‘I shall be glad to have you back in the parlour!’ she said lovingly. ‘Now Richard is home, he can go out and help Mr Megson. I won’t have you fading before my eyes, little Julia. You were the toast of the season last year; I won’t be robbed of my social triumph next winter.’
I smiled, but I knew very well that next winter there would be no triumph for either of us, but much ill-hidden shame. Next winter I should be near my time and, instead of chaperoning me at my London debut, Mama would see her grandchild, conceived out of wedlock and born too early.
‘What are the men doing?’ John asked.
I glanced around. They were standing at a distance from the heap of stooks, aiming and carefully tossing their sickles. The little corn dolly was perched at the top and I saw my ribbon flutter in the breeze as one of the sickles whistled past it. Instead of smiling at the compliment, I felt a deep unease and a cold finger of fear down my neck that made me shudder in the hot afternoon sun. The anxiety which had been with me all these months seemed to be building into some sort of a crisis.
‘Don’t wait if you find it too hot, Mama,’ I said suddenly.
I wanted her away from the field, though I could not have said why. I wanted her away from the reapers playing their odd ritual game. I wanted her away from this last fruiting of the Wideacre harvest. I feared her seeing the ripeness of the wheat growing at my bidding and somehow knowing that I too was fertile, that the seed inside me was growing too.
‘Go for a little walk down to the beech coppice,’ I said invitingly. ‘It’s so cool down there. Don’t wait here. We’ll be some time before we pack up.’
‘Yes, we could,’ she said agreeably and looked to John.
He did not look at her; he was watching the men throwing their sickles. ‘Very skilful,’ he said to Richard.
In a sudden spasm of impatience I wanted them all away, wanted them clear of the field, my field, before the games ended, before anyone brought the doll closer, before anyone gave her to me. I wanted the little gig and my innocent mama away from this field. I felt ill with the certainty that something, a terrible revealing something, was about to happen.
I searched my mind for some way to persuade John to drive on, but he was intent on the sickles glinting in the glare as they were thrown. I glanced to Richard for help, but he had dismounted and was sitting idly on the top bar of the gate. Though he felt my eyes on him, he did not care enough for me to sense my anxiety. Ralph was coming up the hill; I could hear him swearing at the shire horses pulling the wagons. But he was not close enough to help me.
I could feel my anxiety building up to panic as if I were in a coffin of crystal with a glass lid coming down on me. And even if I screamed aloud for help, no one would hear and no one would know that I needed aid. The fragile shell of the lie which hid me from my mama, and from my Uncle John was about to tumble down about my ears, and no skill of mine would ever mend the shattered pieces. I knew that the truth was coming for me in this bright field. I could not even tell which way the cracks were running, but I could hear the structure of my life creaking and beginning to shift.
There was a shout as Jimmy Dart’s sickle caught the doll and he leaped up the pile to pull his sickle down. He ran to me with the doll still impaled on the point of the blade so he did not see what he was bringing me. No one in the field saw what it was, and I took it from the proferred blade with some thought of hiding it. My fingers were wary of the sharp edge, and Jimmy held the blade carefully still for me, beaming with his pride. I gazed at it, uncomprehending.
Then I turned scarlet with shame in a blush so deep that even the field and the sky seemed to look rosy red. But then the heat suddenly left my face and left me icy and white as I faced the truth, a clean honest truth which would smash the shell of lies at last.
The straw dolly had a face made of the head of a stalk of corn, and my pale-grey bow had been tied around her body to signify it was meant to be me. Her little arms were tied stalks, sticking out sideways, and her legs were two seed heads. Her belly was huge, unmistakably swollen, made of seed heads tied tightly together. She was pregnant, she was bursting with the fertility of Wideacre. She was massively, grotesquely made. She was meant to be a pregnant woman. She was meant to be me.
At the look on my face John rapped out my name and held out his hand to me in imperious demand. Scarcely knowing what I was doing, I handed the dolly to him, past my mama, who sat, still as stone, on the seat of the gig while the evil little thing was passed across her, under her blank brown gaze.
