Читать книгу The Complete Wideacre Trilogy: Wideacre, The Favoured Child, Meridon - Philippa Gregory - Страница 18

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My head snapped up, my green eyes blazed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Come here,’ I said. My tone cut him like a knife. In a trance he followed me to the hooks on the wall and when I tapped his legs with the crop he straddled so I could tie both ankles with the leather thongs. Speechless he spread his arms out while I tied him by the wrists – tightly and painfully – to the hooks.

One hard pull and his fine linen shirt was ripped to the waist and he flinched and stood half naked before me. With my bare hand I double-slapped him across the face; left-right-left-right and then, like a stable cat, I scratched his chest from his throat to the belt of his breeches with the sharp fingernails of both claw-like hands. He slumped on his bindings and groaned. It sounded as if he were really hurt. I was filled with deep gladness.

I took Papa’s old hunting knife and slit the seams of Harry’s fine embroidered evening breeches so they hung in tatters from his waist. The blade had nicked his skin on one thigh and when I saw the welling drop of blood I kneeled and sucked it as hungrily as any vampire. If I could have bled every ounce of his male pride and his folly and his power from him, I would have done so. He groaned, then straightened up again, straining against the ties as if he wanted to be free. I stepped backwards and with one expert flick uncoiled the whip so the thong squirmed on the floor towards him like a snake ready to strike. Then I raised it.

‘Understand this, Harry,’ I said, and my voice was clear with hatred. ‘I am never, in all my life, leaving Wideacre. I am never, in all my life, leaving you. We are together for ever. While you are the Squire of Wideacre you have me as surely as you have the land. You forgot that, and that is why I am going to punish you. I shall punish you in such a way that you will never forget and it will be a drug and a longing to you which you will never rid yourself of.’

Harry gasped as if to speak, to beg against the sentence, or to beg for it. I neither knew nor cared. I raised my arm and cracked the whip.

Papa had taught me how to handle a whip in the stable yard when I was ten. With skill and practice you can pick a strawberry without bruising it, or break the hide of a bull. I used Papa’s whip to slap Harry hard on the tender skin under the arms and down the flanks of his sweaty, trembling body, and then to tease and caress him around the throat, down his panting chest and barely to graze him between his straddled legs.

‘Go to the rack,’ I ordered. I untied him and he fell in a heap at my feet as soon as I loosened his wrists. I kicked his ribs without hesitation in one abrupt uncaring move. ‘Go to the saddle rack,’ I repeated.

He fell on it as if it was his schoolboy bed, and laid his cheek on the smooth polished wood while I tied each wrist and ankle to one of the legs. Then I played the whip over his back and his buttocks and his thighs, so each touch was the lightest sting, but the repetition added to discomfort, then pain, and then to pink, stinging grazes.

I untied him again and he slid from the rack into a crumpled heap on the floor and put out one imploring hand to the hem of my skirt.

I loosened the skirt of the riding habit at the waist and dropped it beside him. His hand closed convulsively on the soft velvet and he buried his face it in with a half-sob. But I left on the short tailored jacket and my soft leather riding boots.

‘On your back,’ I said mercilessly.

Harry was far gone. He lay like a stranded whale, beached on a shingle spit of unnatural desire. Out of element, out of place, helpless and heaving; I dropped like a scavenging eagle on the burstingly hard shaft of his body and as he entered me he screamed one hoarse shriek of pleasure. His back arched as he pushed up to greet me, and the sore spots on his shoulders and ribs scraped against the bare floorboards and rubbed on the fleece rug. I stayed cool and detached in my mind, but somewhere in the depth of my body some unimportant private crisis of pleasure mounted and was satisfied. The clenching of my muscles as I took my way tipped Harry over the border of his ecstasy of pain and I felt his whole body shudder. His wriggles underneath my hard control became faster and more frenzied, then I saw his eyelashes close on his tear-stained cheeks and his mouth opened to give a great groan of release and pleasure. At that exact second I abruptly straightened up and lifted myself off him. And I slapped his rigid manhood with an open palm as if I was slamming an ill-trained dog to the floor. Harry gave a shriek of incredulous pain at the blow, and I saw that one of my rings had cut the delicate, bursting skin. A fountain of seed and blood, unwanted, rejected, spilled over his scratched, whipped belly, and he gave three great choking sobs of release and loss. I watched him bleed like a hurt virgin, my face as kindly as frozen marble.

