Читать книгу The Complete Wideacre Trilogy: Wideacre, The Favoured Child, Meridon - Philippa Gregory - Страница 21

It was easier to meet him than I had dared to imagine. John’s abrupt departure from the dinner table had signalled, as I had hoped, a return to hard drinking. I had hardly aided his resolution against alcohol, for when he had flung himself into his study in the west wing he had found the dew forming on two icy-fresh bottles of whisky, a pitcher of cool water to mix with a dram, and a plate of biscuits and cheese to bolster the illusion that he was merely taking a small glass with a meal. Casually, as if blind to his own hands, he had broken the seal on one of the bottles and poured a measure, the merest drop, and diluted it well. One taste undid his resolve and he had drunk nearly all of one bottle by the time I came, clear-headed, to peep in on him. He was asleep in his chair by the log fire. The smartness of his early-morning appearance had faded from him the way a poppy crumples after only a few hours. I looked long and hard at him as he lay, mouth half open, snoring softly. His suit was rumpled, his fair hair sticky with sweat from the nightmare that tossed his head and made him occasionally moan in torment. He had biscuit crumbs in his cravat, and the sour smell of whisky on his breath.

No pity touched me. This was a man I had loved, and who had poured on me weeks and months of lawful, generous loving. But he had execrated me, and he threatened my safety at Wideacre. The blackness of my sin had half destroyed him; now I wished it had killed him outright. If he continued drinking at this pace it would indeed have proved a fatal wound, and I would be at peace once again. I held my silk skirts out so the whisper of the fabric did not prompt a sweet dream of remembered happiness, and I stepped slowly and carefully to the door. I locked it from the outside, and he was safe in my power.

I was safe too.

Then I climbed the third flight of stairs to the room at the very top of the west wing, and set a taper to the logs in the grate, and to the candles. I opened the other door that connects with the main part of the house where Harry waited, shirtsleeved and barefoot, in patient silence lit only by the light of his bedtime candle.

We held each other like lovers, not like the fierce sensual enemies we so often were in that room. With my husband drunk and dreaming horrors downstairs, and someone, some enemy, perhaps even an enemy I knew well, sleeping and plotting less than fifty miles from me, I did not feel like a storm of passion with Harry. I needed some loving; I needed some kissing; I needed, with all my frozen, frightened heart, some tenderness. So I let Harry take me in his arms and lay me on the couch as if we were tender lovers, and then he kissed me and loved me with tenderness. In many ways this gentle, marital exchange was the most perverse and infamous act of all that we did.

But I did not care. I cared for nothing, now.

Afterwards, we lay sprawled in an easy tangle on the couch, watching the firelight flickering, and drinking warm claret. My chestnut hair was spread in a tangle across his warm soft-haired chest. My face rested against the plump column of his throat. I was tired; I was at peace. I was bruised but not pained. Any woman in the world would have been deeply satisfied and ready for sleep.

‘Harry,’ I said.

‘Yes?’ he said, rousing himself from his half-doze, and gathering me closer into his warm hug.

‘There is something I have been waiting to tell you for some time, Harry,’ I said hesitantly. ‘Something that I am afraid may grieve you, but something you have to know for the good of Wideacre.’

Harry waited, undisturbed. He knew we would not have made love if Wideacre had been endangered by any immediate threat. He knew that my love of the land would always take first place in my mind. He waited to hear what might come next.

‘It is about the entail,’ I said. ‘I am concerned that Wideacre is still entailed on our cousin as the next male heir. If anything, God forbid, should happen to you, Celia, Julia and I would all be homeless.’

A slight frown furrowed his complacent face.

‘It’s true,’ he said. ‘I have thought of it once or twice. But there is plenty of time, Beatrice. I do not ride like you do! I may have a boy next time and then he will inherit. I do not think the entail is a pressing problem for us.’

‘I was afraid you did not know,’ I said. I turned over to lie on my belly and reared myself up on my elbows to look into his face. ‘I was afraid Celia had not told you. I do not blame her. It was, perhaps, not made very clear to her in France after the birth of Julia. I fear she is barren, now, Harry. The midwife said it was a miracle she had conceived at all, and that she doubted very much if she would ever have another child. She has some fault in her body that makes her infertile.’

I paused to let the new information sink in.

‘After the birth I told her, as gently as I could, but I did not want to upset her, so possibly I did not make the situation sufficiently clear. The truth is, Harry, the honest truth’ – I widened my hazel eyes at him in a perfect mimicry of a candid gaze – ‘the truth is that I fear Celia will never conceive another child, and that you will never have a son and heir for Wideacre.’

Harry’s happy rounded face fell. He believed me.

‘This is a blow indeed,’ he said, and I could feel him groping for the words to express his thoughts, for some way to make sense of this new view of the world where there would be no son to follow him and, when he died, Wideacre would pass from his direct line to strangers.

‘I thought Celia might have fully understood, and might have told you,’ I said delicately. ‘But it is a bitter thing for both of you to know: that when you die Wideacre will go to our cousin. Little Julia and, indeed, Richard will be homeless.’

‘Yes,’ he said, as the picture struck him. ‘Having been reared on Wideacre, to have to leave it!’

‘If only one could change the entail!’ I sighed at that remote possibility. ‘If only we could find some way to make our two children secure in their home for ever.’

‘I have heard of them being reversed,’ Harry said doubtfully. ‘But it costs an impossible sum of money and involves one in compensating the heirs, as well as the legal fees of changing it. Few estates could bear that sort of cost, Beatrice, certainly not Wideacre.’

‘The cost if we do not change it would be far greater,’ I said. I sat up, naked, and crossed over to the fire to throw an extra log on the embers. I turned and smiled at Harry, the firelight throwing flickering lights and shadows on my smooth warm skin. ‘I cannot bear the thought of our children miserable and exiled from Wideacre when we are gone, because we failed to provide for them. The two of them – so near each other in age, so like you and me – forced out with no home to go to.’

‘Well, they’ll hardly be homeless,’ said Harry prosaically. ‘Julia will inherit my capital and her mother’s dowry, and Richard will be one of the MacAndrew Line heirs. Enough cash there to buy the estate many times over, I should think.’

‘Which would you rather have, money or Wideacre?’ I asked spontaneously, forgetting for a second the way I wanted the conversation to tend.

Harry considered. The fool that he was, he needed time to think. ‘Well,’ he said in careful, doltish judgement, ‘if one had a fortune one could buy places as fine as this. You are Wideacremad, Beatrice, but there are some very pretty properties in Kent or even in Suffolk and Hampshire.’

I bit the inside of my cheeks hard. Then I waited until I knew no reckless scornful words would come. Then, and only then, I said in a voice as smooth as silk, ‘That’s true, I dare say, Harry. But if your little girl is anything like me she will pine and die if she has to live anywhere out of sight of the Wideacre downs. Small comfort a fortune will be to her then, when she has to buy some other hills, and her distant cousins turn her out of the home where she has lived all her life. She’ll think you are an uncaring father then, and she will curse your memory, that you failed to provide for her, although you loved her so much.’

‘Oh, don’t say that!’ said Harry, moved as I knew he would be by the prospect of Julia’s future reproaches. ‘I would we could do something about it, Beatrice, but I can’t for the life of me see what.’

‘Well, let us decide on it at least,’ I said. ‘If we decide to aim for the entail, let us set our hearts on it and we will find a way to the money necessary.’

