Wideacre

I called to one of the Tyacke boys, who was making snowballs in the lane, to come and hold Sorrel while I climbed awkwardly on the wall to reach the saddle, and then tossed him a penny for his help, and then another one because I liked his gap-toothed smile of hero worship as he looked up at me.

‘Gaffer Cooper is poorly, too,’ he volunteered, turning the coins in his hand and planning a feast of buns and toffee.

‘Bad?’ I asked, and the lad nodded. I could call on my way home. He was one of the cottagers who patched together a living on the fringe of the village where it merges with the common. In summer he had the odd day’s work harvesting or reaping in the Wideacre gang, in winter he would help someone kill a pig and be paid with a good measure of bacon. He had a couple of scrawny hens that sometimes laid an egg or two. He had a thin old cow that gave him a little milk. His cottage was built from wood scrounged and stolen from our woods, and from branches legitimately cut on common land. His roof was made of branches and sods of turf. His wood fire burned turves and wood from the common and filled the little room with smoke. He sat on a three-legged stool carved years ago, and he ate from a wooden bowl with a tin spoon. He cooked in a three-legged pot set in the embers of his fire, which burned on a stone in the middle of the room and smoked the room as well as the bacon hung from the rafters.

It was not a life I would choose to lead, but Gaffer Cooper had never had different and never settled to regular work and called no one master. In his dirty little shanty, sleeping on a bed of bracken, rolled up in rags, Gaffer Cooper called himself a free man; Papa, who had a sensitive eye for other men’s pride, always called him Gaffer Cooper and never John. And so did I.

Sorrel was tired of standing still, and chilled, so I gave him a brief canter down the snowy lane and back before turning right down the track that leads towards the cottages. The wood was silent, magical in the snow. The deep green pine trees and firs each held a thick line of snow along their branches and pointy fingers. Even the tiniest pine needles were capped with a sliver of ice. The silver birches looked grey instead of white against the icy brightness, and the beech trees’ grey trunks were pewter-coloured. As I rode I could hear the Fenny clattering louder around the ice-floes and I went closer to see the green water sliding secretly under little silver skins of ice to make silent pools under the white ceiling.

The snow in the woods was pockmarked with animal tracks. I saw the two round two long prints of a rabbit and the little dots of a weasel or stoat following close behind it. There were fox tracks, like a little dog’s, and even the scuffed trail of a badger whose low belly brushed the thicker drifts.

Looking up through the tracery of snow-laden branches, I could see from the sky that we would have more snow later in the day and I put Sorrel into a canter to get home before dinner. Someone had been down the track before me. A stout pair of boots and a pair of wooden clogs, so Gaffer must be ill indeed if he was being visited.

As we rounded the bend to his cottage I guessed I was too late. The door of his cottage stood wide open, something that happened generally only on the most scorching of summer days, and coming out was Mrs Merry, midwife and layer-out in Acre parish – and owner, as befitted her rank, of a good pair of boots.

‘Good day, Miss Beatrice. Gaffer’s gone.’ She greeted me matter-of-factly.

I drew rein beside the fence of hazel sticks.

‘Old age?’ I asked.

‘Aye,’ she said. ‘And the winter takes them.’

‘He had enough to eat, and enough clothes?’ I asked. Gaffer was not one of our people. He was neither tenant, labourer nor pensioner, but he had scraped his living on our land and I should feel to blame if he had died in want.

‘He ate one of his hens only last night,’ said Mrs Merry. ‘And he had survived many winters in those clothes and in that bed. You need have no fears, Miss Beatrice. Gaffer’s time was come and he went peacefully. Would you care to see him?’

I shook my head. There was no family in Acre who would be offended by my refusal. I could please myself.

‘Did he leave any savings?’ I asked. ‘Enough for a funeral?’

‘Nay,’ she said. ‘It’ll be a pauper’s grave for him. We have found nothing.’

I nodded. ‘I’ll stand the coffin and the service,’ I said briefly. ‘Set it in hand, Mrs Merry. I won’t have Wideacre folk buried in shame.’

Mrs Merry measured me with her eyes and smiled.

‘Eh, but you’re so like your papa!’ she said, and I smiled in return at the compliment: the best that could be paid me.

