Wideacre Read online

  ‘This, this is nonsense,’ I stammered. I was overwhelmed by the memory of my mama’s sense of sin, of something dirty and black in the house that she could smell but not see. I had trusted my mama to be too much of a coward, too much of a fool, to track down the foul thing and look it in the face. When she saw it, the two-backed beast before the fire, she had died with horror.

  But Celia might almost dare to track it into its very lair and face it. Armed with her love for her child and her courage, Celia might go where my mama’s nervous thoughts had failed her.

  ‘Stop it, Celia!’ I said abruptly. ‘You are distressed. We will talk no more of this tonight. If you really dislike the whole idea we will change it. But let us have tea now, and then go early to bed.’

  ‘No, I won’t stop here, and I won’t have the tea tray, and we won’t go to bed until I understand more. How was Charles Lacey compensated? What are the terms of the contract?’

  ‘Oh, my!’ I said lightly. ‘Business, then? Well, very well, if you wish it.’ I snowed her under then, with rack-rents and revisions of tenancies, and long leases made short, and cottagers’ rights, and enclosure acts and the price of corn. How to sell when it is standing in the field, how to gamble on the growth and on the rise of the market when other farmers have poor crops. I even threw in the battle I had won over the water rights until her unlearned head spun.

  ‘So we have changed our farming system slightly to make greater profits, and we used the MacAndrew money too,’ I finished.

  She nodded only to clear her head; there was no assent there. She could not have understood a word of the garble.

  ‘John’s money?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That is Richard’s contribution, as it were, towards being made heir of Wideacre, jointly with Julia.’

  ‘You have used John’s money without his consent?’ she asked. Her voice was even but her face was appalled.

  ‘As a loan merely,’ I said with assurance. ‘The whole idea of the power of attorney is to safeguard the patient’s interests. Obviously it is in John’s interests — and mine as his wife and the mother of his son — that he should get maximum interest. The loan he has made to Wideacre is paying far more than the MacAndrew Line dividends. And it secures Richard’s future, too.’

  ‘You have used John’s money without his consent and committed his son to Wideacre without him knowing?’ she asked incredulously.

  ‘Of course,’ I said, challenging her, face to face. ‘Any proper parent would be delighted, as Harry and I are, that the entail can so be changed.’

  She smoothed a hand over her forehead as if to wipe away the confusion. It was ineffectual.

  ‘That is a matter for John and you,’ she said, her mind in a whirl. ‘I cannot think it right. I cannot believe that Harry could have so used John’s entire fortune, and that while he was ill, but if the contract is not signed, perhaps it can all wait until John returns from hospital?’

  ‘Perhaps, perhaps,’ I said soothingly. ‘I am not exactly sure. Harry has been making the arrangements, not I. I undertook only to reassure you, that although Harry was grieved to understand that you are barren there should be no unhappiness between the two of you, because he has found this way around that sorrow. That your lovely little girl can inherit her father’s land.’

  ‘You plan that she and Richard will be joint owners?’ Celia repeated slowly. ‘That she and Richard should grow up together on the land, learning about the land together?’

  I nodded.

  ‘And you and Harry would take them both out on the estate, looking at the land and learning to farm. And all the time they would be growing closer and closer. And only you and I would know that they are not just partners, and not just cousins, but half-brother and half-sister?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But Celia …’

  ‘But we would not be able to tell them that!’ she said. ‘They would be best friends and playmates and business partners. They would think they were first cousins, but they would be close kin. They would learn to love each other, and their interests would lie together. How could they then turn aside from each other and learn to love the people they will be betrothed to marry? How can my Julia have the life I had hoped for her and planned for her as a girl of Quality if she is an heiress from the age of two in a partnership with a boy who is neither husband nor distant relation?’

  She spun on her heel so she did not face me and buried her face in her hands.

  ‘It is a nightmare,’ she said. ‘I cannot tell what it is but some danger is threatening Julia from this. I do not know what!’

  ‘You are being foolish, Celia,’ I said coldly. I took her shoulders in a firm grip and felt a shudder run through her like a terror-struck foal. ‘Wideacre is a family business,’ I said levelly. ‘Julia would always have had obligations to meet on the estate. She will simply work with Richard as Harry and I work.’

  That reassurance tripped her control.

  ‘No!’ she said, and it was nearly a scream. ‘No! I forbid it! You gave her to me and said that she should be my child. I claim my right as her mother to decide her future. She shall not be with Richard as you and Harry are, for I am afraid of something about you and Harry, even if I have no words for it but only a dread that chills and frightens me when I wake in the night. I do not know what I am afraid of, and I make no complaint against either of you. But I am afraid, Beatrice! I am afraid for Julia! I do not want her to be part of another brother-and-sister partnership. No. I do not give my consent. I shall tell Harry.’

  I leaped for the door and spread my arms so that she could not get past me.

  ‘Celia, wait,’ I said. ‘Don’t dash out to Harry like that while you are distressed. He will think it most odd. He will think we have quarrelled. Calm yourself and consider what you mean to say. If you do not want Julia to be joint heir with Richard she can always sell him her share when they are older, or he can sell his. There is no need for you to become so upset over this, Celia.’

  She had heard none of it. She was looking at me as if she had seen me for the first time. She was looking at me curiously, with disbelief, as if there were some mark scrawled on my face, or as if I had spiders crawling in my hair, or some other horror.

  ‘Stand aside, Beatrice,’ she said. Her voice was low and hard. ‘I want to speak with Harry.’

  ‘Not while you are so overwrought,’ I pleaded, and I did not move.

  ‘Stand aside,’ she said again. And I remembered her before the library fireplace with two smashed bottles of whisky dripping from her hand.

  ‘You will distress Harry,’ I said. ‘He planned this to make you happy.’

  ‘Stand aside,’ she repeated, and her eyes flickered towards the bell pull. For one brief moment I wondered if she could face the scene of the butler coming and her ordering him to push me out of the way by forcing open the door. But I saw the look on her face and knew I was arguing with a woman on the edge of hysteria.

  ‘Beatrice, I have asked you three times,’ she said and her voice was tight with control that might break at any moment. I feared Celia in a panic more than I feared her when she could judge to speak or be silent. If she screamed out that Richard and Julia were brother and sister then I would be irreparably lost. But if she kept herself under control, and if I went with her, I might manage this scene still.

  I opened the parlour door for her with a little ironic bob curtsy and followed, hard on her heels, as she swept across the hall to the dining room. A footman was coming through the door from the kitchen bringing more biscuits for Harry, and I scowled at him so he turned on his heel and went back behind the baize door again. Celia saw nothing, heard nothing. She flung open the dining-room door and made Harry jump with the bang. He had a plate before him heaped with cheese and biscuits, and the flagon of port by his hand. He had butter on his chin. I could trust him as far as I could flick water.

  ‘I do not consent to this arrangement,’ said Celia in her high, hard voice. ‘The documen