Harry shook his head. ‘You don’t understand, Beatrice,’ he said. ‘We could never raise the sort of capital needed to make such a change. Only the wealthiest families in the kingdom can do such things. It is simply beyond our scope.’

‘Our scope, yes,’ I said slowly. ‘But what about the scope of the MacAndrew fortune?’

Harry’s blue eyes widened. ‘He never would?’ he said, hopefully. ‘He would never pour all that money into Wideacre!’

‘Not at the moment,’ I agreed. ‘But he might change his mind. He might consider investing. If we had even half the MacAndrew fortune behind us I think we could consider the change, work out the costs, explore ways and means.’

Harry nodded. ‘I’m game,’ he said. ‘I’d be prepared to sacrifice some of my experimental projects and go for more high-return wheatfields instead of the things I wanted to do. The profit from them could go directly into a fund for buying the entail. We could save for it, Beatrice, and if the worst came to the worst we could always mortgage some land and pay it off later.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I would hate to do that, but it would be worth it in this instance.’

‘But you would have to give up your defence of the cottagers and their rights, Beatrice,’ said Harry, earnestly. ‘There is a hundred acres of common land we could enclose and put under the plough and thousands of pounds to be made if we raised the rents. You have set your heart against those measures, but if we needed to raise money, and a lot of money, then we would have to do things we would not do otherwise.’

I hesitated then, thinking of the lovely rolling common land where the heather grows thigh-high on the sandy light soil, where the little streams run on beds of white sand down the miniature valleys. Of the hollows where the bracken grows in green sweet-smelling peppery fronds where, if you sit still, a dark-eyed snake will come out to bask in the sunshine beside you. Of cold nights when I had walked alone in the empty space under the stars and seen the sharp hoofprints of deer on the loam and seen them moving, soft as shadows, under the great branches of the oak and beech trees. If Harry had his way, all this would be burned and hacked and cleared, and smooth square fields of featureless wheat would grow where the silver birches had shivered and the tall firs had swayed in the wind. It was a big price to pay. Greater than I had thought I would ever have to meet. But it was to get my child into the Master’s chair and my blood into the line of Squires.

‘And we will have to use the gang labourers on the parish,’ said Harry, a certain hard relish in his voice. ‘It is sheer waste employing our tenants or people from Acre when we can get all the day labour we need by contracts with the parish. We pay them cash when they work, and nothing when they do not. We would save hundreds of pounds over the year if we left the poor of Acre to find their own work and did not keep them on our books.’

I nodded. I could feel the face of Wideacre changing as I looked into the future. Acre village would be smaller, with fewer cottages. Those that survived would be more prosperous. But the little cottages, where families survived on winter work from us and on casual harvest work, would go. They lived the best lives people could have. In winter they took casual work from us, hedging or ditching or helping with snowed-in sheep or cattle. They lived then on their summertime savings and relied on vegetables from their patch and the milk from the cow they kept on the common. They would keep a pig there, eating acorns from the oak trees, and a couple of hens to run in the lane of Acre.

In spring and summertime they would earn good money sowing seed, moving the beasts, haymaking, harvesting. They would work outrageous hours for two or three days dawn to dusk in the rhythm of the land, and then all of a sudden the work would stop. The fields would be cut, the barns overflowing, the haystacks built, and the whole village would go on a glorious drunken holiday that would last two or three days, until the next job needed doing.

None of them would ever be wealthy. None of them would ever own land. But they lived a life that many a wealthy city-bred man might envy. They worked when they chose and they rested when they chose, and while they would never be rich they seldom feared poverty.

The hens that ran in the lane and the cow on the common were a safe shield against hunger and want. They knew that if they faced a death or an illness in the family there was always a place for the whole family in the Wideacre kitchen, and where a word to Miss Beatrice would see an apprenticeship for the oldest son, and a job for the oldest daughter at the Hall.

But if I went down Harry’s mean narrow road then Wideacre would be like any other estate where the poor pulled their forelocks as the carriages went by, and then pulled faces when they were gone; where the faces of the children were white and thin, and those of their mothers were old with worry. Wideacre poor led trouble-free lives because we kept to the old ways. Unchallenged traditions ruled the use of the land and the easy holidays. The common was open to all – even the poaching was a ritual game played with little malice. But Harry’s way would mean the common enclosed, the footpaths shut, the cow and pig without grazing. The poor would become poorer. And the very poorest of them would drop through the old traditional supports – and they would starve.

But the end of the road was security for my son. The end of this road was his inheritance. I would have ridden roughshod over every mother in the land – Mary, Joseph, and Baby Jesus too, if necessary – to get my son in the Squire’s chair.

‘It has to be,’ I said. ‘I see that.’

‘That’s generous of you!’ said Harry enthusiastically. ‘I know how you love the old ways, Beatrice, and they have served us well. It is generous of you to be ready to give them up, and all for little Julia’s sake, too.’

‘Yes,’ I said. I settled back on the couch and wrapped a silk shawl around my naked shoulders. The touch of the cloth was soft on my skin and warm. As I shrugged at the thought of the cottagers who would be homeless and hungry the folds slipped, and Harry leaned forward to kiss one bare shoulder. I smiled at him. He had to go further yet, this night.

‘But it still would not be enough,’ Harry said. ‘To buy out the heir we would have to offer a massive sum of capital. We could start a fund certainly. But we would be unlikely to make enough money quickly enough.’

‘I know,’ I nodded. ‘It has to be the MacAndrew money.’

Harry frowned. He was slow but he was not stupid.

‘John would hardly agree,’ he objected. ‘It is to secure Julia’s future certainly, and I hope that while she lived and ruled Wideacre there would always be a home for the three of you, but there is no reason why John should put his private fortune into a scheme that gains him or his child nothing.’

I smiled. One always had to take things so slowly with Harry. But he generally got there in the end.

‘Unless we could find some way of making Richard and Julia joint heirs,’ I suggested tentatively. ‘They could run Wideacre as we do, you and I, together. Everyone can see how well that works, perhaps they too could learn to work together.’

Harry smiled, and traced a line of kisses from the sweet round of my shoulder along the clear line of my neck and up to behind my ear.

‘Well, yes, Beatrice,’ he said softly. ‘But you and I have a rather special way of deciding business matters.’

‘They could be partners,’ I murmured, lazily, as if I could think of nothing but the rising warmth and pleasure of his kisses. I lay back on the couch, the shawl falling from my nakedness, my eyelids half closed, and my eyes behind them as sharp as green glass.

Harry’s movement to kiss a new line, from the fascinating bones at the base of my neck down between my warm tumbled breasts, was arrested at that thought.

‘Julia and Richard?’ he said in sudden surprise.

‘Yes,’ I said, pushing his face down to my soft belly, still slack from the birth of my son. ‘Why not?’

Harry kissed me, absently, his mind turning over this seed of an idea that could secure Julia the benefit of inheriting one of the sweetest estates in Sussex, which would keep Wideacre in his line.

‘You know, Beatrice,’ he said. ‘That’s a rather good idea. If John would accept a half-share of the estate as a return for loaning the capital to buy out Charles Lacey and change the entail we could arrange a contract to make them joint heirs.’

‘That is wonderful,’ I said, catching his enthusiasm as if I had not been planning this ever since I had recognized myself in little Julia, and felt Richard’s rights to the land as sharply as I felt my own.

‘How wonderful, Harry, if our two children could rule here after we are gone!’

Harry beamed. ‘To give Julia Wideacre would be worth almost any sacrifice,’ he said tenderly. ‘And to give your son an equal share in our home makes me almost as happy, Beatrice.’

