Wideacre

When the sun started sinking, late in the afternoon, and the sky was like warm mother-of-pearl with fleecy clouds of pink and the pearly greyness of twilight, I said, ‘All right. You can stop now.’

  I waited while they cleaned their sickles and stacked them tidily on the wagon. Then they put on their jackets and the women threw shawls over their shoulders for the weary walk home. I watched them file out of the field, all silent, as if they were too tired and too sad for speech. A newly wed couple walked as a pair, with arms around each other, but she rested her head on his shoulder in a gesture that seemed more like sympathy than passion. The older couples walked side by side with a yawning gulf between them that comes from poverty miserably shared that has no ending. A lifetime filled with regrets. I checked that they had fastened the fence carefully behind them, and watched them down the track towards Acre. I kept my horse still until they were out of sight around the corner and I was alone in the glooming wood. Then I set Tobermory to ford the Fenny and cantered along the track towards the drive and my home.

  My mind was calm. A good day’s work and a yield better than I had a right to expect. If my luck held and I could be the goddess of good weather just once more, just one more year, the gamble would have paid off.

  If I could pay off the most pressing creditors entirely and make prompt repayments on other debts, I could restore faith in Wideacre among the money-men. Once they believed that I could service my debts they would plot against me no more. The spreading of a little gold and the harvest of my fertile fields would serve as good security. These men were foxes — they fed off dying animals; they killed only weak prey. They surrounded Wideacre when they thought it would fail. At the first sight of success I would be offered generous credit again.

  The balance between utter ruin and total triumph now rested on whether I could get the wheat in with a surly, rebellious, undernourished workforce, before the good weather broke and spoiled the standing crop. If I did, I should draw a bounty payment from Mr Gilby and Wideacre would be secure for at least a year. The wind seemed set fair, the sky a faithful promise of clear weather on the morrow. The chances were good.

  My heart was not light, for my heart was a shard of heavy glass these days, and I despaired of ever again feeling it lift with joy at simply being alive. But my mind at least was calm. And my courage was as dauntless as ever.

  So I clicked to Tobermory and he lengthened his fast stride while the shadows and the ghosts slid past us and we saw the lights of the house through the dark pillars of tree trunks of the wood.

  ‘Gracious, how late you are,’ said Celia, as I clattered into the stable yard. ‘Had you forgotten we were going to supper with Mama?’

  ‘Forgive me, Celia,’ I said, sliding from the saddle and tossing the reins to a stable lad. ‘I had forgotten altogether.’

  ‘I can make your excuses if you wish. But won’t you be dull all alone at home?’ she asked. The carriage stood waiting for them; Celia scanned my face in the twilight, exquisite in her evening gown, Harry and John immaculate behind her.

  ‘Not at all,’ I said, smiling at the three of them without affection. ‘How very grand you are! It would take me hours to achieve such a pinnacle of elegance. Leave me in my dirt, and tell me all about it tomorrow.’

  ‘We could send the carriage back for you,’ Celia suggested, as she mounted the steps and spread her grey silk dress carefully over the seat.

  ‘No, no,’ I said. ‘I do indeed assure you. I am tired and longing for my bed. And I must be up early to be in the field with the reapers tomorrow.’

  Celia nodded, and Harry bent and kissed my cheek as he passed me.

  ‘Thank you, my dear,’ he said. ‘Squire of Wideacre!’

  I smiled at the jest, but my eyes were wary when John took my hand. ‘I’ll bid you good day and goodnight too then,’ he said civilly. His sharp eyes scanned my face. ‘You look tired, Beatrice.’

  ‘I am bone-weary!’ I laughed. ‘But a hot bath will set me to rights. And a huge supper. I would eat Lady Havering out of house and home if I came.’

  John’s smile reached his eyes no more than my mirthless performance warmed me.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It is indeed a hungry harvest this year.’

