He reached my side in two quick strides and took my chin in his hand. I suffered him to turn my face to the light and my green eyes were scornful, but I was biting the inside of my cheeks to hide my fear.
‘Yes, you are as lovely as ever,’ he said dismissively. ‘But you have lost a sparkle from your eyes, and there are lines around your mouth that were never there before. What is it, my dear? Have your dirty steps in filth bogged you down so deep you cannot get free? Has the land turned against you? Can you no longer magic the yields you need? Or is it that the people spit on the ground when you pass and curse your very name for the damage and the death that you have brought to Wideacre?’
I broke free of his grip and turned to the door. My hand was on the latch when he called my name.
‘Beatrice!’
I turned, as if I had hoped he might say something gentle to me. Or at least something that would give me a clue to hold him in my grip again.
‘Death is coming for you, and you are ready for it,’ he said quietly. ‘As I drove home with Celia I thought I should come home and kill you, to free us all from the horror that is you. But I will not need to make my hands stink with your blood. For Death is coming for you, and you know you are fit to die. Don’t you, my pretty Beatrice?’
I turned without a word and left the room. I walked with my head high, my steps long, my skirt shushing round me with every dancing stride. I walked like a lord on his land all the way down the corridor to my office, and then I shut the door behind me and leaned against the panels. At once my knees buckled and I slid down the door into a heap on the floor. I rested my face against the panels. The wood was cold and ungentle to the aching cheekbones where the skin felt too tight.
Death was coming for me, John had said so; he had seen it in my face. And I knew how Death was coming. He was coming on a great black horse with two black dogs, one running before, one following behind. He was coming on horseback, for he had no legs to creep along behind me. He would ride up to me, Death, and I would see his face before I died. Death was coming for me. The rich people, the gentry who feared for their lives and their property called him Death; the poor people who followed him called him the Culler. But I would look in his face and call him ‘Ralph’.
*
I sat with my back to the door, unmoving, until twilight darkened the room and I saw the first little star, low on the horizon with the thin moon beside it. Then I clasped both hands around the doorknob and hauled myself to my feet. I was bone-weary, but I did not dare miss dinner. I had to be there.
John had changed. He was free of me. He was free of his love and his dream of love for me that had driven him to drink so he could forget the bitter reality. He was free of his horror of me. He could touch my face with hands that did not tremble. He could turn my head to the light so that he could see with his cruel surgeon’s eyes the new tiny maze of lines in my skin. He had lost his love for me, his fear of me. To him now, I was, as Dr Rose had assured me, an ordinary mortal.
And John was confident with ordinary mortals. I was no longer the woman he loved above life itself. I was no longer the woman he feared because she seemed the embodiment of evil and death. Now I was an ordinary mortal with a body that would die, with a mind that could make mistakes.
From now until the day of my death John would be watching for that: for my lovely young body to walk towards death, and for my clever, obsessed mind to make mistakes. And I could do little to mislead him. He had loved me, and he had watched every shadow across my face in the days of our happiness. He knew me, as no other man, save one, had known me. And he had knowledge too. He had learned how to see the truth about people; he had dedicated his life and his wisdom to understanding what makes people as they are, the infections in their bodies, the illnesses in their hearts, the madness in their minds. To John now I was neither love-goddess nor devil; I was instead the most fascinating specimen he had ever studied at close quarters.
And also an enemy to be defeated.
It was not a role that I could face very easily.
I rang for Lucy and she exclaimed when she saw me.
‘I’ll ask for your dinner to be sent to your room. I’ll tell them you are unwell,’ she said, as she helped me up the stairs to brush my hair.
‘No,’ I said. I was so tired it was an effort even to talk. I could scarcely impose my will on my own maid. However could I manage Harry and Celia and John? ‘No,’ I said again. ‘I will go to dinner. But hurry, Lucy, or I will be late.’
They had not waited for me in the parlour but had gone in to the dining room. The footman opened the door for me as I rustled down the hall, my steps smooth again, my face pale and drawn, but a serene smile on my mouth. I stopped stock-still in the doorway and stared.
Celia was seated in my chair.
She sat where she should be, where she had a right to be.
In the chair of the Squire’s Lady at the foot of the great dining table where she could see the servants standing in readiness against the walls of the room, keep an eye on the blaze in the hearth, see that the plates of all her guests were tilled, and their glasses charged, and meet the eyes of her husband with a warm, loving smile.
Harry glanced up as I entered and his face was half apologetic. ‘I hope you don’t mind, Beatrice?’ he said to me in a low voice, as he rose to meet me at the door and conducted me to a seat opposite John, the seat that used to be Celia’s. ‘I understood from John that you would not be coming to dinner tonight and so Celia naturally took the foot of the table.’
I smiled neutrally and paused by the chair, looking at Celia, waiting for her to leap to her feet and to move to her place to make the chair of the Squire’s Lady free for me. She did not move. She simply smiled at me with her pansy-brown eyes wide and said, ‘I am sure you would rather sit opposite John, would you not, Beatrice? It is just like your courting days when your mama was alive.’
‘I would rather have Beatrice opposite me,’ John said to clinch the decision. ‘I like to have her where I can see her!’