‘Julia .. .’ she said. It sounded like she had never said my name before and was trying out a new word. ‘Julia.’
John dropped the doll on the floor of the gig between his feet and put his boot down on its fat middle to hold it still.
‘Go home at once,’ he said to Richard and me. ‘At once.’
He backed and turned the gig in a skilled manoeuvre and whirled Mama away from the field before I could glimpse more than her face, so deathly pale that I feared she might faint and fall from the gig. Her parasol lurched, she was whiter than the grey satin. She slumped against John and did not hold to the rocking gig. She looked like a broken doll herself; and John drove her down the hill as if he were rushing a mortally wounded person home to die in her own bed.
I gathered the reins into one cold fist and clicked to Sea Mist to follow them. Richard dropped from the gate like a sleep-walker and heaved himself into the saddle. He pulled his horse over beside mine and we started, shoulder to shoulder, down the track in an illusion of unity.
Ralph had the wagon for the stooks pulled over to one side. ‘What’s happened?’ he demanded urgently. ‘Julia! What’s happened in the field?’
‘They know,’ I said. My lips could scarcely move, they were so cold and numb.
Ralph took in my blank face and Richard’s fearful scowl and dropped back.
‘Shall I come with you?’ he offered.
‘No,’ I said, and I rode past him without another word. To tell the truth, I did not see him.
In the field the reapers stood, sickles dangling in their hands, left without orders, left without a word. Once again the ground had cracked beneath the Laceys and once again Acre village, and the livelihood of Acre, would go tumbling into the crevasse. I glanced back at Jimmy Dart, his sickle still upraised where he had held it out to me, frozen like a statue, his blue eyes puzzled, his broad young face uncomprehending, a little afraid.
I did not blame him, the Bath linkboy I had brought safely home. I did not blame old Mrs Miles, whom I had saved from a pitiful death in the poor house. Jimmy Dart had played the game in the old way, and won. He had not known what he was bringing to me. I truly believed that old Mrs Miles had made the dolly with her fingers and with old magic – no thought in her mind at all. She liked me, she would not have injured me. The truth of my pregnancy had come out in her craft. And I knew – from the way I shuddered when I first saw the corn dolly – that it was not the first time that the old magic had welled up, like an unstoppable spring, on Lacey land.
Sea Mist jinked at a fledgling blackbird fluttering in the hedge, and I checked her with instinctive skill, but I felt my grip on the reins was weak and I feared I would drop them.
I knew I was going home to face the end of my girlhood and the loss of the love of my mama. But I felt some dread, almost a superstitious fear, as if there might be something still worse to come. I was shocked and I was afraid, but a still greater dread, like a pair of black dogs, stalked and circled me all the way as I rode home and then tossed the reins to Jem in silence in the stable yard. When I walked up the garden path, it seemed to me that they lay like couchant black lions on the lawn.
John was waiting for us in the parlour, standing by the mantelpiece; Mama was seated in her usual chair at the fireside. Out of habit she had a piece of work in her hands, some broderie anglaise; and she held her little silver scissors ready to snip out the pattern. For one moment everything seemed the same as it had always bee
n. This was still my safe home.
Then I saw with horror that Mama was not following the intricate pattern which she had taken days to copy. She was snipping aimlessly, shredding the expensive lawn, she was snipping random spiky little holes in the jagged material. John had not even noticed.
Richard and I came into the room. The silence and that mad little snip, snip, snipping noise rooted us on the threshold. Richard froze and I took one small step to the parlour table and clung to the back of the chair to steady myself. I felt my knees trembling too helplessly to stand without support. I wanted to run to my mama and throw myself down at her feet, but that detached little snip, snip, snip of the scissors frightened me away from her.
She had her head down, and her eyes were on the fine Irish linen in her hand; she was digging the little silver points into the material with her usual meticulous care, except that the holes were all wrong and she was ruining the work.
I kept my eyes on Uncle John. The only sound was the little snipping noise of the scissors and the nagging nerve-tearing call of the wood-pigeon outside the window in Wideacre wood.