‘You are so right, Harry,’ I said, as if I were congratulating him on his idea. ‘We should set it in train at once, don’t you think?’

Harry rolled towards me in his enthusiasm, and I lay back and readied myself to pay my dues. I could enjoy Harry; when I was full of fear or anxiety, I could even feel a need for him. But once my first easy lust was satisfied I wanted, more than any other pleasure, the delight of being in my own, solitary bed. But Harry was exhilarated at the exercise of his wit upon the problem of the entail, and I wanted him abed and tired and happy tonight, for there would be more to plan in the morning; I wanted him too tired to talk with Celia when he crept in beside her sleeping warmth.

‘Come to my office in the morning, and we will write to the London lawyers,’ I said, and sighed as if the pleasure of his kisses were too much for me. ‘Oh, Harry,’ I said, as if overwhelmed. ‘After breakfast, tomorrow.’

After Harry left me I had sat for two or three long hours gazing into the red embers, puzzling in my mind, giving myself this time like a gift. I was giving myself a chance to draw back. The next steps before me were like the first steps one takes on the crest of the downs where they slope so steeply that even the grass cannot grow. You take one step, then another, and then the height of the slope catches you and you cannot, cannot stop. And there would be no way of stopping the course I was on. And there would be no laughter at the speed and fright of it.

So I gave myself a few minutes to linger at the top and consider what I was doing. Just a couple of quiet hours beside the fire to test my own determination and to see if I could bear what I was about to do. I had to break the land, break it to pay for that entail. Hammer the earth and the people, and the rhythm of the seasons, until it yielded gold like blood to pay for this daredevil scheme.

You never farm for today. You always think of next season, next year, or the year beyond. You plant wheat for your own profit, but you plant trees for your heir. I was planting trees. I was planning fifty years ahead. I could not pour love and money and care into the land for some damned cousin; it had to be for my bone and my seed.

Whatever the cost.

It was as I had planned. After a night spent lovemaking with me, Harry had tumbled into bed beside his silent, sleeping wife, and barely exchanged more than a dozen words with her until we were all seated around the breakfast table in the warm June sunlight. Celia, dressed in a simple black gown trimmed with black lace, looked as lovely as a young woman who has enjoyed twelve hours’ sleep can look on a midsummer morning. Beside her I dare say I looked tired. I know I felt it. I was smiling, for everything that had seemed in conspiracy against me was flowing easily and sweetly my way again. I took a cup of French coffee from Celia with a word of thanks, and a slice of ham from the sideboard. Then the door opened and my husband came in.

He walked with a light and easy step as if he had not been drunk last night, and dead drunk every night for the last twelve. He smiled at Celia’s clear prettiness with real affection, and then his face turned to me and the smile became a sneer.

‘My lovely wife,’ he said, and his words were bitten off as if even speaking to me left a sour taste in his mouth.

‘Good morning,’ I said evenly, and took my place at the foot of the table.

‘Beatrice, I shall come to your office this morning to discuss that matter we mentioned last night,’ said Harry pompously, but I wished he had stayed silent.

‘Last night?’ John asked, his eyes on his plate. ‘Something you three talked over together?’

Celia was unruffled behind the silver coffee set. ‘No, these two were up all hours talking profit and loss as usual,’ she said. ‘You know how they are when they are planning for Wideacre, John.’

John shot a hard look at her under his sandy eyebrows.

‘I know how these two are together,’ he said briefly.

There was an awkward silence.

‘Certainly,’ I said smoothly to Harry. ‘And later I should like to take you to see what the Hale family has done to Reedy Hollow. They have built a little culvert and some drains. It makes that field a good dry field, but I am concerned about the melt-water in spring.’

‘You know the water levels better than anyone, Beatrice,’ said Harry. ‘But do you think they have considered using a water pump?’

Even with John’s icy, daunting presence at the table Celia and I could not resist an exchange of smiles.

‘Really, Harry,’ I said. ‘You are too old to play with toys. I think you will have to give up your pumps and your windmills and your ten-crop systems.’

Harry chuckled ruefully. ‘It’s just that they do such interesting things in the Fens,’ he said plaintively. ‘I should so like to have a pump at Wideacre.’

‘We’ll be digging dikes next,’ I said, teasing him. ‘You stick to Sussex ways in Sussex, Harry, and content yourself with being the most progressive farmer for miles around.’

Harry smiled back at me. ‘I will save, Beatrice,’ he said earnestly. ‘You know I only value these things for the benefits they bring the estate.’

‘Save for what?’ My husband’s tone was like a diamond cutting glass across the warm easy tone of the conversation. ‘Do you know what Harry is saving for, Celia?’ he repeated.

Celia looked blank, but her instinctive loyalty to Harry kept her mouth shut.

‘Harry and I have plans to establish a fund for the future of Julia and for Richard,’ I said smoothly. ‘To come from some of the profits of Wideacre. We have not any idea of the details yet, and we were proposing to talk about them, and about some rather boring farming plans, this morning. You and Celia are, of course, more than welcome to come to my office after breakfast, but it is hardly the sort of thing that interests either of you. And we are only at the talking stage.’

John’s eyes were as sharp as Celia’s were bland. ‘Planning for the future, Beatrice?’ he said, and anyone could have heard the suspicion and hatred in his voice. I shot a hard glance at the footman by the door but his face was correctly wooden. I knew him though; I knew them all. This one was one of the Hodgett lads, a son of the gatekeeper. He had been taken into the house by me after being in trouble with Harry’s keeper over a ferret he would set to work in the preserves. I saved him a beating; I saved his father some time and trouble. He adored me. There would be no rumour of this talk outside this room, except as an outburst by young Hal that Miss Beatrice’s young husband wasn’t worthy to kiss the ground she rode on.

‘Of course I plan for the future, John,’ I said, and I saw him wince when I used his name. ‘I plan for our baby, just like any mother. And I plan for you and me, just like any wife. You can be sure that I will always be thinking of you, and planning for you, just as long as you live.’

Celia looked relieved at the sweetness of my tone, and at the loving nature of the words. But John went pale and looked sickly as he heard the threat behind them. I would hear no more from him today. And I would find a way, I most certainly would find a way, to silence him for ever.

I rose from the table.

‘My room, in ten minutes, Harry?’ I asked.

Harry rose to his feet and nodded his assent as I made to leave. John was a little slow in rising to show his respect for me, and I waited, motionless, my eyes on him, until he had done so. His pushing back of his chair was like a surly boy and I felt secret pleasure at mastering him, as steadily and as surely as one trains an ill-bred dog. But some dogs are such trouble that one puts a stone around their neck, and drops them in the Fenny.

I went to my office.

Anywhere at Wideacre I am at peace, but when I sit in the Squire’s chair with the great round rent table before me, and the papers on all the tenants tucked safe in the drawers, the map of the estate on the easel board, and the swallows swooping low outside the window, I am in bliss. This is where the heart of Wideacre beats. In the deep secret hidden places in the woods, in the soft, sandy, sunny common, and on the high thyme-scented downs, but also here where the lives of the people, our people, are recorded in my clear ledgers, and their futures planned on the great charts of the desk. This is where the revenue comes in, in the weekly rents, in records of yields surpassing yields, in the banker’s orders from Chichester corn merchants, in the wool sale cheques, in the meat market gold. And this is where the wealth is spent: in the orders for equipment, for new stock, for new seed, and for the ceaseless buying for the house, which Celia seems to think is needed, and which I do not refuse. We live well on Wideacre, and my ledgers tell me, in reassuring thick black pen strokes on a white page, that we can afford to live well, for this country makes us rich.

