Celia would not even enter the parlour after dinner but said she wanted to sit with Julia in the nursery. I remembered with a superstitious shudder how John too had sought the nursery as if only the children in the house were free from sin and violence and the lingering smell of corruption. But I smiled at her with all the warmth I could bring into my eyes and kissed her forehead to say goodnight. I thought, I imagined, that she shrank from my touch as if it might somehow mark her, leave some smudge of my ruthlessness on her. But I believed that Celia, like Mama, might hold the thread of detection in her hand and still fail to follow it into the maze.
So Harry and I sat alone in the parlour and when the tea tray came in it was my duty to pour and sweeten Harry’s tea to his liking. When he had sipped, and munched his way through a whole plate of petits fours I stretched my satin shoes out to the brass fender and said, casually, ‘Have you signed and posted the documents for Dr Rose, Harry?’
‘I’ve signed them,’ he replied. ‘They are on your desk. But what Celia tells me about Dr Rose, and about John, makes me wonder if we are doing the right thing.’
‘It was a most distressing scene,’ I agreed readily. ‘John was like a madman. If the two doctors had not been so prompt and efficient I do not know what might have happened. Celia thinks she can control John and help him with his drinking but the way he behaved today proves that she has little influence over him,’ I said. ‘It has been nearly two weeks now since she started trying to make him give up drinking and he has been drunk nearly every night. He even turned on Celia today and accused her of betraying him. We really cannot manage him if he is half mad from drink.’
Harry’s round face was downturned with worry.
‘Celia did not tell me that,’ he complained. ‘She only told me that she thought the doctors were too rough with John and that she feared the whole idea of getting him committed. She even seems to be concerned about John’s fortune: the MacAndrew shares.’
‘She has been influenced by the nonsense John was shouting,’ I said smoothly. ‘It was a very distressing scene. But dear Celia understands nothing of business and these matters. There is no doubt that Dr Rose’s home is the best place for John and of course he has to be committed into their care so that they can make sure he does not run off to buy drink. We should know how impossible it has been to keep it from him! Celia has had the cellars locked for a fortnight and still he has been getting drink from somewhere.’
Harry shot me a sly sideways glance.
‘You don’t know how he has been getting hold of the drink, Beatrice, I suppose?’ he said nervously.
‘No,’ I said firmly. ‘I have no idea.’
‘Well, I shall reassure Celia that we are acting in John’s best interests,’ said Harry, getting to his feet and standing before the fireplace. He hitched up his jacket to warm his plump buttocks before the blaze, for the night was bitterly cold. ‘And I shall tell her that his fortune will be absolutely untouched until he comes to take control of it again,’ said Harry. ‘We have power of attorney over it, but of course we would not use it.’
‘Unless we see some business opportunity for him that we would do wrong to miss,’ I agreed. ‘The whole point of us having control of his fortune is so that his wealth can be properly managed during his illness. Of course we will not use his money to do anything he would not like. But we would be treating him very badly if we did not watch for his interests and act accordingly.’
Harry nodded. ‘Yes, of course,’ he said. ‘But you have no immediate plans, have you, Beatrice?’
I smiled reassuringly. ‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘All this has been so sudden, so unexpected. Of course I have no plans at all.’
‘What about the entail?’ Harry said nervously.
‘Oh, that!’ I put a hand to my face and smoothed my forehead in a gesture that contained a trace of theatre.
‘Let us leave that idea altogether until we can see our way clearer. John may be home inside the month and we can discuss it with him then. We can continue to increase Wideacre’s profits, and to save the surplus. But there is no need for us to rush into trying to change the entail.’
Harry’s look of relief spoke volumes. Celia, with no evidence other than her sharp intuition and her sensitivity to untruth, was mistrustful and anxious. And she had imparted a share of her unease. His question about John’s supplier of drink, his anxiety about my future plans, all pointed to Celia’s half-sense that all of Wideacre was being carried on a tide of my will. That none of us but I knew where we were going. That no one but I was in control. And that no one but I could say who would benefit from this headlong course.
