The Complete Wideacre Trilogy: Wideacre, The Favoured Child, Meridon

Harry had changed in this last term. He had lost his rounded, puppy-fat face and looked like a clear, lean youth rather than a golden baby. He was taller. He greeted Papa with a frank smile of affection and beamed at Papa’s great bear-hug. He kissed Mama’s hand and cheeks with tenderness, but he did not cling to her. Then, and this was the greatest surprise of all, he looked around for me and his bright blue eyes lit up when he saw me.

‘Beatrice!’ he said, and jumped up the front steps in two long-legged strides. ‘How pretty you have grown! How grown up you are! Do we still kiss?’

I lifted my face to him with an easy smile in reply, but I felt my colour rise at the touch of his lips on my cheek and the soft prickle of the little growing hairs of his upper lip.

Then Mama swept upon him and took him into the house, and Papa talked loudly over her fluttering inquiries about the roads and the inns and when he had last dined, and they all left me alone on the sunny front door steps as if I had left the house and belonged nowhere at all.

But it was Harry who paused at the parlour door and looked back through the open front door and called to me. ‘Come in, Beatrice!’ he said. ‘I have a present for you in my bags.’

And my heart suddenly lightened to see his smile and the hand he held out to me. And I went with quick steps into the house and felt that perhaps Harry might not displace me, but could make my home a happier place for me.

However, as the days went on Harry’s charm wore a little thin. Every housemaid, every tenant’s daughter, had a smile for the good-looking young Master. His new confidence and awareness of himself won him friends everywhere he chose to ride. He was charming, and he knew it. He was handsome, and he knew it. We laughed that now I had to look up to him, for he was a head taller than me.

‘You will not bully me any more, Beatrice,’ he said.

He was still bookish: two of his trunks from school were filled with nothing but writings on philosophy, poems, plays and stories. But he had outgrown his childish illnesses and was no longer forced to spend all days indoors reading. He even made me feel ashamed that I had read so little. I might know more about the land than Harry ever could know, for I had spent years out on Wideacre and my heart was in it, as his never was. But that counted for little when Harry would toss off a reference to a book and say, ‘Oh, Beatrice! You must have read it! Why it’s in our library. I found it when I was about six.’

Some of his books were about farming, too, and not all of them were foolish.

This new Harry was the product of the natural growth of a boy nearing manhood. The ill health of his childhood was forgotten. Only Mama still worried about his heart. Everyone else saw his slimmer body, the strength in his arms, the brightness of his blue eyes and his conscious, sly charm with the pretty housemaids. But the principal influence was still Staveley. Staveley’s name was once more heard daily in Mama’s parlour and at the dinner table. Mama had her own opinions about Staveley and his gang. But she kept her head down, her tongue still and let her adored son talk and talk. He boasted about his role as Staveley’s right-hand man. The gang had grown more and more daring and its discipline more and more strict. Harry was second in command, but that had saved him no beatings from the demigod Staveley. Staveley’s swift rages, his harsh punishments, his tender forgiveness, were retailed to me in many confidences.

Harry missed his hero terribly, of course. Throughout his first weeks at home he wrote every day, asking for news of the school and Staveley’s gang. Staveley himself replied once or twice in an ill-formed and misspelled scrawl Harry treasured. And another boy wrote once or twice. His last letter told Harry he was now Staveley’s second in command. On that day Harry looked gloomy, took his horse out in the morning, and was late for dinner.

Yet however pleasant Harry could now be as a companion, with him at my side I was no longer free to slip away to meet Ralph by the river, on the common land or on the downs. As the days went on, I grew more and more impatient with Harry always at my side. I could not get rid of him. Mama wanted him to sing to her; Papa needed him to ride to Chichester, but Harry chose to go with me, while Ralph waited and waited and I burned up with desire.

‘Every time I order my horse from the stables, he has to go riding, too,’ I complained to Ralph in a snatched moment as we met by accident on the drive. ‘Every time I go into a room in the house he trails around after me.’

Ralph’s bright dark eyes shone with interest.

‘Why does he follow you so close? I thought he was tied to your mother’s apron strings?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘He’s never paid much heed to me before. Now I can’t shake him off.’

‘Maybe he wants you,’ said Ralph outrageously.

‘Don’t be silly,’ I said. ‘He’s my brother.’

