claim that their guilt and desire had driven John to drink and overset Celia’s senses. That together they had dreamed of a nightmare world of terror: of monsters in mazes, of toads crushed beneath a plough, of wounded hares. It was nonsense. No one would believe them if I could hold my head as proud as a queen and face down every truth as the vilest calumny.

But I did not think they would put the two halves of the picture together.

‘Don’t stop,’ I said to Lucy, who obediently moved the piping cloth over one shoulder and then the other.

John was fighting with one hand tied behind him because of his tenderness to Celia. I knew that. I had watched him in his first days of horror-stricken knowledge when he wavered between drunken despair, hatred for me, and horror at the web that enmeshed us all. If he had been going to expose me to Celia, to wreck her marriage, to break her heart with the disgusting truth of her beloved husband, he would have done it then. But he did not. Not even when he was writhing in a strait-jacket on the floor of her parlour had the secret escaped him. He was not shielding me. He was protecting Celia from the horror that undermined her life so that the very ground beneath her feet was an eggshell cover over a maze of sin. Celia herself might expose me to John in her first gabble of panic, but I could trust my cool steady husband to see the full picture and yet keep his own counsel.

And I did not fear Celia. If she returned alone or decided to act alone I did not think she would expose me. She had given her word of honour and I imagined that would count for much with her. She had loved me once and that might make her pause. She loved respectability as much as my foolish mama, and to expose me would be my ruin and the shame of the Laceys. But more than all of that, more than everything, was her total love for Julia, which, I imagined, would transcend every other thing. If she exposed me as Julia’s mother, even in my shame I could claim Julia and take her away. Whatever pain and confusion boiled in Celia’s mind I knew, as I knew my own clear-headed calculations, that she would never risk losing Julia. One hint of that danger and Celia would withdraw.

I bent my knees so that the hot water washed over my soaped shoulders and rinsed me clean. I had them both. They both loved and so they were both vulnerable. Compared to that bondage of devotion I was free and unbound. My love for Richard neither contained nor controlled me. I still went my own way. I might plot for him, but I would not sacrifice myself for him. But Celia and John were not their own masters. And as such I did not fear them.

‘Towel, please,’ I said to Lucy, and she fetched the coarse, linen wraps from where they were warming before the fire. I rubbed myself as hard as I could, until my pink skin stung, and then I brushed my hair free in a silky copper mane, soft as satin on my back. My body showed no signs of two pregnancies. My belly was flat and hard, my breasts round and still firm, my legs as long and as slim as ever with no disfiguring veins.

I smoothed my palm down from my neck, over the jutting swell of my breasts, down over my belly with the soft curls of hair between my legs. I was lovely still. And soon I should need a lover. A real lover, not a chore like Harry, but a man who would laugh with me and romp with me and hurt me and pleasure me. I turned with a sigh and snapped my fingers for Lucy to fetch my petticoats. The hard fighting loving I remembered were those passionate struggles I had with Ralph. God alone knew where I would find another like him. I supposed I should have to resign myself to missing him and longing for him.

And waiting. Waiting for this hard time to be done. Waiting for the profits to show on the land so that Wideacre could be eased, if only slightly, from this drag of debt that I had put on the land. Waiting for the great golden glut of corn to release the land and the people from this struggle for money. So that I could restore a little, instead of snatching away. So that people would forget this one bad year of my mastership of Wideacre and remember instead the good years that had followed each other, one after another, since I had run the land.

Today I should spend another morning in my office trying to make sense of the figures. Mr Llewellyn now had three mortgages on our land: the common land, the plantation, and Celia’s dowry lands. But to service the loan to him, when the beasts did so badly, I had borrowed from our bankers. Their rates were lower and I had been pleased with my cleverness at winning Wideacre a little breathing space. But they had the right to alter their rates as they pleased, and now I was paying more to borrow their money than the rate I was paying Llewellyn. I was in the ludicrous position of borrowing money to service a loan. And if I was late with either debt there were penalty clauses to meet.

Last month I had been forced to sell some fat lambs in an early market and had earned less than they deserved, because I was desperate for cash. This month, with Llewellyn’s repayments and the bankers’ loan both falling due, I would have to face the prospect of selling land — I could not keep on selling off stock out of season. There had to be some way to break free of this downward spiral of debt; yet I could see none. And I had no one to advise me. Only one man I knew understood the ways of the London money-men. Only one man I knew could tell me if it was indeed as I feared, that they were playing with me like a clever fisherman plays with a salmon; that, although I spoke privately to only two or three, they all heard my words; that the message was out: Wideacre was headed for ruin and some skilful fisherman could net it with a flick of his wrist. Only one man could advise me on this. And he was advising Celia on how the two of them could wreck my plans, as they drove home together.

