Philippa Gregory - Wideacre

And all the body of the letter was news of the children, a word about the weather, and always the assurance that I was well. ‘Beatrice is well and grows lovelier every day,’ she wrote in one. ‘You will be glad to know that Beatrice is well and, as usual, most beautiful,’ she wrote in another. ‘Beatrice is well but I know she misses you,’ wrote Celia. I smiled a bitter smile when I read them. Then I tied them together and stuffed them at the back of the secret drawer, locked it, hid the key behind a book in the bookcase and went to change for dinner with a light step and my eyes shining. I held to my private pledge not to enclose the common before the worst of the bad weather was over, and I waited until March before two days of settled clear cloudless days tipped my impatience to have done.

I told the parish roundsman that I would be enclosing two hundred acres of common on the following day and that he should have twenty men waiting for me in the morning. He scratched his head and looked doubtful. He was a plain man, in brown fustian, with the good boots of the labouring man who is making a better living than most, on the backs of the rest. John Brien his name; he had married one of the Tyacke girls and moved into the village. A little freer of village loyalties, with book-learning from his Chichester day school, he had obtained the job of parish roundsman and could now congratulate himself that he was the best-paid and most hated working man in Acre. He had no great love for me. He disliked the tone in my voice when I spoke to him. He thought himself a cut above the rest of the Acre villagers because he could read and write and because he did a job most of them would be shamed to do. Somewhere in my heart I still held to the old ways, and if the villagers despised and disliked a man then so did I. But I had to do business with him, and so I held Sorrel on a short rein when I stopped the gig and explained to him civilly where I wanted the men to meet.

‘They’ll not like it, Mrs MacAndrew,’ he said, his voice expressing contempt for such people who would refuse to work when and where the Quality and their dogs like him bade them.

‘I don’t expect them to like it,’ I said indifferently. ‘I merely expect them to do it. Can you get enough men together for tomorrow, or should we wait a day?’

‘I have the men to do the work.’ His hand gestured towards the shuttered cottages where idle men were sitting, heads in hands beside empty tables. ‘Every man in the village wants work. I can pick and choose. But they will not like the job of fencing in the common, fencing themselves out. There may be trouble.’

‘These are my people,’ I said with the indifference of a local for a stranger’s advice. ‘There will be no trouble that I cannot manage. You get the men there. There is no need for you to tell them what job they are to do. And I will meet you there. And any trouble I shall deal with.’

He nodded and I held Sorrel in, my hard eyes on him until he turned the nod into the full bow that I expect from my people in my village. Then I gave him a tight smile and said abruptly, ‘Good day, Brien, I shall see you at the beech coppice tomorrow, with twenty men.’

But when next day I trotted my gig down the lane and turned the corner to the start of the common land I saw there were not twenty men, there were more like one hundred. Wives too, and children, and the old people too aged for work. And a handful of the poorer Wideacre tenants, and about a dozen of the cottagers. The whole of the poor community of Wideacre was out to greet me. I halted Sorrel and took my time in tying his reins to a bush. I needed time to think; I had not expected this. When my head came up from fumbling with the reins my face was Clear and serene, my smile as lovely as the bright morning.

‘Good day to you all,’ I said. My voice was as bright and as untroubled as the robin in the beech tree over my head who started a clear and lovely warble at the pale blue sky.

The older men were in a little cluster, conferring among themselves. They jostled each other like boys caught in an orchard and then George Tyacke stepped forward, the oldest man in the village, still hanging on to life and his cottage, though he was stooped and bent with rheumatism and his hands shook with palsy.

‘Good day, Miss Beatrice,’ he said with the gentle courtesy of a patient man who has spent his life at other men’s bidding, and yet never lost temper or dignity.

‘We have all come out today to speak to you about your plans for the common,’ he said. His voice had the soft accent of the Sussex downland. He had been born and bred here, spent all his life within this circle of green hills. His family had never lived anywhere else. It was probably his ancestors whose bones lay in Norman Meadow. It was probably his land before my ancestors stole it.

‘Good day, Gaffer Tyacke,’ I said, and my voice was gentle. Today might see a hard act, a harsh act, against the poor of Wideacre, but I could never keep a smile from my eyes when I heard the slow drawl of my home. ‘I am always pleased to see you,’ I said with courtesy. ‘But I am surprised to see so many from Acre village, and others, too.’ My eyes flicked towards the tenants: my tenants, whose roofs depended on my goodwill, and they shuffled their feet at my scrutiny. ‘I am surprised that so many of you should think you have anything to say about what is done by me on my own land.’

Gaffer Tyacke nodded at the reproof, and the tenants looked as if they wished they were elsewhere. They knew that in that one swift glance I had noted every one, and they had an uneasy fear that they would pay for it. As indeed they would.

‘We are just worried, Miss Beatrice,’ Gaffer said gently. ‘We did not want to come up to the Hall and when we first heard of your plans we did not believe that you would do it. So we have left it so long to speak to you.’

I set my hands on my hips and looked around at them. In the winter sunshine my driving dress glowed a deep black. Under my neat black riding hat my hair gleamed as ruddy as an autumn beech tree. They had formed a circle around me but it was the circle of a court, not that of a mob. I was in utter control of this scene and they all knew it. And even old George Tyacke with his dignity and wisdom could not keep the servility from his voice.

‘Well,’ I said, and my tone was clear and loud so even the most distant of my shrinking tenants could hear me. ‘I’m damned if I can see it’s anyone’s business but my own, but since you’ve all made a day’s holiday to be here, you’d best tell me what it’s all about.’

It was as if a flood had broken through a dam.

‘It’s the rabbits! I can’t buy meat, they’re the only meat we eat!’ said one woman.

‘Where am I to get kindling from if I can’t come here?’ said another.

‘I’ve a cow and two pigs and they’ve always grazed here,’ said one of the villagers.

‘I set my beehives out on the common for the heather honey,’ said one of the tenants.

‘I cut peat for my stove on the common!’

‘I gather my brushwood here!’

‘My sheep graze here in autumn!’

And above the babble of voices Gaffer Tyacke’s old-man trembly tenor carried to my ears.

‘Look behind you, Miss Beatrice,’ he said. I turned. I had been standing in front of a great oak tree, one of the oldest in the woods. It was a pretty tradition of the village that lovers plighting their troth should seal their engagement by carving their names in its bark. From as high as a tall arm could reach, down to the roots, were love knots and names entwined and hearts carved, sometimes exquisitely carved, in the bark.

‘There’s my name, and my wife Lizzie,’ said George and pointed behind my head. Carefully I stared at the knots and whorls of the tree trunk and made out, as lichened as an old headstone, the heart shape and ‘George’ and ‘Lizzie’ carved inside.