‘Maybe he’s learned something at that school of his,’ Ralph persisted. ‘Perhaps he’s had a wench at school and learned to look at a girl. Maybe he sees, like I saw, that you are young and burning and ready for pleasure. Maybe he’s been away from home so long he’s forgotten he should think of you as a sister and just knows he’s in the same house as a girl who is warmer and lovelier every day and looks just about ready for all that a man could offer.’

‘Nonsense,’ I said. ‘I just wish he would leave me alone.’

‘Is this him?’ Ralph asked, nodding to an approaching horseman. My brother, in a riding coat of warm brown, which set off his broadening shoulders, was trotting towards us. He looked, surprisingly, like a young copy of my father, mounted on one of the high Wideacre hunters. He had my father’s proud, easy way and his ready smile. But Harry’s sweetness was all his own and his lithe slimness showed no sign of Papa’s broad solidity.

‘It’s him,’ I confirmed. ‘Be careful.’

Ralph stood a little back from my horse’s head, and pulled his forelock respectfully to my brother.

‘Sir,’ he said.

Harry nodded at him with a sweet smile.

‘I thought I’d ride with you, Beatrice,’ he said. ‘We could go up on the downs for a gallop.’

‘Certainly,’ I said. ‘This is Ralph, Meg’s son, the gamekeeper’s lad.’ Some devil prompted me to make them face each other, but my brother barely glanced at him. Ralph said nothing, but watched my brother intently. Harry simply did not realize Ralph was there.

‘Shall we go?’ he said, smiling. With a sudden shock I remembered the gulf between Ralph and me, which I had forgotten in the days of sensuality under the equal sky. Harry, of my blood and my Quality, ignored Ralph because Ralph was a servant. People like us, my brother and me, were surrounded by hundreds and thousands of our people who meant nothing; whose opinions, loves, fears and hopes never could mean anything to us. We might take an interest in their lives, or we might ignore them completely. It depended wholly on ourselves. They had no choice in the matter. For the first time, seeing Ralph beside my graceful, princely, high-riding brother, I blushed in a horror of shame, and the dreams of those spring days seemed a nightmare.

We turned our horses and moved off. I felt Ralph’s eyes on us as he watched us ride away, but this time they did not fill me with joy but with dread. I rode stiff-backed, and my mare felt my unease and pricked her ears and was wary.

I was proud, but I was young and sensual and it had been many days since I had been alone with Ralph. The track up to the downs was where I had ridden with my father on the first day I had seen the sweep of Wideacre from horseback, and it was a favourite meeting place for Ralph and me. As we rode through the beech coppice I could remember a long lazy afternoon of teasing each other’s desire in a deep shady hollow, and as the horses climbed to the highest point of the downs they passed one of our little nests of ferns. My shame faded in the memory of pleasure.

In that spot, only a few yards from the hoofs of my brother’s horse, I had insisted that Ralph lie as still as a statue while I undressed him and ran my tongue and the long tresses of my hair all over his body. He had groaned with desire and with the conflicting pain of the struggle to lie still. In sweet revenge, he had laid me on the grass and kissed me lingeringly all over, in every unexplored sensitive crevice of my naked body. Only when I was actually weeping with longing did he slide into me.

Remembering that pleasure made me burn with a wet heat and I glanced sideways at my brother in sudden dislike that he should interrupt my summer with Ralph now the bracken stood high to hide us, and only a soaring peregrine falcon could see with his sharp black eyes our secret nakedness.

I said suddenly, ‘I have to go, Harry. I am not well. It is one of my headaches.’

He looked at me with quick concern. I felt a passing pity at his tender gullibility.

‘Beatrice! Let me take you home.’

‘No, no,’ I said, maintaining the pretence. ‘You enjoy your ride. I shall go to Meg’s house and have some of her feverfew tea. That always cures them.’

I cut short his protests and anxiety by turning my horse back down the way we had come. I felt his eyes upon me and drooped in the saddle as if every step jolted my aching head. But once I was under the shelter of the beech trees, and out of sight, I sat up and swung along at a good pace back down the track. I took the short cut to Meg’s cottage – not up the drive but a neat little jump over the park wall – and then a brisk canter alongside the Fenny to where the little heap of a house slumbered in the sunshine. Ralph was sitting outside, his dog outstretched beside him, knotting a cord into a snare. At the very sight of him my heart twisted inside me. He heard the horse’s hoofbeats and laid his work aside. His smile as he walked to the gate to meet me was warm and easy.