‘It has been a bitter blow for you,’ Harry said kindly. ‘But do not be too distressed, Beatrice. I do believe John may be cured by these people, and then we can be as we were.’
I smiled back at him, a brave little smile. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Indeed I hope so. Now go and comfort Celia, Harry. And do assure her that although I am very sad I shall not break down under this.’
Harry gave me a gentle kiss on the top of my head and took himself off. I stayed only to drink one glass of port beside the dying fire, then missed supper in favour of an early bed. I had a day of hard work tomorrow. Mr Llewellyn was coming to look at the estate for a mortgage to pay the lawyers’ fees for the change of entail, and I was ready at last to write to the lawyers that they could go ahead: that I had access to the MacAndrew fortune, and that I could use it to buy Wideacre for my son. His to keep, and his to hand on to his son, and his son, and his, in a long, long line for ever. All of them descended from the witch of Wideacre.
16
I liked Mr Llewellyn on sight. He was a fifty-year-old Welshman who had made a fortune on the little hill ponies of his home mountains. He had bred a string of them and, cunningly, gave them as presents to the cream of the London nobility. Months of relentless training paid off and the ponies carried the heirs of the wealthiest estates in the land with rocksteady safety — and set a new fashion. The craze for the Llewellyn Welsh mountain ponies swept the fashionable world and was not exhausted until every butcher’s daughter had one of her own. By the time the fashion had moved on Mr Llewellyn had a fine town house of his own and need never again set foot in Wales, never again go out in the freezing fog of a Welsh winter to break the water on the drinking troughs.
But he had lost none of his sharp peasant cleverness in the huge town mansion. His blue eyes twinkled at the frosty fields of Wideacre and ranged over the view from my office window as if he was pricing every tree in the park.
‘A neat estate,’ he said approvingly.
‘We have made many improvements,’ said Harry, sipping coffee with relish. He gestured to the map where the fields we had enclosed were outlined in yellow: the colour of the wheat we would plant this spring. Harry and I had spent long anxious evenings outlining in a dotted orange line all the areas where wheat could grow if the land was cleared. Each time Harry’s pudgy finger swept over a wood or a lush meadow I felt dread, and a foreboding of loss.
‘We can’t possibly enclose Norman Meadow,’ I had said. ‘It’s an old battlefield and the ploughshare will turn up skulls and bones. We’ll never get a boy to take a plough in there. The whole of Acre believes it is haunted.’
‘I didn’t know that,’ said Harry, interested. ‘What battle would that have been?’
‘The one that gained us the land, I think,’ I had said ruefully. ‘The tradition is that it was there that the Le Says, our ancestors, brought their handful of Norman soldiers and beat the Saxon peasants in a fight that went on for three days until every man in the village was dead. That’s the story, anyway.’
‘Well, it would make jolly good fertilizer!’ said Harry jovially. ‘And see, Beatrice! If we turn Oak Tree Meadow over to corn, and Three Gate Meadow over to corn, we cannot be left with a meadow growing hay stuck in the middle. It doesn’t make sense.’
None of it made sense to me. To change the shape of a high-profit high-yieldin
g farm where the people who owned the land and the people who lived on it had hammered out some sort of harmony. Where the memory that the landowners came in and laid waste to the village was no more than the name of a field. Wideacre as it stood was a little island of security in a changing countryside. All around us landowners were changing the way they ran their farms. Charging higher rents for shorter leases, withdrawing traditional rights so the poorest of the poor were forced off the land altogether. Using the parish workhouse labour rather than keeping their own people in lifelong security. And building higher and sharper-topped park walls to shut out the sight of the angry faces pinched and thin with hunger and the eyes that burned with rage.
