Wideacre Read online

  Of course it would end. If he went on down this road he would make a serious proposal of marriage and have to be seriously refused, and then this innocent, pleasurable time would be over. But while it lasted, while each day brought me a visit from him, or a book he had promised, the loan of his beloved Sea Fern for a treat, or a posy of flowers, I found I woke each morning with a smile and the recollection of some phrase he used, a mental picture of him. And I started my day in a small ripple of pleasure.

  I had never before been wooed by a man of my own class and so I was new to the trivial delights of a Quality courtship. The way he touched my fingers when I passed him a teacup, or the way his eyes would meet mine in a room full of people. I liked knowing that the second I came into a room, perhaps at one of the assemblies at Chichester, he would see me and make his way to me. Or if he were in a set preparing to dance I smiled at the secret knowledge that wherever I was in the room, whether before his eyes or behind him, he was acutely aware of my presence. Then, when tea was served, he would be at my chair with a little plateful of my favourite cakes and the eyes of the whole room on us both.

  I was so entranced by this courtship of tenths of inches, which progressed invisibly, slowly, that I relaxed my awareness of Celia and Harry. In this new, trivial pleasure I had forgotten my old agonized desire for Harry. In the certainty of my mastery of the land — now accepted by everyone — I no longer needed to dominate the Master of Wideacre himself. Harry could be my partner, my colleague. If I was secure on the land I did not need him as a lover.

  Of all people it was Celia, who had done so much to create this oasis of peace, who spoiled it. Of all people who suffered from it, it was she who lost as much as anyone. Of course, being Celia, the mistake came from love and tenderness. But if she had stayed silent that once, stayed silent for that one summer, it could all, even then, have been a different story.

  But not Celia. Her mama had tackled her about the separate bedrooms she and Harry occupied. My mama had mentioned the need of a son to follow the triumph of the angel baby. Her own honest conscience reminded her nightly at her prayer time that she had not done her duty by Harry since the baby he loved was not their child. But most importantly for Celia, for Harry and, of course, for me, was that she was learning to love him.

  Harry, viewed every day from breakfast to dinner, was neither tyrant nor monster. She heard him being reproved by bis mama for being late for lunch; she heard his sister mock his newfangled ideas on farming; she saw him accept reproof and teasing with unshakeable sunny good nature. The arrangement of their married life he accepted with unswerving cheerfulness. He never unlocked the adjoining door between their two bedrooms, although she knew he had the key. He always entered her room from the corridor and he always knocked first. When he greeted her in the morning he kissed her hand with respect, and when he bade her goodnight he kissed her forehead with tenderness. We had been home three months and he had never said a cross word in her hearing, or showed one spark of malice or one edge of spite. In growing amazement at her luck, Celia discovered she was married to one of the sweetest men ever born. Of course she loved him.

  All of this I should have foreseen as clearly as I saw Harry’s smile of tenderness when he watched her walking the baby. All of it I should have heard in the way her voice lilted when she spoke of him. But I saw and heard nothing until the late September day when Celia met me in the rose garden. She had a pair of ineffectual but elegant silver scissors in her hand and a basket, and a straw bonnet tied to shade her face. I was walking back from the paddock in my riding habit after checking one of the hunters, who I thought might have sprained a tendon. Celia delayed me on my way to the stable to order a poultice, to offer me a buttonhole of late-flowering white roses and I sniffed their creamy smell, smiling my thanks.

  ‘Don’t they smell like butter?’ I said dreamily, with the full fat flowers pressed to my face. ‘Butter and cream and a hint of something sharp like lime.’

  ‘You make it sound like one of Cook’s puddings,’ said Celia, smiling.

  ‘Quite right, too,’ I said. ‘She certainly should make a pudding of roses. How lovely to eat roses. They smell as if they would be melting and sweet.’

  Celia, amused at my sensual relish, sniffed a little bud to please me, and snipped another bloom and put in in her basket.

  ‘How is Saladin’s leg?’ she asked, noticing my dirty hands and the halter.

  ‘I’m on my way to order a poultice,’ I said.

  Some movement in the first floor of the Hall caught my attention and I stared at the house. Someone was going down the corridor with a great pile of clothing and bedding, followed by someone else with another pile, and someone behind with yet another. As I watched, they passed one window and then another in an extraordinary procession.

  I could have asked Celia, but it did not occur to me that she might know what was going on inside the house when I did not. So I said, ‘Excuse me,’ and went with quick steps to the open front door and up the stairs to the corridor. The place was in utter confusion with bedding everywhere, a wardrobe blocking the door of Celia’s bedroom and a great heap of Harry’s clothes on Mama’s bed.

  ‘What is this?’ I asked the chambermaid. She was half buried under a heap of Celia’s starched petticoats and dipped a curtsy to me like a linen basket falling.

  ‘Moving Lady Lacey’s things, Miss Beatrice,’ she said. ‘She is moving into your mama’s room with Master Harry.’

  ‘What?’ I said incredulously. The pile of linen bobbed again as the girl curtsied and repeated what she had said. I had heard her the first time. It was not my ears that had failed to hear, but my mind that could not believe what I was hearing. Celia and Harry moving into Mama’s bedroom together could mean only one thing; that Celia had overcome her fear of Harry’s sexuality — and that was not possible.

  I spun on my heel and clattered down the stairs again and out into the sunlight. Celia was still snipping roses like an ignorant cupid in the Garden of Eden.

  ‘The servants are moving your things into the master bedroom to share with Harry,’ I said baldly, and waited for her start of shock. But the face she turned to me under the broad brim of her sunhat was utterly untroubled. She even had the hint of a smile playing around her lips.

  ‘Yes,’ she said calmly. ‘I asked them to do it this afternoon while you were all out. I thought it would cause you all less inconvenience.’

  ‘You ordered it!’ I exclaimed incredulously, and then I bit the inside of my lip and stopped.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Celia calmly and then her eyes flew to my face. ‘I thought it would be all right,’ she said anxiously. ‘Your mama has no objection and I did not think I should have confirmed it with you. I hope you are not offended, Beatrice? I did not think you would be affected in any way at all.’

  Words of complaint died in my mind as I recognized that Celia would think precisely that — that I could hardly be affected if she chose to sleep in the same bed as her husband. But that bed was the great master bed of Wideacre where Squires and their Ladies had lain for years. In that bed Celia became the first lady on the land, and that affected me. In that bed, in Harry’s arms, she became a true wife to him and the pleasure of his nights. And that affected me. As his Lady, as his lover, she made me redundant. And the spectre of a suitor riding towards us to take me away was too real for me to risk losing Harry’s need for my company.

  ‘Why are you doing this, Celia?’ I said urgently. ‘You do not have to do this, you know. Just because my mama, or your mama, are anxious for another grandchild, there is no need to do this. You have years ahead of you, you do not have to rush into Harry’s bed this summer. You are the mistress of your own house now. You do not have to do any duty with is repugnant to you, to which you object.’

  Celia’s cheeks flushed as pink as the rose in her hand. And she was definitely smiling, though her eyes were turned down.

  ‘But I do not object, Beatrice,’ she whispered very low. ‘I am