And now this wealth, this steady circulation of paper and gold money must be diverted to a new reservoir – a fund to buy my son into the chair where I sit, into the room where I give the orders, into the land and into the power. Richard, my lovely baby, whose bath I would go and watch in a few minutes, would be Master here if any act, any act at all, of mine could put him in this place.

Harry tapped on the door and came in. His kiss on my cheek was the second he had given me that day, but it recognized that our first kiss of greeting at breakfast had been in public, as brother and sister. This one, no warmer or more loving, was a private one between old, familiar lovers.

‘Sit down,’ I said, and he drew up a chair to the table.

‘I shall be writing to the London solicitors this morning to raise the question of the entail with them, and when we know how much they estimate the purchase will cost, we will know better where we stand,’ I said in a businesslike tone.

‘Good,’ said Harry, nodding in assent.

‘But I think we should keep this matter between ourselves, until we know we can go ahead,’ I said. ‘I shall not tell John yet, and I think it would be better if you did not tell Celia.’

‘Oh?’ said Harry. ‘Why not?’

Oh, Harry,’ I said. ‘You understand so little about women! If Celia knows you are planning to make Julia your heir, she will know you believe she is barren. I think that would break her heart. Worse, she will know that I told her sad secret to you, so she will feel betrayed by me. Until we know for certain that we can buy the entail, indeed, until the entail is actually purchased and signed over to Richard and Julia, I think Celia should know nothing about it. It would only be a reproach to her for something she cannot possibly help.’

‘Very true,’ said Harry, with the quick tenderness he always had now for Celia, his pretty wife. ‘I should hate her to be distressed. But she will know that I think there will be no more heirs when the contract of partnership between Richard and Julia is signed.’

‘But then she will have the comfort of knowing that Julia’s future is secure and that at least she has played a part in providing Wideacre with an heir. Julia and Richard will inherit jointly.’

Harry nodded, and got up from the table to gaze out of the window. I heard the scrunch of footsteps on the gravel, and went to stand beside him. My husband was wandering aimlessly towards the rose garden. I could tell from the droop of his shoulders that he had found the drink I had left in the library and he had taken a glass to help him face the day looming ahead. All day without laughter, or joy, or love in a house that stank of sin. He had lost the quickness and lightness of his step. He had lost the pride that made him a swift walker, a fast dancer, a fine lover. I had taken the virtue, the strength and the power from him. If I could see my way to it, I would take more.

‘What about John?’ Harry asked in an undertone.

I shrugged. ‘As you see,’ I said. ‘I shall tell him of no plans. He is indiscreet, he is incompetent to judge. If he continues to drink in this way then I shall write to his papa and see if you and I can have power of attorney over his MacAndrew shares. He is not to be trusted with a fortune. He could spend it all on drink tomorrow.’

Harry nodded, his eyes still on John’s bowed back.

‘He is ashamed because he made a mistake with Mama’s dose?’ he asked.

I nodded. ‘I suppose that is it. He does not confide in me. He knows I cannot forgive his behaviour that night. If he had not been drunk our darling mama might have lived.’ I rested my head against the window frame. ‘I cannot stop weeping when I think of her in illness, and that clown muddling the dose.’

Harry’s face was flushed with anger. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘If we had only known! But, Beatrice, we cannot be sure. She always had a weak heart; we all knew that one day we would lose her.’

‘What I cannot bear is to have lost her through his folly!’ I said.

‘I wonder what set off Mama’s attack,’ Harry said, his cowardly eyes on my face. ‘Does John have any idea?’

‘No,’ I said, lying in my turn. ‘Mama collapsed just before she came into the parlour. Perhaps she came down the stairs too fast. John has no idea what caused it.’

Harry nodded. He was greedy for sweet untruths when reality was uncomfortable.

‘I know we cannot be sure,’ I said. ‘But you believe it, and I believe it; the whole house knows how drunk he was. All of the county knows he attended her although he was drunk, and that she was dead the next day. Of course I cannot forgive him. Of course he is ashamed. He has not shown his face off the estate except for her funeral since it happened. And he is not called out even to the poorest houses. Everyone believes he was drunk and made a mistake.’

Harry nodded. ‘It must be a bitter thing for him,’ he said. John was walking along the paths of the rose garden that led to the little summerhouse. As we watched he dawdled up the steps and sat down inside as if he were worn out.

‘It is indeed,’ I said. ‘His whole life and his pride was in his practice of medicine. I expect he wishes he were dead.’

The relish in my voice penetrated even Harry’s dullness.

‘You hate him that much?’ he asked. ‘Because of Mama?’

I nodded.

‘I cannot forgive him for failing Mama, for failing me, for failing in his duty. I despise him for his drunkenness that night, and for his drunkenness every night since. I wish I had never married him. But with your support and help, Harry, we will ensure he cannot harm me.’

Harry nodded. ‘Aye, it’s a bitter shame for you, Beatrice. But you will always be safe here with me. And if his father does indeed invest the MacAndrew shares on you and takes them away from John, then he will be harmless. He will be able to do nothing if he has only what you give him, and has to live where you permit.’

I nodded. ‘It will have to do,’ I said, half to myself. ‘It will do, at any rate, until we know about the entail.’

Two long months passed before we had news. In London the lawyers consulted their dusty files and traced back through hundreds of years the decision to invest only boys of Wideacre stock with the power to inherit. It was the usual way. In the earliest days, when my ancestors first came to Wideacre and saw its dreaming hills and the little cluster of mud and lath buildings, they were fighting men, arrived with the Norman conqueror, hungry for land. Women to them were carriers and breeders and rearers of soldier sons. Nothing else had any value. Of course they settled it that boys and only boys should inherit.

And no one ever challenged it.

Generations of women came and went on this land. Married, bedded, bore children with pain and with courage and were left to run the estate alone. Mothers and daughters-in-law inherited responsibility but no power, as husbands and sons gave the orders, took the profits and took themselves off. Crusading Squires left Wideacre for years in the care of their wives and came back to find the fields peaceful, the crops yielding, the cottages repaired and newly built, and the land fertile. Strangers on their own land, tanned brown from foreign suns, they retired at last to their home and took back the power without a murmur from the women who had poured their own lives and love into keeping Wideacre Hall and Wideacre land strong and thriving.

They are buried in Wideacre church, these absentee Lords. There are great effigies of them in their armour, on their backs, their hands piously clasped over their metal bellies, their feet uncomfortably crossed. Their eyes stare sightlessly at the church roof and I imagine they sometimes lay in bed like that, beside their sleeping wives, gazing at the roof of the great wooden bed that I now sleep in, but seeing in their mind’s eye the desert, and the bands of infidels, and Jerusalem on the horizon.

The wives would be as sound and as deeply asleep as I am after a day when I have worked so hard and so long on the accounts that the figures dance before my eyes until I take my candle and go to bed in a haze of tiredness. Or on the days when we have to round up sheep and I spend all day riding around the silly things in circles and bawling like a peasant at the dogs. Or when harvesting goes badly and is interrupted by rain and I have to be out all day to keep the men working and say, ‘Hurry! Hurry! Hurry! The storm is coming! The autumn is coming! And the crops are not in!’ The crusaders’ wives would be as tired as I am after days like that, and they would sleep as I do – the sleep of a woman who runs the house and the land. We have no time to dream, or go riding off to find wars and battles and glory. We are left with the home to run and the land to run, and no glory, no power, and no wealth.