‘Shaken off your high and mighty brother then?’ he asked. ‘I felt I was dirt on the road compared to him.’

I had no answering smile. The contrast between the two of them was too painful.

‘We rode on the downs,’ I said. ‘Near our places. I missed you too much. Let’s go to the mill.’

He nodded as if accepting an order and the smile had gone from his eyes. I tied the mare to the gate and followed him along the little path. As soon as he was inside the door he turned, took me in his arms and started to say something, but I dragged him down to the straw and said urgently, ‘Just do it, Ralph.’

Then my anger and my sadness melted as I felt the familiar, ever new pleasure starting to warm me. He kissed me hard with an anger and sorrow of his own, and then opened the front of my gown at the neck. With shaking fingers I untied the leather thongs at the front lap of his breeches while he fumbled among the layers of petticoats under my riding habit. I said impatiently, ‘Let me!’ and swept the habit and petticoats off over my head.

Naked, I spread myself under him and shivered with pleasure as his weight came down on me. We were panting like hounds, hard-pressed. My hands gripped his buttocks forcing him into me, and in some distant recess in my head I could hear my sobbing whimper of pleasure settle into a rhythm of sighs that matched the rocking of our loving bodies. Then the great half-door swung wide open and a white wall of brilliant sunshine fell on us like a physical blow. For a second we were frozen with shock and terror, Ralph twisting round and me peeping white-faced over his shoulder.

In the sunlit archway stood my brother, his eyes blinking in the gloom, peering at the sight of his naked sister impaled by lust on a dirty threshing floor. For a split second nothing moved, like an obscene tableau, then Ralph leaped off me. I rolled to one side, crouching for my clothes and Ralph hitched his leather breeches over his hard nakedness. Still no one spoke. The silence lasted a lifetime. I stood, my new riding habit clutched to my naked breasts, staring at my brother in a sort of terror.

Then Harry gave a choking cry and rushed at Ralph with his riding whip upraised. Ralph was heavier and taller, and had been fighting village lads since he could walk. He fended Harry off and Harry’s wild blows with the whip fell only on his arms and shoulders. But then a cut across his cheek slashed him into anger and he jerked the whip from Harry, thumped him hard in the belly and tripped him roughly to the floor. Harry thudded down on his back and a sharp kick from Ralph’s foot into the crutch made him scissor together in a ball. He cried out, I thought in pain, and I called urgently, ‘Ralph. No!’

But then my brother’s face lifted from the dusty straw and I saw his angelic smile and the haze of his blue eyes. My blood ran cold as I recognized Harry’s blissful expression of happiness as he lay in the dirt at Ralph’s feet and gazed slavishly up the length of his tall body and at the whip in his hand. He shifted his body in the dust and crawled towards Ralph’s bare feet.

‘Beat me,’ he said in a begging, childish voice. ‘Oh please, beat me.’

As Ralph’s incredulous eyes met mine in the dawning realization that we would escape scot-free, I knew at last why my brother had been expelled and the mark Dr Yately’s school had left on him for life.

Ralph’s light flicks of the whip slapped Harry’s well-cut jacket and breeches and Harry tightened his grip on Ralph’s naked foot and gave a sharp cry then a shuddering sigh of pleasure. The future Master of Wideacre sobbed like a baby with his face buried in dirty straw, his hands cupping a labourer’s foot. Ralph and I looked at each other in utter silence.

That silence lasted, it seemed, all summer. My brother no longer dogged my footsteps, walked in my shadow, hung around the stables while I watched my horse being groomed, trailed behind me when I walked in the garden, sat at my side in the parlour in the evening. Now he followed Ralph. My father was pleased that Harry should be out on our land and not wandering around the house or sitting indoors. Slowly Harry learned the fields, the woods and the River Fenny as he followed in Ralph’s footsteps as faithfully as Ralph’s new black spaniel puppy. As Ralph checked the coverts, scattered grain for the game birds, set wire-noose traps and noted the fox holes and the badgers’ dens Harry shadowed him, learning, in the course of his faithful pursuits, the secrets of Wideacre I had learned as a child.