I could hardly get up next day, I was so tired. The emotional strain, the great shuddery sexual tension and the effort of dominating and brutalizing Harry had worn me out. I took breakfast very late in my room, sitting up in my wide white bed, and then spent the rest of the morning at my desk at the sunny window of my office. I was supposed to be doing the accounts, but little work was done that day. In truth, I spent the time gazing unseeing out of the window with the picture of Harry’s agony and Harry’s agonized ecstasy before my eyes.

At midday the parlourmaid brought me some of the strong black coffee we had shipped home from France. On the silver tray was an extra cup, and Harry entered the room behind her. I must confess, he took me by surprise. I had hardly thought he would have the courage to assert himself, and so soon. He walked rather stiffly, but not so badly that anyone would notice who was not watching him like a newly trained sparrowhawk.

The maid poured the coffee and put mine on the desk by my hand, and then left us alone. I said nothing. My tiredness had vanished and I was as wary as a poacher – seeking gain and yet rigid with fear.

Harry put his cup down on the porcelain saucer with a high-toned click.

‘Beatrice,’ he said, and his voice was a sigh of exhaustion and obsession.

It was as if all the candles in my heart had been lit at once. I had him. I had him safe again. I need never again fear for my place at Wideacre. I had won the Squire to corruption and I had him tight in my net.

‘You treat me as if you hate me, but you don’t hate me, do you, Beatrice?’ His voice had a hint of a beggar’s whine. I guessed that this was the voice my clever Ralph would recognize. The voice the schoolboy Harry had learned at school when the hero Staveley had taught his little troop to fetch and carry and fag and fight for him. The voice Staveley had taught him to use when he begged for bullying, or beating, or little treats of reward. If I had known Staveley, or even if I had Ralph to advise me, I should have known better at this moment what I should do – whether to indulge or punish Harry some more. I awaited some clue.

‘I was wrong, I have been all wrong,’ said Harry like a whipped spaniel puppy. ‘But do not beat me again, Beatrice. I shall do better. I shall never offend you again.’

Harry, the Squire of Wideacre, as a whimpering child, made my skin crawl with revulsion. With a sudden stab of memory I remembered the disdain in Ralph’s bright black eyes when Harry knelt on the floor of the dusty barn and laid his cheek on Ralph’s bare foot. Of course Ralph had looked relieved that we should, so miraculously, escape discovery. But he also looked as I imagined I looked now, as if Harry were some obscene mistake of nature, like a three-headed calf. I saw before me the long years of running the Squire as a puling baby – and I longed for Ralph’s uncomplicated, dominating fresh lust.

‘You disgust me,’ I said, speaking the truth, which leaped unstoppable to my lips.

Harry gave a whimper and slid from the pretty salon chair to his knees on the carpet at my feet.

‘I know it. I know I do,’ he said miserably. ‘I cannot help it. I am bewitched, I think. I have been wrong all my life. Only you can save me, Beatrice – though it is you who have done the bewitching. I am caught in your snare and I am helpless before you. For God’s sake be merciful with me.’

I smiled, the easy cruel smile of this new role Harry had cast for me in his fevered, oversexed, over educated imagination.

‘You are mine for ever, Harry,’ I said. ‘Your rumblings with your little bride, your friendships with men, your love for Mama or your work on the land – none of these are the real life. The real life is with me in secret, in a private locked room that only you and I know about. And you will get to that room only when I bid you, for only I have the key. And there I will take you into pain and beyond pain. And we will never, ever part; for I do not wish to go, and you –’ I smiled down into his upturned white face – ‘you would die without this pleasure.’

He gave a sob and buried his face in my skirt. I touched his head with my hand as gently as our mama would have done and heard his sobs renew at my tenderness. Then I gripped on to the long blond curls and pulled his head up so I could look into his eyes.

‘Are you my servant?’ I demanded in a whisper like a shard of ice.

‘Yes,’ he said tonelessly. ‘Yes.’