They laughed at that, the fools. As if John had never drunk himself into a stupor at this very table. As if my place could be challenged with impunity. As if I should take a seat down the board and give way to Harry’s child-bride. I smiled, a sour smile, and sat where they all wished me to be. And I noted with an inward promise of vengeance the quick exchange of looks between the youngest footman and a new lad. They would be looking for work after next pay day.
That night belonged to Celia.
And I saw she had earned it. A bluish bruise shadowed her cheekbone but her eyes were serene. I guessed that Harry had struck her, in anger or passion, but once, and then dissolved into apology and reconciliation. She had no glimpse of his real needs and thought that blow the single lowest moment of her married life. She did not know there was a pattern of punishment forming around her. She thought that blow the first and last she would ever have from Harry. And she thought she could bear it. With the life of Wideacre hanging on a thread she thought she had to endure it.
So she took her place at the foot of the table.
Her beloved brother-in-law drank lemonade on her left, and her husband beamed down the table at her. She bloomed in the candlelight like a carnation in sunshine. Her worries and her sense of horror had been stilled firstly by John’s calm acceptance of her garbled, hysterical story, and then by promises Harry had made her while they lay in bed. John had told her that he had not known of the plan to change the entail but he was not surprised. And that the contract could certainly be changed. That, as Richard’s father, he could and would resign Richard’s rights to inherit jointly with Julia. That Julia could inherit with his blessing, and that they would find some way of compensating Richard or himself for the use of the MacAndrew fortune.
John’s calm acceptance of the news, his easy packing and friendly departure from Dr Rose, pulled Celia back from the entrance to the maze. She began to think she had been mistaken. She forgot the evidence of her senses: t
he smell of sin around the house, the prickle on her skin when Harry would look at me during dinner and ask if I could spare him some time later that evening for business. The sight of a strawberry-red bruise on Harry’s back. And her bewilderment when she woke late one night and put her hand out to where her husband should be and found the bed cold. All that she could forget when John smiled at her with steady honest eyes and said, ‘Trust me, Celia, I can make it right.’
She had come home on a cloud of relief in her shabby dress, and with a growing anxiety that Harry would be angry with her; that he would not overlook her scream in the silence of the dining room; that he would press her for an explanation of her horror. For Celia and John, and Harry and I, all had our little deceptions and secrets. And we were all jealously guarding them.
But Harry had been easy. They had both conspired to silence. His blow had shocked her but had been followed by a string of kisses. With her love and loyalty half transferred to John she paid her dues to her husband, just as I paid rent to my landlord. Harry thrust himself into her like a fat foot into a silk slipper, forgave her indiscretion and asked nothing more.
They cleared the soup plates and served the fish. John was eating with relish. ‘This is wonderful,’ he said, nodding to Celia. ‘Salmon! How I have missed Wideacre food.’
‘Poor fare at the doctor’s, was there?’ asked Harry, his attention caught. ‘I feared there might be. You’ll be glad to be home.’
John smiled a warm smile at Celia, whose signature and passionate insistence had brought him home, but his voice when he answered Harry was cold.
‘I am indeed,’ he said.
‘What was it like there?’ Harry asked, tactless as ever.
‘It was well run,’ said John. ‘It was well organized. It was a good place for treatment. It was lonely.’
Celia’s hand twitched. She had been about to stretch it out to him in an instinctive gesture of sympathy.
‘I hoped my letters would help,’ she said.
‘What letters?’ said John. ‘I received no letters.’
My fork in my hand, I hesitated, but then moved steadily on, ate the piece of salmon and reached for my wine glass.
‘Did you receive my letters?’ I asked.
John’s eyes met mine with a hard, ironic, insulting smile.
‘No, my dear,’ he said politely. ‘Did you write to me often?’
‘Every other day,’ I said blandly.
‘And I wrote every week,’ Celia put in. ‘What can have happened to them?’
John’s eyes were on my face, his eyes like pale stones.
‘I can’t imagine. Can you, Beatrice?’
‘No,’ I said shortly. ‘Perhaps Dr Rose thought you were not well enough to receive letters from home. He forbade visitors, you know.’
‘I guessed there must be some reason I heard from no one,’ said John. It was like swordplay, talking to him. It was like an unending duel. But I was weary.
I gave up. I was almost ready to give up on the rest of my plans too. I was certainly ready to let one evening go without my controlling every move.
‘Excuse me,’ I said to Celia. ‘I am tired. I will go to my room.’
I rose to my feet and the footman sprang to pull back my chair for me. Harry rose and gave me his arm to the west-wing door.
‘It wasn’t Celia in your chair, was it?’ he asked with his usual doltishness. But I was too tired even to fire an opening shot in a battle over a chair, when my husband had looked at me with trained eyes and saw Death in my face.
‘No, it wasn’t the chair,’ I said wearily. ‘She can sit in the damned thing all night if she chooses.’ I turned from him and slipped through the door of the west wing. Lucy undressed me and I dismissed her. Then I took the key from my dressing table and locked the door. I jammed the chair under the handle for good measure. Then I fell into bed and slept as if I wanted never to wake up.
