Wideacre Read online

  ‘Follow me,’ I said in a tone I reserve for impertinent servants, and swung out of the yard.

  I drove down the lane to Acre. This tale of silent cottages might do for John Brien but I knew that behind every cottage window there would be a pair of eyes watching me go past. I drove to the chestnut tree at the centre of the village green, as clear a signal for a parley as if I was carrying a stick with a handkerchief.

  I tied Sorrel to one of the low branches, I climbed back into the gig and waited. I waited. I waited. Slowly, one by one, the doors of the cottages opened and the men came sheepishly out, pulling on their caps and shrugging on their sheepskin waistcoats, their wives and children following at their heels. I waited until I had a goodly crowd around the gig, and then I spoke clearly and my voice was cold.

  ‘We had a few words yesterday and you all explained to me why you wanted things at Wideacre left as they are,’ I said. ‘I told you then that it cannot be so.’ I paused and waited for any comment. None came. ‘John Brien here tells me that none of you stayed to work yesterday,’ I said. I let my gaze wander around the circle of faces. Not one eye met mine. ‘Nor today,’ I said.

  I signalled to John Brien to untie Sorrel and pass me the reins. ‘The choice is yours,’ I said flatly. ‘If you refuse to work I shall send to Chichester for the labourers from the Chichester poorhouse and they can come and earn your wages and take home your pay while you sit in your houses and go hungry. Or, if there are problems with that, I can bring in Irish labourers and I can cancel your tenancies and give them your houses.’ There was a shudder of horror at that thought. I waited until the spontaneous moan had died, then gazed around the circle of faces again. They were all people I knew so well. I had worked side by side with all of them ever since I had been out on the land. Now I sat high above them and spoke to them as if they were dirt in my road.

  ‘The choice is yours,’ I said again. ‘You can either take the work that these changes provide. And take the wages that are fairly set by the parish. Or you can starve. But either way those fences are going up. The common will be enclosed.’

  I nodded to Brien to stand aside from Sorrel’s head and loosened the reins to move off. No one said a word this time, and I had the feeling that they were silent even when I was out of earshot. They were stunned by the ruthlessness of a woman they had loved since she was a tiny girl on a fat pony. They had thought I was their pretty Miss Beatrice who would never fail them. And now I looked at them with a cold set face and offered them the choice between independent starvation and starvation wages.

  They went back to work. Of course they did. They were not such fools as to try to stand against one who was landlord, employer and landowner all in one. Brien rode up to the Hall during their dinner break to tell me that the work had started and that the fences were going up quickly.

  ‘You did tell them!’ he said admiringly. ‘You should have seen their faces. That’s broken their spirits all right. I wish we had brought the Irish in. It would wake that village up for once! But they looked pretty sick when you trotted off, Mrs MacAndrew, I can tell you! You slapped them down pretty hard!’

  I looked at him coldly. His spite against my people reminded me again of the oddness of the role I had to play. And the disgusting nature of the tools I had to use to do the jobs I had to do. I nodded.

  ‘Well, get back to work,’ I said brusquely. ‘I want that common ready for spring sowing.’

  I did not spare myself the pain of seeing the common this time but drove down to it in the early spring dusk, which came at about four o’clock. In the gloaming I could see little of the common, but the smell of it, the frosty bracken and the hint of icy pine needles, pulled at my heart strings as I sat on the gig at the end of the lane and Sorrel chafed at the bit. Before us loomed the new fences that marked out the limits of this year’s wheat-fields. Next year we would enclose and drain more and more until the only fields left to grow hay and the sweet meadow flowers would be the ones that were too high or too steep for any plough. All of the common that rolled in such easy soft valleys would be gone in a few years’ time, and this fence, which was causing Acre village so much worry and grief, was only the first of many lessons that would teach them that the land belonged only to us, and that in years to come they would not be allowed so much as to set foot on it without permission. But behind the dark outline of the new fence I could see the soft rolling profiles of the little hills and valleys of the common where it drops down to our woods. And my heart ached for it.

  I drove home in a hurry for I wanted to be in time to bathe Richard and to put him into his fleecy little nightshirt. I wanted to tickle his bare sweet-smelling warm tummy, and to tease him by poking my chilled fingers in the soft little pits under his arms. I wanted to brush his hair into black little kiss-curls, and to bury my face in his warm neck and sniff at the sweet pure smell of baby. But most of all I wanted to see him to reassure myself that I did indeed have a son who would be Squire if I could only hold to this one true course, that I was not crazy to tear the heart out of the land I loved.

  Next morning John Brien was calling even before breakfast. He was waiting in the lobby before my office and my maid, Lucy, told me he was there as I was dressing. I raised an eyebrow at her as our eyes met in my mirror.

  ‘Don’t you like John Brien, Lucy?’ I asked quizzically.

  ‘Nothing to like or dislike,’ she said abruptly. ‘I hardly know him. I only know what his job is, and that he earns twice the wage of anyone in Acre and yet never has a penny to lend his wife’s own kin. I only know that he picks out the men who can work and left young Harry Jameson off the gang all through the winter when the lad was desperate for a wage. I don’t like him very much. But then, most of them hate him like poison.’

  I grinned at Lucy. She was no longer a village woman, for her life was bound up with my life at the Hall and her plate would be always full at the kitchen table. But she had kin in Acre and a good nose for what went on there.

  ‘I’ve no love for him either,’ I said, as she piled my hair on the top of my head, and let a few curls hang down around my face. ‘But he should be out working this morning. Have done, Lucy. There’s like to be some trouble.’

  Obediently, she made two deft touches and stood back.

  ‘Bound to be trouble if you fence off land that’s always belonged to the village,’ she said dourly.

  I gave her a long hard look in the mirror until her eyes dropped.

  ‘The land belongs to Wideacre,’ I said firmly.

  I gave her one more look, and thought that here was another person I had faced down in so few days. Wideacre might be wealthier at the end of this, and my son might be the Squire, but I would have lost a great deal of love.

  I shrugged off the thought and went down to John Brien.

  ‘Yes?’ I said coldly. He was twisting his cap in his hands and his eyes were wide with excitement at the bad news he was bringing to me.

  ‘Mrs MacAndrew, ‘tis your fences,’ he gasped, forgetting his town-bred accent in his haste. ‘They’ve pulled your fences down and hacked some of them. Nearly all the work we did yesterday has been undone. Your fences are down and the footpaths are open again.’

  My head jerked up to stare at him as if he was an angel of death.

  ‘Is this the Culler’s work?’ I said sharply. The fear in my voice made him hesitate and look strangely at me.

  ‘What’s the Culler?’ he asked.

  ‘An outlaw, a rogue,’ I said, stammering in haste. ‘He fired Mr Briggs’s plantation back in the autumn. Could this be his work? Or is it the village?’

  ‘It’s the village,’ said John Brien positively. ‘There’s been no time for anyone else to have heard of the trouble we are having here. Anyway I swear I know who has done it.’

  ‘Who?’ I said. My face, which had been white and wet with cold sweat, was regaining its colour and my breath was coming normally again. If it was not the Culler on my land then I could face any danger. For