‘Are you my slave?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then go now for I have had enough of you.’

I said it cruelly, and I turned back to my desk. He shuffled to his feet and walked slowly and painfully to the door. His hand was on the doorknob when I said, in the voice I use to call my dogs, ‘Harry!’

He turned quickly and awaited my pleasure.

‘You will behave at dinner as if nothing at all had ever happened,’ I said. ‘This is a life and death secret and your silly open face must not betray you, or you will be ruined. Do it, Harry.’

He nodded, like a pauper taking orders at the workhouse, and turned to leave.

‘And Harry,’ I said with a new, languorous note in my voice, little more than a whisper.

I could see his back tense like a shudder, and he turned again.

‘I will unlock the door of my secret room tonight, and you may come to me at midnight,’ I said, softly.

He shot me a look of speechless gratitude. Then I let him go.

I was still left with the problem of John MacAndrew and, to tell the truth, the problem of my pleasure in his company, which I was loath to lose unless I had to. One solution was obvious: an easy lie. That Harry had quite misunderstood me, and that I enjoyed his friendship but I feared we would not suit as a married couple. I sat, musing, facing my desk with the papers I should be checking piled under a heavy glass paperweight – a deep red poppy embalmed inside it. I played the scene over in my mind – my dignified regret at rejecting John MacAndrew – and I tried some of the phrases of maidenly modesty in my mind. But my serious face kept breaking into a smile. It was all such fustian! And clever, sharp John MacAndrew would see through it in a trice. I had to find some lie to turn him from his course of marriage to me, and my exile to Scotland. But I would never convince him that I liked him only as a friend when he could see, as everyone could see, that I had a quick smile as soon as I saw him, and that no one could amuse me as he did.

I did not ache for him as I had for Harry. I did not see him with my conscious mind suspended utterly by the power of my body’s feelings as I had with Ralph. But I could not help smiling when I thought of him and the idea of his kisses delighted me. Not in my dreams – for I never, ever dreamed of him – but in daytime reveries and in the pictures that came into my mind before I slept.

While I was still turning over in my mind what I could say to him, I heard the noise of a curricle and pair and Dr MacAndrew’s expensive carriage bowled up the drive and stopped, informally, impertinently, outside my window. He looked down from the high box-seat and smiled at me. I crossed to the window and flung it wide to him.

‘Good morning, Miss Lacey,’ he said. ‘I have come to kidnap you from your business. It is too lovely a day to waste indoors. Come for a drive with me.’

I hesitated. To refuse would be ungracious and would only delay the proposal if his mind was set on marriage. Besides, now the window was open I could smell the hot end-of-summer scents of full-blown roses and gillyflowers and stocks. In the woods, pigeons were cooing their hearts out and the swallows were swinging and swooping in the air in their last picnic before their travels. We could drive around to watch them breaking the turf in the rested fields to ready them for sowing.

‘I’ll fetch my hat,’ I said with a smile, and I swept from the room.

But I had not considered Mama. She met me at the great staircase, and insisted that I change into a pretty walking-out dress and not clatter about the country in my morning gown. While I fretted at the delay, Mama called her maid as well as mine and laid out a choice of gowns before me on the bed.

‘Any one, any one of them,’ I said. ‘I am only going for a drive to the fields with Dr MacAndrew, Mama. I’m not off to London for the season, you know.’

‘There is no reason why you should not look your best,’ Mama said with unusual force. And she chose for me a deep green gown, smart jacket and voluminous skirt, which would bring out the green in my eyes and show my clear honey skin to perfection. The little matching bonnet had a veil of green lace, which I complained gave me spots before my eyes but actually delighted me with the way it hinted at the brightness of my eyes and drew attention to my smiling mouth. Mama’s own dresser piled up my hair in fat coils and Mama herself pinned on the hat and pulled down the veil. Then she took both my gloved hands in her own and kissed me.

‘Go on,’ she said. ‘You look lovely. I am very, very happy for you.’

Not only Mama seemed to think I was off to hear a proposal. Half the household had found a job to do on the staircase or in the hall that morning, as I made my way down to the front stairs. Every one of them bobbed a curtsy or tipped a bow to me and they smiled as if the whole of Wideacre was in a conspiracy to see me wedded.

