Philippa Gregory - The Complete Wideacre Trilogy - Wideacre, The Favoured Child, Meridon

‘Magic and science,’ said Dr Pearce. ‘No wonder your crops flourish.’

‘I hope it lasts,’ I said, without knowing what made me cast such a shadow over the conversation. A flicker of some premonition – as insubstantial and yet as ominous as woodsmoke on a distant horizon – touched me. ‘There is nothing worse than a bad year after a series of good ones. People become too confident, they expect too much.’

‘They do indeed,’ said Dr Pearce quickly, confirming Harry’s view of him as a hard-headed realist, and my view of him as an unimaginative, pompous man. I knew too well what would follow: a tirade against the poor, their unreliability with rent and tithes, their ceaseless fertility, their unreasonable demands. If Celia and I withdrew now, there was a chance that Harry and Dr Pearce would have finished by the time they came to the parlour for tea. I nodded at Celia, and she left some grapes on her plate and rose with me. Stride went to the door, but Harry put him aside with a gesture and held the door for us both. I let Celia precede me and knew I had read the gesture aright when I saw Harry’s warm eyes on me. The talk of the land had reminded him of my power and my beauty. He had buried his horror and fright with his mama, and tonight we would be lovers again.

It was easier to meet him than I had dared to imagine. John’s abrupt departure from the dinner table had signalled, as I had hoped, a return to hard drinking. I had hardly aided his resolution against alcohol, for when he had flung himself into his study in the west wing he had found the dew forming on two icy-fresh bottles of whisky, a pitcher of cool water to mix with a dram, and a plate of biscuits and cheese to bolster the illusion that he was merely taking a small glass with a meal. Casually, as if blind to his own hands, he had broken the seal on one of the bottles and poured a measure, the merest drop, and diluted it well. One taste undid his resolve and he had drunk nearly all of one bottle by the time I came, clear-headed, to peep in on him. He was asleep in his chair by the log fire. The smartness of his early-morning appearance had faded from him the way a poppy crumples after only a few hours. I looked long and hard at him as he lay, mouth half open, snoring softly. His suit was rumpled, his fair hair sticky with sweat from the nightmare that tossed his head and made him occasionally moan in torment. He had biscuit crumbs in his cravat, and the sour smell of whisky on his breath.

No pity touched me. This was a man I had loved, and who had poured on me weeks and months of lawful, generous loving. But he had execrated me, and he threatened my safety at Wideacre. The blackness of my sin had half destroyed him; now I wished it had killed him outright. If he continued drinking at this pace it would indeed have proved a fatal wound, and I would be at peace once again. I held my silk skirts out so the whisper of the fabric did not prompt a sweet dream of remembered happiness, and I stepped slowly and carefully to the door. I locked it from the outside, and he was safe in my power.

I was safe too.

Then I climbed the third flight of stairs to the room at the very top of the west wing, and set a taper to the logs in the grate, and to the candles. I opened the other door that connects with the main part of the house where Harry waited, shirtsleeved and barefoot, in patient silence lit only by the light of his bedtime candle.

We held each other like lovers, not like the fierce sensual enemies we so often were in that room. With my husband drunk and dreaming horrors downstairs, and someone, some enemy, perhaps even an enemy I knew well, sleeping and plotting less than fifty miles from me, I did not feel like a storm of passion with Harry. I needed some loving; I needed some kissing; I needed, with all my frozen, frightened heart, some tenderness. So I let Harry take me in his arms and lay me on the couch as if we were tender lovers, and then he kissed me and loved me with tenderness. In many ways this gentle, marital exchange was the most perverse and infamous act of all that we did.

But I did not care. I cared for nothing, now.

Afterwards, we lay sprawled in an easy tangle on the couch, watching the firelight flickering, and drinking warm claret. My chestnut hair was spread in a tangle across his warm soft-haired chest. My face rested against the plump column of his throat. I was tired; I was at peace. I was bruised but not pained. Any woman in the world would have been deeply satisfied and ready for sleep.

‘Harry,’ I said.

‘Yes?’ he said, rousing himself from his half-doze, and gathering me closer into his warm hug.

‘There is something I have been waiting to tell you for some time, Harry,’ I said hesitantly. ‘Something that I am afraid may grieve you, but something you have to know for the good of Wideacre.’

Harry waited, undisturbed. He knew we would not have made love if Wideacre had been endangered by any immediate threat. He knew that my love of the land would always take first place in my mind. He waited to hear what might come next.

‘It is about the entail,’ I said. ‘I am concerned that Wideacre is still entailed on our cousin as the next male heir. If anything, God forbid, should happen to you, Celia, Julia and I would all be homeless.’

A slight frown furrowed his complacent face.

‘It’s true,’ he said. ‘I have thought of it once or twice. But there is plenty of time, Beatrice. I do not ride like you do! I may have a boy next time and then he will inherit. I do not think the entail is a pressing problem for us.’

‘I was afraid you did not know,’ I said. I turned over to lie on my belly and reared myself up on my elbows to look into his face. ‘I was afraid Celia had not told you. I do not blame her. It was, perhaps, not made very clear to her in France after the birth of Julia. I fear she is barren, now, Harry. The midwife said it was a miracle she had conceived at all, and that she doubted very much if she would ever have another child. She has some fault in her body that makes her infertile.’

I paused to let the new information sink in.

‘After the birth I told her, as gently as I could, but I did not want to upset her, so possibly I did not make the situation sufficiently clear. The truth is, Harry, the honest truth’ – I widened my hazel eyes at him in a perfect mimicry of a candid gaze – ‘the truth is that I fear Celia will never conceive another child, and that you will never have a son and heir for Wideacre.’

Harry’s happy rounded face fell. He believed me.

‘This is a blow indeed,’ he said, and I could feel him groping for the words to express his thoughts, for some way to make sense of this new view of the world where there would be no son to follow him and, when he died, Wideacre would pass from his direct line to strangers.

‘I thought Celia might have fully understood, and might have told you,’ I said delicately. ‘But it is a bitter thing for both of you to know: that when you die Wideacre will go to our cousin. Little Julia and, indeed, Richard will be homeless.’

‘Yes,’ he said, as the picture struck him. ‘Having been reared on Wideacre, to have to leave it!’

‘If only one could change the entail!’ I sighed at that remote possibility. ‘If only we could find some way to make our two children secure in their home for ever.’

‘I have heard of them being reversed,’ Harry said doubtfully. ‘But it costs an impossible sum of money and involves one in compensating the heirs, as well as the legal fees of changing it. Few estates could bear that sort of cost, Beatrice, certainly not Wideacre.’