Wideacre Read online

  Enough there to keep me indoors, even when the swallows came and swooped low over the Fenny in the morning. Enough there to keep me waiting for the postman every morning in a frenzy of anxiety that today might be the day when Dr Rose would write one of his gentle, but increasingly confident letters saying, ‘I am so pleased to tell you that your husband has made a complete recovery. As I write he is packing his bags to come home!’

  Every day I expected a letter announcing John’s return. Every day I prayed for the letter to tell me that our cousin had accepted the compensation and John’s fortune could be paid to him, and the legal work to change the entail could begin in earnest. Every morning I awoke with those two converging processes racing closer and closer together. And every day the postbag was brought to me in my office I opened it with dread, waiting to see if I had won or lost Wideacre for my son.

  I had won.

  On that sweet April morning with the daffodils nodding golden heads in the garden outside my window and the birds carolling to the spring sunshine, the postbag held a thick cream envelope with our lawyers’ crest embossed on the corner, and their pompous seal on the flap. With much self-congratulatory flourish they wrote to say that our cousin Charles Lacey had accepted compensation and was prepared to resign his rights to Wideacre. I had won. Richard had won. The horror and confusion of the past few months could slip behind me and would soon be forgotten. It would be as if this icy spring, this glassed-in shut-out spring had never been. Richard would be reared on the land as the future Squire. I should teach him all he needed to know about the land and the people, and he would bring in the harvest every year of his life. He would marry a pretty Sussex-bred girl of my choice and they would breed new heirs to the land. Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh. I would have established a line that could stretch down the centuries to the unimaginable future. And I had done it with wit and with cunning and with courage. I had done it, although I had lost the sound of my own heartbeat, of Wideacre’s heartbeat, of a voice of love from anyone. But I had done it.

  I sat in silence with the letter in my hand and great floods of release and relief sweeping over me as tangible as the spring sunshine that warmed my face and my silk shoulder. I did not move for long, long minutes, savouring the time of victory. Only I knew what it had cost me, what it had cost Wideacre, what it had cost Acre village, to get us to this point where the way was clear for my son. Only I knew that. Even so, there were costs that I did not know, that I did not fully realize. I had won the land for Richard but this spring it had been dead to me. I could not be sure that my feeling for the land could come back to me. The people had turned against me; the grass was too bright a green, even the thrushes’ song failed to pierce the wall around me. But it might all be a price that had to be paid to put Richard into my seat. And I was paying and paying and paying, and now the reward was in sight.

  I drew the embossed notepaper to me with a sigh and wrote to our bankers ordering them to realize John’s entire fortune, to sell all the MacAndrew shares and pay them into our cousin’s account. I enclosed the power of attorney document to forestall any query from them at such an extraordinary move. Then I drew another sheet of paper towards me and started a letter to the lawyers to tell them that they could now go ahead with the legal processes to change the entail to favour my son Richard and my daughter Julia as joint heirs.

  Then I sat still, with the sunshine warm on my shoulder and gave myself a few silent moments to consider and reconsider what I was doing.

  But I was as impatient as I had been when I had been fifteen and said, ‘Now.’ The price Richard might face, Julia might face, lived in the future. I could deal only with now. I owed it to myself. I owed it to my son that he should sit in the Squire’s chair. I was wilfully blind, I had to be wilfully blind, at the price I might be laying on him. The mortgages I had already accepted on the estate he would have to clear. The cost of working all his life with his sister would fall on him and her too. I would have done my duty by him, to her, to myself, and even in some odd way to my papa and the long Lacey line when I put the heir, the best heir possible, in the Squire’s chair. Future debts would have to be met in the future.

  I blotted the letters, and sealed them, and then I wrote a third. To Mr Llewellyn. I offered him another mortgage on Wideacre: the new meadow lands we had enclosed near Havering. They had come to the estate as part of Celia’s dowry and if the worst came to the worst and we had to sell land, I should feel better about losing those newly gained fields. I could not have borne a mortgage on the fields I had ridden with my papa, even for his grandson. But we needed the money. The legal agreement would have to be signed and witnessed in the House of Lords itself and there were many pockets to be lined on the way, as well as legitimate fees to pay. The green shoots of wheat would have to be golden indeed this summer or we would face ruin.

  ‘Beatrice! You look so much better!’ said Celia, when I joined her and Harry for breakfast after my morning of shuddering relief.

  ‘I feel better,’ I said, smiling. Celia’s cook had sugar-roasted a ham with apricots, accompanied by little spicy beef pies. ‘What a wonder Mrs Gough is in the kitchen. I really do not begrudge her her wages.’

  ‘No, why should you?’ asked Celia, her brown eyes wide. ‘All London-trained cooks are expensive. I should think she is rather underpaid here.’

  I smiled and shrugged. ‘No, don’t worry, Celia. I am not about to bring the parish labourers into the kitchen to cook your dinner. I have just been working on the accounts and cannot help pricing everything I see.’

  ‘They cannot be too bad, Beatrice, for your eyes are shining green again and they only do that when you are happy,’ said Celia observantly. ‘Have you had some good news?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I had a letter that made me very happy.’

  Celia’s face lit up as if someone had given her a thousand candles.

  ‘John is coming home!’ she said, and her voice was full of joy.

  ‘No,’ I said, irritated. ‘John is not coming home. This good news was business news that you would neither understand nor appreciate. I have not heard from Dr Rose this month, but in his last letter he said that John still had much progress to make before he could come home.’

  Celia’s eyes dropped to her plate and I guessed that tears were prickling under the downcast lids. When she looked up, her mouth was trembling slightly, both at the disappointment and at the sharp way that I had dashed her hopes.

  ‘I am sorry, my dear,’ she said. ‘It was thoughtless of me to jump to that conclusion just because you said you had some good news. I think of John and of your unhappiness without him so constantly that as soon as I saw you I thought it could only be his return that could make you so blooming again.’

  I nodded ungraciously and turned my attention to my breakfast. Celia, I noticed, ate little and refused some fruit.

  ‘Shall you go to Bristol to see him?’ she asked tentatively. ‘It seems to have been such a long time. He left in the first week of December, and it is now mid-April.’

  ‘No,’ I said, and my voice was firm. ‘I feel I should obey Dr Rose’s advice on this. He said he would tell me the moment John could receive visitors. It would hardly help John if I were to go pushing in before he was ready to see me.’

  Celia nodded submissively.

  ‘As you wish, my dear,’ she said tenderly. ‘But if you should change your mind, or when Dr Rose says you may go, you know that Richard would be perfectly able to do without you for a few nights. I should make sure that he was happy.’

  I nodded. ‘I know. Thank you, Celia,’ I said.

  I need not have been in such a fret of impatience. While the April days grew warmer and longer and the green shoots that were to pay for my son’s inheritance grew stronger and taller, the lawyers in London started the process of hearings and counter-arguments that would take them to the House of Lords. The bankers raised their eyebrows at my letter, but were bound by the power of attorney. One fine morning