The front door was flanked by our entire staff of footmen and parlourmaids as if we were entertaining in state. Both halves of the great double door were flung ceremoniously open by the butler and, gawping out of the parlour window, as Dr MacAndrew handed me up, were Celia, Nurse and, of course, Baby Julia.

‘You’ve had a fine send-off this morning,’ he said teasingly, noting the flush of scarlet on my cheeks.

‘It’s more usual to wait until you are accepted before you make an announcement,’ I said acidly, my scene of maidenly refusal forgotten in my irritation.

He choked with laughter at my indiscretion.

‘Now, Beatrice, try for a little tone,’ he implored, and for all the world I could not check a laugh in response. But this was no way to lead up to a refusal – and besides all the house staff had piled out on to the terrace to see us go, and could see me driving away with my suitor with a smile on my face.

We swept down the drive at a spanking pace. He was driving his matched bays and they were fresh and going well. Although he held them to a trot on the twists and turns, I was looking forward to feeling the speed when we reached the road to Acre. The lodge gates were waiting for us opened wide, and Sarah Hodgett was there with a curtsy and a meaningful smile for me. I glanced accusingly at John MacAndrew’s profile as all the Hodgett family crowded out of the house to point and wave at pretty Miss Beatrice and her young man. John MacAndrew turned his head and grinned at me, unrepentant.

‘Not me, I swear it, Beatrice. So don’t look daggers at me. I said not a word to anyone save your brother. I imagine the whole world has seen how I look at you, and how you smile at me, and has been waiting for us while you and I are taken by surprise.’

I considered this in silence. I disliked the easy tone of confidence but I was interested in whether I was surprised at the proposal. I had been amazed at the day of the race, but I was even more disbelieving of my own behaviour now. Sitting up high on the box of his racing curricle, with a laugh trembling all the time on my lips and no words of refusal anywhere in my mind.

That I should refuse to leave Wideacre was, of course, self-evident. But I could hardly refuse him before he proposed, and every second the assumption that I would accept him, and even the impression that I had accepted him, seemed to be growing. John MacAndrew had been clever enough to let the proposal of marriage become an understood thing between us without chancing a refusal.

As we came out of the drive and into the lane he turned, not as I had expected towards Acre but right towards the crossroads where our lane meets the main road between London and Chichester.

‘Where do you imagine we are going?’ I inquired drily.

‘For a drive, as I told you,’ he said lightly. ‘I have a fancy to see the sea.’

‘The sea!’ I gasped. ‘Mama will have a fit. I told her I should be back for dinner. I am sorry, Dr MacAndrew, but you will have to go shrimping alone.’

‘Oh, no,’ he said coolly. ‘I told your mama we would be back after tea. So she will not expect us earlier. She agrees with me that too much desk work is bad for young women.’

I gasped again at this further evidence of John MacAndrew’s tactical flair. ‘Is my health suffering very badly?’ I asked sarcastically.

‘Indeed, yes,’ he said without hesitation. ‘You are becoming round-shouldered.’

I choked down a laugh – and then laughed out loud.

‘Dr MacAndrew, you are a complete hand, and I will have nothing to do with you,’ I declared. ‘You may have kidnapped me today, but I shall be more careful of you another time.’

‘Oh, Beatrice,’ he said, and he turned his face from the road to smile very tenderly towards me, ‘Beatrice, you are so very clever, and so very, very silly.’

That left me with nothing to say. But I found I was smiling into his eyes, and my colour was rising.

‘Now,’ he said, dropping his hands and letting the pair break into a smooth fast canter, ‘now we are going to have a lovely day.’

Indeed we did. His housekeeper had packed a picnic that a lord might have envied, and we dined at the top of the downs with all Sussex at our feet and God’s clear sky above us. My extraordinary performance of the night before dropped from my mind as if it had never happened and I revelled in the relaxation of being neither goddess nor witch but simply a pretty girl on a sunny day. After Harry’s frenzied worship, it was restful not to have to pretend, not to have to dominate. John MacAndrew’s smile was warm, but his eyes were appraising and quick. I should never have him grovelling at my feet in a wet heap of remorse and lust. I smiled at him in easy approval and he smiled back. Then we packed up the picnic gear and drove on.