  He dropped my hand and got into the carriage with Harry and Celia, and the odd little threesome rolled off. I saw nothing more of them that night. After I had scalded the aches out of me with one of my boiling baths, I ate a supper big enough for two, and rolled into my bed like a hedgehog ready for winter. Before I slept the thought of the hidden tears in young Rogers’s eyes gave me a strange sharp pain, somewhere beneath my ribs. But then it passed. Nothing touched me much these hot, sad days.

  I saw little of Harry, Celia or John the next day, or the next. The August social round was starting, and that meant picnics and fêtes and fairs in Chichester, and midsummer revels and late balls. For me it meant the wheat harvest, and that alone. Indeed the only time I noticed the gay life Celia was leading was when she wanted the coach horses when I had ordered them to be harnessed to an extra wagon. I refused to allow her the horses and Celia, the sweetest summer merrymaker that ever was, renounced the picnic without a frown, and made a summer ball for the children instead. She laughed and danced in the little summerhouse in the rose garden while John strummed a guitar, as if she cared not whether she was at a ball or alone with the children. I could hear her laughter, and her light step on the wooden floorboards while I made up the accounts and readied the wages at my desk. Through the glass I could see my son, and Julia, and Celia, hand-clasped, ringing-a-roses all afternoon.

  I felt no regret at being behind the window while they were out in the sunshine and little Richard’s knees grew browner and his face bloomed with speckles of freckles like a lapwing’s egg. I did not mind seeing them through glass. My work this summer would mean I need never worry again when I opened the drawer that held the bills. Under one heavy glass paperweight were the terrifying quarterly demands from the money-lenders, the mortgage-holders, and the creditors. But under another was a sheet of paper with a list of yields from the wheatfields. And every sun-filled long day, while the workers sweated and swung the sickles, and I sat motionless on Tobermory in the shadow of a hedge if I could find one, Wideacre was growing and ripening its way into breaking even. If the weather held, if the uncut fields yielded equally well, we might even make a tiny profit.

  This summer I might be living the life of a despised bailiff, but next summer I should be as blithe and as beloved as Celia. For one season, for one season only, I had to be either indoors counting the gains, or out on the fields watching for treachery. Next summer I would be the prettiest girl in the county again. Next year I should teach Richard to dance with me, not with Celia. Next year I should not feel this sluggish coldness. I should feel joy again, I would be as happy, as easy, as uncomplicated as Celia.

  There was a tap on the door and it was Harry, dressed to cut the corn. Instead of his dark silken breeches and waistcoat he had trews of homespun. But he had kept his fine linen shirt, and his polished leather riding boots. He looked like a painter’s idea of a farm labourer. He was a cruel travesty of the young golden god who had brought in the harvest only three years ago. His face then had been round and golden, now it was plump and flushed with the heat. His features then were as clear as a Greek statue and now even his profile was blurred, with fleshy cheeks and a double chin. And Harry’s lithe young god-like body was now that of an ordinary man, a little older-looking than his years: over-indulged, overweight, under-exercised.

  He had lost his early promise of intelligence, too. The Harry who had gone to school had been a scholar with a keen love of books and learning for its own sake. He came home with the sharp wits knocked out of him by the school’s corruption and by the discovery of his own perverse taste for pleasure. All he read these days were books on farm machinery, the odd fashionable novel, and occasionally stories about punishment and pain, which he kept in a secret box in the room at the top of the s
tairs.

  He was like our mama. He would always avoid an unpleasant scene or an unpalatable truth; he complained they gave him a pain in his chest. He was a great one for the convenient lie, or for accepting another’s untruths rather than braving reality.

  But he was also like me. We were both obsessed children. But when I learned that the most important thing in my life was the land, this Wideacre, Harry learned that the most important thing in his life was his pleasure, his indulgences. So he grew fat on rich food and sweet pastries, and red-faced on too much port. And he grew lazy and slobbish about his body for he sought to be fit for punishment — not fit for clear, free, equal love.

  Now he dressed like a pauper prince in the travelling theatre and planned to work alongside ill-paid hungry men. I thought of our lads in the fields with enough material for perhaps one decent shirt among them, and sighed at Harry’s bright foolish face.