I counted the days that Celia had been away as I went downstairs to breakfast. A day to get to Bristol, since she had started in the early evening. A day or two days to see John and to persuade Dr Rose to release him. Two days to drive home. Heads together in the carriage. Minds together, pitted against me. Planning my downfall, driving closer.

I thought four or five days, and I was right. On the afternoon of the fourth day since Celia had dashed from the house, the carriage came bowling up the drive: muddy, and with one lamp broken. And the two of them inside.

‘They are here,’ I said tersely to Harry. ‘You know what you have to do. We have talked it over, and I am sure you are right. She had tried to meddle with our business. She dashed out of the house to go to another man, and that man my husband. She ran away like a mad thing. She has exposed the Laceys to comment in the county.’

Harry nodded. He was breathing fast and there was a certain brightness in his eyes. ‘She should be punished,’ he said, and I remembered his early training in bullying at his vicious school.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘She has been treated like porcelain by us all. Take her at once and take your pleasure on her. You are her husband. You have the right. Go and break her.’

He nodded again. ‘But no man could hurt Celia,’ he said, wanting to be convinced and loving to hear the words.

‘Any real man could,’ I said tempting. ‘You of all people could, Harry. Remember the little boys at your school? Besides, Celia may be precious to you but you cannot allow her to behave like this. She fled from you to John. If you want to keep her you had best show her who is Master. You are the Squire. You are her husband. You can do anything you like to her. But do not listen to a word she says. Just reclaim her.’

Harry’s eyes were wide and blue and his breath came fast. He walked past a tray of cakes without even seeing them. He blundered to the front door alight with cruelty and lust. We heard the noise of the carriage draw up and Harry was at the door before Stride could be there. Celia tumbled out, not waiting for the steps. She was wearing the dress she had left in, and it was creased and shabby from travelling. She looked nothing like the Lady Lacey who had dominated Harry and me. She looked exhausted and a little afraid.

‘Harry?’ she said hesitantly and went up the steps towards him where he stood, unmoving, by the front door.

He was magnificent. He said not a word. He looked like some fat hero in the travelling theatre. His face was stony. She came beside him, and put her little hand on his arm.

‘Harry?’ she said again. He scooped her up into a hard grip and I saw her face blench white as he hurt her. Then, still without a word, he swept her into the house and up the main stairs to the first floor. I heard his heavy tread along the corridor to their bedroom, the door open and close, and the double click as he locked it. Then I turned back to the carriage. Whatever was happening behind that door I cared not. Celia would be humiliated and would be forced down to face the mire of Harry’s twisted desires. If she refused him he could strike her or rape her. If she consented she would carry the filth of his perverse pleasure on her soul and never again would she meet John with unshadowed eyes or stand before me in my own office and lay down the law to me. She would be humbled to dust.

I smiled.

John caught that smile as he stepped down from the carriage. The sunshine was bright but he shivered as if a cold wind had blown down the nape of his neck. He was looking well. The strained, desperate look had gone from his face and he had put on weight and was lithe and fit again. The hollows under his eyes had gone, and the muscle that used to twitch in his cheek was still. His ordeal had graven two hard lines either side of his unsmiling mouth and two deep frown lines above his eyebrows, but his face was serene, strong. He was dressed immaculately with his usual neatness, in black with the whitest of linen, and a thick black travelling coat. I met his blue eyes and we measured each other in a long hard stare. He might have the look of the man I had loved, but we were sworn enemies. I said no word of greeting but turned on my heel and walked back to the parlour.

I poured myself a cup of tea and my hands were steady. Unbidden, the parlourmaid came in with another cup and a plate, and behind her, as if he had taken tea with me every day for the past five months, came John my husband. He shut the parlour door with a click and I wondered why that little noise should give me such a shudder of dread. I was alone with my husband.

‘Tea?’ I asked courteously. ‘Some cakes? Or some fruit bread?’

‘Let us have some straight talking, if you please,’ he said, and his voice was even and clear. He was cured of his terror of me, and of his need to drink when my shadow fell on him. I had lost my old power over John and I rose to stand by the mantelpiece so that I could casually rest my arm along it, to hide the fact that my knees were shaking with anxiety.

John moved into the centre of the parlour and dominated the pretty room. His driving coat with the great capes seemed too bulky for the small space. His high black polished boots seemed to straddle the carpet. His hat on a chair filled the lady’s room with male power and male threat. I held on tight to the stone of the mantelpiece and kept my face impassive.