‘Are you with child, Julia?’ John asked, his voice as sharp as Mama’s scissors, empty of emotion. But his face was trembling, his mouth working.
‘I don’t know,’ I said weakly.
‘Have you felt nauseous? Has your monthly flow ceased? Are your breasts tender?’ John rapped out his questions as though I were a kitchenmaid facing dismissal. I nodded like a jointed doll.
‘Mama!’ I said quietly, summoning her help.
Her head stayed down over the work as she enlarged some of the holes she had hacked and trimmed the ragged edges,
‘Excuse me,’ John said with mad politeness, and he crossed the room towards me. I flinched and stepped backwards until I was up against the wall. I gasped in horror when he placed his hand low on my belly and pressed hard.
‘Mama!’ I cried out.
She never even turned her head to see what he was doing to me. He walked back to the fireplace as if I had not spoken. He took out a fine silk handkerchief from his pocket and under my horrified gaze he wiped his hands as if the touch of my riding gown could soil him.
‘I conclude you are the father, Richard?’ John said, his voice an uninterested monotone.
‘Yes, sir,’ Richard said. Something in his voice made me turn to look at him. He was not blank with horror like the rest of us. His eyes were blazing blue. He looked utterly delighted. I could not think what was in his mind. He must be half mad, or perhaps he was rising to the challenge of this horror. Mama was bent industriously over her work, while I was where John had left me, backed against the wall, and John now clung to the mantelpiece. But Richard stood astride in the doorway, a smile on his face.
‘My God,’ said John. He made an odd little retching sound in his throat as though he were going to be sick.
‘And we are married!’ Richard said defiantly. ‘The child, the heir to Wideacre, will be born in wedlock. We were secretly married over a month ago, and you cannot break that. We will inherit Wideacre jointly, just as my mama planned!’
John’s head jerked up, his pale eyes blazing so brightly they looked almost white. ‘Not just your mama,’ he said, hissing through his teeth. ‘My God, you pair of fools! You do not know what you have done!’ he said, recapturing that precise monotone which told of a horror kept in check. ‘You do not know what you have done. She was not just your mama! She gave birth to you both. You have seduced and married your sister, Richard!’
No one said a word. It was as if we were a tableau in some theatre of horror. Then I gave a little sobbing scream and slumped on to one of the chairs at the parlour table.
Richard’s smile was wiped from his face. ‘You’re lying,’ he said uncertainly.
‘No,’ John said. ‘Beatrice conceived Julia with her lover, and she persuaded Celia to take the baby when they were in France on the wedding tour. Harry Lacey never knew the child was not his. Julia was born in France when he was absent. He came home early. The next time Beatrice conceived, she married me. After you were born, I discovered the truth, Richard, the foul truth that you are both Lacey bastards from the same whore.’
Mama’s scissors went snip, snip, snip in the silence. She had not looked up once. She had abandoned the little jagged holes and was slicing along the edge of the cloth in a delicate threadlike fringe.
‘Who is my father?’ Richard asked, utterly bemused.
I could not take my eyes from my mama’s downcast face. She was not my mama. She was not my mama.
‘Who is my father?’ Richard asked again.
John dropped into a chair by the empty fireplace; he seemed too weary to go on much longer. ‘Harry Lacey,’ he said indifferently. ‘Beatrice lay with her brother, Harry, and got you both. You are incestuous bastards, and now the two of you have conceived another.’
Mama’s head came up. ‘Harry’s child?’ she demanded. ‘Julia is Harry’s child? Beatrice’s lover was my Harry?’
‘Didn’t you know it?’ John demanded, his voice as hard as a costerman’s, of the woman he loved. ‘Didn’t you always know it in your secret heart? And you feared it and hid it from yourself, and I conspired with you in that lie.’
Mama dipped her head again to her work. ‘Yes,’ she said very softly. ‘I knew there was something evil between them. I tried not to wonder what it meant.’ She had dropped the scrap of lawn when she looked up, but she did not cease her work. Absent-mindedly she took a handful of the figured silk of her driving dress and started to cut perfectly symmetrical little holes in it. Snip, snip, snip went the scissors, and no ‘one thought to stop her.
