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

‘Yes,’ I said, absently, watching his eyes.

‘Did you mistake your dates, my dear?’ Mama asked, her voice low. ‘He seems so plump and well for a baby born so early.’

‘Oh, come, Mama,’ I said idly. ‘You must see perfectly well. He was conceived when John and I were affianced. I go by the old ways; he was conceived with my betrothed. There’s no harm in that.’

Mama’s face was a picture of disapproval.

‘There’s nothing morally wrong with it, Beatrice, I know,’ she said. ‘And if your husband has no objection it is not my place to make any complaint. But it is typical of your country childhood and your obsession with country values. I should not have dreamed of such a thing. I am glad you are no longer in my charge.’

And with that, she swept out of the room in high dudgeon, leaving me to laugh at her with Richard who neither laughed nor cried, but lay, somnolent in the sunshine, as if his mama could be a self-confessed strumpet every day of her life.

The fiction that he had been conceived by John before our marriage was so persuasive that I did not trouble myself about John’s return and what he might think. I knew little of babies, and I thought that three weeks in infancy would make little difference. I could scarcely remember the first days of Julia, but I had a recollection of her filling out once she got to England and looking much the same from birth till then. And the success of the deception with Julia had made me confident. I had done it once. I had spoken vaguely of a baby coming early, of the inaccuracy of a young bride’s calculations. It had been done easily and without challenge. I did not think it would be so different with Richard. I could see no reason why my husband, however clever and skilled, should be able to distinguish between a strapping boy child born a little later and one born three weeks early. Some extra days and he might have been sure of nothing.

But he came early.

He came earlier than we expected. He was with us inside the week, travelling post like a demon and bribing the coach boys to ride day and night and not stop for food. He hammered up the drive in a filthy post-chaise and thundered into the house and into the parlour. Mama was at the piano, Celia with Julia on her knee, and I was seated in the window seat with Richard in the wooden cradle rocking beside me. John was white with fatigue, smelling of whisky, his face dirty, and shabby, with beard. He looked around incredulously as if he could not believe the existence of this scented parlour, this domestic peace. Then his red-rimmed eyes focused on me.

‘Beatrice, my love,’ he said, and was down on one knee beside me, one arm around my waist, his chapped dry mouth hard on mine. The door behind him slammed as Mama and Celia whisked out to leave us alone.

‘My God,’ he said with a deep tired sigh. ‘I had imagined you dead, or ill, or bleeding, and here you are, as lovely as an angel and as well.’ He raised his eyes and scanned my clear face. ‘You are indeed well?’ he said.

‘Oh, yes,’ I said, tenderly and low. ‘And so is your son.’

He gave an exclamation and turned to the crib, a smile of wonderment half hovering around his tired mouth. Then the half-smile was wiped from his face and he bent over the cradle with eyes that were suddenly hard.

‘Born when?’ he asked, and his voice was cold.

‘June the first, ten days ago,’ I said, trying to keep my voice even; as a man crossing a frozen river tries to spread his weight by sliding.

‘Some three weeks premature, I think?’ John’s voice was as sharp as a shard of cracking ice; I felt myself beginning to tremble with unexpected fear.

‘Two or three,’ I said. ‘I am not utterly sure …’

John lifted Richard from the cradle with expert, unloving hands, and unwrapped his shawl. Ignoring my half-hearted protest he undressed him so swiftly and skilfully that the baby did not even cry. He pulled gently at the little legs and on the hands, and he prodded the rounded belly. His taper doctor’s fingers encircled the plump wrist and the betraying chubby knees. Then he wrapped the baby in the shawl again and put him gently back in the cradle, holding the head steady until the child was safe. Only then did he straighten and face me. As I saw the look in his eyes the thin ice broke beneath me and I plunged down into an icy blackness of discovery, and ruin.

‘That baby was carried full term,’ he said, and his voice was a splinter of frozen glass. ‘You had him in your belly when you lay with me. You had him in your belly when you married me. You doubtless married me for that very reason. That makes you a whore, Beatrice Lacey.’

He stopped, and I opened my mouth to speak, but no words came. All I could feel was a pain in my chest as if I was drowning in icy water trapped under a low ceiling of ice in a frozen river.

‘You are something else, too,’ he said, his voice flat. ‘You are a fool. For I loved you so much I would have married you and taken on your child if you had asked it of me. But you preferred to lie and cheat and steal my good name.’

I put my hands up as if to ward off a blow. I was ruined. My son, my precious son was ruined too. I could find no words to protect us, nothing to make us safe.

He took half-a-dozen hasty steps to the door and opened and shut it quietly. My nerves cringed, waiting for the slam of the door to the west wing but none came. A hushed click of the library door was all. Then the house was as silent as if we had all been frozen in time, and the ice of my sin had killed even the warm heart of Wideacre.

I sat without moving as a finger of sunlight moved slowly across the room mirroring the sun’s slow afternoon pace across the sky. It failed to warm me, and I shivered even while I felt my silk dress grow hot. Every one of my senses was on edge to hear movement in the library, but I heard nothing. The peaceful tick of the parlour clock was as gentle and as regular as a heartbeat, the louder clicking of the grandfather clock in the echoing hall subdivided the slow seconds.

I could wait no longer. I crept from the room and listened outside the library door. There was no sound, but the room was full of a presence. I could sense him, like a deer senses a waiting hound. I stood stock-still, my eyes wide with fear, my breath unconsciously shallow. I could hear nothing. My mouth was dry with terror … so I went in. I am, after all, my father’s daughter. Afraid as I was, my instinct was to face it and go on into it. I turned the doorknob and it yielded. It opened a crack and I froze in fright, and then, when nothing happened, pressed it open a little further so that I could peep into the room.

He was in the winged armchair with his filthy riding boots on the velvet cushions of the window seat, staring sightlessly over the rose garden. One hand was loosely clasped around a glass and a bottle of the MacAndrew whisky was tucked into the cushions of the chair. The bottle was nearly empty; he had been drinking on his journey and now he was drunk. He turned to stare at me as I walked into the centre of the room, my ivory skirts hushing on the Persian carpet. His face was a stranger’s – a mask of pain. There were lines I had never seen before on either side of his mouth and his eyes looked bruised.

‘Beatrice,’ he said, and his voice was a gasp of longing. ‘Beatrice, why did you not tell me?’

I stepped a little closer and my hands moved out to him, palms outspread as if to say I had no answer.

‘I would have cared for you,’ he said, his eyes luminous with tears, the skin on his cheeks shiny where tears had spilled over and dried. The lines on either side of his mouth as deep as wounds. ‘You could have trusted me. I promised you I would care for you. You should have trusted me.’