But then I remembered the entail and my son, and my heart hardened. When Richard was Squire of Wideacre with Julia his partner he could make reparation to the people I had been forced to injure in my search for ready money to pay his way to the Master’s chair. When Richard ruled the land he could restore the fields for the villagers’ vegetables. He could bring back the meadows; he could reopen the footpaths. He could let them snare rabbits, and fish again in the Fenny. When Richard was Squire he could leave the fresh new cornfields to revert to common land. And in a few years (very well, I concede, in many, many years), Wideacre would be again as it was before I conspired with Harry to despoil it. Richard could put right what I was forced to make wrong. Once Richard was in the Master’s chair he could make Wideacre good again. And the only way I knew to put him there was to make it bad first.
‘It will look so different,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ said Harry. ‘It will start to look like a properly planned estate, like one of the plans in my book, rather than a picturesque muddle.’
‘Yes,’ I said sadly.
The map I had ordered so proudly so that I could resolve the silly squabbles about the use of the land and the precise route of paths or borders was now Harry’s delight. He led Mr Llewellyn over to it with an insistent hand on his arm.
‘You’re planning a lot of changes,’ Mr Llewellyn said, scanning the growth of orange-dotted fields, which were spreading like a fungus.
‘Yes,’ said Harry with pride in his voice.
‘You believe in corn then?’ said the London merchant, smiling.
‘Of course,’ said Harry. ‘That’s where the profits are these days.’
Mr Llewellyn, peasant stock from a hard region, nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But you’re making a lot of changes very quickly, aren’t you?’
Harry nodded, and leaned towards Mr Llewellyn confidentially.
‘We have a project in mind that we need capital to finance,’ he said.
‘And we plan to raise that capital with your mortgage,’ I interrupted Harry smoothly. ‘We will repay the loan with the profits from the extra wheatfields so the turnover of money from the estate remains at its present high level, despite the loan.’
Mr Llewellyn nodded at me, his shrewd blue eyes crinkling in a smile. He had seen that I had silenced Harry.
‘You’ll miss your hay crop,’ he said. ‘How much will it cost you to buy in the extra hay you will need for winter feed?’
I pulled a sheet of paper towards me, for I had done the calculations, not Harry.
‘Between eight hundred and a thousand pounds, depending on the going rate,’ I said. ‘But we will be feeding the sheep on root crops, and on this new silage made from clover. Both the roots and the clover grow in the cornfields when they are being rested for a season.’
‘And hay for the horses?’ Mr Llewellyn asked Harry. But again I answered.
‘The horses will continue to eat their heads off,’ I said. ‘But we will keep enough hayfields to feed them.’
Mr Llewellyn nodded and scanned the figures I handed to him.
‘Let’s see the lie of the land,’ he said, putting his coffee cup down.
‘My brother Harry will show you around,’ I said, gesturing to my black silk gown. ‘I am still in mourning and I can only drive.’
‘Drive me then!’ he said genially, and I found myself smiling back at him.
‘I should be happy to,’ I said politely. ‘But I must tell the stables, then go and change. Excuse me for one minute.’
I slipped from the room and called from the west-wing door to a stable lad to harness Sorrel to the new gig. I took only minutes to change into my black velvet riding habit, and then I threw a thick black broadcloth cape on top, for this December weather was bitter.
‘You would rather drive than ride?’ I asked Mr Llewellyn as he tucked a rug across our knees and we bowled down the drive, Sorrel’s hoofs noisy on the frozen gravel and the iron-hard mud.
‘I would rather see the land with the farmer,’ said Mr Llewellyn with a sly sideways twinkle at me. ‘I think it is your footprint on the fields, Mrs MacAndrew.’
I smiled my assent, but stayed silent.
‘These are handsome woods,’ he said, looking around at the beech trees silvered on the east side with last night’s snow.
‘They are,’ I said. ‘But we would never mortgage these. The woods I would like you to consider are higher up, mostly firs and pines, on the north slopes of the downs.’
