Wideacre (Wideacre Trilogy) Read online

  If there had been more young people in the neighbourhood we would have spent far less time together. Or if Harry had known more about the land he would not have needed my company daily. If we had not been in heavy mourning, Harry would probably have spent the previous winter in London for the season, and even I might have been taken to town for a few days. But as things were, we were very much on our own. My returning spirits showed themselves in my better health and I became once more buoyantly fit, restrained only by Mama who tried to keep me eternally stitching embroidery by her side in the pale parlour. There was no Papa to come banging in from the stables and rescue me from the tyranny of conventional behaviour now, but I could generally rely on Harry to need my advice for some work on the land.

  The land missed Papa. Harry was inexperienced and slow to learn how to control the tenants who poached and thieved outrageously. Nor could he organize the villagers’ sowing and weeding of our crops. But beside his ignorance my status grew, and it was very pleasant to be able to order this thing or that thing to be done without confirming an order with the Master. I kept thinking how good it would have been if I could have had the land wholly to myself, but it was only ever a passing thought. It was also good to drive down the lanes to the fields with Harry riding alongside, and to look up in the evening and find his eyes smiling upon me.

  He was no longer the schoolboy home early. He was a man in the first broadening and strengthening of his youth. As for me, every day made me a shade more golden, my eyes brighter hazel, my hair a tinge redder from the sun. Every day as I bloomed in the warmth of that especially fine spring, I felt a greater longing for a lover. I pressed my lips together remembering Ralph’s rough biting kisses, and my body warmed and tingled under the black silk of my mourning dress when I remembered his intimate, shameless probing. Harry once caught my eye in one of these erotic daydreams as we sat alone beside the library fire one evening, supposedly doing accounts. I blushed at once to the roots of my hair.

  Harry, oddly, said nothing, but he looked at me as if he were somehow bemused and blushed too.

  We were so delightfully strange to each other. My pleasure with Ralph had been in confirming the person I was, the things that were important. With Ralph I hardly needed to speak. We both knew if the day would be fair or if it would rain. We both knew that the villagers would be planting the fields on the bottom slopes of the downs so we would have to hide in the woods that day. We both knew that passion and the land are the most important things in anyone’s life, and that any other interests are secondary and slight.

  But Harry knew none of these things, and while I could not help despising his ignorance, I felt also a great curiosity about the things he did know, and the things he did care for. Harry was a great intriguing mystery to me, and as the warm spring days became reassuringly hot summer ones I found my interest in him growing and growing while the corn turned silver-green. The only distraction from this growing affection and intimacy was Mama, who would intermittently insist that I behave as a normal young lady and not as a farm manager. But even she could not ignore Harry’s real need for me on the land. One day when she insisted that I stay at home to receive a call from the ladies from Havering Hall, we lost something like fifty pounds on one day’s work! Harry could not control the reaping gang and their families following behind to glean robbed us of one stook in every three.

  The ladies — Lady Havering and little mousey Celia — had chatted politely with Mama as I watched the sun stream through the window, and knew in impotent rage that Harry would not be watching the reapers. When he came in for afternoon tea my fears were confirmed. He reported with great pride that they had finished the Manor Farm fields already. Properly cut they should not have been finished until the following day. Harry sat beside Celia Havering and nibbled seed cake like a sun-kissed cupid without a care in the world, while I could hardly sit still for anxiety.

  He chatted away like a caged songbird to Celia, who actually spoke back in a voice a fraction clearer than her habitual whisper. Half an hour he spent talking of the lovely weather and the latest novel, before a hard look from me reminded him that he had workers in the field who were, I knew, taking an equally lengthy break. He took himself off with much flowery bowing and kissing of hands and seemed almost sorry to leave. The mysterious tastes of my beautiful brother were not always a delight.

  ‘You seem very anxious about the harvest, Miss Lacey,’ said Celia softly. I looked sharply at her to see if she was being impertinent, but the soft brown eyes were guileless and her face pale and quite without a spark of malice.

  ‘It is the first harvest Harry has had to supervise,’ I replied absent-mindedly. ‘He had been away from home and does not know our country ways. I am afraid I am needed out in the fields.’

  ‘If you would like —’ she paused delicately. ‘If you would enjoy a drive —’ She broke off again. ‘We came in Mama’s carriage and you and I could … I am sure …’ Her flutter of words came to a total standstill but her meaning finally penetrated my ears. I had been watching some rain clouds on the horizon that would have ruined everything if they had come to anything, but they seemed to be breaking up.

  ‘A drive?’ I said. ‘I should love it!’

  ‘Mama’s carriage’ turned out to be a large old-fashioned open landau, and after much fussing with parasols to protect our delicate complexions, we drove towards the fields. Celia tilted her sunshade precisely at the sky to cast a shadow over her face. She was milk compared with honey sitting beside me. Her skin looked as if she had been reared in a cellar she was so beautifully pale, while I was a clear honey colour on face, hands and throat, and had even a disastrous dusting of freckles on my nose. Even in my dark mourning clothes I was bright beside Celia, with flushed cheeks from the warmth of my heavy dress in the sun. She was pale and cool, her shy brown eyes scarcely daring to look over the hedges as we drove. She had a little trembly face and a quivering rosebud mouth. She seemed so young beside me. Five years older but such a sweet baby.

  She showed no signs of anxiety at the plight of being ill-loved and unmarried at twenty-one. Her pale prettiness had not taken in London during her one cut-price season. Lord Havering had opened Havering House for her coming-out ball and had stood her the price of a court gown. But all of Lady Havering’s fortune at marriage had been squandered on betting and gambling, and there was little to spare for her daughter. Celia’s own substantial fortune, secure from her step-papa by sensible settlements, had guaranteed her one or two proposals. But Celia had demurred, and Lady Havering had not insisted, and she had come home to her restricted and hard-working life at the Hall with little idea that life for a young girl could include pleasure, or liveliness or joy.

  She had little enough joy in her life. When her mama accepted Lord Havering and moved into the Hall little Celia went too, more like an extra bandbox than a person whose wants might be consulted. Aged eleven, she had been put in charge of the jolly, noisy Havering children for day after long crowded day, while Lord Havering recouped his gambling debts by dismissing housekeeper, governess and nurse, leaving his new wife and stepdaughter to share the work of running house and nursery between them.

  The nobly born, ill-bred Havering children cared not a rap for their quiet-voiced, subdued new sister, and Celia, in silent mourning for her papa and their quiet, invalid’s routine, lived a life of loneliness and solitude in the very heart of one of the biggest houses in the county.

  Enough in that situation to make any girl nervous. Celia was fortunate only in that her dowry, which was a handsome parcel of land adjoining ours, a good half-dozen farms tied up by her mother’s lawyers, was safe from her spendthrift stepfather as part of the marriage settlement. I knew her from childhood when our mamas would call on each other and I would be taken to the nursery to romp with the small Haverings and attend Celia’s solemn dolls’ tea parties. But when I grew old enough to ride with my father, I saw little of her. We sometimes took our hounds over to Havering Hall, and I w