Wideacre Read online

  ‘Ralph.’

  I went to the window, to the open casement creaking on a hinge, and looked towards the high hills of the downs. Some conviction, some need, as blinding as the distant lightning, was shattering the southern horizon, was growing on me.

  ‘Ralph.’

  It had all gone wrong since I lost him.

  I ached. Not just the pain I had awoken with, of bruises in my softest, wettest, most vulnerable flesh. But the pain beneath my ribs, which I had lived with so long that I had thought it my nature to long and long and long until I was sick and exhausted with my unfulfilled passion. Until I grew dull and tired. Until every season was the same, until every plan was hollow, until every road led nowhere, and all there was was the absence of Ralph, and my lack of him, and my unswerving, unceasing, passion for him.

  And now, they said, he was coming.

  It had been the same for him. I knew. Not as a pretty woman knows, with the tactics of courtship, the easily broken promises, and easily told lies. It had been the same for him because we were two halves of a trap. We could only snap together. And even that death-toothed real trap could break only his legs, could break nothing between us. He was mine even though I had tried to kill him. He was mine even though I had sliced him in two as neatly as one slices a peach. He was mine even if he came to murder me.

  And I would be his.

  The window suddenly banged beside me and my eyes lost their impassioned haziness, and focused on the drive. I could see, I thought I could see, a glimmer of torches moving in a line under the shadows of the trees. They were coming up the drive. I was quite calm. Ralph, or a dream of Ralph, had lain with me and I was finished with longing and clinging to life and hoping to escape him. I was the child Beatrice again, who feared nothing.

  I turned to the mirror over the fireplace, lit only by the flashes of lightning, and unpinned my hair, shook out the powder, and let it sweep in a great glorious wave of copper and brass down over my shoulders nearly to my waist, as I had worn it when I was a child playing with another child in the woods of Wideacre. I smiled into my own reflection. If I had been superstitious, or if there had been any sense left in me, I should have made the sign of witchcraft against myself when I saw that smile in the mirror. My eyes had a blank greenness, rinsed of humanity. My smile was that of a madwoman. My face’s pale clear loveliness was so utterly corrupted from within that it was the face of a fallen angel, of one who has supped with a devil and used no spoon. I looked like a she-devil, as lovely as an angel from heaven but with eyes as green as a cat’s, as green as jade, as green as a snake’s. I felt an insane ripple of joy in my heart. The distant rumble of thunder sounded more like the salute for a queen than a warning.

  The thunder was coming nearer.

  I could smell rain on the wind, which was now cold. A good night wind, cool with a smell of rain falling on distant meadows. A cleansing rain to wash this pain and confusion away. Great heavy drops of rain to wash the wreckage clean.

  The rain was coming.

  And so was Ralph.

  I walked to the window seat, my gown shimmering in the repeated flashes of lightning. It was a night for demons. I could see some of the torches before they were hidden by the sharp bend of the drive, just before the house. They would be here soon. The lightning flashed again and I settled in the window seat where the casement opens like a tall door on to the terrace. I would see them rounding the bend from here.

  The torchlight bobbed as they came up the drive. Then the lightning flash split Wideacre’s sky in two with a great crack-crack! First, I saw his dogs, black as devils: one black lurcher, one black water-spaniel. One before, and one behind him, scouting as they had learned to do when he walked in the woods after poachers. The lurcher was in front, its black coat shiny with the rain, which was lashing down like black silver bolts from a low black sky.

  Then I saw him.

  They had not lied when they had told me about him. The horse was high, a thoroughbred and strong. Black without a single fleck of white on it. Utterly black. Black mane, black head, black eye, black nostrils. And toweringly high. Bigger even than Tobermory. And atop it ‘the Culler’, sitting ‘so oddly’. His legs stopped short at the knees, but he rode like one accustomed to holding his seat. He rode like a lord, one hand on the reins, the other clenched on his hip, holding something. Something I could not see. My Ralph with his black curls all wet with rain.

  A shaft of lightning made the scene noontime bright and showed my white face at the window. The dogs scouted up the terrace as if they were sniffing out a witch, and the lurcher came without a check to my window, and paused, and scratched, and whined. Then it reared up on its hind legs, and scrabbled at the window, and barked, bayed, at me.

  And Ralph turned his head.

  He saw me.

  His great horse reared and leaped up to the terrace as if it were no more than a grassy bank. When the lightning crashed again and the thunder bellowed, Ralph was between me and the light and his body shielded my eyes.

  I climbed up on the window seat like a girl slipping out to greet her lover. I swung open the window and stepped out. The rain was sheeting down in great thick rods, a wall of water. I gasped as it poured on my head. I was soaked in seconds, my silk gown a second skin.

  Beyond Ralph the mob had stopped, watchful, fearful. The torches hissed, sizzling in the rain, paled by the great blinding flashes. I was deaf with the barrel-rolling thunderclaps, and blinded by the light, but my eyes were on Ralph’s face and his smile, as I walked towards him, my head high, right up to the great horse’s head. The lightning split the sky and shone bright on the knife in his hand. His gamekeeper’s knife, for slitting the throats of cornered deer.

  I smiled and in the sharp blue light he saw my eyes gleam as he leaned down to me, as if he would catch me up to him, and hold me, and hold me, and hold me, for ever.

  ‘Oh, Ralph,’ I said with a lifetime of longing in my voice, and I held up my arms to him.

  And then his knife hand came down like a thunder blow. And the lightning itself was black.

  EPILOGUE

  Wideacre Hall faces due south and the sun shines all day on the yellow stone, illuminating mercilessly the great black scorch marks on the two walls left standing, and the blackened, charred roof timbers.

  When it rains the smoke stains run in great black smears down the honey-coloured walls, and the scattered rubbish from the house — Beatrice’s papers, even her map of Wideacre — blows around the garden, sodden, breaking into mushy scraps.

  As winter comes and the nights are longer and darker the villagers from Acre will not go near the Hall. Mr Gilby, the London merchant, wants to buy the estate from the widowed Lady Lacey but he is hesitating about the price, afraid of the reputation of the local poor, afraid of the mob. If he buys, he will have to wait until summer to rebuild; and bring in labourers from outside the county. No Sussex labourer would touch the house. Neither will the villagers go into the Wideacre woods, although the old footpaths are reopened. Miss Beatrice’s body was found in the leaves in a little secret hollow near the garden gate, a childhood hiding place. And now they say the whole wood is haunted by her, crying and crying for her brother who died the same night, when his heart — weak like his mother’s — could not stand the bolt to Havering Hall. Crying and crying for the land goes Miss Beatrice, a swatch of corn in one hand and a handful of earth in the other.

  If Mr Gilby does buy he will care neither for ghosts nor for profit. He is too practical a business man to mind the rumour of a ghost on his land. More important for the village, he cares little for profit. His money is made on guaranteed returns in the City. He does not put his faith in the weather, or the health of beasts, or the unreliable treacherous gods of Wideacre. He wants only to live in peace and enjoy his notion of country life. So his leases would be long, and the rents easy. But while he dithers, the footpaths are reopened and the new cornlands have self-seeded and gone back to meadow. If he does not come to Wideacre be