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

Mama and Celia were ready to tease me at John’s absence. Celia had ordered his favourite meal of wild duck cooked in limes, and I advised that we eat without him and save his portion for him to dine later.

‘He is exhausted,’ I said. ‘He has had a long, long journey, and no company save a crate of his papa’s whisky. He left his valet behind him several stages back, and his luggage will not yet have reached London. He has ridden too fast, too far. I think we had better leave him to rest.’

I kept the white rose beside my plate all through dinner. In contrast with the greenish purity of the deep centre the napery seemed cream, and the candle flames yellow. The talk flowed easily between Harry, Celia and Mama, and I had only to say an occasional word of assent. After dinner we sat before the fire in the parlour while Celia played the piano and sang, and Mama stitched, and Harry and I sat before the fire, and watched the flames together.

When the tea tray came in, I murmured some excuse and left the room. John was still asleep in the library, sprawled in his chair. He had drawn his favourite chair up to the window and had set a table beside it with a glass and the bottle to hand. From where he was sitting he would have seen me walking to the wood and had perhaps understood the droop of my shoulders and my unusual slow pace. If he had felt any ache of love then, he had drowned it well. The bottle was empty, and rolled under his chair dripping a stain of whisky on the priceless Persian carpet. His head was tipped back on the cushions and he was snoring. I spread a travelling rug from the chest in the hall over his outstretched legs. I tucked the folds around him as tenderly as if he were mortally ill, and when I was certain he would not wake I kneeled beside him and placed my cheek to his stubbly unshaven dirty face.

There was nothing more I could do.

My heart ached.

Then I straightened, pinned a calm and confident smile on my face and went back to the candlelit parlour for my tea. Celia was reading a novel aloud to us and that saved me from conversation. Then, when the clocks in the hall and in the parlour chimed eleven o’clock in a clear duet, Mama sighed, and straightened up from the remorseless work of the altar cloth.

‘Goodnight, my dears,’ she said, and kissed Celia who rose to sketch a curtsy. Then she dropped a kiss on the top of my head, and pecked Harry’s cheek as he held the door for her.

‘Goodnight, Mama,’ he said.

‘Are you off to bed too, Celia?’ I asked.

Though a wife of two summers, Celia still knew her place.

‘Shall I?’ she asked the air midway between Harry and me.

‘Go and warm my bed,’ Harry smiled at her. ‘I need to talk some business with Beatrice. But I won’t be long.’

She kissed me, and tapped Harry’s cheek with her little fan as he held the door for her too. Then he returned to his seat at the fireside beside me.

‘Business?’ I asked, cocking an eyebrow at him.

‘Hardly,’ he said with a knowing smile. ‘I thought, Beatrice, that you might have recovered from the birth by now. I was thinking about the room at the top of the stairs.’

A great weariness flowed through me.

‘Oh, no, Harry,’ I said. ‘Not tonight. Physically I am well, and we will meet there soon, but not this evening. John is home, and Celia is waiting for you. We will meet there perhaps tomorrow night.’

‘Tomorrow John will be rested and you will have no time free from him,’ Harry said. He looked like a spoilt child denied a plaything. ‘Your only free time for weeks is likely to be tonight.’

I sighed with weariness and distate for Harry’s selfish, insistent lust.

‘No,’ I said again. ‘It is not possible. The room is cold and in darkness. I have not ordered a fire. We will meet there in the near future, but tonight is not possible.’

‘Here then!’ said Harry, his face lighting up. ‘Here before the parlour fire. There is no reason why we should not, Beatrice.’

‘No, Harry,’ I said, with rising irritation. ‘John is asleep in the library but he could wake. Celia is waiting for you upstairs. Go to Celia, she wants you.’

‘But tonight I want you,’ said Harry stubbornly, and I saw the mulish look around his soft mouth. ‘If we cannot go to the room we need not do so, but then I want you here.’

The last event I wanted to crown this long lonely day was a romp with Harry on the hearth rug, but the prospect seemed unavoidable.

‘Come on, Beatrice,’ he said, boisterous as a puppy, and he kneeled at my feet and hugged around the waist with one arm, and fumbled in my silk skirts and petticoats with the other.

‘Very well,’ I said crossly. ‘But let be, Harry, you will tear my dress.’ I loosened my stays with quick fingers, and lifted my skirts and petticoats, and lay before the fire. With Harry in his mood of obstinate insistence I could see that the quickest, easiest way to resolve this conflict was to pay my dues swiftly. Harry was urgent and the whole tedious exercise should not take more than a few minutes. Already, at the mere sight of me, he was breathing heavily and his round face was rosy in the firelight. He had stripped naked from the waist down, and I lay back ungraciously to let him push, unwelcomed, inside me.

‘Oh, Beatrice,’ he said, and I smiled ruefully at the realization that he actually preferred my unenthusiastic coupling to Celia’s loving kisses in the Master’s bed. As his body started its well-known rocking pushes I surrendered myself to the easy, familiar pleasure. I raised my hips a fraction and felt him sigh as he eased in yet more deeply. Then I forgot my unwillingness as my body caught the rhythm of his movement, and waves flowed from the very central hot core of my body down to the very tips of my toes. I was caught in the easy seductive pleasure of the moment, deaf and blind to all else.

In the distant back of my mind I heard a sound quite different from Harry’s stifled groans, different from my light panting, the sound of a door opening … click … and then, too late, too late, one hundred years too late, I realized that the noise was the parlour door opening and the click was the latch dropping as my mother’s hand fell from the doorknob.

Everything moved so slowly that it seemed pointless to try to respond. My eyes opened as languidly as if they had pennies weighting the lids. With my brother still heaving up and down upon me, I met my mother’s gaze.

She was standing frozen in the parlour door, the candles from the hall illuminating as bright as daylight the scene before her. Harry’s humping, moonlike, fat, white buttocks, and my pale face, staring speechlessly at her over his velvet-jacketed shoulder. The disaster dawned on us all as slowly as sunrise.

‘I left my novel,’ she said stupidly, as she stared at the two of us, coupled before the dying embers of the fire. Harry was frozen. He still lay on me but his head was slewed round to face her, his blue eyes goggling, his red face sweaty.

‘I came to fetch my book,’ she said. Then the candelabra dropped from her hand and she reeled backwards into the hall as if the sight of us, her two children, meant instant death to her.

Harry gasped, like a punctured bladder of wind, but her collapse had released me from my trance. I moved as fast as I could, but still with nightmare slowness – as if I was drowning in the Fenny and struggling through green weeds under a roof of ice. In one sleek movement I slid up and off Harry and pulled my petticoats and dress down, and retied my laces.

‘Get your breeches up,’ I hissed at him, jolting him into life, and he scrambled to his feet and fumbled for his clothes. I strode to the door and nearly fell over Mama, who lay in a crumbled heap beside her smoking candles. In the cruel light of the hall she looked not white but green, as if she too were trapped in an under-river world of horror. Some random instinct made me feel for a pulse in her neck, and then for her heart. She looked like death, and I could feel no heart beating.