‘I hope so,’ I said and nodded my farewell.

In a day or two the plain whitewood coffin would take Gaffer’s remains to the churchyard and he would be buried in the far corner where the water pump is and the tools are kept. I would pay for a plain wooden cross with his name on it. The service would be read by the curate to whoever was there, idling from work, for Gaffer had few friends. A couple of the other cottagers might attend to pay their respects to one of their own from the village within a village, but Acre itself would be little touched. I would pay the extra penny necessary to toll the funeral bell for him, and at the sound the men ploughing in the fields, or trimming the hedges and digging ditches, would stop their work and pull off their caps to be bare-headed for the passing of the old man who never earned such a mark of respect in his life.

Then the bell would cease and the caps would go back on to the quickly chilled heads. The men digging would spit on their cold hands, grasp the spades again and curse the life that forced them to stand knee-deep in icy water in mid-January with no break until dinner, and no chance of being warm and dry until dusk.

The freezing weather was hard enough on the labourers but this winter it was a nightmare for the shepherds. It was especially hard because the snow fell so thick and so early that the sheep had not been gathered off the downs in time for them to lamb on the lower, more accessible hills. Day after grey snowy day we toiled up that blocked track to the top of the downs to poke about with long sticks in the snow to try to find the firm white lump that meant a buried sheep, and then set to the miserable job of digging the thing out.

We lost remarkably few because I made sure the men were out from dawn to dusk and they cursed me with language that should have dropped me faint with horror from the saddle, but that instead made me laugh.

They learned a great, if grudging, respect for me that winter. Unlike the labourers and tenants who saw me almost daily, the shepherds worked alone. Only at a time of crisis like this one when most of the flock was buried under six-foot drifts did they work in a gang commanded by me. They noted the advantage the horse gave me and cursed me roundly when I trotted past them up the track, or when they slipped and fell into great deceiving hills of snow while I rode dry-shod. But they knew also that not even the oldest, wisest one of them could match me for sensing where a sheep was buried or guessing where a little flock would have huddled. Then, when they were digging, more often than not I would be side by side with them in the snow, probing for the buried animal, and feeling for its head.

And when it came to rounding up the chilled and silly things to move them downhill, the shepherds knew that although I was tired and cold I would ride behind the stragglers and bawl at the dogs until we had them all safe in a lower meadow.

Only then, when the gate was pulled shut and hay thrown on the snow, would our ways diverge. The men would go home to their little cottages to dig out potatoes, or swedes, or turnips for their dinner, or reluctantly go to work their tract on the common fields. Or they would go out to set a snare for a rabbit or mend a leaking roof. Working, even in the dark, working, working, working, until they fell into their beds and slept, sometimes still in their wet clothes.

But I would trot home and toss the reins to a stable lad, climb the stairs to my room and sink into a tub before the fire while Lucy poured ewer after ewer of hot water over me and said, ‘Miss Beatrice! You will scald! You are all pink!’

Only when my skin was stinging with the heat would I heave myself out and wrap up in a linen towel while Lucy brushed my hair and piled it up and powdered it ready for the evening.

I found I could chat to Mama at dinner, and she showed some interest in my day, although the weight of her disapproval curbed my tongue. She disliked what I was doing, but even she could see that when a fortune of wool and meat lay buried in the snow one could not leave it to paid labourers to dig out, when and how they fancied.

But once the covers were removed I became quiet, and by the time the tea tray came into the parlour I was weak with sleepiness.

‘Really, Beatrice, you are good for nothing these days,’ Mama said, looking pointedly at a spoiled piece of embroidery which had been in and out of the work basket every night for a sennight. ‘It is hardly like having a daughter at all,’ she said.

‘I am sorry, Mama,’ I said in sudden sympathy. ‘I know it seems odd. But we have had such bad luck with the sheep. Another couple of days and they will all be in, and then Harry will be home in time for lambing.’

‘In my girlhood I did not even know the word lambing,’ said Mama, her tone plaintive.

I smiled. I was simply too tired to try to restore her to good humour.

‘Well, as Papa used to say, I am a Lacey of Wideacre,’ I said lightly. ‘And while I am the only one, I have to be Squire and daughter, all at once.’