We reached the sea at teatime. He had chosen the stretch of shoreline nearest to Wideacre – almost due south – where there is a tiny fishing village of half-a-dozen shanties and a most villainous-looking public house. We pulled up outside and John MacAndrew’s shout brought the landlord running, very surprised and very certain he had nothing in his house fit for the Quality. So, too, were we. But in the boot of the curricle was a complete tea service with the best tea, sugar and cream.

‘I dare say it will be butter by now,’ said John MacAndrew, spreading a rug on the shingle of the beach for me to sit. ‘But a simple country girl like yourself does not expect everything to be perfect when she condescends to leave her estate and visit the peasantry.’

‘Indeed not,’ I retorted. ‘And you will not know the difference, for I dare say you tasted neither butter nor cream until you crossed the border.’

‘Och, no,’ he said instantly, adopting the broadest Scots accent. ‘All we drink at home is the usquebaugh!’

‘Usquebaugh!’ I exclaimed. ‘What is that?’

His face darkened with some private thought. ‘It’s a drink,’ he said shortly. ‘A spirit, like grog or brandy, but a good deal stronger. It’s a wonderful drink for losing your senses with, and a good many of my countrymen use it to forget their sorrows. But it’s a poor master to have. I’ve known men, one of them very dear to me, ruined by it.’

‘Do you ever drink it?’ I asked, intrigued at this serious side to John MacAndrew that I had glimpsed before only in his professional work.

He grimaced. ‘I drink it in Scotland,’ he said. ‘There’s many places where you can get nothing else. My father serves it at home instead of port in the evening, and I cannot say I refuse it! But I fear it rather.’ He paused and looked at me uncertainly, as if considering whether or not to trust me with a secret. He took a breath and went on. ‘When my mother died I had just started at the university,’ he said quietly. ‘The loss of her hit me hard, very hard indeed. I found that when I drank usquebaugh – whisky – the pain left me. Then I found it good to drink all the time. I think it is possible to be addicted to it – as I warned you some people become addicted to laudanum. I fear addiction for my patients because I’ve had a taste of it in my own life. I’ll take a glass of whisky with my father, but I’ll take no more. It is a weakness of mine I do well to guard against.’

I nodded, understanding only dimly what he meant, but knowing well that he had trusted me with some sort of confession. Then the landlord came out from the public house carrying, with awestruck concentration, John MacAndrew’s silver tea service, the silver pot filled to the brim with perfectly brewed Indian tea.

‘I shall expect to be attacked by highwaymen on the way home, all after your sugar tongs,’ I said lightly. ‘Do you always travel with such vulgar ostentation?’

‘Only when I am proposing,’ he said so unexpectedly that I jumped and some of my tea spilled in the saucer and splashed my gown.

‘You should be horse-whipped!’ I said, dabbing at the stain.

‘No, no,’ he said, teasing me even further. ‘You misunderstand the nature of my proposal. I am even prepared to marry you.’

I choked on a laugh and he rescued my teacup and put it on the tray behind him.

‘Now I will stop,’ he said, suddenly serious. ‘I love you, Beatrice, and I want with all my heart that you should be my wife.’

The laughter died on my lips. I was ready to say ‘No’ but somehow the word would not come. I simply could not bring myself to spoil this lovely sunny day. The waves splashed and sucked at the shingle; the seagulls called and wheeled in the salty air. The words of refusal seemed a million miles away, even though I knew I could not possibly accept.

‘Is it Wideacre?’ he asked as the silence lengthened. I looked up quickly in gratitude at his understanding.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I could live nowhere else. I simply could not.’

He smiled gently, but his blue eyes showed hurt.

‘Not even to make a home with me and be my wife?’ he asked. The silence lengthened, and it seemed that I would indeed be forced to frame some sort of absolute refusal.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I truly am. Wideacre has been my life, all my life. I cannot begin to tell you what it means to me. I cannot go away from it.’

He reached across the rug and took my hand in both of his. He held it gently, and then turned it palm up and pressed a kiss into the warm, cupped hand, and then he closed my slim fingers over the kiss as if to hold it in.

