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

‘The cost if we do not change it would be far greater,’ I said. I sat up, naked, and crossed over to the fire to throw an extra log on the embers. I turned and smiled at Harry, the firelight throwing flickering lights and shadows on my smooth warm skin. ‘I cannot bear the thought of our children miserable and exiled from Wideacre when we are gone, because we failed to provide for them. The two of them – so near each other in age, so like you and me – forced out with no home to go to.’

‘Well, they’ll hardly be homeless,’ said Harry prosaically. ‘Julia will inherit my capital and her mother’s dowry, and Richard will be one of the MacAndrew Line heirs. Enough cash there to buy the estate many times over, I should think.’

‘Which would you rather have, money or Wideacre?’ I asked spontaneously, forgetting for a second the way I wanted the conversation to tend.

Harry considered. The fool that he was, he needed time to think. ‘Well,’ he said in careful, doltish judgement, ‘if one had a fortune one could buy places as fine as this. You are Wideacremad, Beatrice, but there are some very pretty properties in Kent or even in Suffolk and Hampshire.’

I bit the inside of my cheeks hard. Then I waited until I knew no reckless scornful words would come. Then, and only then, I said in a voice as smooth as silk, ‘That’s true, I dare say, Harry. But if your little girl is anything like me she will pine and die if she has to live anywhere out of sight of the Wideacre downs. Small comfort a fortune will be to her then, when she has to buy some other hills, and her distant cousins turn her out of the home where she has lived all her life. She’ll think you are an uncaring father then, and she will curse your memory, that you failed to provide for her, although you loved her so much.’

‘Oh, don’t say that!’ said Harry, moved as I knew he would be by the prospect of Julia’s future reproaches. ‘I would we could do something about it, Beatrice, but I can’t for the life of me see what.’

‘Well, let us decide on it at least,’ I said. ‘If we decide to aim for the entail, let us set our hearts on it and we will find a way to the money necessary.’

Harry shook his head. ‘You don’t understand, Beatrice,’ he said. ‘We could never raise the sort of capital needed to make such a change. Only the wealthiest families in the kingdom can do such things. It is simply beyond our scope.’

‘Our scope, yes,’ I said slowly. ‘But what about the scope of the MacAndrew fortune?’

Harry’s blue eyes widened. ‘He never would?’ he said, hopefully. ‘He would never pour all that money into Wideacre!’

‘Not at the moment,’ I agreed. ‘But he might change his mind. He might consider investing. If we had even half the MacAndrew fortune behind us I think we could consider the change, work out the costs, explore ways and means.’

Harry nodded. ‘I’m game,’ he said. ‘I’d be prepared to sacrifice some of my experimental projects and go for more high-return wheatfields instead of the things I wanted to do. The profit from them could go directly into a fund for buying the entail. We could save for it, Beatrice, and if the worst came to the worst we could always mortgage some land and pay it off later.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I would hate to do that, but it would be worth it in this instance.’

‘But you would have to give up your defence of the cottagers and their rights, Beatrice,’ said Harry, earnestly. ‘There is a hundred acres of common land we could enclose and put under the plough and thousands of pounds to be made if we raised the rents. You have set your heart against those measures, but if we needed to raise money, and a lot of money, then we would have to do things we would not do otherwise.’

I hesitated then, thinking of the lovely rolling common land where the heather grows thigh-high on the sandy light soil, where the little streams run on beds of white sand down the miniature valleys. Of the hollows where the bracken grows in green sweet-smelling peppery fronds where, if you sit still, a dark-eyed snake will come out to bask in the sunshine beside you. Of cold nights when I had walked alone in the empty space under the stars and seen the sharp hoofprints of deer on the loam and seen them moving, soft as shadows, under the great branches of the oak and beech trees. If Harry had his way, all this would be burned and hacked and cleared, and smooth square fields of featureless wheat would grow where the silver birches had shivered and the tall firs had swayed in the wind. It was a big price to pay. Greater than I had thought I would ever have to meet. But it was to get my child into the Master’s chair and my blood into the line of Squires.

‘And we will have to use the gang labourers on the parish,’ said Harry, a certain hard relish in his voice. ‘It is sheer waste employing our tenants or people from Acre when we can get all the day labour we need by contracts with the parish. We pay them cash when they work, and nothing when they do not. We would save hundreds of pounds over the year if we left the poor of Acre to find their own work and did not keep them on our books.’

I nodded. I could feel the face of Wideacre changing as I looked into the future. Acre village would be smaller, with fewer cottages. Those that survived would be more prosperous. But the little cottages, where families survived on winter work from us and on casual harvest work, would go. They lived the best lives people could have. In winter they took casual work from us, hedging or ditching or helping with snowed-in sheep or cattle. They lived then on their summertime savings and relied on vegetables from their patch and the milk from the cow they kept on the common. They would keep a pig there, eating acorns from the oak trees, and a couple of hens to run in the lane of Acre.

In spring and summertime they would earn good money sowing seed, moving the beasts, haymaking, harvesting. They would work outrageous hours for two or three days dawn to dusk in the rhythm of the land, and then all of a sudden the work would stop. The fields would be cut, the barns overflowing, the haystacks built, and the whole village would go on a glorious drunken holiday that would last two or three days, until the next job needed doing.

None of them would ever be wealthy. None of them would ever own land. But they lived a life that many a wealthy city-bred man might envy. They worked when they chose and they rested when they chose, and while they would never be rich they seldom feared poverty.

The hens that ran in the lane and the cow on the common were a safe shield against hunger and want. They knew that if they faced a death or an illness in the family there was always a place for the whole family in the Wideacre kitchen, and where a word to Miss Beatrice would see an apprenticeship for the oldest son, and a job for the oldest daughter at the Hall.

But if I went down Harry’s mean narrow road then Wideacre would be like any other estate where the poor pulled their forelocks as the carriages went by, and then pulled faces when they were gone; where the faces of the children were white and thin, and those of their mothers were old with worry. Wideacre poor led trouble-free lives because we kept to the old ways. Unchallenged traditions ruled the use of the land and the easy holidays. The common was open to all – even the poaching was a ritual game played with little malice. But Harry’s way would mean the common enclosed, the footpaths shut, the cow and pig without grazing. The poor would become poorer. And the very poorest of them would drop through the old traditional supports – and they would starve.

But the end of the road was security for my son. The end of this road was his inheritance. I would have ridden roughshod over every mother in the land – Mary, Joseph, and Baby Jesus too, if necessary – to get my son in the Squire’s chair.