I was free of him at last, but Ralph and I were impossibly awkward when we met in my brother’s silent, sharp-eyed presence. Even on the few days when I rode out early to see Ralph before Harry was up, we did not embrace with the old passion. I felt chilly and tense and Ralph was stoical and silent. I felt as if at any moment my brother might come upon us and might again crawl to Ralph’s feet for a beating. I could not even ask Ralph if he and my brother …? If on their long wanderings around the estate they, too, paused in sheltered hollows and …? Whether when Ralph’s untrained puppy rolled on its back after a beating, Ralph turned to Harry with the whip still raised and …? I could not. I could not picture the two of them together; I could not find words for the questions I longed to ask, but did not dare.

Perhaps I should have felt jealous, but I felt nothing. The magical summer of Ralph, the dark god, seemed to be over. It had ended like the magic it was, as soon as it had begun. It ended for me on the drive on that hot day when Ralph pulled his forelock to my brother and my brother had not even noticed. Ralph had taught me about pleasure, and to keep my heart well guarded, but there could be no future for us. He was one of our people, a servant, and I was a lady of Wideacre. When I rode to hounds on a hunter of my own, or took the carriage to church, or walked over our fields, I should not want to see Ralph slouching beside a hedge smiling at me with his secret, knowing smile. It was not jealousy but a sharp sense of caste that made me hate that smile when I saw it directed at my brother; when I saw the gamekeeper’s lad with the next Master at his beck and call.

So I saw little of Ralph in the following weeks and he did not seek me. He smiled that secret smile at me once when I was driving down the lane to Acre beside Mama in the carriage, and I thought I saw behind his velvety black eyes some message. It was as if he were waiting for something. For a chance to speak freely with me, for an opportunity to turn a long-considered idea into words. But he was a country boy and believed in waiting for the right season.

In any case, his time was taken up with a sudden increase in poaching. The price of mutton had soared sky high after an epidemic of foot rot in the spring, and even our own tenants were not respecting our coverts. Pheasant after pheasant went missing and at every meal Harry spoke of Ralph’s plans to catch the poachers and praised Ralph’s determination and daring.

It was a dangerous job. The penalty for poaching is death by hanging and the men driven to it are desperate men. Many a poacher has added murder to his crimes – clubbing down a gamekeeper who had recognized him. Ralph kept his guns constantly primed and carried a heavy stick. His two dogs – the black lurcher and the black spaniel puppy – scouted before and behind him, as much to protect their master as the pheasants.

At breakfast, dinner and tea we had enthusiastic accounts from Harry as to how the war against the poachers was going, and how Ralph’s assistance to the gamekeeper was making all the difference. Then when Bellings, the keeper, fell sick with the flux, Harry was urgent that Ralph be paid an extra two shillings a week and given the job until the older man was well again.

‘He’s very young,’ said my papa cautiously. ‘I think it might be wiser to bring in an older man until Bellings is well.’

‘No one knows the estate better than Ralph, Papa,’ said Harry confidently. ‘And although he is young he is fully grown and as strong as an ox. You should see how easily he throws me when we wrestle! I don’t think any other person could do the job better.’

‘Well,’ said my papa tolerantly, his eyes on Harry’s bright face, ‘you’ll be the Master here when I am gone. Appoint a young keeper like Ralph and you will work with him for all your lives probably. I’m happy to take your advice on this.’

My eyes flickered to Papa’s face and then back to my plate. Only a few weeks ago Papa would have asked me what I thought. Then I would have praised Ralph to the skies, for I adored him. Now I was not so sure. He had my brother in utter thrall, and my ears had pricked up at the mention of their wrestling bouts. It sounded like Staveley all over again. And for some reason, I could not have said why, I feared the idea of Ralph having such a hold on Harry’s impulsive heart.

‘I need someone to check the sheep today,’ said Papa, looking down the table with his eyes equally on Harry and me.

‘I’ll go,’ said Harry, ‘but I must be done by dinner. Ralph has found a kestrel’s nest and I am going after it this afternoon before the hen lays a second brood.’

‘I’ll go,’ I said. ‘They’ll need to be checked for foot rot and you will not recognize the signs, Harry.’

Papa beamed, unconscious of the latent jealousy in my voice.

‘It seems I have two bailiffs then!’ he said, pleased. ‘What d’you say, ma’am?’

Mama smiled, too. At last everything was falling into what she saw as its proper place. Only I was still intractable.