‘Beatrice, know this,’ he said, and his voice was very grave. ‘I have seen you, and watched you for a year now and I knew you would be likely to refuse me and to choose instead to stay at home. But hear this: Wideacre belongs to Harry and after him to his heirs. It will never, it can never, be yours. It is your brother’s home; it is not your home. If you and he should quarrel – I know, I know, how impossible that seems – but if he insisted, he could throw you off tomorrow. You are there only at Harry’s invitation. You have no rights at all. If you refuse marriage for Wideacre then you are refusing your future home for a place that is only a temporary place to stay – it can never be either secure or permanent.’

‘I know,’ I said, low. My eyes were on the sea and my face was stony. ‘It is as secure as I can make it,’ I said.

‘Beatrice, it is a special place, a wonderful place. But you have seen very little of the rest of the country. There are other places equally lovely where you and I could make a home of our own, that would become as dear to you as Wideacre is now,’ he said.

I shook my head and glanced at him.

‘You do not understand. It could only ever be Wideacre,’ I said. ‘You do not know what I have done to try to win it, to make a place for myself there. I have longed for it all my life.’

His clever eyes were on my face. ‘What you have done?’ he said, repeating my indiscreet words. ‘What have you done to try to win it that commits you so deeply?’

I hovered between a collapse into a heart-easing conscience-saving confession to this wise, this gentle, lover and a clever, habitual lie. My instincts and my hungry cleverness warned me away, away from confidence, away from trust, away from love, away from real marriage.

‘Beatrice …’ he said. ‘You can tell me.’

I paused, the words were on my tongue. I was about to tell him. Then I glanced down towards the sea and saw a man, bronzed as a pirate, looking curiously at us.

‘It seems I was right about your silver sugar tongs,’ I said lightly. John followed the direction of my gaze and exclaimed and started to his feet. Without hesitation he went towards the fellow, his boots scrunching on the shingle. I saw them exchange a few words, and then John glanced uncertainly back at me, and came back towards me with the man following a few steps behind.

‘He recognizes you as Miss Lacey of Wideacre,’ John said, rather bewildered. ‘And he wants to speak with you about something, but he will not tell me what it is. Shall I send the fellow about his business?’

‘No, of course not!’ I said smiling. ‘He may be about to tell me where to find buried treasure! You count the spoons and repack the tea things and I will see what he wants.’

I rose to my feet and went towards the man who pulled his forelock as I approached. I could tell he was a sailing man; he had none of the heaviness of a farming labourer. His skin was tanned a deep dirty brown, and his eyes narrowed with staring over bright waters. He had a pair of flapping trousers, wide-bottomed, and shoes – not boots like a farm labourer would. He wore a handkerchief tied over his head with a characteristic little plait of hair poking out behind. A complete villain, I judged, and I had a wary smile for him.

‘What d’you want of me?’ I said, certain it was a loan or some favour.

‘Business,’ he said, surprisingly. ‘Trade.’

His accent was not local and I could not place it. West country, I thought. I started to have a glimmer of an idea what his business might be.

‘Trade?’ I said sharply. ‘We farm, we don’t trade.’

‘Free trade, I should have said,’ he said, watching my face. I could not control the flicker of a smile.

‘What d’you want?’ I said briskly. ‘I’ve no time to waste talking to rogues. You can speak to me briefly but we don’t break the law on Wideacre.’

He grinned at me without a flicker of shame. ‘No, miss,’ he said. ‘Of course not. But you have good cheap tea and sugar and brandy.’

I grinned ruefully at him. ‘What d’you want?’ I said again.

‘We’ve trouble at the place where we usually store our goods,’ he said in an undertone, keeping a wary eye on John MacAndrew, waiting alert by the curricle. ‘We’ve got a new leader and he suggested storing in the old mill on your land. The goods would be there only a few nights each run, and you need know nothing about it, Miss Lacey. There’d be a couple of kegs left behind for you if you would be gracious enough to accept them, or perhaps some fine French silks. You’d be doing the Gentlemen a favour, Miss Lacey, and we never forget our friends.’