  ‘I thought I’d ride down on the wagon and do some reaping,’ he said boyishly. ‘They’re working on Oak Tree Meadow, aren’t they?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘That was two days ago. They’re in Three Gate Meadow now. I’ll be down later. You can keep an eye open for gleaning if you’re there. I told you that I’ve warned them I’ll not stand for it.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Harry. ‘I shall probably stay till dinner. You might send one of the stable lads down with something for me to eat if I’m not back by three.’

  It was in my mind to caution Harry again, but I let it pass. If he chose to play gentleman farmer then it could do little more harm. The bitterness between us and the village could hardly grow more sour. Besides, I reckoned I had taken all the blame for the changes on the land. If Harry stole their hearts and became once more the demigod of the harvest, he might make them less surly. A rather plump deity, this year, and less bronzed and muscled. But if they liked having him in the line, it might make them go a little faster.

  Harry took himself off singing what he fondly thought was a country song with many a ‘Hey-nonny-no’, a sound I have never heard any countryman make, even in his cups. Then the wagon went creaking down the drive with Harry sitting up beside the wagoner and waving goodbye to Celia and the children.

  He was back within the hour, his face grim as he drove the wagon past my window. I pushed the letter I was writing aside, and waited. The west-wing stable door banged and I felt the gust of hot wind as Harry came into my room without a knock.

  ‘They insulted me!’ he said. His lower lip was trembling with rage and distress. ‘They would not speak to me. They would not sing the reaping songs we used to sing. They did not give me a place on the line of reapers. They squeezed me up against the hedge. The girls didn’t smile at me. And when I said, “Come on, lads, let’s sing,” one said, “We’re not paid enough to breathe, Squire, let alone sing. You get that flint-eyed sister of yours to pay us the proper rate, the fair rate, and we’ll sing like bloody blackbirds to please you. But while we hunger, you can sing to yourself!” ‘

  ‘Who?’ I said swiftly. ‘I’ll have him off the estate at once.’

  ‘I don’t know!’ said Harry petulantly. ‘I don’t know all their names like you do, Beatrice. I can’t even tell them apart. They all look the same to me. They don’t seem to have proper features. It was one of the older men, but I don’t know who. The others would know.’

  ‘And it’s likely they’d tell me!’ I scoffed. ‘Well, what did you do?’

  ‘I came home!’ said Harry indignantly. ‘What else could I do? If I can’t harvest my own fields I might as well come home for dinner. You’d think they’d be glad to have a Squire to work alongside them. If it’s the old ways they want, what could be more traditional than that?’

  ‘Odd indeed,’ I said drily. ‘How far had they got?’

  ‘Oh, I hardly noticed, I was so upset,’ said Harry uselessly. ‘Really, Beatrice, it is too bad. I can tell you, I shan’t go into the fields again this season. You’ll have to do the supervision, and if it’s too much for you it must be John Brien. It really is quite wrong I should be exposed to such insult.’

  ‘Very well,’ I said wearily. ‘Now go and have some coffee and biscuits, Harry. You’ll feel better after that.’

  ‘But why should they speak to me so?’ he demanded, his face working with distress. ‘Don’t they realize that this is the way the world has to be now?’

  ‘They certainly don’t seem to.’

  ‘I get a pain in my chest when I am upset,’ Harry said, the sickly-child whine in his voice again. ‘I should not be exposed to a scene like that. It is time they realized we are doing our best. When I think of all the work we provide for them. And the charity too! There’s Celia spending pounds every week on soups and bread for the poor. And this harvest dinner too! A pretty penny that will cost. And no thanks for it, you know, Beatrice!’

  ‘Harvest dinner?’ I said sharply. ‘There is to be no harvest dinner this year.’

  Harry looked blankly at me. ‘Celia is organizing one,’ he said. ‘You asked her to make the arrangements, she said. It’s to be at the mill, once the last field is cut, and they bring the last wagon in, as usual.’

  ‘No!’ I said aghast. ‘Harry, it cannot be! Bill Green himself faces ruin and he will hardly welcome merrymakers at the mill. It will be the Christmas party over again. We cannot tell what will happen! Besides, it is hardly bringing the harvest home when we are merely storing it, and threshing it at the mill and Mr Gilby’s wagons will come and take every grain of it out of the county!’