Richard stared. ‘So I am Harry Lacey’s son,’ he said slowly. ‘I am the son of the squire.’
Nobody said anything. John’s eyes were on the empty grate. It looked like he was watching flames and glowing embers, but there was nothing there. Mama’s head was bent down over her dress. It was a cream silk with small yellow flowers. She was cutting the flowers out of the material with careful accuracy. The scraps fell around her feet as though she were sitting under a cherry tree shedding its petals.
‘I am the heir,’ Richard suddenly said, his voice strong. ‘I am the Son of the Laceys. Wideacre is my inheritance.’
‘Wideacre!’ John shouted. He jumped from his chair, explosive with rage. He crossed the room in two swift strides and took Richard’s lapels and dragged him close. ???? have got your own sister with child, and all you can think of is Wideacre?’
His blazing pale eyes scanned Richard’s frightened face and then he pushed him away as if he did not want to touch him.
‘You are true Laceys,’ he said bitterly. He looked at us with loathing. ‘Both of you,’ he said. His mouth was twisted as though he had accidentally bitten into something dead and rotting. ‘Both of you bred very true. All you care for is this filthy estate, all you chase is your own lusts. You are both Beatrice’s true children.’
We said nothing. I did not dare look up from the polished surface of the table. I could see my reflection. I was as white as a ghost and my eyes in that darkened mirror were huge and appalled.
John leaned his arm along the mantelpiece. ‘It will have to be annulled,’ he said levelly. The passion had gone from his voice and he sounded tired and old. ‘It can be the last thing I do for the pair of you. I will go to London and get an annulment on the grounds that you are brother and sister, and I shall put the estate on the market while I am there. Wideacre will be sold, and you two will be separated.’
I did not protest. Indeed, I consented.
The nightmare of the Laceys on Wideacre should end, whatever it cost me, whatever it cost Richard. That morning in the summer-house had been even worse than rape. It had also been a perversion. I wanted the Lacey line to be over for ever. I wanted no Lacey on God’s earth again after Richard and me. Most of all, I wanted the fairest part of God’s earth to be free of us. I wanted to be punished. I wanted to be exiled. I wanted the pain of
losing Wideacre and the pain of losing my name and my home and the father of my child to tear my heart out so I would never forget that there should be no future for the Laceys, so that I should never hope and plan again. I wanted to be gutted like a river trout and cleansed. ‘Yes,’ I said.
My mama spoke. Her dress was pock-marked with circular holes. ‘Yes,’ she said.
Richard’s blue eyes went from one face to another in the room.
I saw a flicker of hesitation pass across it and then he too nodded.
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘I’ll start at once,’ John said. ‘Celia, you will have to come with me as Julia’s guardian.’
Mama nodded.
‘Julia, you will go to Havering Hall and stay with your Grandmama Havering,’ John said. ‘You two are not to see each other until we return. Is that clear?’
We nodded in silence.
‘Richard, you will stay here until we get back. We should not be gone more than one night.’
Richard nodded.
John went for the door and my mama followed him.
‘Mama!’ I said pitifully. She paused and looked at me. Her eyes were hard. I had never seen her face as it was then. She looked through me as if she saw a green-eyed whore and not the child she had raised.
I hesitated. There was no appeal I could make. I saw her clear gaze drop down from my face and she looked at my belly where my child was growing.
‘You should change your dress, Mama,’ I said gently.
She glanced down at the gown, speckled with holes. ‘Yes,’ she said, and she left the room.
She did not touch me. She did not say farewell. She was gone before I could say goodbye, or ask for her forgiveness, or ask for her love. And I did not tell her how much I loved her.
Richard brought the news to me at Havering Hall in the evening. He came riding over, and as soon as I saw him, I knew something was wrong, for John had ordered him to stay at home and not to see me.
But John was dead, and Richard could do just as he pleased; my mama was dead too.