Wideacre twt-1 Read online

  But although Harry had lost his magic, the land had not. Wideacre that autumn glowed like a scarlet leaf of rowan. The summer heat lingered late and even in October John could take me driving with only a shawl around my shoulders. But when the frosts came in November I was glad, for the hard ground held the scent and in the hoar frost I could see the prints of foxes’ paws and the hunting season was open. I was back in the saddle for the first time after two long years of mourning and absence, and our hounds were mastered once more by Wideacre’s Squire, as they should be. Every day Harry and I checked them and talked of nothing but foxes and hunters and runs. It was Harry’s first season and he threatened to botch it badly. But his interest in breeding good animals meant that we had the fastest hounds in the county — you had to follow them at a gallop and jump whatever lay in your path — no time for niceties! So there would always be riders who would want to come out with us and lend a hand with the hounds. Shaw was a good keeper who knew the ways of foxes, and I was always at Harry’s side.

  12

  Between Shaw the keeper, and me, Harry made a reasonable fist of it, and our first day out in October was a long glorious run that started on the common and then chased in a great sweep over the fields back to the common and a kill on the edge of the park where the Wideacre woods are encroaching on the heather and bracken. He was an old dog fox that one. I swear I hunted him one season before with Papa. He got away then from the slower old-fashioned pack but now he was three years older and Papa was dead, and even unskilled Harry, who totally lacks a hunter’s instinct, could see that the wily animal was heading for a stream to lose the scent in the water.

  ‘Send them in, Harry!’ I yelled above the clamour of the pack and the thunder of hoofs, the wind whipping my words away.

  The horn blasted, ‘Too-roo! Too-roo!’ and the horses leaped forward; the hounds spread out with their final full-cry killing run, and the old fox strained to a final burst of speed. He nearly made it too, but they had him at the side of the stream, and Harry waded thigh-deep among squealing, hungry hounds to cut the brush and pass it, still bloody, up to me. I nodded my thanks, and took the prize in my gloved hand. I have had the first kill of the season every hunt since I was eleven when Papa smeared my face with the disgusting, rank, sticky blood.

  Mama had gasped then, when she saw me, as stained as any savage, and she had neared open complaint when Papa sternly told her that I was not to be washed.

  ‘The child smells of fox,’ Mama said. Her voice, tremulous with anger, had dropped to a whisper.

  ‘It is the tradition,’ Papa said firmly. That was enough for him and it was enough for me too. God knows I was not a squeamish little doll, but when he had rubbed the blood on my face from the base of the hot tail I had swayed in my saddle with sickly faintness. But I did not fall. And I did not wash.

  I solved the problem in a way that, looking back, seems typical of my desire to please my papa and yet be true to myself. Papa had told me that the tradition was that the beastly blood stayed on until it wore off. I thought for some hours while the blood congealed into crusty scabs on my young skin, then I made my way down to the old sandstone drinking trough by the stables. I sat beside it, put my face to it, and rubbed the delicate skin of my cheeks and forehead against its rough sides until I was sore and scraped, but clean.

  ‘Did you wash, Beatrice?’ Papa asked me sternly when we met at breakfast the following day.

  ‘No, Papa, I wore it away,’ I said. ‘May I start to wash again now?’

  His great lovable, loving shout of laughter rattled the sash windows and the silver coffee pots.

  ‘Wore it away, did you, my little darling!’ he roared, and then subsided into chuckles, wiping his eyes on his napkin. ‘Yes, yes, you may wash now. You have satisfied tradition; and that’s good. And you have got your own way too, and that’s comical.’

  I seemed years away from this scene and from my papa’s love as I sat in the hard winter sunshine and accepted the brush from Harry. The smell of the warm freshly killed fox had brought it all flooding back to me, but it was all long gone. Long lost, and long past.

  ‘A good run, Miss Lacey,’ said one of the Havering boys, Celia’s step-brother George.

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ I said smiling.

  ‘And how you do ride!’ he said with worship in his eyes. ‘I can’t keep up with you! When you took that last hedge I had to shut my eyes. I was certain that low bough would sweep you off!’

  I laughed at the recollection.

  ‘I had my eyes shut too!’ I confessed. ‘I get so excited I forget to take care. I put Tobermory at the hedge without even seeing the tree. When I realized there was no room for us between the hedge and the low branches it was too late to do anything about it except keep my head down and hope we squeezed through. We just did, though I felt the twigs scratch my back.’

  ‘I hear you have been racing too,’ said George, nodding to John MacAndrew, who rode up to us. The sun seemed to shine with sudden new warmth, and we smiled into each other’s eyes.

  ‘Just a friendly race,’ I said. ‘But Dr MacAndrew rides for high stakes.’

  George’s bright eyes flicked from one to another of us.

  ‘I hope you did not lose Tobermory!’ he said.

  ‘No,’ I said, with a private smile to John MacAndrew. ‘But I’ll not be betting blind against the doctor again.’

  George laughed, and at last took himself off to compliment Harry on the run, and I was left alone with John. But it was the trained doctor, not the lover who spoke.

  ‘You’re pale,’ he said. ‘Do you feel unwell?’

  ‘No, I’m very well,’ I said, smiling to reassure him and to support the lie. Even as I spoke I felt a swimmy sensation of faintness and nausea.

  ‘I can see you are not,’ he said curtly. He dismounted and held out peremptory arms to me. I shrugged my shoulders and slid down from the saddle and let him lead me to a fallen tree. Once seated I felt better and drew a couple of deep breaths of the sharp autumn air, smelling the bright, cold exciting smell of dry leaves.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked. He had not released my hand after leading me to the seat, and his sensitive fingers had discreetly taken my pulse.

  ‘Oh, let be,’ I said, and pulled my hand away. ‘I cannot afford a weekly consultation, doctor. I am queasy and headachey because we have harvested the first of the wine and I was tasting the young vintage last night. It tastes like vinegar; it needs a West Indian island full of sugar to make it sweet enough; it costs a fortune to produce and it leaves me with the vilest headache in the world — on account of the loss we have made on it all, and the damage it does to my liver.’

  He laughed out loud at my ill humour, quite unoffended. Then kindly, sensibly, he left me alone. He moved off to chat with some of the others and I was free to lean back against a branch of the tree.

  I had lied, of course. We had indeed drunk Harry’s bitter unsuccessful wine last night, but that was not the cause of my early-morning queasiness and my faintness, and the tenderness in my breasts. I was with child again, and I felt sick because of that nauseous, tiring condition, and worse at the idea of the condition. It cost me every ounce of courage to smile and joke with Harry and George and John MacAndrew with the sickness from this vile growth inside me.

  I was not surprised George could not follow my lead. I had been riding for a fall. A good bruising tumble that would shake this parasite free and leave me blooded and clean and whole again. But Tobermory was too sure-footed and I was too good a rider. I had taken some incredible jumps and was still here in the autumn sunshine, as lovely as ever, as virginal-looking as Diana the huntress — but one month pregnant. My rage at the injustice of my continual fertility while Celia, the deserving wife, could only play host to my cuckoo made the nausea on my tongue taste like fire. In recapturing Harry’s slavish adoration, I had created another problem. This beastly, intractable, insoluble growth in my belly had not shaken loose on my hell-for-leather ride so ma