18
But I had to wake up. There was always work to do, and no one but me who could do it. I had to wake, and dress, and go down to breakfast and sit opposite John, with Celia at the foot of the table, and Harry smiling, at the head, and exchange inanities. Then I had to go to my office and pull out the drawer of bills and spread them out before me and puzzle and worry at them until my head ached.
They were a morass of demands to me. I could not see how we had got there; I could not see how to get free. The first simple debts with Mr Llewellyn I had understood well enough. But then the bad weather had come and the sheep had done so badly. Then the cows had some infection and many calves were stillborn. So I had borrowed from the bankers on some of the new wheatfields. But then that had not raised enough, so I had mortgaged some of the marginal lands — the fields on the borders with Havering. But the repayments on those loans were heavy too. I was borrowing and borrowing against the wheat harvest. Praying that the wheat harvest would be such a golden glut that I need never borrow again. That the barns would overflow with wheat in such a surplus that I could sell and sell and sell, and all my debts would vanish — as if they had never been. I spread the bills before me like some complicated patchwork before an inadequate needlewoman, and I sighed with anxiety.
I carried this burden alone. I dared not tell Harry how the scheme for the entail had committed us to one debt after another. I mentioned casually that we had obtained credit on the basis of one field or one small farm, but I dared not tell Harry that I was borrowing to repay loans. And then I was borrowing to service loans. And now I was borrowing just to pay wages, to buy seedcorn, to stem the tide of bankruptcy that was lapping at my feet. I dared not tell Harry, and I felt so much alone. The scheme Ralph had planned for Harry: the erosion of his profits and the seeping away of his wealth, I had played on myself. In my one great gamble for total ownership of the land — to have it myself and to see my child in the Squire’s chair — I had gambled everything on the Wideacre harvest.
And if that failed: I failed.
And if I failed Harry and Celia and John and the children would go down in one resounding crash of debt. We would disappear like all bankrupts did. If we could salvage anything we might buy a little farmhouse in Devon or Cornwall, or perhaps in John’s beastly Scotland. Anywhere where land was cheap and food prices low. And I would never wake to see the hills of Wideacre again.
No one would call me ‘Miss Beatrice’ with love in their voice. No one would call Harry ‘Squire’, as if it were his name. We would be newcomers. And no one would know our family went back to Norman times, and that we had farmed and guarded the same land for hundreds of years. We would be nobodies.
I shuddered, and pulled the bills towards me again. The ones from Chichester tradesmen I let run. Only the purveyors of the household did I pay regularly. I did not want Celia to learn from the cook or from a housemaid that the merchants were refusing to deliver until their bills were met. So that made a pile of bills that had to be paid at once. Beside them were a smaller pile of creditors’ notes that had to be met this month. Mr Llewellyn, the bank, a London money-lender, and our solicitor, who had advanced a few hundred pounds when I badly needed cash to buy some seedcorn. They had to be paid at once too. With them also was a note from the corn merchant, to whom we owed a few hundred guineas for oats, which we did not grow, for the horses, and a note from the hay merchant. Now we grew fewer meadows I was having to buy in hay, and it was costlier than I had believed possible. It would make sense to reduce the Wideacre stables, which were filled with underworked horses. But I knew that the first Wideacre horse on the market would be seen as a sign that I was selling up, and then the creditors would rush to be first with their notes. They would foreclose on me, in a panic not to be left with a dishonoured note-of-hand, and in their rush for little sums of money, Wideacre would bleed to death from a hundred minor stabs.
Each small, irresistible demand added to a total I could not meet. I had no money. I felt the creditors gather around me like a pack of nipping wolves and I knew that I must free myself of
them, and free Wideacre of them, but I could not see how.
I shuffled the final pile of papers into a heap of debtors who could wait, who would wait. The wine merchants, who knew we had their bill’s worth of wine in the cellars, and who would be circumspect in their demands. The farrier, who had worked on the estate since coming out of his apprenticeship. The carters, who had been paid on the nail for years and years. The cobbler, the gate-mender, the harness-maker — the little men who could beg that their bills be paid but who could do nothing against me. It was a large heap of bills, but they were all for small sums. My failure to pay might ruin the little tradesmen, but they could not ruin me. They could wait. They would have to wait.
It made three tidy piles. It got me no further forward. I folded them up and stuffed them back into the drawer. I did not have to see them to remember that I was drowning in debt. I remembered it every waking moment, and my nights were full of dreams of strange men with town accents saying to me, ‘Sign here. Sign here,’ in a long dream of horror and fear of the loss of Wideacre. I slammed the desk drawer shut with sudden impatience. There was no one to help me, and I was alone with this burden. All I could hope for was the old magic winds of Wideacre blowing my way again and a warm wind blowing out of a hot harvest sun to make the land golden, and set me free.
I rang the bell and ordered that Richard be dressed for a drive and brought to me in the stable yard. I could not stay indoors. The land no longer loved me, I could not take Richard at a whirling trot down the drive and show him the trees with the confidence of my papa on the land he owned outright, but I could still go out. It was still my land. I might still escape the intractable, unanswerable sheets of bills by driving out under a clear blue sky with my son.