‘I have nothing to say to you,’ I said. My voice did not quaver. He would not know I was afraid. I guarded myself too well.

‘No, but I have some things to say to you,’ he said. I glanced towards the door. He would be able to catch me before I reached it. I thought about pulling the bell on the pretext of more hot water, but then I thought better of it. This was as good a time as any to face John. And he would have to be faced some time this day. Now I had him without Celia, without Harry, and tired from the journey. Also, with a warm flicker of relief, I felt my anger growing, and I knew that if he threatened me I would challenge him and beat him down. I was no longer the woman who could not move for grief and horror because children fled at her approach. I was a woman fighting for myself and my child, and my child’s inheritance and my own home. I had not desolated Wideacre, enclosed the fields and murdered the sweetest lads in the village, to collapse in a repentant heap because my husband looked hard at me with his pale blue eyes.

‘I know what you have done,’ he said. ‘Celia told me all she knew, and with the knowledge that I have, I could understand what you have done.’

‘What do you fancy I have done?’ I said, my tone icy.

‘You have had two incestuous bastards sired by your brother,’ said John, his voice as cold as mine. ‘One you passed off on Celia who presented it to Harry as her own. One you tried to fob off on me. Then you had me committed to a lunatic asylum — oh, yes, that is what it was, thank you, my dear — so you could rob me of my fortune to buy your son into the inheritance and to lock your two children in partnership on the land.’

My knuckles gleamed white as I gripped the mantelpiece. But I said not a word.

‘What I shall do is to untangle this thread of sin and deceit and set us all free of you,’ John said. ‘Some of your legal contracts and agreements will be breakable, and I shall break them,’ he said. ‘The children should be cleaned of the taint of you, and of this damnable land. Celia shall be freed of this morass of sin and complicity you have tricked her into. And she may save Harry from you.’

‘You are ready to hang then?’ I asked drily. ‘I promised you I would swear you had killed Mama. The noose would be round your neck the second you speak one word against me. You are tired of life then, John? You are ready for death?’

His eyes met mine without a shadow of dread and with a dawning coldness down my spine, along my shoulders, I realized I had lost that hold on him too.

‘I’ll take my chance,’ he said, and his eyes met mine with a strength that was greater than my own. ‘I’m prepared to stand trial to expose you, Beatrice. No court in the land could try me for manslaughter, or even murder, without hearing why your mama’s heart stood still on that night. Then you would be exposed to the world as an incestuous whore, as the mother of two bastards, and a thief. Are you ready for that, my pretty wife?’

‘You won’t get your money back,’ I said spitefully. ‘You’ve lost that for ever. It’s in Charles Lacey’s hands and if I know him it’s already half spent.’

‘No,’ he acknowledged. And he was not looking at me, but out of the window, towards the green line of the horizon. ‘No, but I can save the children from you … and Celia.’

‘A strange way to free them,’ I said harshly. ‘To free them with your death. I might be shamed, but Celia would have nowhere to live but here. Harry might be disgraced but he would still be Squire. We would all live on here without you. Are you ready for a death that changes nothing?’

‘It is not I who am ready for death, Beatrice,’ he said. He had turned back and was looking at me, hot with hatred, but with a sharp interest. His eyes were those of Dr MacAndrew again, the quickest-witted physician ever to come out of Edinburgh. ‘I see it on you,’ he said acutely. ‘You have lost yourself somewhere down this weary evil road that you have travelled. The life has gone out of you, Beatrice.’

He reached my side in two quick strides and took my chin in his hand. I suffered him to turn my face to the light and my green eyes were scornful, but I was biting the inside of my cheeks to hide my fear.

‘Yes, you are as lovely as ever,’ he said dismissively. ‘But you have lost a sparkle from your eyes, and there are lines around your mouth that were never there before. What is it, my dear? Have your dirty steps in filth bogged you down so deep you cannot get free? Has the land turned against you? Can you no longer magic the yields you need? Or is it that the people spit on the ground when you pass and curse your very name for the damage and the death that you have brought to Wideacre?’

I broke free of his grip and turned to the door. My hand was on the latch when he called my name.

‘Beatrice!’

I turned, as if I had hoped he might say something gentle to me. Or at least something that would give me a clue to hold him in my grip again.

‘Death is coming for you, and you are ready for it,’ he said quietly. ‘As I drove home with Celia I thought I should come home and kill you, to free us all from the horror that is you. But I will not need to make my hands stink with your blood. For Death is coming for you, and you know you are fit to die. Don’t you, my pretty Beatrice?’