I tossed the stitchery back into the workbox and rose to my feet.

‘Forgive me, Mama. I know it is early and I am no company for you, but I am too tired to stay awake.’

I bent down for her goodnight kiss, a cool resentful one, and left her.

Every night was the same. As I climbed each stair my tiredness fell away and my thoughts turned to Harry. His smile, the sweetness and tenderness of his expression, his blue eyes and the set of his coat became more and more vivid with every step I took up to my room. By the time I was undressed and lying on my back in bed, I could almost feel his body on mine and his arms around me. With a moan I would roll on my side and try to put the insane, senseless picture from my mind. I was sure that I longed for the touch, for the pleasure of Ralph. But the thought of Ralph was a nightmare to me, so my mind had played this trick on me and made me dream of Harry. Once he was home, and we were working side by side again, I might enjoy his company and this strange, fevered dreaminess would be gone. I tossed and turned, and dozed and woke with a jump until midnight. Then I sank into sleep and dreamed only of golden curls and a sweet, honest smile … and acres and acres of snow hiding precious sheep.

Harry came home the second week of February, later than he had promised. His lateness meant I had the first week of lambing to manage alone. The shepherds and I spent each long dark evening, after every long cold morning, finding sheep in lamb, checking the lambs and moving the sickly ones indoors to barns where they could be watched. Some of the flock, the less hardy ones, were to lamb indoors anyway.

I loved going into the barn when it was full of sheep. They rippled like a woolly river away from me as I walked through them. Outside the wind howled and the beams of the barn creaked like a ship at sea; but inside it was snug and sweet-smelling. The oil lantern cast a yellow glow when I checked the newborn lambs early in the morning, or last thing at night, and the smell of the oil on their fleeces lingered on my greasy hands when I rode home.

I was tired and chilled and smelling of lanolin one night riding home, when I noticed fresh hoof marks in the snow of the drive and, absurdly, my heart sprang up like a winter robin. ‘Perhaps Harry is home,’ I said to myself and spurred Sorrel on to a faster canter, sliding on the icy snow.

His horse was standing at the front door and Harry, gross in a caped cloak, was in the doorway, hugging Mama and answering her babble of questions with a laugh. The sound of Sorrel’s hoofs on the icy gravel made him turn and come back out to me, though I saw Mama’s detaining hand on his cape.

‘Beatrice!’ he said and his voice was full of joy.

‘Oh, Harry!’ I said and blushed as scarlet as a holly berry.

He reached his arms up to me and I slid from the saddle towards him. The capes of his riding cloak billowed round and half drowned me in the smell of wet wool, of cigar smoke and horse sweat. He held me in a hard hug before he released me and I sensed, with the sureness of my leaping heart, that his heart was pounding too, as he held my slim body in his arms.

‘Come along, you two,’ called Mama from the doorway. ‘You will both catch your deaths of cold out there in the snow.’

Then Harry’s arm was round my waist and he swept me indoors like some buffeting winter wind, so we arrived in the parlour breathless and laughing.

Harry was full of town gossip – the snippets of political news he had heard from old friends of Papa’s, the family news of our cousins and a bundle of little presents. He had the playbill of the theatre he had visited and the programme from a concert.

‘Wonderful music,’ he said enthusiastically.

He had visited the sights of London, too; Astley’s amphitheatre and the Tower of London. He had not been to Court but he had been to several private parties and met so many people he could not remember half their names.

‘But it’s fine to be home,’ he said. ‘My word, I thought I should never get here at all. The roads were shocking. I planned to come post but I left my baggage at Petworth and rode the rest of the way. If I had waited for the road to be cleared for carriages, I think I should have been there for Easter! What a winter it has been! You must have been busy with the sheep, Beatrice!’

‘Oh! Do not ask her!’ Mama threw her hands up with sudden vivacity at the return of her lovely boy. ‘Beatrice has become a full-time shepherdess and she smells of sheep, and talks sheep and thinks sheep until she can barely speak at all but only bleat.’

Harry roared. ‘I can see it’s high time I came home,’ he said. ‘You two would have been pulling caps in another week. Poor Beatrice, you will have had hard work to do in this weather! And poor Mama, with no company!’