I could not look severe at the cheeky rogue and there was nothing unusual in what he was asking. The smugglers – the Gentlemen as they were called – had always come and gone up the hidden deep-banked lanes of Sussex, and the two Preventive Officers, whose job it was to control smuggling along the whole long, inlet-ridden coast, spent their nights snug in bed and their days writing reports. One of them was a professional poet and had been given the job to provide him with time to write. So in Sussex we had the joint benefits of duty-free spirits and fine poetry, an excellent, if comical, result of the muddle over the excise laws, and the gifting of government jobs to deserving young gentlemen.

Papa had permitted smuggled goods in out of the way barns and had turned a blind eye to occasional reports of half-a-dozen horses passing quietly down the lane through Acre late in the night; Acre village itself would keep curtains drawn and mouths shut. The Gentlemen were generous to their friends but they would find and kill a tale-bearer.

So there was very little reason why they should not store goods on our land and the permission was on my lips, but the mention of the old mill and the new leader made me curious.

‘Who is this new leader you have?’ I said.

The man winked. ‘Least said, soonest mended,’ he said discreetly. ‘But he’s a fine planner and good man to follow. When I see his black horse at the head of the ponies I feel at ease.’

My mouth was suddenly dry. I swallowed with difficulty.

‘Did he choose the old mill as a store?’ I said. My voice was a thread and I could feel sweat making my face clammy.

The man looked curiously into my face, which was suddenly white.

‘He did, miss,’ he said. ‘Are you ill?’

I put my hand to my eyes and found my trembling fingers were wet with sweat.

‘It is nothing, nothing,’ I said desperately. ‘Is he a local man then?’

‘I think he was born and bred near Wideacre,’ said the man, impatient with my questions and worried at the way my hands were trembling and how my eyes had gone dark. ‘What shall I tell him?’

‘Tell him that the old mill is washed away and that everything is different,’ I burst out, my voice rising with my fear. ‘Tell him there is no place for him on Wideacre. Tell him to find another store, another route. Tell him he may not come near me or near my land. Tell him my people will not allow it. Tell him he was always an outcast and I was always loved.’

My knees were buckling but suddenly I found John’s haul arm around my waist. He held me up and one hard look from him sent the man scuffling down the shingle to slip between the upturned fishing boats.

John MacAndrew, professional that he was, scooped me up like a baby and tossed me up into the curricle without a word. From under the driver’s seat he produced a flask of his Scottish whisky and held the silver bottle to my lips. I turned my head away in disgust at the smell but he forced a couple of mouthfuls on me and I found that it warmed me and stopped my panic-stricken trembling. We sat in silence until I could hear the frightened beats of my heart slowing again. My mind was blank with fear at this sudden apparition – this ghost on a clear day. There were surely a hundred better things I could have done than to break down, and that in front of a man who was led, no doubt, by one of our expelled poachers, or one of Acre’s ne’er-do-wells, or by one of the farm labourers pressed into the navy and run off to the smugglers. The black horse alone meant nothing. I was a fool to panic. A fool to be afraid.

But even now, sitting up high in the curricle in the warm afternoon sunshine with hundreds of pounds’ worth of MacAndrew silver in the boot, and hundreds of guineas of bloodstock between the shafts, I felt utterly vulnerable and abasingly afraid.

I shuddered in one convulsive shiver, then took a deep breath. I gave the inside of my cheeks a good hard bite and, hidden in my lap, I pinched the palms of my hands with my sharp strong fingernails. Then I turned to John MacAndrew and smiled.

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I am silly to have been upset by him. He was a free-trader, a smuggler, and he wanted somewhere to store his kegs. When I said no he was abusive. I don’t know why I should let it upset me, but somehow it did.’

John MacAndrew nodded understandingly, but his eyes were sharp.

‘Why did you say no?’ he asked. ‘You’re surely not against them?’

‘I never was,’ I said slowly. But then my fear rose up and choked the truth out of me. ‘But I’ll have no lawless men on Wideacre,’ I cried passionately. ‘I’ll have no leaders of mobs, no attackers of property, no men who move and work in the night on my land, near my home. He may be a smuggler today, but who knows what he might do tomorrow? I’ll have no trained men led by a black horse riding the lanes near my house.’ I stopped with a sob, horrified at my outburst. I was too scared and shocked at myself either to retract or to try to reduce the impression I had so clearly given of fright and horror.