I turned without a word and left the room. I walked with my head high, my steps long, my skirt shushing round me with every dancing stride. I walked like a lord on his land all the way down the corridor to my office, and then I shut the door behind me and leaned against the panels. At once my knees buckled and I slid down the door into a heap on the floor. I rested my face against the panels. The wood was cold and ungentle to the aching cheekbones where the skin felt too tight.

Death was coming for me, John had said so; he had seen it in my face. And I knew how Death was coming. He was coming on a great black horse with two black dogs, one running before, one following behind. He was coming on horseback, for he had no legs to creep along behind me. He would ride up to me, Death, and I would see his face before I died. Death was coming for me. The rich people, the gentry who feared for their lives and their property called him Death; the poor people who followed him called him the Culler. But I would look in his face and call him ‘Ralph’.

I sat with my back to the door, unmoving, until twilight darkened the room and I saw the first little star, low on the horizon with the thin moon beside it. Then I clasped both hands around the doorknob and hauled myself to my feet. I was bone-weary, but I did not dare miss dinner. I had to be there.

John had changed. He was free of me. He was free of his love and his dream of love for me that had driven him to drink so he could forget the bitter reality. He was free of his horror of me. He could touch my face with hands that did not tremble. He could turn my head to the light so that he could see with his cruel surgeon’s eyes the new tiny maze of lines in my skin. He had lost his love for me, his fear of me. To him now, I was, as Dr Rose had assured me, an ordinary mortal.

And John was confident with ordinary mortals. I was no longer the woman he loved above life itself. I was no longer the woman he feared because she seemed the embodiment of evil and death. Now I was an ordinary mortal with a body that would die, with a mind that could make mistakes.

From now until the day of my death John would be watching for that: for my lovely young body to walk towards death, and for my clever, obsessed mind to make mistakes. And I could do little to mislead him. He had loved me, and he had watched every shadow across my face in the days of our happiness. He knew me, as no other man, save one, had known me. And he had knowledge too. He had learned how to see the truth about people; he had dedicated his life and his wisdom to understanding what makes people as they are, the infections in their bodies, the illnesses in their hearts, the madness in their minds. To John now I was neither love-goddess nor devil; I was instead the most fascinating specimen he had ever studied at close quarters.

And also an enemy to be defeated.

It was not a role that I could face very easily.

I rang for Lucy and she exclaimed when she saw me.

‘I’ll ask for your dinner to be sent to your room. I’ll tell them you are unwell,’ she said, as she helped me up the stairs to brush my hair.

‘No,’ I said. I was so tired it was an effort even to talk. I could scarcely impose my will on my own maid. However could I manage Harry and Celia and John? ‘No,’ I said again. ‘I will go to dinner. But hurry, Lucy, or I will be late.’

They had not waited for me in the parlour but had gone in to the dining room. The footman opened the door for me as I rustled down the hall, my steps smooth again, my face pale and drawn, but a serene smile on my mouth. I stopped stock-still in the doorway and stared.

Celia was seated in my chair.

She sat where she should be, where she had a right to be.

In the chair of the Squire’s Lady at the foot of the great dining table where she could see the servants standing in readiness against the walls of the room, keep an eye on the blaze in the hearth, see that the plates of all her guests were tilled, and their glasses charged, and meet the eyes of her husband with a warm, loving smile.

Harry glanced up as I entered and his face was half apologetic. ‘I hope you don’t mind, Beatrice?’ he said to me in a low voice, as he rose to meet me at the door and conducted me to a seat opposite John, the seat that used to be Celia’s. ‘I understood from John that you would not be coming to dinner tonight and so Celia naturally took the foot of the table.’

I smiled neutrally and paused by the chair, looking at Celia, waiting for her to leap to her feet and to move to her place to make the chair of the Squire’s Lady free for me. She did not move. She simply smiled at me with her pansy-brown eyes wide and said, ‘I am sure you would rather sit opposite John, would you not, Beatrice? It is just like your courting days when your mama was alive.’

‘I would rather have Beatrice opposite me,’ John said to clinch the decision. ‘I like to have her where I can see her!’

They laughed at that, the fools. As if John had never drunk himself into a stupor at this very table. As if my place could be challenged with impunity. As if I should take a seat down the board and give way to Harry’s child-bride. I smiled, a sour smile, and sat where they all wished me to be. And I noted with an inward promise of vengeance the quick exchange of looks between the youngest footman and a new lad. They would be looking for work after next pay day.

That night belonged to Celia.

