Wideacre Read online

When the sun started sinking, late in the afternoon, and the sky was like warm mother-of-pearl with fleecy clouds of pink and the pearly greyness of twilight, I said, ‘All right. You can stop now.’

  I waited while they cleaned their sickles and stacked them tidily on the wagon. Then they put on their jackets and the women threw shawls over their shoulders for the weary walk home. I watched them file out of the field, all silent, as if they were too tired and too sad for speech. A newly wed couple walked as a pair, with arms around each other, but she rested her head on his shoulder in a gesture that seemed more like sympathy than passion. The older couples walked side by side with a yawning gulf between them that comes from poverty miserably shared that has no ending. A lifetime filled with regrets. I checked that they had fastened the fence carefully behind them, and watched them down the track towards Acre. I kept my horse still until they were out of sight around the corner and I was alone in the glooming wood. Then I set Tobermory to ford the Fenny and cantered along the track towards the drive and my home.

  My mind was calm. A good day’s work and a yield better than I had a right to expect. If my luck held and I could be the goddess of good weather just once more, just one more year, the gamble would have paid off.

  If I could pay off the most pressing creditors entirely and make prompt repayments on other debts, I could restore faith in Wideacre among the money-men. Once they believed that I could service my debts they would plot against me no more. The spreading of a little gold and the harvest of my fertile fields would serve as good security. These men were foxes — they fed off dying animals; they killed only weak prey. They surrounded Wideacre when they thought it would fail. At the first sight of success I would be offered generous credit again.

  The balance between utter ruin and total triumph now rested on whether I could get the wheat in with a surly, rebellious, undernourished workforce, before the good weather broke and spoiled the standing crop. If I did, I should draw a bounty payment from Mr Gilby and Wideacre would be secure for at least a year. The wind seemed set fair, the sky a faithful promise of clear weather on the morrow. The chances were good.

  My heart was not light, for my heart was a shard of heavy glass these days, and I despaired of ever again feeling it lift with joy at simply being alive. But my mind at least was calm. And my courage was as dauntless as ever.

  So I clicked to Tobermory and he lengthened his fast stride while the shadows and the ghosts slid past us and we saw the lights of the house through the dark pillars of tree trunks of the wood.

  ‘Gracious, how late you are,’ said Celia, as I clattered into the stable yard. ‘Had you forgotten we were going to supper with Mama?’

  ‘Forgive me, Celia,’ I said, sliding from the saddle and tossing the reins to a stable lad. ‘I had forgotten altogether.’

  ‘I can make your excuses if you wish. But won’t you be dull all alone at home?’ she asked. The carriage stood waiting for them; Celia scanned my face in the twilight, exquisite in her evening gown, Harry and John immaculate behind her.

  ‘Not at all,’ I said, smiling at the three of them without affection. ‘How very grand you are! It would take me hours to achieve such a pinnacle of elegance. Leave me in my dirt, and tell me all about it tomorrow.’

  ‘We could send the carriage back for you,’ Celia suggested, as she mounted the steps and spread her grey silk dress carefully over the seat.

  ‘No, no,’ I said. ‘I do indeed assure you. I am tired and longing for my bed. And I must be up early to be in the field with the reapers tomorrow.’

  Celia nodded, and Harry bent and kissed my cheek as he passed me.

  ‘Thank you, my dear,’ he said. ‘Squire of Wideacre!’

  I smiled at the jest, but my eyes were wary when John took my hand. ‘I’ll bid you good day and goodnight too then,’ he said civilly. His sharp eyes scanned my face. ‘You look tired, Beatrice.’

  ‘I am bone-weary!’ I laughed. ‘But a hot bath will set me to rights. And a huge supper. I would eat Lady Havering out of house and home if I came.’

  John’s smile reached his eyes no more than my mirthless performance warmed me.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It is indeed a hungry harvest this year.’

  He dropped my hand and got into the carriage with Harry and Celia, and the odd little threesome rolled off. I saw nothing more of them that night. After I had scalded the aches out of me with one of my boiling baths, I ate a supper big enough for two, and rolled into my bed like a hedgehog ready for winter. Before I slept the thought of the hidden tears in young Rogers’s eyes gave me a strange sharp pain, somewhere beneath my ribs. But then it passed. Nothing touched me much these hot, sad days.

  I saw little of Harry, Celia or John the next day, or the next. The August social round was starting, and that meant picnics and fêtes and fairs in Chichester, and midsummer revels and late balls. For me it meant the wheat harvest, and that alone. Indeed the only time I noticed the gay life Celia was leading was when she wanted the coach horses when I had ordered them to be harnessed to an extra wagon. I refused to allow her the horses and Celia, the sweetest summer merrymaker that ever was, renounced the picnic without a frown, and made a summer ball for the children instead. She laughed and danced in the little summerhouse in the rose garden while John strummed a guitar, as if she cared not whether she was at a ball or alone with the children. I could hear her laughter, and her light step on the wooden floorboards while I made up the accounts and readied the wages at my desk. Through the glass I could see my son, and Julia, and Celia, hand-clasped, ringing-a-roses all afternoon.

  I felt no regret at being behind the window while they were out in the sunshine and little Richard’s knees grew browner and his face bloomed with speckles of freckles like a lapwing’s egg. I did not mind seeing them through glass. My work this summer would mean I need never worry again when I opened the drawer that held the bills. Under one heavy glass paperweight were the terrifying quarterly demands from the money-lenders, the mortgage-holders, and the creditors. But under another was a sheet of paper with a list of yields from the wheatfields. And every sun-filled long day, while the workers sweated and swung the sickles, and I sat motionless on Tobermory in the shadow of a hedge if I could find one, Wideacre was growing and ripening its way into breaking even. If the weather held, if the uncut fields yielded equally well, we might even make a tiny profit.

  This summer I might be living the life of a despised bailiff, but next summer I should be as blithe and as beloved as Celia. For one season, for one season only, I had to be either indoors counting the gains, or out on the fields watching for treachery. Next summer I would be the prettiest girl in the county again. Next year I should teach Richard to dance with me, not with Celia. Next year I should not feel this sluggish coldness. I should feel joy again, I would be as happy, as easy, as uncomplicated as Celia.

  There was a tap on the door and it was Harry, dressed to cut the corn. Instead of his dark silken breeches and waistcoat he had trews of homespun. But he had kept his fine linen shirt, and his polished leather riding boots. He looked like a painter’s idea of a farm labourer. He was a cruel travesty of the young golden god who had brought in the harvest only three years ago. His face then had been round and golden, now it was plump and flushed with the heat. His features then were as clear as a Greek statue and now even his profile was blurred, with fleshy cheeks and a double chin. And Harry’s lithe young god-like body was now that of an ordinary man, a little older-looking than his years: over-indulged, overweight, under-exercised.

  He had lost his early promise of intelligence, too. The Harry who had gone to school had been a scholar with a keen love of books and learning for its own sake. He came home with the sharp wits knocked out of him by the school’s corruption and by the discovery of his own perverse taste for pleasure. All he read these days were books on farm machinery, the odd fashionable novel, and occasionally stories about punishment and pain, which he kept in a secret box in the room at the top of the s