Wideacre Squires were not great Lords like the Havering family, nor great merchants like the de Courceys. They stayed home a little more than the greater men, but still they roamed. With Wideacre at their back and Wideacre wealth at their beck and call they rode out for the King during the war, and lived long years in exile. Wideacre wives ran the estate then too. Writing letters, sending money from coffers that grew steadily more and more empty. Arguing, dealing, persuading the Roundhead army to leave the hay standing, the horses in the field.

In the long years of the Protectorate the Wideacre women were exiles on their own land – staying quiet, staying unobtrusive, hoping that they would be left to live their lives in peace and security. Of course they managed it. What woman does not know how to melt into a threatening landscape so she becomes half invisible and can concentrate on surviving – without power, without wealth, without help?

So when the Stuart Squires came riding home in triumph there was a tired, pale woman on the doorstep ready to welcome the Master home. And he stepped from his horse and into the Master’s chair as if he had never been away. And she turned over the books to him, the keys to him, the plans and the orders and the decisions to him, as if all she knew was her needle. As if she had never been anything else but a peg to hang clothes on, an arranger of flowers, and a singer of little songs.

My great-great-great-grandmother was one of those women. I pass her portrait every day of my life, for it hangs on the curve of the west-wing stairs. She has the low-cut gown and the fat white arms of all the women of her day. She has the pretty rosebud mouth that slightly echoes Harry’s. But I like to think that she had a strong mouth, a firm chin like mine, which the painter never saw for he was looking for prettiness, not strength. For I know I see something of myself in her eyes. They are not like mine for they are blue, and not feline. But there is something about them. A wariness, a suspicion, that I know mine have when men speak of land and ownership. She learned, as I learned: that women can deserve, or women can earn, but women can never own. And my eyes narrow in recognition when I pass her portrait, and I wonder how well she hid her hatred and her rage when she was moved out of the Master’s chair and into the parlour. And how I can avoid that fate myself.

If I could have seen my way to it I would rather have won Wideacre as my Norman forefathers did: with a straight challenge and a fight to the death to own the land. But we are civilized now, and so women are serfs without hope of recompense. No landed Squire even considers the rights of his wife or his daughters. The only chance I have ever had to own the land that I loved and deserved was by being indispensable to the men who owned it: indispensable to them in the field, like Papa, or – in the case of Harry – in field, office, and bed.

But my son and my daughter would not have to plot and contrive and lie and give their bodies to buy themselves into their rights. They would inherit legally, through men’s law, by an act of the men’s Parliament, with the blessing of male lawyers and male delegates. And I would smile and smile with my green eyes lidded to hide the gleam of triumph on the day that Richard and Julia were solemnly contracted as equal partners and named as the joint heirs of Wideacre.

The London lawyers’ letter outlined how it could be done. The process was as costly as we had feared; it had to be agreed up to the very House of Lords. And then we had to compensate the cousin, Charles Lacey, who would be disinherited. While his hopes could not be high at the moment, for no word of Celia’s barrenness had gone beyond the walls of the private rooms of Wideacre, he would guess soon enough when Harry wanted to settle the estate on his daughter and his nephew that Harry knew he would never have a son. Then we might expect a claim of more than a hundred thousand pounds – and we had to meet that claim before the entail could be changed.

‘I don’t know how we will ever raise that sort of money, Beatrice,’ said Harry, the letter in his hand, seated at the rent table. ‘We cannot raise it by mortgaging Wideacre for that would be a poor inheritance to pass on to the two of them. And we will never be able to save that sort of money from our revenues.’

‘It has to be the MacAndrew fortune,’ I said decisively. ‘If we could use that to pay Charles Lacey, then I think we could mortgage some land to pay for the legal fees – and pay it off over time. With good management, and high-profit farming, we could probably free the estate from debt in ten or twenty years – certainly before the two children inherit.’

‘Yes, but old Mr MacAndrew is hardly likely to buy his grandson into Wideacre at that price,’ Harry objected. ‘Besides he settled nearly that sum on John only a year ago.’

‘It is John’s fortune I’m thinking of,’ I said musingly. ‘If we could get power of attorney over that we could use it however we wished.’

‘But on what grounds?’ Harry asked, getting up from the table and looking out of the window. The Michaelmas daisies were still blooming beneath my window and their purple smell and the peppery perfume of the chrysanthemums were drifting into the room.

‘Because of his drunkenness,’ I said crisply. ‘It might be possible to have him certified.’

Harry recoiled as if he had been stung by a bee.

‘Certified!’ he choked. ‘Beatrice, it is you who are mad! I know that John is drinking steadily, drinking every day. But he seldom shows it. He is hardly insane!’

‘I think his drinking is increasing,’ I said, suppressing a fleeting sense of regret. ‘I think he will drink more rather than less. And if he drinks much more he will either become incompetent, in which case you can have power of attorney, or he will drink himself to death, in which case I inherit his fortune with you and old Mr MacAndrew as trustees. Either way, his money is ours.’

‘Yes, but Beatrice,’ – Harry turned back into the rom and his face was serious – ‘if this was to come about it would be a tragedy. John is a young man; he has all his life ahead of him. If he were to recover you might still be happy together, and he might well be happy to invest in such a good scheme for his son’s future. I know you are angry and distressed with him now, so soon after Mama’s death, but I am sure the two of you will be happy again, when John is his old self once more.’

I gave Harry my brightest, most angelic smile.

‘It is what I pray for, every night,’ I said. ‘You heard me then, planning as a business woman. Now you see me as a wife. Of course I hope and believe that this shadow will pass from John. But if it does not, I will be responsible for my son’s future, so naturally I have to plan ahead.’

Harry’s smile was relieved.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I knew you were thinking aloud and planning for Richard and Julia. And I knew you were not really thinking that John should be certified.’

‘Of course not,’ I said lightly, then turned the subject away from my dangerous husband’s future, and led Harry to think of other things.

But I could not turn Celia so easily. She had been walking Julia in the rose garden when John had seen her from the summerhouse and come out to take a turn. Julia’s little bandy legs were eager to take wobbly steps, and she loved holding on to adult hands while she toddled, uncertainly, with many changes of direction and sudden plumpings to the ground on her well-padded bottom.

From my office window I saw them both and could hear Celia’s clear voice.

‘Do you think she is too young to start walking?’ she asked, straightening up from the back-breaking exercise of following the infant prodigy’s footsteps.

‘No,’ said John. He stood beside Celia and detached first one, then another of Julia’s little grasping hands from her mama. Celia stood back and put both hands on the small of her back while Julia, welcoming the arrival of a new supporter, set off on one of her little expeditions with John bent over her, keeping her steady.

‘If she was in swaddling she would not be walking till she was three or even four,’ Celia said, watching their erratic progress.

‘Bairns are the same as any young animal,’ John said lightly. ‘They know their own business best. Tied up in swaddling you can keep them still. But if they can kick and grow strong they are ready to walk at this early age.’

‘But she won’t hurt her legs, will she? She won’t strain them?’

John turned his head and smiled at Celia. ‘No,’ he said reassuringly. ‘She’ll go at her own pace and soon be nimble and strong.’

Celia nodded.

‘It is so good to see you outside on such a lovely day,’ she said. ‘And so nice to be able to ask you about Julia. You will start practising medicine again soon, won’t you, John? It has been more than three months, you know.’

A shadow passed over his face and he looked back down at Julia again.