Then I saw the clock and hurried to my room to change. My bath was even more scalding than usual that night and my scrubbing with the perfumed soap even more meticulous. I chose a deep blue gown of velvet with wide swaying loops of material over the paniers at the side. My maid powdered my hair with extra care and placed among the white curls deep blue bows that echoed the colour of the gown. Against the powder, my skin was clear, pale honey, my eyes hazel rather than green. I doubted if there were lovelier girls even in London, and after Lucy left me I stayed seated before my mirror gazing blankly at my reflection.

The gong roused me from my daze and I hurried downstairs in a rustle of silk petticoats and rich velvet.

‘Very nice, dear,’ Mama said approvingly, noting my unusually thorough powdering and the new gown.

Harry frankly gaped at me and I stared back at him.

In half-mourning, like Mama and me, he had to wear dark clothes, but his waistcoat was a deep, deep blue embroidered with intricate black thread. His long coat with the dandified wide cuffs and lapels was deep blue also – a sheeny satin that caught the light when he moved. His hair was tied back with a bow of matching blue material, and his satin evening breeches were blue also.

‘You match,’ Mama said unnecessarily. ‘How very fine you both look.’

Harry smiled, but his eyes had a confused, transfixed expression in them. With jesting ceremony he bowed to Mama and me, and offered us both an arm, but behind the smile and the ready courtesy I knew him to be keenly aware of my every move. I smiled back as if I was at ease, too, but the hand I put on his arm trembled, and when I sat in my chair the table swam before my eyes as if I was going to faint.

Harry and Mama exchanged family news over the dinner table and I concentrated on schooling my voice to make normal, laughing replies when one or other of them turned to me. After dinner Harry refused port and said he preferred to come at once with us to the parlour.

‘For I have brought home the family jewels from the bank, Mama,’ he said. ‘And I am longing to see them. Such a great weight! I had them tucked under my arm on the horse for I feared to leave them with the rest of my baggage. I was certain I should be robbed!’

‘There was no need to carry them,’ Mama said apologetically. ‘You could have left them with your valet. But you shall certainly see them.’

She went to her room for the key and then opened up the little chest and lifted out the three fitting trays.

‘Celia shall have these on her wedding day,’ she said, picking out the family heirloom, the Lacey diamonds: a set of gold and diamond rings, bracelets, a collar of diamonds, eardrops and a tiara.

‘I should think they would bring her to her knees,’ said Harry laughing. ‘They must weigh a ton. Have you ever worn them all, Mama?’

‘Good heavens, no!’ she said. ‘We only had one season in town after our marriage and I looked behind the times enough without being draped in old-fashioned jewels. These were given to me on my wedding day, as is the custom, and then stored at the bank. But Celia should at least see them in October.’

‘October?’ I said. The eternal piece of embroidery slipped in my hands and the needle jabbed into my thumb.

‘Oh, poor Beatrice!’ said Harry. ‘I must have this embroidered kerchief when it’s done. There are more blood spots on it than thread. What tortures you put her through, Mama!’

‘The torture is in trying to teach her,’ Mama said, laughing with her beloved son. ‘After a day out with your sheep she can barely see to put a stitch in its place. And she was always clumsy with a needle.’

She packed the jewels back into the box and took them up to her room. Harry took my hand in his and inspected the welling spot of blood on the ball of the left thumb.

‘Poor Beatrice!’ he said again and kissed the thumb. His lips opened and he sucked the little spot of blood. In my nervous, passionate state I trembled like a high-bred mare. The ball of my thumb was pressed against his teeth, and I could feel his tongue, wet and warm, sliding over the ridges of the thumbprint. His mouth was hot, and fascinatingly wet. I held my hand up to his face and scarcely breathed.

‘Poor Beatrice,’ he repeated. He raised his eyes and looked at me. I hardly dared move. There was such pleasure in having him touch me, such delight in a tiny gesture. I could not have taken my hand away had my life depended on it. But somewhere in the back of my mind was a growing awareness that he had kept hold of my hand for some time. The casual gesture was turning into a caress. There was silence.

He took the thumb from his mouth and inspected it with playful seriousness.

‘Do you think you will survive this wound?’ he asked.

