Philippa Gregory - Wideacre

‘Mrs MacAndrew, ‘tis your fences,’ he gasped, forgetting his town-bred accent in his haste. ‘They’ve pulled your fences down and hacked some of them. Nearly all the work we did yesterday has been undone. Your fences are down and the footpaths are open again.’

My head jerked up to stare at him as if he was an angel of death.

‘Is this the Culler’s work?’ I said sharply. The fear in my voice made him hesitate and look strangely at me.

‘What’s the Culler?’ he asked.

‘An outlaw, a rogue,’ I said, stammering in haste. ‘He fired Mr Briggs’s plantation back in the autumn. Could this be his work? Or is it the village?’

‘It’s the village,’ said John Brien positively. ‘There’s been no time for anyone else to have heard of the trouble we are having here. Anyway I swear I know who has done it.’

‘Who?’ I said. My face, which had been white and wet with cold sweat, was regaining its colour and my breath was coming normally again. If it was not the Culler on my land then I could face any danger. For one moment it was as if the ground had opened beneath my feet and the Culler sitting so oddly on his black horse with his two black dogs was coming for me out of the darkness of hell. But then I recognized the sense of what Brien said. It was too soon for anyone outside the village to have got wind of the troubles here. If the Culler was coming, if he was coming for me, and that was a fear I would have to face, then I prayed only to be spared that fear while my mind was so busy, so frantic with so much else.

‘Who from the village then?’ I said, my voice steady again.

‘Gaffer Tyacke’s youngest son John. Sam Frosterly, and Ned Hunter,’ said Brien certainly. ‘They worked slowly and were surly all day. They’re known troublemakers. They were last to leave last night and they were in a huddle together all the way home. And they were first there this morning to see my face when I saw the damage. I saw them smile at each other then. I’d lay a week’s wages it was them.’

‘That’s a serious charge, a hanging offence,’ I said. ‘Have you any evidence?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘But you know they’re the wildest lads in the village, Mrs MacAndrew. Of course they had a hand in it.’

‘Yes,’ I said thoughtfully. I turned to the window and looked out over the garden and the paddock and the high, high hills of the downs. Brien cleared his throat and shuffled his feet impatiently. But I let him wait.

‘We do nothing,’ I said eventually, when I had taken my time and thought the thing through. ‘We do nothing, and you say nothing. I’ll not come driving down to Acre every time something happens. Set the fences back in their places and repair the broken ones as best you can. Say nothing to those three: young Tyacke, Sam Frosterly and Ned Hunter. Just leave it. It may be that it was high spirits and bad temper and they’ll forget all about it. I’m prepared to overlook it.’

I knew also that if Brien had no evidence we could not move against the three. The village had closed its doors and its face to me. If I arrested three of the happiest, naughtiest, best-looking lads in the whole of Acre I would be more than disliked: I would be hated.

The three had been an irrepressible gang ever since they had been expelled in a giggling heap from the village school. They had stolen apples from our orchards; they had poached game from our preserves. They had taken salmon from the Fenny. But one of them was always the first to claim my hand at a Wideacre dance and, while the other two would hoot and catcall, he would spin me around, his red face smiling. They were bad lads — in the village judgement. But there was not an ounce of vice or spite among the three of them. And any girl in the village would have given her bottom drawer to be courted by any one of them. But they were just twenty and in the uproarious stage of bachelordom when young men prefer each other’s company and a pint pot to the prettiest girls in the world. So although they would give and take a hearty kiss under the mistletoe in winter, or behind the hay ricks in summer — they were not the marrying kind.

If I knew them — and I thought I did — then the breaking of our fences would have been done as a dare. If they had no response either from me or from John Brien, the joke would lose its savour. And it would not be repeated, for that would smack of spite. And I believed that they loved me, and would not break my fences, once the thing was beyond a joke.

‘Leave it,’ I said again. ‘And don’t let them know that you think it was them.’

John Brien nodded, but the gleam in his eyes told me that he thought I was being weak. I did not care. His opinion mattered nothing to me. If I read this attack as a jest, then I was more likely to be right than he — with his prickly pride about property and his anxiety at being made mock by three wild lads.

But he was right. And I was wrong.

Somewhere I had lost my sense of what was happening in Acre village and on the land. I had been certain that the one attack was one jest, that it would stand alone as Acre’s reply to Miss Beatrice’s haughtiness. That if I said nothing and did nothing but merely continued to enclose the common, then honour would be satisfied on both sides and the work would go smoothly ahead.

But the second night the fences were thrown down. And the third night they were thrown down and burned.

It was a tidy fire, built with a countryman’s care in a clearing, away from the dry tinder in the wood and clear of any overhanging branches. They had piled up the fences, fired them, and got themselves home to Acre before anyone noticed the flames.

‘And then they all tell me that there was nothing they could do!’ said John Brien in irritation. ‘They say that by the time they got water from the Fenny to put out the flames the fences had been destroyed!’

‘They could have made a chain to the common stream,’ I objected. ‘It’s only a few yards away.’

‘It’s inside the area that’s to be enclosed,’ John Brien said. ‘They said you’d told them to keep off that land, so they did.’

I gave a hard smile. ‘It makes sense,’ I said.

But I turned to look out of the window and my smile died. ‘I won’t have this,’ I said coldly. ‘I gave them a chance, but they seem determined to defy me. If they want to threaten me, with a fire in my woods, then they will have to learn who is Master on this land.

‘I shall have to go to Chichester to get new fences. I shall call in at the barracks and get a couple of soldiers to guard the fences until they are up. And if those lads come near them they can have a beating to teach them better manners. I have allowed them their jest. But now there is work to do and the games are over.’

Brien nodded. His eyes bright at the hardness in my voice. ‘You could arrest them if we caught them red-handed,’ he said. ‘They could hang for this.’

‘Not Wideacre lads,’ I said dismissively. ‘They deserve a fright, but nothing more. I’ll go to Chichester at once.’

I paused only to find Harry, who was playing with Julia in the nursery, before I ordered the carriage.

‘This is very bad, y’know, Beatrice,’ said Harry, as he accompanied me to the stable yard.

‘I agree,’ I said briskly, pulling on my gloves.

‘Typical of the poor,’ said Harry. ‘They simply can’t see that this is the way things have to be.’

‘They seem to be doing rather well at ensuring that events do not follow this apparently inevitable course,’ I said ironically, and stepped into the carriage. ‘For a natural process your progress seems to be rather difficult to bring about.’

‘You are jesting, Beatrice,’ Harry said pedantically. ‘But everyone knows this is the way things have to be. A couple of crazy villagers cannot stop it.’