Wideacre Read online

  He reached my side in two quick strides and took my chin in his hand. I suffered him to turn my face to the light and my green eyes were scornful, but I was biting the inside of my cheeks to hide my fear.

  ‘Yes, you are as lovely as ever,’ he said dismissively. ‘But you have lost a sparkle from your eyes, and there are lines around your mouth that were never there before. What is it, my dear? Have your dirty steps in filth bogged you down so deep you cannot get free? Has the land turned against you? Can you no longer magic the yields you need? Or is it that the people spit on the ground when you pass and curse your very name for the damage and the death that you have brought to Wideacre?’

  I broke free of his grip and turned to the door. My hand was on the latch when he called my name.

  ‘Beatrice!’

  I turned, as if I had hoped he might say something gentle to me. Or at least something that would give me a clue to hold him in my grip again.

  ‘Death is coming for you, and you are ready for it,’ he said quietly. ‘As I drove home with Celia I thought I should come home and kill you, to free us all from the horror that is you. But I will not need to make my hands stink with your blood. For Death is coming for you, and you know you are fit to die. Don’t you, my pretty Beatrice?’

  I turned without a word and left the room. I walked with my head high, my steps long, my skirt shushing round me with every dancing stride. I walked like a lord on his land all the way down the corridor to my office, and then I shut the door behind me and leaned against the panels. At once my knees buckled and I slid down the door into a heap on the floor. I rested my face against the panels. The wood was cold and ungentle to the aching cheekbones where the skin felt too tight.

  Death was coming for me, John had said so; he had seen it in my face. And I knew how Death was coming. He was coming on a great black horse with two black dogs, one running before, one following behind. He was coming on horseback, for he had no legs to creep along behind me. He would ride up to me, Death, and I would see his face before I died. Death was coming for me. The rich people, the gentry who feared for their lives and their property called him Death; the poor people who followed him called him the Culler. But I would look in his face and call him ‘Ralph’.

  *

  I sat with my back to the door, unmoving, until twilight darkened the room and I saw the first little star, low on the horizon with the thin moon beside it. Then I clasped both hands around the doorknob and hauled myself to my feet. I was bone-weary, but I did not dare miss dinner. I had to be there.

  John had changed. He was free of me. He was free of his love and his dream of love for me that had driven him to drink so he could forget the bitter reality. He was free of his horror of me. He could touch my face with hands that did not tremble. He could turn my head to the light so that he could see with his cruel surgeon’s eyes the new tiny maze of lines in my skin. He had lost his love for me, his fear of me. To him now, I was, as Dr Rose had assured me, an ordinary mortal.

  And John was confident with ordinary mortals. I was no longer the woman he loved above life itself. I was no longer the woman he feared because she seemed the embodiment of evil and death. Now I was an ordinary mortal with a body that would die, with a mind that could make mistakes.

  From now until the day of my death John would be watching for that: for my lovely young body to walk towards death, and for my clever, obsessed mind to make mistakes. And I could do little to mislead him. He had loved me, and he had watched every shadow across my face in the days of our happiness. He knew me, as no other man, save one, had known me. And he had knowledge too. He had learned how to see the truth about people; he had dedicated his life and his wisdom to understanding what makes people as they are, the infections in their bodies, the illnesses in their hearts, the madness in their minds. To John now I was neither love-goddess nor devil; I was instead the most fascinating specimen he had ever studied at close quarters.

  And also an enemy to be defeated.

  It was not a role that I could face very easily.

  I rang for Lucy and she exclaimed when she saw me.

  ‘I’ll ask for your dinner to be sent to your room. I’ll tell them you are unwell,’ she said, as she helped me up the stairs to brush my hair.

  ‘No,’ I said. I was so tired it was an effort even to talk. I could scarcely impose my will on my own maid. However could I manage Harry and Celia and John? ‘No,’ I said again. ‘I will go to dinner. But hurry, Lucy, or I will be late.’

  They had not waited for me in the parlour but had gone in to the dining room. The footman opened the door for me as I rustled down the hall, my steps smooth again, my face pale and drawn, but a serene smile on my mouth. I stopped stock-still in the doorway and stared.

  Celia was seated in my chair.

  She sat where she should be, where she had a right to be.

  In the chair of the Squire’s Lady at the foot of the great dining table where she could see the servants standing in readiness against the walls of the room, keep an eye on the blaze in the hearth, see that the plates of all her guests were tilled, and their glasses charged, and meet the eyes of her husband with a warm, loving smile.

  Harry glanced up as I entered and his face was half apologetic. ‘I hope you don’t mind, Beatrice?’ he said to me in a low voice, as he rose to meet me at the door and conducted me to a seat opposite John, the seat that used to be Celia’s. ‘I understood from John that you would not be coming to dinner tonight and so Celia naturally took the foot of the table.’

  I smiled neutrally and paused by the chair, looking at Celia, waiting for her to leap to her feet and to move to her place to make the chair of the Squire’s Lady free for me. She did not move. She simply smiled at me with her pansy-brown eyes wide and said, ‘I am sure you would rather sit opposite John, would you not, Beatrice? It is just like your courting days when your mama was alive.’

  ‘I would rather have Beatrice opposite me,’ John said to clinch the decision. ‘I like to have her where I can see her!’

  They laughed at that, the fools. As if John had never drunk himself into a stupor at this very table. As if my place could be challenged with impunity. As if I should take a seat down the board and give way to Harry’s child-bride. I smiled, a sour smile, and sat where they all wished me to be. And I noted with an inward promise of vengeance the quick exchange of looks between the youngest footman and a new lad. They would be looking for work after next pay day.

  That night belonged to Celia.

  And I saw she had earned it. A bluish bruise shadowed her cheekbone but her eyes were serene. I guessed that Harry had struck her, in anger or passion, but once, and then dissolved into apology and reconciliation. She had no glimpse of his real needs and thought that blow the single lowest moment of her married life. She did not know there was a pattern of punishment forming around her. She thought that blow the first and last she would ever have from Harry. And she thought she could bear it. With the life of Wideacre hanging on a thread she thought she had to endure it.

  So she took her place at the foot of the table.

  Her beloved brother-in-law drank lemonade on her left, and her husband beamed down the table at her. She bloomed in the candlelight like a carnation in sunshine. Her worries and her sense of horror had been stilled firstly by John’s calm acceptance of her garbled, hysterical story, and then by promises Harry had made her while they lay in bed. John had told her that he had not known of the plan to change the entail but he was not surprised. And that the contract could certainly be changed. That, as Richard’s father, he could and would resign Richard’s rights to inherit jointly with Julia. That Julia could inherit with his blessing, and that they would find some way of compensating Richard or himself for the use of the MacAndrew fortune.

  John’s calm acceptance of the news, his easy packing and friendly departure from Dr Rose, pulled Celia back from the entrance to the maze. She began to think she had been mistaken. She forgot the evidence of her senses: t