‘I’m scarred from a thousand similar battles,’ I said, trying to keep my voice light, but I could not help it quivering. I noticed that he was breathing slightly faster and his eyes had that absorbed, incredulous look again.

‘Poor Beatrice,’ he said, as if he had forgotten any other words. He still held my hand and I rose from my seat to stand beside him. We were nearly the same height and if I had moved half a step closer my breasts would have rubbed his chest and our bellies brushed.

‘I hope you will always care for my wounds and sorrows so tenderly, Harry,’ I said.

‘My dear sister,’ he said sweetly. ‘I will always care for you. You must promise to tell me if ever you are unhappy or unwell. I am sorry I left you with so much work to do, and I was sorry to see you so pale.’

‘My heart flutters so, Harry,’ I whispered. It was hammering like a drum at the closeness of him. He put his hand against my ribs as if to feel for the pulse and I covered it with my own, pressing his palm against me. Scarcely knowing what I was doing, I slid it towards the curve of my breasts, very soft under the blue velvet.

Harry gave a gasp and his other hand came around my waist to draw me towards him. We stood like two statues scarce believing that our hearts were hammering hot blood round our bodies and that we were moving closer and closer together. I felt his leg press forward, then closed my eyes at the blissful moment of contact as our bodies touched down the quivering length. With my eyes still closed I blindly lifted my face and felt the warmth of his breath as his head bent down to me.

His lips touched mine as gently and as chastely as any brother’s could. Instinctively I opened my mouth in pleasure and felt his whole body flinch in surprise. He would have pulled away but my hand was behind his neck and held his face to me. Then my tongue slid into his virginal mouth and I licked him in a thoughtless fit of passion.

He jerked back, and I came to my senses and let him go.

‘That was a brotherly kiss,’ he said gently. ‘I am so glad to be home and to see you again that I wanted to give you a hug and a brotherly kiss.’ Then with cruel suddenness he turned on his heel and left me. Left me with a sweet smile and a sweet unconvincing lie.

He had lied to spare us both the knowledge of our mutual desire. He had lied because he knew nothing of passion between a man and a woman. He lied because he had two irreconcilable pictures of me in his mind. One his dear pretty sister, and the other the irresistible beauty who greeted the wheat carts with her head tipped back and the glory of a goddess of the harvest in her eyes.

So he left me with a lie and I stood, one hand on the mantelpiece of my mama’s parlour and my feet on the hearthstone of my home, and shuddered with longing for him. And looked that longing, at last, in the face.

Nothing could stop us or divert us from the road down which we were travelling, Harry and I. No word of mine or act of will could have kept us from each other. We were both like driftwood on the Fenny’s springtime floods, and our passion and our love grew as remorselessly as the buds on the trees and the spring flowers in the hedgerows.

If I had wanted to escape this destiny I do not know where I could have gone. I was as driven to Harry as the birds were driven to build nests and lay eggs; my heart and my body called to him as wilfully as the cuckoos called in the greening woods. He was the Master of Wideacre; of course I wanted him for my own.

The first days of the warm spring weather passed for me in a haze of sensual daydreaming. The lambs were fit and we transferred the flock back to the spring grass on the downs and I was suddenly at leisure. I rode around the woods; I even made myself a little line and spent one morning fishing in the high fast river. I took myself up to the downs and lay on damp grass gazing up into the blue sky where a few early larks were climbing. The spring sun warmed my cheeks, my closed eyelids, but inside I was scorching. And there was nothing I could do to stop it.

My nonchalant dismissal of the courtship Celia enjoyed was now past history. When Harry and Mama spoke of the October wedding, I felt nauseous with envy. Harry’s every other sentence was of Celia and her likes and dislikes and I could scarcely school my face to remain smiling and serene when I heard her name. She was no longer something off Wideacre, as distant and unimportant as the London scene; she was a threat to me that was coming ever closer. She held my brother’s heart in her little hands. She would be coming into my home; she would sit at the foot of the great Wideacre table and Harry would smile down the length of it to her. Worse, most nightmarish picture of all, every night of our lives she and Harry would climb the stairs together and shut the bedroom door, and he would hold her and possess her while I lay in my single bed and trembled with longing.