‘No,’ he said softly. ‘I dare say I’ll never practise again. I have lost my reputation; I have lost the occupation that was very dear to me; Wideacre has cost us all, in different ways.’

I froze, standing by the window. If this conversation grew any more revealing I should tap on the window to interrupt it. John was treading a very narrow line. I would not permit hints and indiscretions to Celia. They both, separately, knew too much. They must never put that picture together.

‘But you will stop your drinking now,’ said Celia tenderly, persuasively. ‘You know how bad it is for you, and how unhappy you are making dear Beatrice. You will try to stop, won’t you?’

John straightened up abruptly as Julia sat down, and reached for the golden head of a chrysanthemum.

‘I will try,’ he said uncertainly. ‘These past months seem like a dream, not like reality at all. I keep thinking that one morning I will wake in bed beside Beatrice and she will be expecting our child and that none of this nightmare – my absence, the birth, our mama-in-law’s death – will have happened. Then I take a drink because I cannot believe what is happening to me. And when I am drinking I know that it is all unreal, and that my real life is as happy as it was only a few months ago.’

Celia, the odious flirt, put out her hand to him. ‘You will try to stop drinking,’ she said persuasively. ‘Dear, dear, brother John, you will try?’

And my broken drunk of a husband took her hand and kissed it. ‘I will try,’ he promised. And then he stooped over Julia and set her on her feet, and toddled her round to the stable yard.

And I knew, then, that I had him.

He was in my hand, like a hand-reared foal, because he was half in love with Celia and her child and the whole sentimental nonsense of Celia’s life. Repelled by me, appalled by me, he was clinging on to Celia as a devout kisses the hem of a statue of the Virgin. Celia’s love of her child, her clear-eyed honesty, her decent warmth, all held John to life when he feared he was going mad, when he longed for death. When he despaired of a world dominated by me, he could always see Celia’s clear, lovely gaze and warm himself at the bright clear flame of her purity.

And that gave me a key to manage him. While he stayed on Wideacre through love of Celia, he could not harm me. While he kept his mouth shut to spare her, his discretion benefited me. While he gently, tenderly kissed her hand, he would not harass me. He loved and so he was vulnerable. And I was a little bit safer for that.

I was a little bit more dangerous for that as well. I am not a cold woman and I am not one who easily shares anything she loves, or even has loved once in the past. I never forgot that Celia had once threatened to take Harry from me. That when he could have been my lover he spent time and trouble to bring her willingly to his bed. That in order to keep the two of them permanently estranged I had to don all kinds of disguises and dance to all sorts of tunes to make myself Harry’s addiction. If he had not been fatally flawed, early corrupted by the brutality of that school, I should never have been able to keep him from Celia. I knew I was a hundred times more beautiful than she, a hundred times stronger. But I could not always remember that, when I saw the quiet strength she drew on when she believed she was morally right. And I could not be certain that every man would prefer me, when I remembered how Harry had looked at her with such love when we came back from France.

I would never forgive Celia for that summer. Even though it was the summer when I cared nothing for Harry but rode and danced day and night with John, I would not forget that Celia had taken my lover from me without even making an effort at conquest.

And now my husband bent to kiss her hand as if she were a queen in a romance and he some plighted knight. I might give a little puff of irritation at this scene played out before my very window. Or I might measure the weakness in John and think how I could use it. But use it I would. Even if I had felt nothing else for John I should have punished him for turning his eyes to Celia. Whether I wanted him or not was irrelevant. I did not want my husband loving anyone else.

For dinner that afternoon I dressed with extra care. I had remodelled the black velvet gown that I had worn for the winter after Papa’s death. The Chichester modiste knew her job and the deep plush folds fitted around my breasts and waist like a tight sheath, flaring out in lovely rumpled folds over the panniers at my hips. The underskirt was of black silk and whispered against the thick velvet as I walked. I made sure Lucy powdered my hair well, and set in it some black ribbon. Finally, I took off my pearl necklace and tied a black ribbon around my throat. With the coming of winter, my golden skin colour was fading to cream, and against the black of the gown I looked pale and lovely. But my eyes glowed green, dark-lashed and heavy-lidded, and I nipped my lips to make them red as I opened the parlour door.

Harry and John were standing by the fireplace. John was as far away from Harry as he could be and still feel the fire. Harry was warming his plump buttocks with his jacket caught up, and drinking sherry. John, I saw in my first sharp glance, was sipping at lemonade. I had been right. Celia was trying to save my husband. And he was hoping to get his unsteady feet back on the road to health. Harry gaped openly when he saw me, and John put a hand on the mantelpiece as if one smile from me might destroy him.

‘My word, Beatrice, you’re looking very lovely tonight,’ said Harry, coming forward and setting me a chair before the two of them.

‘Thank you, Harry,’ I said, as sickly sweet as John’s lemonade. ‘Good evening, John.’ The look I gave him was warm and sensual. I saw his knuckles whiten on the mantelpiece.

The parlour door opened and Celia came in. The blacks of mourning that set off my skin and eyes and hair merely drowned Celia’s pale gold prettiness. She never looked her best in dark colours and I foresaw two years when I would shine her down without the least effort. Tonight, while I glowed with health and loveliness and the black velvet was like a jeweller’s cloth to show off a warm cameo, Celia seemed aged and worn in her black gown.

Her brown eyes went to John’s glass and her cheeks coloured, making her suddenly a pretty girl again.

‘Oh! Well done!’ she said encouragingly. And when Harry offered her a glass of sherry she chose to take lemonade in some feeble gesture of support. I smiled, my eyes more green and veiled than ever, and accepted the large sherry Harry poured for me, and drank it before John with obvious relish.

Stride called us in to dinner and nodded to me that he wished to speak with me. I let Harry lead me into the dining room and to my chair, then I smiled my excuses and went back out into the hall where Stride hovered.

‘Miss Beatrice, I thought I should confirm with you,’ he said in an undertone. ‘Lady Lacey has ordered that there shall be no wine served this evening, nor any port for the gentlemen after dinner. She has ordered lemonade for the table, and water jugs.’

I gave an irrepressible chuckle.

‘Don’t be foolish, Stride,’ I said. ‘Are there wine glasses on the table?’

He nodded. ‘The table was laid when she gave me this order and so I did nothing until I had confirmed it with you,’ he said.

‘Of course,’ I said smoothly. ‘You did rightly. We will certainly drink wine this evening and Sir Harry will, of course, wish to have his port. You must pour wine for my husband, and if he wishes to continue drinking lemonade he can do so.’

Stride nodded, and I returned to the dining room with a smile on my lips.

‘Everything all right?’ Harry asked. I nodded, and leaned towards Celia.

‘I will explain about the wine later,’ I said to her quietly.

She looked surprised at me, and then she glanced instinctively at John. His mouth was white where his lips were pressed together. He had himself in check but one could see the strain. Then Stride came back to the room and the two footmen served the meal while he poured the wine in every glass, as I had ordered.

Celia’s gaze came up to me again in an unspoken challenge, but I was looking at Harry and asking him about the newly appointed Master of the Hunt.

‘We’ll still keep the dogs here, of course,’ Harry confirmed. ‘And Mr Haller can come over and see them often. I would rather, in any case, see a good deal of him during this year of mourning because although he knows the runs he does not know the Wideacre woods as we do, Beatrice. And I want to make sure the foxes are kept down this year.’

‘Good,’ I said. Mr Haller was leasing the Dower House, a handsome square-built sandstone house like a half-size Wideacre, which was standing empty, halfway down the drive. He had rented the house for the sport and was delighted to find that the Wideacre Hunt was without a Master while Harry was in mourning.

