Wideacre Read online

  ‘Well, what if they are?’ I demanded, suddenly hard; weary of shielding Harry from the consequences of our joint choice. ‘You wanted to use the roundsman labour gangs. We both agreed there would be no more casual labour for the villagers of Acre. We both agreed we would keep no hedgers and ditchers and helpers with the sheep on the wage books to be paid in good and bad weather and to be paid if they work or no. We agreed to that. Did you think they worked for the love of it? Of course they are hungry. They are receiving no pay; they are trying to last out on their savings until spring. They think that we will go back to the old ways and that every man in the village will be able to do a day’s ploughing, and every lad will be able to earn a penny sowing seed. When spring comes they will find that it is not so. That we shall still use the gang labourers. And if they want work they will have to go to the parish and join the gang and accept the pittance they are offered.

  ‘Are you saying now that you don’t want to continue with our plans?’ I asked tightly. ‘We are saving hundreds of pounds a month, and we are fanning as you have always wanted to. Did you think no one paid for your fancy farming ideas, Harry? The poor pay. The poor always pay. But they can do nothing against us. And if you don’t like the look of what you are doing then turn your head away and look out of the other window like Celia.’

  I spun on my heel and turned my back to him to stare into the fire and regain my temper. I was panting with anger and close to tears. Harry’s wilful ignorance about what we were doing to the land enraged me. But also I was boiling with rage at the trap I was in. For the decision to farm for profit and consider only profit had led us to this point and might yet take us farther. The poorer people would have to leave Acre; the estate could not support so many, farming in this new way. And many, many of them would be stubborn and not leave. Then, I supposed, the old people, and perhaps the frailer children, might die. And Giles would be only the first death on the road to make Richard the heir. With the picture of Richard as Master in my mind I would not retract, I would not relent. But I could see, and no one but I would see, the long, slow, painful path the poor of Wideacre would tread barefoot so that my son could be called Squire.

  Harry’s hand fell on my shoulder and I tensed, but controlled myself not to shake it off. ‘This is a bitter time for us both,’ said Harry sadly, forgetting the hungry faces and thinking only of himself. ‘Of course I agree we should go on. Every landowner has precisely these problems. It is a time of change. Nothing we can do could stop that process of change. The people will just have to adapt, that is all. They will just have to learn to live the way things are. It would be folly for you and me to try to farm in the old ways, Beatrice.’

  I nodded. Harry had found a way to still his own conscience, and I had my way to silence mine. I could comfort myself with the thought that all that I now did brought my lovely son closer and closer to owning Wideacre. And Harry could tell himself the convenient lie that he was equally trapped by the changes as the people he had dismissed from their work. Harry had Pontius Pilate’s answer that it was really nothing to do with him. He saw himself as part of a process of historical change and he could neither be blamed nor held responsible for what would happen.

  ‘There is just no alternative,’ he said quietly. And he even sounded sad that there was nothing he could do.

  So when Celia came downstairs with the two nurses and the two children dressed in their best and hungry for roast goose we could all exchange smiles and go into the dining room to eat at a table heaped with main courses and side dishes, as if, five miles away, there were no hungry children picking crumbs from the frozen grass of the vicar’s garden.

  It was a hard winter in Acre that year. I went less to the village than I had ever done, for it was no pleasure to me to be greeted with surly faces. Once or twice a woman had burst from a cottage with tears in her eyes and put her hand on the side of my gig and said, ‘Miss Beatrice, do take my William to do some hedging for you. You know there’s no one like him for hedging in the whole county. I can’t keep the children on the wages we get from the parish. They’re hungry, Miss Beatrice. Do give my man work.’

  Then I would have to hold the picture of my own child, my Richard, and his future very clear before my eyes. I would stare hard at the horse’s ears and not look the woman in the face and say in an even tone, ‘I am sorry, Bessy, but there’s nothing I can do. We only use the roundsman on Wideacre now. If your man wants other work he had best go and seek it.’

  Then I would click to the horse and drive off before she shamed herself and her man by weeping before me in the village lane. And my face was set and cold, for I knew no other way to do it.

  Harry would do nothing at all. When he met someone in the lane and heard the tale of the bad wages the roundsman gave the gang, of the meanness of the parish and of the fear of the workhouse, he would shrug at the man and say, ‘What can I do? I am no freer to choose how the world is than you, my good fellow.’ And he would put a hand in his pocket for a shilling as if that would help a man with four children and a sickly wife at home, and a long cold winter to get through.

  They thought I had turned against them. But that was only partly true. I had to think of other things, of the claim of Richard, and of my desperate need to establish the entail and Richard’s and Julia’s partnership in the breathing space I had won by John’s absence using John’s fortune. Even so, I did not enclose the common until spring, so they had a winter’s supply of firewood, which they gathered for free, and peat, which they cut for nothing, before I had the fences made that would straddle the footpaths, and ban the whole village from the land they had thought was their own to use.

  All winter the fences stood at the back of the stables and I delayed ordering them set in place.

  ‘We really should get on with enclosing the common,’ Harry would say to me, leaning over the map. ‘Mr Llewellyn’s loans are costing us a good deal. We shall be planting wheat this spring, and there will be much work to do to make the ground ready.’

  ‘I know,’ I said, glancing up from writing letters at my desk. ‘I have it in mind, Harry. I have the fences ready and I have told the roundsman that I shall need at least twenty men for the work. But I wish to wait until the snow is gone. The people are used to getting their firewood for free, and also snaring rabbits there. There may be trouble when the fences first go up. It is bound to be easier for us if we do it when the weather is milder.’

  ‘Very well, Beatrice,’ Harry said. ‘You know best how it should be done. But really, the people should understand that they have been living in the old ways for too long. I don’t know another estate in the county that held to the traditional ways as long as we did. Free firewood, free snaring, free grazing, free gleaning; we have been robbing ourselves for all these years, Beatrice. You would think they would be grateful.’

  ‘Odd, isn’t it?’ I said drily. ‘But they are not.’

  Indeed they were not. As the winter went on I heard no more appeals from the village women. When I trotted my gig through the village there were no smiling faces or deep curtsys. There was no open rudeness; I would have dismissed anyone from the land if I had seen so much as a flicker of overt insolence. But I was not loved as I had been. And I missed it. The men would doff their caps or pull a forelock and the women make their little bob, but they did not call out ‘Good day’ to me, and the children were not held up to see pretty Miss Beatrice and her fine horse. It was just another price that had to be paid.

  They disliked Harry too, of course. But in the fickle way of ignorant people they did not blame him as they blamed me. They knew he had always been crazy for change, but they had trusted me to hold out against him. Now I was farming for profit they blamed me far worse than they did Harry. They even blamed me for influencing Harry, although if they had consulted their own conveniently short memories they would have known that Harry had always been a fool on the land and I was not responsible for that.

  The weather matched the angry desolate m