Philippa Gregory - Wideacre

‘I know,’ I said. ‘I shall check the law with Lord de Courcey while I am in town. If it goes on we will have to catch them and turn them over to the courts.’

‘Absolute severity,’ said Harry, inspecting the shine on his top boots. ‘No leniency.’

I nodded and waved him farewell from the window. Harry’s tone might strike me as pompous and silly but everyone I spoke to in Chichester seemed to share it. Lord de Courcey treated the fence breaking and the mischievous bonfire as if it were an armed insurrection and took me at once to the barracks. I resisted, without too much difficulty, the suggestion that I should have an entire troop of horse quartered on the Home Farm to protect Wideacre Hall from three young lads. But I was glad to accept the offer of half-a-dozen soldiers with a sergeant.

I could have used the Wideacre footmen. But ours is a small community and I knew only too well that while the love and sympathy of the Hall servants might be wholly mine, they would not seize and hold their cousins or even their brothers in a free-for-all over my fences.

I came home in triumph, followed at a lumberingly slow pace by a wagonful of new fences, and at a distance by the sergeant and the troopers. They were to put up at the Bush and it was given out that they were a recruiting party. But they were to be ready for my word to set the trap.

I sent word the very next night. All day John Brien and the grinning villagers had set the new fences and dug them securely into the ground. As darkness fell and the men went home, John Brien, Harry and I met the troopers on the far side of the river. Making no noise, we waded the horses through the water and the soldiers tied their mounts and surrounded the clearing, leaving only the lane to Acre empty. It was dark, the moon was not yet up, and the only light was starlight, and that often hidden with cloud.

I had stayed on horseback and I could see Tobermory’s ears flickering nervously at this late vigil. It was cold, a damp bitter cold of a late winter evening. Harry beside me shifted in his saddle and blew into his gloves to warm his fingers.

‘How long do we wait?’ he asked. He was as excited as a boy and I remembered, with some anxiety, his enthusiastic accounts of the fights at his school led by his hero Staveley. It was all a game to Harry. To John Brien, whose horse was on my other side, it was more serious. Despite his Acre wife he hated the village and thought himself above it. Like any foolish town-bred man he prized his quick wits above the slow wisdom of the country. And like any man climbing up the small and difficult ladder of snobbery he hated the rank of people he was trying to leave.

‘We’ll give them an hour,’ I said softly. I was anxious and tense with the excitement of the ambush, but somewhere in the back of my mind there was a voice saying, ‘These are your people, these are your people, and yet you are in hiding with soldiers and with two men whose judgement you despise to ambush them and do them harm.’

I could not believe that I had lost so much of my relationship with Wideacre, with the land, with the people, that I should be out in the dark like some spy to attack them. If it had not benefited Richard! But Richard’s rightful place at Wideacre had created a long chain of events that meant that even now my husband was eating his dinner behind bars, and that the face of Wideacre, that beloved smiling land, seemed to be changing as I looked at it. If it had not been for Richard! But…

‘There they are,’ said John Brien softly.

Straining my eyes into the darkness I could see, as he had seen, three figures coming silently down the track that leads to Acre. They were walking at the side in single file and their shadowy shapes sometimes blended with the dark bushes. I saw John Tyacke’s blond curls bright in the starlight, and thought I recognized the broad shoulders of Sam Frosterly. I heard John Tyacke say something under his breath and heard Ned Hunter laugh softly. They were quiet because it was night and they were country born and bred. They were not hushed for fear of a trap. They would never have dreamed that there could be a trap laid for Acre lads on Wideacre land.

They moved to the first fence that straddled the land and readied themselves to push it down. One of them had a spade over his shoulder and he dug out the foundations and then all three rushed at it in a giggling dash and tumbled over when it gave way beneath the charge.

‘Now?’ said Brien softly to me.

‘Now,’ I said, my lips so cold I could hardly speak.

‘Now!’ shouted Harry, and spurred his horse forward as the troopers rose up out of the dark bushes and raced towards the three lads. There were six troopers, a mounted sergeant, Harry, John Brien and I. The lads tumbled to their feet and stared as if they could not believe their eyes, then in a flash they were running like startled deer back towards Acre, heading for home, in the old trust that home was safe for them.

Ned and Sam leaped the broken fence and raced up the track with the troopers behind them and Harry riding them down. But I saw a glint of fair hair and realized that John Tyacke was running in the opposite direction, down towards the Fenny where he could be sure of a hundred hiding places and a dark secret creep home. He did not know I was there, watching him as he ran straight towards me. His ears and his attention were on the noise of Harry throwing himself from his horse on to the two other lads. He was expecting to be chased from behind. He was upon me almost before he knew it and he skidded to a halt in the darkness at Tobermory’s side.

‘Miss Beatrice!’ he said.

‘John Tyacke,’ I replied. Then he ducked away from me and fled down the little path towards the river.

‘Did you see him go, ma’am?’ called the sergeant, turning his men from the fight in the lane where Ned and Sam were standing sulkily between John and Harry.

‘No,’ I said in a quick thoughtless response. He was Tyacke’s grandson and I liked Tyacke. He was one of our people and the sergeant was a stranger. He was not to be ridden down like a dog.

‘No, we’ve lost him,’ I said.

The troopers took Sam and Ned away to Chichester that very night. I had not thought of that. They were committed to trial at the quarter sessions before Judge Browning. I had not thought of that. By the time Acre woke up the next day there was nothing anyone could do. Two of the best-loved lads of the village had been taken away. And their greatest friend, young John Tyacke, could only sit by his mother’s small fire with his head in his hands and mutter that he did not know what he should do.

The whole of Acre knew that if Ned and Sam had been up to some devilry then John would have been with them. But they also knew that the devilry must have gone badly wrong indeed for the three to have been split up. For John was not the sort of lad to leave his friends to face trouble alone. He sat and brooded all day about what he should do, while the fence was repaired and the felling of the trees inside the enclosed land could at last start. Then he went to his grandfather, Gaffer Tyacke, and told him what had happened.

Then Gaffer Tyacke came to me.

I had half expected him, for I had yet to learn that I was no longer the villagers’ first call when they faced trouble. Gaffer came in to my office while Harry was there, and if I had been quicker to send Harry out of the room then I might have stopped the downward spiral from error to tragedy. But Stride had served coffee for Harry and me while we worked on some plans, and Harry was intent on some petits fours and would have been troublesome to move. So I let him munch at the table while Gaffer Tyacke stood in front of my desk with his cap in his hands.

‘I’ve come to give myself up, Miss Beatrice,’ he said.