‘How much I shall miss hunting,’ I said with longing in my voice. The tone made John’s shoulders tense. His wine glass was filled and ruby red before him; he could smell the bouquet.

‘Yes,’ said Harry. ‘And of all people Mama would have wished us to enjoy ourselves.’

I gave a gurgle of laughter. ‘Not me, Harry,’ I said ruefully. ‘She would have broken every convention in the book to please you, but she always wanted to keep me off horses, and indoors.’

Harry smiled and nodded. ‘That’s true,’ he said comfortably. ‘And I would not wish to be disrespectful to her memory. But it seems very hard to miss another season.’

He turned his attention to his plate and nodded at Celia.

‘This is excellent, my dear,’ he said.

She smiled and glowed a little at his praise.

‘It is a recipe Papa brought back from one of his London clubs,’ she said. ‘I thought you would like it.’

John’s shoulders had relaxed slightly and he was eating.

‘I am so glad to see you eating, John,’ I said sweetly to him. ‘I was so distressed when you were unable to eat.’

John’s fork fell back on his plate, untasted. Harry’s eyes on me were tender and sympathetic, but Celia looked slightly puzzled, and was watching my face. I smiled warmly at her and reached for my wine glass. John’s eyes were on the claret and I licked my lips in anticipation.

‘What shall you do tomorrow, Harry?’ I asked lightly, to turn the attention away from me again. ‘I had thought of going to Chichester to order a trap or some sort of curricle for me to drive while I may not ride in public.’

‘I shall come too then,’ said Harry. ‘I don’t want you thundering home in a high-perch phaeton!’

I laughed, a confident, seductive ripple. John’s fork clattered in his plate and he pushed his food away.

‘Oh, yes!’ I said. ‘Something sporty and racy and a pair of matched greys to pull it!’

‘I should like to come too, if I may,’ said Celia softly. ‘Julia needs some new shoes and I don’t want to take her to the Acre cobbler; he does not have soft enough kid.’

The servants cleared the plates and Harry stood to carve a brace of pheasants. Celia and I had breast meat and John a couple of legs with rich savoury gravy to pour over the large chunks of meat. He was looking down at his plate, and I guessed he was feeling nauseous, and probably longing for a drink. I waited until he had been served with vegetables, and had a bread roll on his plate beside him, and then I leaned forward.

‘Do try and eat,’ I said tenderly. ‘Don’t leave the table and go to your study, John.’

It tipped the scales. He pushed his chair back as if the seat was burning him and took two hasty steps towards the door. He turned and bobbed a bow at Celia.

‘I beg your pardon,’ he said briefly, and the footman sprang to open the door and closed it with a click behind him. I nodded; John’s plate and cutlery vanished smoothly, and Harry and Celia and I were alone.

‘It is a shame,’ Harry said compassionately. ‘You do your best, Beatrice. But, my God, it is a shame.’

I dipped my head as if I were hiding tears.

‘I am sure it will get better,’ I said in half a whisper. ‘I am sure he will learn to conquer it.’

I had thought I might escape a little talk with Celia by sitting with Harry over his port and then going straight to bed. But before breakfast the following day she tapped on my office door and asked if she might come in. In her morning gown of black she looked weary and far older than her twenty-six years. There were shadows under her eyes – she had clearly not slept – and her forehead was creased in a permanent frown of worry. Fresh-faced, smooth-skinned, and as sunny as the crisp blue-skied winter morning, I smiled at her and invited her to take a seat.

‘It is about John,’ she began. I smiled. Celia diving into a conversation, Celia seeking me out, Celia anxious about my husband, was a novelty indeed.

‘Yes?’ I said. I had remained seated at my desk and I let my eyes drift to the papers before me.

‘Beatrice, he went to his study last night, and he started drinking again, although he promised me he would try to stop,’ Celia said in an earnest rush.

‘Yes,’ I said sorrowfully. The papers were a comparison of yields on Wideacre since I had started keeping records. I thought that they might show the sort of profits we could expect if we followed Harry’s idea of farming Wideacre as a business and not as a home.

‘Beatrice, I am sorry to intrude,’ said Celia. But she did not sound sorry. I was reminded suddenly of her barging into my bedroom in France with words of apology on her lips, but with a hungry baby in her arms and an absolute determination that I should feed the child. There was not one ounce of selfish strength in Celia, but give her someone to mother and she became in an instant a heroine. I should have been wary, but I was only amused.

‘You are not intruding, Celia,’ I said politely, and let her see that she was. ‘Please go on.’

‘When John went to his study last night there were two open bottles of whisky on the table. He drank them both,’ she said. I showed her a shocked face.

‘How did they get there?’ asked Celia baldly.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘John probably ordered his valet to bring him some. He has been drinking like this for four months, remember, Celia. The servants have just got into the routine of bringing him what he wants.’

‘Then we must tell them not to,’ Celia said energetically. She leaned forward on the table, her brown eyes bright and her tiredness gone. ‘You must tell Stride that on no account is John to be supplied with drink, and we must not have wine on the table, or drink in the house, until he is cured.’

I nodded. ‘You may be right, Celia,’ I said. ‘And John’s health must come first. We must find some way to help cure him. Perhaps we should send him away. There are some wonderful doctors who specialize in cases such as this.’

‘Are there?’ asked Celia. ‘I didn’t know. But would he agree?’

‘We could insist that he goes. We could legally bind him to take treatment,’ I said, deliberately vague.

Celia sighed. ‘It may come to that, I suppose. But it sounds dreadful. We could start to help him by not having drink here.’

I nodded. ‘If you’re sure that’s the way, Celia,’ I said uncertainly. ‘I only ordered wine served last night because I thought John should get used to drinking lemonade while other people around him drink wine. When he dines out, there will always be wine at table, and port, you know.’

‘Yes,’ Celia said. ‘I had not thought of that. But I feel sure we should keep drink completely away from him for the first few days. Will you order that, Beatrice?’

I smiled at her. ‘Of course I will, Celia. Anything. Anything, to make my husband well again.’

She looked carefully at me, scanning my face. The little, loving Celia, who thought the world as gentle as herself, was learning fast. And the silly child who thought everyone was like herself, spoke like her, thought like her, loved like her, had the pit of otherness opening beneath her feet. She was coming to learn that I was different from her. But she could not begin to understand me.

She returned to her usual good manners. ‘I should beg your pardon,’ she said. ‘I had no right to give an order without your knowledge. It was my concern for John that made me thoughtless. I just wanted to clear the table of wine.’

I blew her a kiss with an airy wave.

‘It doesn’t matter, Celia!’ I said lightly. ‘And you were probably right. We will clear the house of drink and that may help John, as you say.’

‘I’ll go and tell him then,’ she said, and slipped from the room with a whisper of black silk.

I returned, with interest, to the yields. I did not need to eavesdrop on the conversation, for I knew, as clearly as if I had been there, how it would be. Celia would beg John to drink no more; John in pain from the whisky he had had last night, in pain at his own loss of manhood, of pride, of control, would miserably agree. Celia, her face glowing with hope and tenderness, would tell him that she had managed to make it easy for him. That the house would be free of drink. That if he came to dinner tonight there would be no sherry scenting the air of the parlour, and no ruby glow of wine cast over his plate at dinner.

That would make him hopeful. He would think that whatever sweet, tempting, teasing smiles I could give him, and however breathtakingly lovely I looked, however desirable I was, at least he would be spared the other sight – of two fresh bottles of whisky dewy-sided in his study, and a key in the lock so he could be alone with them.