‘Harry should go,’ she said sweetly. ‘I need Beatrice to cut some flowers this morning, and this afternoon she may come with me and pay some calls.’

My eyes flew to Papa’s face in an instinctive, silent appeal. But he was not looking at me. Now his son was home our easy, loving comradeship had taken second place. He was watching Harry learning his way around the land with as much love and interest as he had shown when he had been teaching me. There was pride as well as love in his eyes when he looked at his tall, golden son. He saw Harry growing, broadening and developing from the milksop mother’s boy into a young man. And he saw in him the future Master of Wideacre.

‘Harry can go then,’ he said with careless cruelty. ‘I’ll ride out with you, Harry, and show you what foot rot looks like. If Beatrice is right and you do not know, then it’s high time you learned. Wideacre is not all play, you know!’

‘I wanted to ride today,’ I said, my voice small and my face mutinous.

Papa looked at me and he laughed as if my disappointment and pain were funny.

‘Ah, Beatrice!’ he said with casual, worthless affection. ‘You must learn to be a young lady now. I have taught you all I know on the land. Your mama must teach you all you need to know in the house. Then you can rule your husband in and out of doors!’ He laughed again and Mama’s little tinkling laugh told me I had been beaten.

Harry learned to spot foot rot from Papa and he also used the time to persuade Papa that Ralph and Meg should be rehoused. When I heard him mention it at tea, I could not keep a still tongue in my head.

‘Nonsense,’ I exclaimed. ‘Ralph and Meg do very well in their little cottage. It’s practically rent-free as it is, and Meg is a sluttish housekeeper. The straw roof is blowing away because Ralph is too lazy to glean straw to rethatch it and Meg is too idle to care. They’ve no call to be rehoused. Meg would not know what to do with a good house.’

My father nodded his agreement, but he looked to Harry. The way his eyes strayed from me cut me to the bone. He was looking at his successor, his heir, measuring his judgement. My opinion as the daughter of the house might be right or wrong, it hardly mattered. But Harry’s judgement mattered very much, for on him the future would depend. He was the male heir.

Papa had not ceased to love me. I knew that. But I had lost his attention. He had broken the thread of our constant companionship that had held me ever since he first took my pony on a leading rein and that had kept my mare to his horse’s shoulder ever after. Now there was another horse riding beside my papa: the future Squire’s.

I might ride my mare, or practise the piano, or paint little pictures, it hardly mattered. I was the daughter of the house. I was just passing through. My future lay elsewhere.

And while Harry had Papa’s ear, Ralph had Harry’s. And if I knew Ralph he would use that influence for his own ends. Only I could see clearly into Ralph’s mind. Only I knew the longing for the land. Only I knew how it felt to be an outsider in your own home, on your own land. Forever longing to belong and to be secure. Forever denied.

‘Ralph’s a first-rate man,’ Harry said firmly. He had lost most of his quiet diffidence but still had his gentle voice and manners. He was openly disagreeing with me, without a thought in the world that I might be irritated or angry. ‘It would be a shame to lose him and there are many landlords who would pay him more and house him better, too. I think he should have the Tyacke cottage when the old man dies. It’s a handy cottage and near to the coverts.’

I nearly exploded with anger at my brother’s stupidity. ‘Nonsense! Tyacke’s cottage is worth £150 a year and the entry fee to a new tenant is £100. We can’t throw money like that away on Ralph’s convenience. We could repair his old cottage or move him into a small cottage in the village, but the Tyacke cottage is out of the question. Why, it’s practically a house! What would Ralph or Meg want with a front parlour – they’d only use it to keep the pheasant chicks in.’

My mother, stone-deaf to the discussion, heard only the tone of my voice and it roused her from her habitual indifference.

‘Beatrice, decorum,’ she said automatically. ‘And don’t interfere with business, dear.’

I ignored the caution, but my father nodded at me to be silent.

‘I’ll consider it, Harry,’ he said. ‘Ralph is a good man, you’re right. I’ll look into it. He’s reliable with pheasants and foxes and we need to keep him on the estate. Beatrice is right that the Tyacke property is a handsome cottage, but Ralph does need something more than that shack by the stream. Full of ideas Ralph is. Why, he’s even got one of those mantraps for the woods. He knows his job and he works hard. I’ll consider it.’