And I saw she had earned it. A bluish bruise shadowed her cheekbone but her eyes were serene. I guessed that Harry had struck her, in anger or passion, but once, and then dissolved into apology and reconciliation. She had no glimpse of his real needs and thought that blow the single lowest moment of her married life. She did not know there was a pattern of punishment forming around her. She thought that blow the first and last she would ever have from Harry. And she thought she could bear it. With the life of Wideacre hanging on a thread she thought she had to endure it.

So she took her place at the foot of the table.

Her beloved brother-in-law drank lemonade on her left, and her husband beamed down the table at her. She bloomed in the candlelight like a carnation in sunshine. Her worries and her sense of horror had been stilled firstly by John’s calm acceptance of her garbled, hysterical story, and then by promises Harry had made her while they lay in bed. John had told her that he had not known of the plan to change the entail but he was not surprised. And that the contract could certainly be changed. That, as Richard’s father, he could and would resign Richard’s rights to inherit jointly with Julia. That Julia could inherit with his blessing, and that they would find some way of compensating Richard or himself for the use of the MacAndrew fortune.

John’s calm acceptance of the news, his easy packing and friendly departure from Dr Rose, pulled Celia back from the entrance to the maze. She began to think she had been mistaken. She forgot the evidence of her senses: the smell of sin around the house, the prickle on her skin when Harry would look at me during dinner and ask if I could spare him some time later that evening for business. The sight of a strawberry-red bruise on Harry’s back. And her bewilderment when she woke late one night and put her hand out to where her husband should be and found the bed cold. All that she could forget when John smiled at her with steady honest eyes and said, ‘Trust me, Celia, I can make it right.’

She had come home on a cloud of relief in her shabby dress, and with a growing anxiety that Harry would be angry with her; that he would not overlook her scream in the silence of the dining room; that he would press her for an explanation of her horror. For Celia and John, and Harry and I, all had our little deceptions and secrets. And we were all jealously guarding them.

But Harry had been easy. They had both conspired to silence. His blow had shocked her but had been followed by a string of kisses. With her love and loyalty half transferred to John she paid her dues to her husband, just as I paid rent to my landlord. Harry thrust himself into her like a fat foot into a silk slipper, forgave her indiscretion and asked nothing more.

They cleared the soup plates and served the fish. John was eating with relish. ‘This is wonderful,’ he said, nodding to Celia. ‘Salmon! How I have missed Wideacre food.’

‘Poor fare at the doctor’s, was there?’ asked Harry, his attention caught. ‘I feared there might be. You’ll be glad to be home.’

John smiled a warm smile at Celia, whose signature and passionate insistence had brought him home, but his voice when he answered Harry was cold.

‘I am indeed,’ he said.

‘What was it like there?’ Harry asked, tactless as ever.

‘It was well run,’ said John. ‘It was well organized. It was a good place for treatment. It was lonely.’

Celia’s hand twitched. She had been about to stretch it out to him in an instinctive gesture of sympathy.

‘I hoped my letters would help,’ she said.

‘What letters?’ said John. ‘I received no letters.’

My fork in my hand, I hesitated, but then moved steadily on, ate the piece of salmon and reached for my wine glass.

‘Did you receive my letters?’ I asked.

John’s eyes met mine with a hard, ironic, insulting smile.

‘No, my dear,’ he said politely. ‘Did you write to me often?’

‘Every other day,’ I said blandly.

‘And I wrote every week,’ Celia put in. ‘What can have happened to them?’

John’s eyes were on my face, his eyes like pale stones.

‘I can’t imagine. Can you, Beatrice?’

‘No,’ I said shortly. ‘Perhaps Dr Rose thought you were not well enough to receive letters from home. He forbade visitors, you know.’

‘I guessed there must be some reason I heard from no one,’ said John. It was like swordplay, talking to him. It was like an unending duel. But I was weary.

I gave up. I was almost ready to give up on the rest of my plans too. I was certainly ready to let one evening go without my controlling every move.

‘Excuse me,’ I said to Celia. ‘I am tired. I will go to my room.’

I rose to my feet and the footman sprang to pull back my chair for me. Harry rose and gave me his arm to the west-wing door.

‘It wasn’t Celia in your chair, was it?’ he asked with his usual doltishness. But I was too tired even to fire an opening shot in a battle over a chair, when my husband had looked at me with trained eyes and saw Death in my face.

‘No, it wasn’t the chair,’ I said wearily. ‘She can sit in the damned thing all night if she chooses.’ I turned from him and slipped through the door of the west wing. Lucy undressed me and I dismissed her. Then I took the key from my dressing table and locked the door. I jammed the chair under the handle for good measure. Then I fell into bed and slept as if I wanted never to wake up.