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

I had kept it as a retreat, and the new use I planned would not draw any attention to it. I cleared the saddles I had been working on from the saddle rack and it stood like a vaulting horse in the middle of the floor. Papa’s coats and his boots, his notebooks on breeding and his diagrams of saddles I packed away in a chest. But I kept his hunting knife and his great long-thonged whip.

Then I called in the Acre carpenter and ordered him to fix two stout hooks to the wall at a man’s shoulder height, and another two at floor level.

‘I hope I’ve done right, for if I don’t know what they be for, I can’t tell if they’ll serve,’ he grumbled.

‘That’s perfect,’ I said, looking at them. I paid him once for his trouble and once for his silence. A good bargain. For he knew that if he broke it I would know and he would never again work in Sussex. When he had gone I tied leather thongs to the hooks. The room was perfect. It already had a large chaise-longue near the fireplace and no one would notice if I added a candelabra from my other rooms and scattered a few sheepskins on the floor. I was ready.

I was ready, but I could not make a start. It was hardly reticence, but I could not find in myself the necessary confidence or the necessary mania to do it. In this thing I was serving Harry’s peculiar tastes and not my own more simple ones. I needed an event to spur me on to action. Even when Celia came downstairs to breakfast too late to pour my coffee, with shadows under her eyes but with a smile like a happy child, I still made no move. A week passed and I was ready, but still unready. Then Harry said to me at supper, ‘May I speak with you afterwards, Beatrice? Will you sit with me while I take port?’

‘Certainly,’ I said with equal formality. I waited while Celia and Mama withdrew from the room and took the seat at the foot of the table. The butler poured me a glass of ratafia and set the decanter of port at Harry’s hand, and left us.

The house was quiet. I wondered if Harry remembered another evening, like this one, when we had sat in silence as the house creaked and the flames flickered and died in the stone fireplace, and we had melted into each other on the hard wooden floor. But then I saw the smile on his boyish mouth and the happy clear eyes, and I realized he did not remember at all. It was other kisses and another body that warmed him now. His lovemaking now took place in the Master’s bed; our passionate, furtive exchanges belonged to the past.

‘I have to speak with you about something which makes me very happy,’ said Harry. ‘I do not think it will come as a surprise to you. Actually, I do not think it will come as a surprise to anyone.’

I turned the delicate stem of the glass between my forefinger and thumb, my mind blank.

‘Dr MacAndrew has approached me, as the head of the house, for my permission to ask for your hand in marriage,’ said Harry pompously.

My head snapped up, my green eyes blazed.

‘And you said?’ I shot the question at him.

He stumbled in his surprise. ‘I naturally said “Yes”, Beatrice. I thought … we all thought … I was certain that …’

I leaped to my feet and the heavy old chair scraped the polished floor.

‘You gave your consent without consulting me?’ I said, my voice icy but my eyes green fire.

‘Beatrice,’ said Harry gently. ‘Everyone has seen how you like him. His profession is unusual, of course, but he is of excellent family and his fortune … is remarkable. Of course I said he could speak to you. Why ever should I not?’

‘Because he has nowhere to live!’ I blazed out, my voice almost a sob. ‘Where does he propose I should live, may I ask?’

Harry smiled, reassuringly. ‘Beatrice, I don’t think you realize how very, very wealthy John MacAndrew is. He plans to return home to Edinburgh and I believe he could buy all of Holyrood Palace for you if you had a mind to it. He certainly has the money to do it.’

My mind, ice-sharp with anger, caught at once at the crucial point. ‘So I am to be married and packed off to Edinburgh!’ I said, outraged. ‘What of Wideacre?’

Harry, still confused at my rage, tried to reassure me. ‘Wideacre will survive without you, Beatrice. You are all a Squire could be, and more, God knows, but this must not stand in your way. With your life and happiness taking you away to Scotland, Wideacre is the last thing you should have on your mind.’

If I had not been in such a blind rage that made me want to shriek and weep I should have laughed aloud. The idea of my life taking me to some pretentious town house in Edinburgh or my love for some sandy-haired stranger taking me from Wideacre was comically funny – if it had not been stark horror. All horror.

‘Who knows of this plan?’ I said, fiercely. ‘Mama?’

‘No one, except myself,’ Harry said, hastily. ‘I spoke first of all to you, of course, Beatrice. But I believe I may have mentioned it to Celia.’ His half-smile revealed that my future exile had been the topic of some marital chit-chat in the master bed.

‘But I had no idea, Celia had no idea, that you would be anything but deeply, deeply happy, Beatrice.’

His voice, so controlled, so soothing, so much the chocolate smooth voice of powerful men who marry, and bed, and dispose of women down the long centuries, while women wait and wait for land, snapped the remainder of my control.

‘Come with me,’ I ordered, and grabbed a candelabra from the dining table. Harry exclaimed, looked around for rescue and seeing none followed me. In the hall we could see the parlour door ajar and hear Mama and Celia’s gentle voices as they sewed the altar cloth. I ignored it and turned to the great sweep of shallow stairs, Harry following, bemused but obedient. I led him up the first, then the second flight, then up the narrow stairs where my candles were the only dipping, flickering light.

We reached the locked door to the west-wing store room.

‘Now wait,’ I said and unlocked the door with the key from my pocket and left him standing outside without even a light. In haste I slid from my evening gown into the green riding habit I had worn as a girl when Harry had first come home from school and caught me, on that hot afternoon, naked on the floor of the old mill barn. The long line of buttons down the close-fitting jacket I left open from throat to navel. I was naked underneath. In my hand I held Papa’s old hunting whip – a long black thong of leather coiled wickedly and efficiently, the handle black ebony with silver inlay.

‘Come in,’ I said in a voice Harry would not dare to disobey.

He pushed open the door and gasped as he saw me, tall and angry in the flickering light of the candles. He gasped again when he took in the deep shadow down the front of my gown, and the saddle rack, and the hooks on the wall, and the sensuously cushioned divan and the scatter of thick sheepskin rugs.

‘Come here,’ I said. My tone cut him like a knife. In a trance he followed me to the hooks on the wall and when I tapped his legs with the crop he straddled so I could tie both ankles with the leather thongs. Speechless he spread his arms out while I tied him by the wrists – tightly and painfully – to the hooks.

One hard pull and his fine linen shirt was ripped to the waist and he flinched and stood half naked before me. With my bare hand I double-slapped him across the face; left-right-left-right and then, like a stable cat, I scratched his chest from his throat to the belt of his breeches with the sharp fingernails of both claw-like hands. He slumped on his bindings and groaned. It sounded as if he were really hurt. I was filled with deep gladness.

I took Papa’s old hunting knife and slit the seams of Harry’s fine embroidered evening breeches so they hung in tatters from his waist. The blade had nicked his skin on one thigh and when I saw the welling drop of blood I kneeled and sucked it as hungrily as any vampire. If I could have bled every ounce of his male pride and his folly and his power from him, I would have done so. He groaned, then straightened up again, straining against the ties as if he wanted to be free. I stepped backwards and with one expert flick uncoiled the whip so the thong squirmed on the floor towards him like a snake ready to strike. Then I raised it.