Philippa Gregory - Wideacre

‘What?’ I demanded incredulously.

‘I’ve come to give myself up,’ he replied steadily. ‘I took the two lads into the woods last night and I ordered them to pull down the fences. I ordered them to help me on that one night. The nights before was me alone.’

I stared at him as if one of us was crazy, and then slowly it dawned on me what he was doing.

‘Gaffer Tyacke, no one could believe that,’ I said gently. ‘You are an old man, you could not possibly have done it. I know what you are trying to do, but it cannot be done.’

There was no responsive gleam in his eye. He had known me and loved me since as far back as I could remember. He saw me christened in the parish church, and on my first rides with Papa. But now he looked through me as if I were a smeary window, and said, ‘I’ve come to give myself up, Miss Beatrice, and I ask that you will have me arrested and send me to Chichester.’

‘What’s this?’ said Harry, coming out of his dream of chocolate cakes with a start. ‘What’s this I hear? Was it you breaking the fences, Tyacke?’

‘Yes,’ said the old man steadily.

‘No!’ I said, breathless with irritation and a rising sense of fear. ‘How could it be, Harry? Don’t be so foolish. You saw the man run last night. It could not have been Gaffer Tyacke.’

‘It was me, begging your pardon,’ said George Tyacke steadily. ‘And I have come to give myself up.’

‘Well, you’ll have to stand trial and it’s a most serious offence,’ said Harry warningly.

‘I know that, Squire,’ said Tyacke evenly. He knew it better than any of us. It was only because he really understood what was happening that he was here. I put out a hand to him.

‘Gaffer Tyacke, I know what you’re doing,’ I said. ‘I did not mean it to go this far. But I can probably stop it. There’s no need to try and save them this way.’

He turned his face towards me and his dark eyes were as black as a prophet. ‘Miss Beatrice, if you did not mean it to go this far you should never have started it. You told us yourself this is the way of the world outside Wideacre. You have brought that world to Wideacre and now it will mean death. You have brought death to Wideacre, Miss Beatrice. And it had better be mine rather than anyone else’s.’

I gasped and fell back in my chair, and Harry stepped forward with bullying authority.

‘Now see here, that’s enough!’ he said. ‘You’ve upset Miss Beatrice. Hold your tongue!’

George Tyacke nodded his head, his eyes still upon me burning with reproach while Harry crossed to the bell and ordered the carriage for Chichester.

‘Harry,’ I said urgently. ‘This is nonsense and it must stop now.’

He hesitated at my tone and looked from me to George Tyacke.

‘I’ve come to give myself up to you,’ said George. ‘But I can go to Lord Havering. I’m prepared to take the punishment.’

‘It’s too serious to let pass, Beatrice,’ said Harry, his tone reasonable but his babyish face alive with excitement at the drama of these petty, deadly events. ‘I’ll take Tyacke here to Chichester at once and make my deposition. You come along, now,’ he said rudely to Tyacke and took him from the room.

I saw the carriage go past the window and I could think of no way to stop it. I could think of no way to stop anything. I sat with my head in my hands by my desk for a long, long hour. Then I went up to my nursery to find my son, the future Squire.

They hanged him.

Poor, old, brave, foolish, Gaffer Tyacke.

The two lads would not agree that it was all his doing but the court was happy to have a man who confessed to breaking fences, trespassing on property and burning wood. So they hanged him. And Gaffer Tyacke went with steady steps to the scaffold and his old shoulders straight with pride.

The two lads, Hunter and Frosterly, they transported. Ned Hunter caught gaol fever and died while he was awaiting transportation. They said that Sam was with him all the time and he died in Sam’s arms, his lips black with the fever, longing for a sight of his home and the touch of his mother’s hand. Sam Frosterly sailed on the next ship out, and his family had a letter from him, just once. He was in Australia, a hard life and a bitter life for a lad reared in the gentle heart of Sussex. He must have longed and longed for the green hills of home. And they said it was the homesickness, not the heat or the flies or the dreadful bloody brawls, that killed him. He died within the year. If you are Wideacre born and Wideacre bred you cannot be happy elsewhere.

I heard of the deaths — Gaffer’s through the trapdoor, and Hunter’s on the convict ship — with a thin mouth, a white face, and dry eyes. After Hunter’s death, John Tyacke, the young lovely grandson and the pet of the village, disappeared. Some said he had run off to sea, some said he had hanged himself in the Wideacre woods and would be found when the autumn winds came and swept the leaves away from shielding him. He was gone, anyway. And the three of them would roister arm in arm down Acre lane no more. And when they brought the harvest in, John Tyacke would not swirl me round in a leaping jig while the others twisted their caps in their hands and giggled and nudged each other. The three of them were gone.

17

And something had gone from me, too.

I could not hear the heartbeat of Wideacre any more. I could not hear the heartbeat; I could not hear the birdsong. As the spring warmed up, slowly, slowly, as if there was a lump of ice at the heart of England that year, I did not warm. The cuckoos were calling in the woods; the larks started to make small experimental upward flights and try their voices, and I did not warm. My heart did not sing. The spring, with all its bobbing wild daffodils in the woods, and its scattering of meadow flowers, with all the leaves and the sweetness, and the rushing of the Fenny, the Wideacre spring came, but I did not melt from my winter coldness.

I could not tell what was happening. I could neither hear nor see. Nothing, nothing in my life seemed real to me any more and I looked out on the greening, damp land as if I were looking through a wall of ice that would separate me for ever from the land I had loved, and the people I had known.

I spent much time gazing out through the window, through the glass pane. Looking incredulously at the greening woods, which were as bright and as fluttering as if everything was still the same, as if my heart still pattered to the tune of the steady thud of my home. I did not dare to go out. I was weary of driving and not yet released from mourning so I could not ride. But I did not even wish to ride. I did not care either to walk in the fields. The warm moist earth that caked on my boots seemed to pull me down like a bog of clay — not like Wideacre’s soft loam at all. When I was driving it seemed such an effort to turn the horse’s head, to click to him to trot, to hold him steady on the road.

And this spring the countryside was not so lovely; it was too bright. The colours of green this spring hurt my eyes with their vibrant growth. I squinted when I tried to look towards the downs, and the sunshine put hard lines around my mouth and on my forehead where I found I was scowling.

There was no pleasure for me out on the land this spring, I could not tell why. And there was no pleasure for me in the village either. As I had ensured, no one noticed the lack of kindling from the enclosure. I had timed the fencing in of the common carefully. They should not have reproached me for that. No one went cold in the village that spring by my action. So I did not do all things badly.