We took the bridle-track opposite the drive, and Sorrel leaned forward against the collar and blew clouds of steam with the weight of the gig.
The strips of the common plots where the villagers had planted their own crops for the past seven hundred years were white with frost. The little boundary walls and fences were already pulled down, and in the spring we would be ploughing up the vegetable rows that had been tended with so much care for so long.
We gained about twenty acres taking the land back from the villagers. Their land, where they could grow vegetables for the pot, and seed for the fowls: a shield against a poor season, no work, and the spectre of hunger. Their right to their little strip of land was nowhere stated in writing; they had no contract. It was just the tradition that these few acres should always be for the villagers’ use. And when I drove into the village and told half-a-dozen of the oldest men that we were ploughing up the land for corn next spring there was nothing they could do to stop me.
I had not discussed the matter; I had not even got down from the gig. I had met them under the chestnut tree on the green and, as I had told them, it started to snow. They had to have their grumble beside their own fireplaces, not at me. And, in any case, the potatoes had already been lifted, the green vegetables cut. They would not feel the loss of the common strips until next winter.
Even then, Acre villagers might count themselves lucky, for almost every cottage had a little garden. The gardens were filled with flowers, often the pride and joy of the house. They would have to go, and the little grass patches where children played would be dug over for vegetables, and planted in straight rows. All this, so that the Wideacre estate might be increased by twenty acres. But all this so that my son Richard would be a week closer to the Master’s chair with the extra small profit.
I pulled Sorrel up, and tied her to a fence post and then led the way on a little path along the brow of the downs until we reached the new plantation with the sheep-proof withy fence protecting the young trees.
‘How old is it?’ asked Mr Llewellyn, the smile gone from his eyes and a hard shrewd look ranging over the tall trees, now standing twenty, thirty feet.
‘I planted it with my papa,’ I said, smiling at the memory. ‘I was five. These woods are fourteen years old. He promised I should have a stool from these trees when I was an old lady.’ I shrugged away my sadness.
‘Times change,’ said Mr Llewellyn, his quick mind following my grief. ‘No one can predict the way things change these days. All we can do is to try to follow our consciences — and to chase profit with a care to others!’ He gave me a rueful smile and turned back to the trees.
‘Growing well,’ he commented approvingly. ‘How many trees?’
‘About five hundred,’ I said. I opened the little gate in the fence for him, and he strode down the st
raight rows looking carefully at the needles for signs of disease, pulling at the branches to see their healthy spring back into place. Then he walked in a carefully paced square, his lips moving as he counted how many trees to a ten yard square.
‘Good,’ he said finally. ‘I’ll certainly lend money on this plantation. I have a contract you may look at in my chaise. Was there some common land as well?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But it’s in the opposite direction. We’ll drive there.’
We walked back to the gig and with clever courtesy he did not offer to help me as I took Sorrel’s reins at the bit and backed him up the narrow path to turn the gig. Only when I had Sorrel facing downhill with the brake on, did he swing into the gig and smile at me.
We drove downhill and then along the lane towards Acre. Before we reached the village we turned left into the park woodland again, along the little track that leads to the new mill. Mrs Green was feeding hens from her front door and I waved at her as we went past and saw her eyes scanning Mr Llewellyn, wondering who he was. She would know soon enough. There are no secrets on Wideacre. I never expect to keep my business quiet.
The track wound through the woods, thickly silent under the grip of the frost, and then broke out into clearer ground as we neared the common. Softly on the air I heard the creaky sound of strong wings and above our heads was a V of geese flying westwards, looking for melted water and feed.
‘This is the land,’ I said, nodding at the common. ‘I showed you the area on the map. It is all as you see here. A little hilly, mainly bracken and heather, a few trees which will have to be felled and two little streams.’
I kept my voice even, but my love for the common, gold and brass under this cold winter light, crept into my tone despite myself. One of the streams was near by and we could hear the trickle of its clear waters as it dripped off icicle waterfalls on its way to the Fenny.