Wideacre Read online

  Celia would not even enter the parlour after dinner but said she wanted to sit with Julia in the nursery. I remembered with a superstitious shudder how John too had sought the nursery as if only the children in the house were free from sin and violence and the lingering smell of corruption. But I smiled at her with all the warmth I could bring into my eyes and kissed her forehead to say goodnight. I thought, I imagined, that she shrank from my touch as if it might somehow mark her, leave some smudge of my ruthlessness on her. But I believed that Celia, like Mama, might hold the thread of detection in her hand and still fail to follow it into the maze.

  So Harry and I sat alone in the parlour and when the tea tray came in it was my duty to pour and sweeten Harry’s tea to his liking. When he had sipped, and munched his way through a whole plate of petits fours I stretched my satin shoes out to the brass fender and said, casually, ‘Have you signed and posted the documents for Dr Rose, Harry?’

  ‘I’ve signed them,’ he replied. ‘They are on your desk. But what Celia tells me about Dr Rose, and about John, makes me wonder if we are doing the right thing.’

  ‘It was a most distressing scene,’ I agreed readily. ‘John was like a madman. If the two doctors had not been so prompt and efficient I do not know what might have happened. Celia thinks she can control John and help him with his drinking but the way he behaved today proves that she has little influence over him,’ I said. ‘It has been nearly two weeks now since she started trying to make him give up drinking and he has been drunk nearly every night. He even turned on Celia today and accused her of betraying him. We really cannot manage him if he is half mad from drink.’

  Harry’s round face was downturned with worry.

  ‘Celia did not tell me that,’ he complained. ‘She only told me that she thought the doctors were too rough with John and that she feared the whole idea of getting him committed. She even seems to be concerned about John’s fortune: the MacAndrew shares.’

  ‘She has been influenced by the nonsense John was shouting,’ I said smoothly. ‘It was a very distressing scene. But dear Celia understands nothing of business and these matters. There is no doubt that Dr Rose’s home is the best place for John and of course he has to be committed into their care so that they can make sure he does not run off to buy drink. We should know how impossible it has been to keep it from him! Celia has had the cellars locked for a fortnight and still he has been getting drink from somewhere.’

  Harry shot me a sly sideways glance.

  ‘You don’t know how he has been getting hold of the drink, Beatrice, I suppose?’ he said nervously.

  ‘No,’ I said firmly. ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘Well, I shall reassure Celia that we are acting in John’s best interests,’ said Harry, getting to his feet and standing before the fireplace. He hitched up his jacket to warm his plump buttocks before the blaze, for the night was bitterly cold. ‘And I shall tell her that his fortune will be absolutely untouched until he comes to take control of it again,’ said Harry. ‘We have power of attorney over it, but of course we would not use it.’

  ‘Unless we see some business opportunity for him that we would do wrong to miss,’ I agreed. ‘The whole point of us having control of his fortune is so that his wealth can be properly managed during his illness. Of course we will not use his money to do anything he would not like. But we would be treating him very badly if we did not watch for his interests and act accordingly.’

  Harry nodded. ‘Yes, of course,’ he said. ‘But you have no immediate plans, have you, Beatrice?’

  I smiled reassuringly. ‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘All this has been so sudden, so unexpected. Of course I have no plans at all.’

  ‘What about the entail?’ Harry said nervously.

  ‘Oh, that!’ I put a hand to my face and smoothed my forehead in a gesture that contained a trace of theatre.

  ‘Let us leave that idea altogether until we can see our way clearer. John may be home inside the month and we can discuss it with him then. We can continue to increase Wideacre’s profits, and to save the surplus. But there is no need for us to rush into trying to change the entail.’

  Harry’s look of relief spoke volumes. Celia, with no evidence other than her sharp intuition and her sensitivity to untruth, was mistrustful and anxious. And she had imparted a share of her unease. His question about John’s supplier of drink, his anxiety about my future plans, all pointed to Celia’s half-sense that all of Wideacre was being carried on a tide of my will. That none of us but I knew where we were going. That no one but I was in control. And that no one but I could say who would benefit from this headlong course.

  ‘It has been a bitter blow for you,’ Harry said kindly. ‘But do not be too distressed, Beatrice. I do believe John may be cured by these people, and then we can be as we were.’

  I smiled back at him, a brave little smile. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Indeed I hope so. Now go and comfort Celia, Harry. And do assure her that although I am very sad I shall not break down under this.’

  Harry gave me a gentle kiss on the top of my head and took himself off. I stayed only to drink one glass of port beside the dying fire, then missed supper in favour of an early bed. I had a day of hard work tomorrow. Mr Llewellyn was coming to look at the estate for a mortgage to pay the lawyers’ fees for the change of entail, and I was ready at last to write to the lawyers that they could go ahead: that I had access to the MacAndrew fortune, and that I could use it to buy Wideacre for my son. His to keep, and his to hand on to his son, and his son, and his, in a long, long line for ever. All of them descended from the witch of Wideacre.

  16

  I liked Mr Llewellyn on sight. He was a fifty-year-old Welshman who had made a fortune on the little hill ponies of his home mountains. He had bred a string of them and, cunningly, gave them as presents to the cream of the London nobility. Months of relentless training paid off and the ponies carried the heirs of the wealthiest estates in the land with rocksteady safety — and set a new fashion. The craze for the Llewellyn Welsh mountain ponies swept the fashionable world and was not exhausted until every butcher’s daughter had one of her own. By the time the fashion had moved on Mr Llewellyn had a fine town house of his own and need never again set foot in Wales, never again go out in the freezing fog of a Welsh winter to break the water on the drinking troughs.

  But he had lost none of his sharp peasant cleverness in the huge town mansion. His blue eyes twinkled at the frosty fields of Wideacre and ranged over the view from my office window as if he was pricing every tree in the park.

  ‘A neat estate,’ he said approvingly.

  ‘We have made many improvements,’ said Harry, sipping coffee with relish. He gestured to the map where the fields we had enclosed were outlined in yellow: the colour of the wheat we would plant this spring. Harry and I had spent long anxious evenings outlining in a dotted orange line all the areas where wheat could grow if the land was cleared. Each time Harry’s pudgy finger swept over a wood or a lush meadow I felt dread, and a foreboding of loss.

  ‘We can’t possibly enclose Norman Meadow,’ I had said. ‘It’s an old battlefield and the ploughshare will turn up skulls and bones. We’ll never get a boy to take a plough in there. The whole of Acre believes it is haunted.’

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ said Harry, interested. ‘What battle would that have been?’

  ‘The one that gained us the land, I think,’ I had said ruefully. ‘The tradition is that it was there that the Le Says, our ancestors, brought their handful of Norman soldiers and beat the Saxon peasants in a fight that went on for three days until every man in the village was dead. That’s the story, anyway.’

  ‘Well, it would make jolly good fertilizer!’ said Harry jovially. ‘And see, Beatrice! If we turn Oak Tree Meadow over to corn, and Three Gate Meadow over to corn, we cannot be left with a meadow growing hay stuck in the middle. It doesn’t make sense.’

  None of it made sense to me. To change the shape of a high-profit high-yieldin