Wideacre Read online

  ‘What is the matter?’ asked Celia gently. She had slipped from her window seat and come to stand beside me, her arm around my waist, her eyes on my face.

  ‘Look at us,’ I said, and she turned to look in the mirror as well. It reminded me of the day we were fitting for her wedding and my bridesmaid’s dress, so long ago at Havering. Then I had been a pattern for any man’s desire, and Celia had been a pale flower. Now as we stood side by side I saw she had worn the years better than I. Her happiness had put a bloom in her cheeks, a constant upturning of her mouth. She had lost the scared look she had worn at Havering Hall, and was ready to laugh and sing like a carefree bird. The battle she had fought and won, over John’s drinking, against her husband and Lord, Harry, and against her best friend, me, had put an aura of dignity around her. She still had her childlike prettiness, but she had cloaked that vulnerable girlishness with the dignity of knowing her mind when others did not. And being able to judge, and judge rightly, when those around her were ready to do wrong. She would be an old lady beloved for her charm, but also for her uncompromising moral wisdom.

  It was not in Celia’s nature to be unforgiving, but she would never forget the selfishness I showed and Harry showed when John trembled at the sight of a bottle, and we drank before him and praised the wine. She no longer depended on me, and she would never trust me again. There was a little distance between us that not even Celia’s loving spirit would attempt to bridge. And as she watched my eyes in the glass I could no longer predict with certainty what she was thinking.

  ‘I think you could ride to see the wheat crop,’ she said temptingly. ‘I do think you could, if you wanted to, Beatrice.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, smiling. ‘It has been nearly a year. I should love to ride up to the downs again. Tell the stables to get Tobermory ready for me.’

  Celia nodded and took her dismissal from the room, pausing only to gather her sewing. Lucy handed me my grey kid gloves and my whip.

  ‘Better already,’ she said, and her voice was cool. ‘I have never known a lady who could recover like you, Miss Beatrice. Sometimes I think that nothing will stop you.’

  My weeks in bed had rested me well. I took Lucy by the arm, just above the elbow in a hard, pinching grip, and I pulled her a little towards me.

  ‘I don’t like the tone of your voice, Lucy,’ I said confidentially. ‘I don’t like it at all. If you want to look for a new place without a reference, with a week’s wages in your purse, and far away from here, then you have only to say.’

  She looked back at me with villager’s eyes. Hating and yet craven.

  ‘I beg your pardon, Miss Beatrice,’ she said and her eyes fell below my blazing green ones. ‘I meant no harm.’

  I let her go with a little push and swung out of the door and pattered down the stairs to the stable door. John was just outside, watching the tumbler pigeons on the stable roof.

  ‘Beatrice!’ he said, and his cold eyes scanned my face. ‘You are better,’ he said definitely, ‘at last.’

  ‘I am!’ I said, and there was a gleam of triumph in my face that he could no longer look on me as a patient that he was nursing to a slow and painful end. ‘I am rested and well again, and I am going out riding,’ I said.

  One of the lads led Tobermory from the stable door. In the hot sunshine his coat gleamed exactly the colour of my own chestnut hair. He whickered when he saw me and I stroked his nose. I gestured to John and there was nothing for him to do but to cup his hands for me to put my booted foot in then, and to toss me up into the saddle. I had a thrill of pure joy when I felt his white hands, doctor’s hands, under my boot, and I beamed down on him from Tobermory’s high back, as if I loved him.

  ‘Do you see Death in my face today, John?’ I said teasingly. ‘You were in rather a hurry to think that I would die to please you, weren’t you?’

  John’s face was serious and his eyes were as cold as flints.

  ‘You’re healthy as ever,’ he said. ‘But I still see Death coming for you. You know it, and so do I. You feel well now because the sun is shining and you are out on horseback again. But things are not the same for you, Beatrice. And you are not such a fool you do not know when everything around you has been destroyed, and that the only thing left to die is you.’

  I bent down and patted Tobermory so that John should not see that my face had blenched when he spoke to me in that prophet’s voice.

  ‘And what shall you do?’ I said, my voice hard and under control. ‘When you have talked me into an early grave or into madness with boredom at this theme of yours? What do you do then?’

  ‘I will care for the children,’ he answered easily. ‘You hardly see Richard these days, Beatrice. You have either been plotting the downfall of Julia and Richard and Wideacre, or you have been ill in bed.’

  ‘And you care for Celia,’ I said, finding the point at which I could wound him in return. ‘That is why you did not tell her the whole package of crazy ideas you have about me and my life. When she came to you all in grief and all in terror you did not tell her she should be grieved, she should be terrified. Even though you yourself were grieved and terrified, did you? You soothed her and petted her and told her it could all be made right. And then you brought her home to be reconciled with her husband as if nothing were wrong.’

  ‘As if there were no monster in the maze,’ John said softly. ‘Yes. There are some sights and some thoughts that a woman — a good woman, Beatrice — should never have to think, should never need to know. I am glad to protect Celia from the poison that is in her house. It is possible to do because I know that this time of endurance will not go on for ever. The maze will collapse. The monster will die. And in the rubble I want Celia and the children safe.’

  ‘Fustian!’ I said impatiently. ‘It sounds like a scene from one of Celia’s romances. What do you think causes this collapse? How are Celia and the children safe? What nonsense you talk, John. I shall have to get you committed again!’

  His eyes went hard at the jest, but his face stayed serene.

  ‘The collapse will come about through you,’ he said certainly. ‘You have overreached yourself, Beatrice. It was a good plan and a clever one. But the price was too high. I do not think you can service the loans and then Mr Llewellyn will foreclose. And he will not only foreclose on the loans you made with Harry’s consent, he will foreclose on the others: that only you and he, and now I, know about. And he will refuse to accept the land. He will insist on money. And you will have to sell. And you will have to sell cheap, because you will be in a hurry. And all your promissory notes will fall due at once. And you will not be able to pay without selling land and more land. Then Wideacre will be stripped of its land and its wealth. And you will be lucky if you hold on to the house, but all the rest of this’ — he gestured to the garden, the green paddock, the shimmering pigeon-cooing wood, and the high pale hills, streaked with the white path — ‘all this will belong to someone else.’

  ‘Stop it, John,’ I said, my voice hard. ‘Stop it. Stop the way you curse me. Any pain, any threats from you and it will be I who smash the maze. I shall tell Celia that you are in love with her and that is why you drank. And that is why you came home with her. And I shall tell Harry that you and she are lovers. And Wideacre will be destroyed for you and her. She will indeed be in the rubble. And you will have brought the wreckage on her when she is divorced and parted from her child, and thrown off the estate, and shamed. If you threaten and curse me, if you meddle in my financial affairs, if you contact Mr Llewellyn and threaten my ownership of the land, I will ruin Celia. And that would break your heart. So do not threaten me, and do not curse me as you do.’

  John’s eyes were bleak and distant. ‘It is not I who lay the curse, Beatrice,’ he said. ‘You are your own curse. For every road you tread has a snake coiled in the path. If Death comes for you, if ruin comes for you, it will be because death and ruin are all that you know, all that you plan for, everything around you. Even when you think you are p