  ‘Well, it’s all arranged, Beatrice,’ said Harry awkwardly. ‘And I told all the people about it today, before they would not let me reap. I suppose it would only make everything worse if we said now that it would not take place.’

  I scowled dreadfully. ‘I never meant Celia to take me seriously,’ I said. ‘It will have to be cancelled.’

  ‘As you wish,’ said Harry uncertainly. ‘But everything is prepared, and everyone seems to be planning to come. It might be easier to go through with it than to cancel outright.’

  I nibbled the tip of my finger, lost in thought.

  ‘Oh, very well,’ I said. ‘If it is all planned, and Miller Green has not refused, I suppose it should go ahead. But it is odd, midway between the old ways and the new like this.’

  ‘Perhaps when they have brought the corn in they will all cheer up and have a good party,’ Harry said witlessly. ‘Perhaps it will be like that first wonderful summer.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ I said. ‘One never gets the same summer twice. And Wideacre is all different these days. And you are different. And I would not know myself.’ I paused, my voice had sounded so sad. ‘Anyway,’ I said briskly, ‘if it is all planned it will have to go ahead. And we can leave early if there is any unpleasantness.’

  Harry went off to change and take coffee, a little soothed, and was able to pour out the tale of his wrongs to Celia’s sympathetic ear. But when she, prompted by a hard look from John, suggested that the men would not have been so rude if they had not been in despair, Harry was quickly up on his high ropes.

  ‘Now, Celia,’ he said, wagging a plump finger at her. ‘You must let Beatrice and me run the land as we see fit. If they have to tighten their belts in Acre for a few days that will do no great harm. It will give them an appetite for your harvest supper! Beatrice and I know best on this.’

  Celia opened her mouth to reply, but then thought better of it. She shot a swift glance at John from under her eyelids. They needed nothing more. They understood each other so well. John now took up the debate, knowing, without being told, that Celia could not challenge Harry further than she had done.

  ‘Celia is right, you know, Harry,’ said John. He was hiding his distaste of Harry in his anxiety to get Harry to see reason about the land.

  ‘Celia and I have spent much time in Acre recently,’ said John. He spoke with his old incisive authority. ‘We have set in hand a system so the food we give is distributed first to the families with ill children,
then to the old people, and then to the other families in need. But it is evident to me that we can do nothing effective while there is no long-term solution to the problem of poverty on Wideacre.’

  ‘No one denies that!’ said Harry. ‘It is a hard time for all of us who are dependent on the land.’ He took another cake and bit into it with resolution.

  ‘It’s not just “hard” in Acre,’ John said patiently. ‘There will soon be many deaths through starvation if nothing is done. The supply of food we have provided can keep some families going, but there are more of them in need than we can satisfy.’

  ‘That is because they insist on having large families,’ I said coldly. ‘They bear children with no idea how to support them. All you two have been doing is encouraging them to live in a fool’s paradise. While you give them free food they will never understand the way of the real world.’

  John shot me a hard look. ‘This real world of yours, Beatrice,’ he said in a tone of detached interest, ‘this is the world where you can employ every man in Acre for hundreds of years, and then suddenly refuse to keep any, save two skilled workers, on the wage books?’

  I said nothing.

  ‘This real world is one where there is no way of preventing the conception of children and yet the bastards of Quality wear silk and can look forward to inheritances? Yet the legitimate children of the poor go hungry?’

  I knew he was thinking of two bastards, two incestuous bastards, in this house. I said nothing again, but I shot a murderous glance at Harry who was licking his fingers and looking at John.

  ‘No wonder they do not understand the real world,’ said John, ‘for this real world of yours baffles me. I have never been anywhere like Wideacre and I have travelled all around England and Scotland. In less than a year this estate has gone from being one of the most profitable, happiest places in the county. Now it is in the hands of the creditors, and the poor are starving. Which picture is real? The reality you inherited, or this horror you have made?’