So at breakfast we drank tea and lemonade, and Harry huffed into his pint pot, but said nothing. Celia gave up her drive to Chichester with me, preferring to stay home. If I knew my sister-in-law, she planned to tempt John out for an airing, to fortify him with sweet tea, and to keep him by her, with chatter and smiles, and play with Julia until dinnertime. She was fighting for his soul, and she would put all her loving, loyal little heart into it.

So Harry and I drove alone to Chichester and tested our new resolve to save money for Wideacre against the beauties of carriages that the carriage-maker showed us. Harry’s resolve, predictably, wavered. But I held firm. What I needed was a smart little gig or trap to get me round the estate, and the well-built low-slung models were both too costly and too unstable for the rutted lanes that I would need to travel on if I wanted to spare myself a walk in the winter snow to check on the lambing.

‘I’m exhausted,’ I said, affecting a sigh when we had finally reached a decision. ‘Let’s go and beg some tea from the de Courceys.’

Lady de Courcey was an old friend of Mama’s and her two children were only a little older than Harry and me. Of all the Chichester families the de Courceys were the nearest to us in rank, according to Mama’s precise calculations. They owned no local land, but they were wealthier. They were an older family, but they had not been in the same house for years as we Laceys. We visited the bishop, whoever the present incumbent might be, of course. We visited two or three other families, but we were friendly only with the de Courceys.

Although we had now lost Mama’s chilling sense of social gradations, Harry and I had not yet moved out of her chosen circle to make new friends. Partly it was because we lived at such a distance from Chichester as to make a visit there something of an expedition rather than a regular event. But also it was the nature of our Wideacre life. Like Papa we met only the people who lived close to us, or hunted with us, or kin. The roads were often muddy, and in mid-winter utterly impassable. Our work on the land was time-consuming and physically tiring. And, perhaps more than anything else, Harry and I, and now Celia and John too, were an absorbed self-centred little group. Given the choice, I would have been willing never to leave Wideacre for a single day, and while no one loved the place as I did, they all confessed to being content to stay inside the park walls for weeks and months at a time.

The Haverings were our friends, and the de Courceys. We occasionally had relations of Mama’s to stay, or sometimes some of the Lacey family. But, like many families of our rank, we were a little isolated island amid a sea of poor people. No wonder Mama, who saw those beneath her as an anonymous mass, nearly invisible, had been lonely. No wonder I, catching the slightest hint of threat from those surrounding hundreds, thousands, felt sometimes afraid.

It was different for town dwellers. The de Courceys’ house stood well back from the road among Scotch firs and was surrounded by a high wall topped with handsome, vicious, metal spikes. When Harry and I drove up there were three carriages already standing on the gravel sweep of the drive and I grimaced at him.

‘A tea party,’ I said. ‘Don’t desert me to the old ladies.’

Harry chuckled and handed me up the shallow flight of steps, while our footman hammered on the door. The de Courceys’ butler escorted us over the black and white marble floor and threw open the parlour door.

‘Mrs MacAndrew, Sir Harry Lacey,’ he announced, and Lady de Courcey hurtled towards us from her chair.

‘Beatrice! Harry! Darlings!’ she said, and kissed us both soundly on both cheeks. I was slightly taller than her, and had to stoop for her kisses. She always made me feel as if she were too young to have been my mama’s friend. She seemed to me to be eternally the twenty-year-old beauty who had captured the whole of London for a season and then scooped the best suitor on the market, Lord de Courcey. With no money and no family, she had got to this beautiful house and to her wealth on her looks alone. She struck me, with my keen eye for advantage and ownership, as an adventuress. But there was never a hint of that in her behaviour. She was a pattern card of social graces. It was only my view of her, as having gained wealth and position solely by a pretty face, that made her seem to me a clever cheat.

Now her drawing room was filled with some of the best of Chichester society. Most of the faces we knew, and I was led to make my curtsy to the old tabbies, and to shake the Bishop’s hand. Harry, eyeing a plate of cakes, chatted to Lady de Courcey’s daughter-in-law behind the tea trolley, and to her son Peter, standing by the fire.

Half a tedious hour we stayed before it was courteous for us to take our leave and then I turned on impulse to Isabel de Courcey and asked her if they would care to dine with us. Peter was keen to come; Lady de Courcey smilingly gave permission; in ten minutes they were ready, and the informal, impromptu invitation excused as part of my impulsive charm.

Celia was watching for us from the parlour window and came out on the doorstep when she saw the second carriage with the de Courcey arms emblazoned on the door following behind.

‘How delightful,’ she said, with her easy sweet manners. But I saw a shadow on her face, and I knew why.

She had spent all day with John keeping him from alcohol, nerving him for dinner with me, assuring him there would be no wine on the table. Now, dressed for dinner and waiting for him to come downstairs and for us to come home, she discovered with horror that he would be faced with a gay social event, and not the quiet helpful dinner party of a loving family.

I left the de Courceys with Celia and flicked up the west-wing stairs to change. This evening I had a gown of black taffeta, cut low along the square neck, and I wore a pair of jet ear-rings that dangled low and emphasized the length of my neck. I glanced at myself in my glass as I turned to the door and was well pleased with what I saw. The look of me, the perfect shape, would fill any man with desire. I knew, as surely as I knew where I was going, that to see me so lovely and to hate me so much, every night of his life, would destroy John MacAndrew.

He had gone through a stage when, fired with drink, he could attack me. He had gone through a stage when he needed a drink to face the sight of me. Now he discovered that the drink that had been his support, that had kept him alive through the nightmare of the recent months, was no help to him at all. He saw now why there had always been a bottle placed by his bedside, always a glass on his morning tray. He saw now that the bottle in the study, in the library, in the gun room, was no accident. That I had ordered it so. And he learned now, slowly, that he had two enemies and they were allied. One enemy was the woman he had loved. And the other was the drink he could not now refuse. He feared he was near defeat. He could feel himself falling. He could not bear his life, filled as it was, with loss. No child, no wife, no work, no pride, no affection from any source except Celia. And she was pouring her love to help him in a reform he feared he could not sustain. He feared also that failure.

I smiled to myself and saw how my mirror showed a woman so radiant that you would think I was still a bride on my wedding day. Then I sped down the stairs, the taffeta billowing behind me. Stride was in the hall, loitering for me.

I smiled at him with my quick awareness.

‘I know,’ I said, half laughing. ‘But we really cannot expect the de Courceys to drink lemonade. Serve sherry in the parlour and wine in the dining room. We will have the best claret with the meal, and I think, champagne with the fruit. The gentlemen will have port as usual.’

‘Is Mr MacAndrew’s glass to be filled?’ Stride asked, his voice neutral.

I showed no flicker of my awareness that Stride, and thus the rest of the household staff, had ceased to call my husband ‘Doctor’. He would be ‘Mr MacAndrew’ to them now for the rest of his life, and they would hear no reprimand from me.

‘Of course,’ I said, and passed Stride and went into the parlour.

They were all there. John had himself well under control and Celia’s eyes were on him full of love. Harry was looking around for the sherry decanter as Stride brought it in, and he poured with a liberal hand for the de Courceys, for me, and for himself. Celia took a glass of lemonade, and John held the pale yellow drink in his hand, untouched. I could see his head was up, turned towards Harry, and with my keen instinct, I knew he was scenting the air, smelling the perfume of the sherry, warm in the firelight.