John’s warm hand covered mine.

‘Do you want to tell me why?’ he asked, and his voice was sympathetic and tender and low.

I exhaled, and it was almost a moan.

‘No,’ I said miserably. ‘No.’

We sat in silence then, the horses with their heads bowed and the reins slack, the late afternoon sun red among rosy, fleecy clouds, low over the sea.

‘I’ll drive you home then,’ said John and there was warmth and patience in his voice. I knew then that he loved me. That he loved me so much he was prepared to take on trust the things that I did, that should have warned him I was not the straightforward pretty girl I seemed. He could have guessed I had a secret, a hanging secret. But he chose instead to click to the horses and to drive me home in the sunset, which turned to twilight as we crested the downs at Goodwood and then to starlight along the sweet-smelling nighttime lanes of my land. We followed a new moon home, a slim sickle in the night sky, and when John MacAndrew lifted me down from the curricle I felt the ghost of a kiss on the top of my head.

He never pressed me for an explanation. Not through the final hot days of summer when the hay was stacked and the corn winnowed and the beasts weaned and growing fat, and there was less work on the land and more time for visiting and dancing and picnics.

When we went to Havering with Celia and Harry and Mama, John and I would find ourselves walking alone together in the ramshackle formal gardens, or in the overgrown shrubbery. When we went in to tea there would be a smile between Mama and Lady Havering, instantly wiped off their faces when John or I looked directly at either of them. If in the evening we rolled back the rugs and Mama played country dances and jigs on the Haverings’ grand piano, I would always dance the first and the last dance of the evening with my hands in John’s. Then, when we waited for our carriages in the night air, which turned cooler at the end of every sweet insignificant evening, he would tuck my wrap around my shoulders, and sometimes gather it around my neck, to brush the side of my cheek, pale and soft as a flower in the moonlight.

Then the carriages would clatter around from the stable yard and he would hand me into the chaise with a gentle pressure on my fingers to say a private goodnight among the general farewells. I would lean my head back against the silk cushions and feel the warmth of his smile, the gleam of his eyes, the touch of his hand on my cheek as the horses trotted home, and Mama sat beside me, her face smiling and at peace too.

But I was never so absorbed in this delightful, this easy, courtship that I forgot to hold on to Harry, to hold to the land. At least once a week I would climb the stairs to the room at the top of the house and take Harry into a shivering, private maze of pleasure and fear. The more often I did it, the less it meant to me, until my icy disdain of Harry’s plump pantings was real.

I knew now what my earlier passion for Harry had hidden from me. That although I had thought I had bedded him as a free woman I was as bound as if I were a slave. For it was not a free choice. I had wanted him because he was the Squire, not for himself. And now he was losing his fine, clear looks and becoming fatter and softer, I bedded the Squire, not Harry. And it was no free choice because I could not choose to say no. My safety and security on the land meant I had to keep my special, costly hold on its owner. I paid him rent as surely as the tenants who came to my round rent table with their coins tied up in a scrap of cloth. When I lay on my back, or strode round the rooms threatening him with every imaginable, ridiculous pain, I was paying my dues. And the knowledge galled me.

But although Harry had lost his magic, the land had not. Wideacre that autumn glowed like a scarlet leaf of rowan. The summer heat lingered late and even in October John could take me driving with only a shawl around my shoulders. But when the frosts came in November I was glad, for the hard ground held the scent and in the hoar frost I could see the prints of foxes’ paws and the hunting season was open. I was back in the saddle for the first time after two long years of mourning and absence, and our hounds were mastered once more by Wideacre’s Squire, as they should be. Every day Harry and I checked them and talked of nothing but foxes and hunters and runs. It was Harry’s first season and he threatened to botch it badly. But his interest in breeding good animals meant that we had the fastest hounds in the county – you had to follow them at a gallop and jump whatever lay in your path – no time for niceties! So there would always be riders who would want to come out with us and lend a hand with the hounds. Shaw was a good keeper who knew the ways of foxes, and I was always at Harry’s side.