Wideacre Read online

  ‘Yes, Harry?’ I said.

  ‘With both Celia and John away …” He let the request trail off. His breathing was shallow and a little faster. I shot him one unwinking look from under my dark eyelashes. A look that was both a challenge and an invitation.

  ‘I will go and light the fire,’ I said. ‘Ten minutes, Harry.’

  He gave a sigh of anticipation and buttered another biscuit. I slid from the room like a snake and closed the door softly. ‘Carry on eating like that, Harry,’ I thought wryly, ‘and you will be dead within three years. Then my son Richard and my daughter Julia will be joint heirs, and I will be their guardian and the only Master of Wideacre until I hand over to my darling son. And neither Celia nor John will be able to stop me.’

  I did not send an express letter post-haste after Celia. I did not send a footman riding after her to catch her. If quiet, conventional, mousy Celia could whirl out of the house with only a shawl over her head like some demented peasant woman, then she could travel non-stop, and no letter could reach Dr Rose before she did. With Coachman Ben Tyacke driving, no footman with my order would make him stop and turn against the order of Lady Lacey. And, given that Ben was a Tyacke and had loved his uncle dearly, the fact that I wished Celia to return would be enough to make him whip up the horses.

  All I could count on was John’s instability, on Celia’s confusion and despair, and on Dr Rose’s prejudice against the two of them, which I had instilled without even planning to do, but which now came, like the witch they called me, unbidden to my hand. I could do nothing, I decided, as I sat back in my morning bath before my bedroom fire. Lucy had rung for more cans of hot water and took them from the footman at the door and poured the scalding jugful down my back. My toes were resting on the rounded lip of the bath, my body curled in the boiling sweet-scented water.

  ‘Miss Beatrice, you will scald,’ said Lucy predictably as I waved for another hot jug.

  ‘Yes,’ I said happily and felt the near-unbearable heat wash around me. My ten toes were rosy pink with heat; my buttocks and body would be scarlet. After a night of beating and threatening and cursing Harry into a frenzy of whimpering pleasure I felt a certain need to boil myself clean. I might have all the crimes of Wideacre on my copper-curly head — and a few I had not done as well — but at least I lacked Harry’s confused messiness. When I needed that sweeping flood of sexual pleasure all I wanted was an honest man to tumble me in bed or grass. Harry seemed to need an unending repertoire of threats and promises and a cupboardful of tricks. And his plump heaving body filled me neither with lust nor hatred, but with a certain cool disdain that excited him all the more. I waved for more hot water. I felt a need to scrub and scald Harry’s wet kisses off my skin.

  I had done nothing, and I could do nothing, I thought, as Lucy poured the water, and at my gesture massaged the back of my neck with sweet perfumed soap right up to the damp hairline in hard slow circles.

  ‘Mmmm,’ I said in pleasure, and closed my eyes.

  At the very, very worst Celia and John would come home a pair of avenging angels to destroy Wideacre and the garden of deception I had grown here. John had guessed that Harry was Richard’s father, and Celia’s secret — that Julia too was my child — would be another piece in the jigsaw. The two secrets together would ruin me.

  But I looked at that prospect with my fighter’s gaze. I thought I might survive it. John was fresh from the cool sanity of a well-run asylum, unready for the craziness of his real life. I had established him as insane, I might be able to tar Celia with the same brush. Theirs was an insane tale. No one would believe it. It would be far more convincing to claim that their guilt and desire had driven John to drink and overset Celia’s senses. That together they had dreamed of a nightmare world of terror: of monsters in mazes, of toads crushed beneath a plough, of wounded hares. It was nonsense. No one would believe them if I could hold my head as proud as a queen and face down every truth as the vilest calumny.

  But I did not think they would put the two halves of the picture together.

  ‘Don’t stop,’ I said to Lucy, who obediently moved the piping cloth over one shoulder and then the other.

  John was fighting with one hand tied behind him because of his tenderness to Celia. I knew that. I had watched him in his first days of horror-stricken knowledge when he wavered between drunken despair, hatred for me, and horror at the web that enmeshed us all. If he had been going to expose me to Celia, to wreck her marriage, to break her heart with the disgusting truth of her beloved husband, he would have done it then. But he did not. Not even when he was writhing in a strait-jacket on the floor of her parlour had the secret escaped him. He was not shielding me. He was protecting Celia from the horror that undermined her life so that the very ground beneath her feet was an eggshell cover over a maze of sin. Celia herself might expose me to John in her first gabble of panic, but I could trust my cool steady husband to see the full picture and yet keep his own counsel.

  And I did not fear Celia. If she returned alone or decided to act alone I did not think she would expose me. She had given her word of honour and I imagined that would count for much with her. She had loved me once and that might make her pause. She loved respectability as much as my foolish mama, and to expose me would be my ruin and the shame of the Laceys. But more than all of that, more than everything, was her total love for Julia, which, I imagined, would transcend every other thing. If she exposed me as Julia’s mother, even in my shame I could claim Julia and take her away. Whatever pain and confusion boiled in Celia’s mind I knew, as I knew my own clear-headed calculations, that she would never risk losing Julia. One hint of that danger and Celia would withdraw.

  I bent my knees so that the hot water washed over my soaped shoulders and rinsed me clean. I had them both. They both loved and so they were both vulnerable. Compared to that bondage of devotion I was free and unbound. My love for Richard neither contained nor controlled me. I still went my own way. I might plot for him, but I would not sacrifice myself for him. But Celia and John were not their own masters. And as such I did not fear them.

  ‘Towel, please,’ I said to Lucy, and she fetched the coarse, linen wraps from where they were warming before the fire. I rubbed myself as hard as I could, until my pink skin stung, and then I brushed my hair free in a silky copper mane, soft as satin on my back. My body showed no signs of two pregnancies. My belly was flat and hard, my breasts round and still firm, my legs as long and as slim as ever with no disfiguring veins.

  I smoothed my palm down from my neck, over the jutting swell of my breasts, down over my belly with the soft curls of hair between my legs. I was lovely still. And soon I should need a lover. A real lover, not a chore like Harry, but a man who would laugh with me and romp with me and hurt me and pleasure me. I turned with a sigh and snapped my fingers for Lucy to fetch my petticoats. The hard fighting loving I remembered were those passionate struggles I had with Ralph. God alone knew where I would find another like him. I supposed I should have to resign myself to missing him and longing for him.

  And waiting. Waiting for this hard time to be done. Waiting for the profits to show on the land so that Wideacre could be eased, if only slightly, from this drag of debt that I had put on the land. Waiting for the great golden glut of corn to release the land and the people from this struggle for money. So that I could restore a little, instead of snatching away. So that people would forget this one bad year of my mastership of Wideacre and remember instead the good years that had followed each other, one after another, since I had run the land.

  Today I should spend another morning in my office trying to make sense of the figures. Mr Llewellyn now had three mortgages on our land: the common land, the plantation, and Celia’s dowry lands. But to service the loan to him, when the beasts did so badly, I had borrowed from our bankers. Their rates were lower and I had been pleased with my cleverness at winning Wideacre a little breathing space. But they had the right to alter their rates as they pleased, and now I