Philippa Gregory - Wideacre

Harry glanced up as I entered and his face was half apologetic. ‘I hope you don’t mind, Beatrice?’ he said to me in a low voice, as he rose to meet me at the door and conducted me to a seat opposite John, the seat that used to be Celia’s. ‘I understood from John that you would not be coming to dinner tonight and so Celia naturally took the foot of the table.’

I smiled neutrally and paused by the chair, looking at Celia, waiting for her to leap to her feet and to move to her place to make the chair of the Squire’s Lady free for me. She did not move. She simply smiled at me with her pansy-brown eyes wide and said, ‘I am sure you would rather sit opposite John, would you not, Beatrice? It is just like your courting days when your mama was alive.’

‘I would rather have Beatrice opposite me,’ John said to clinch the decision. ‘I like to have her where I can see her!’

They laughed at that, the fools. As if John had never drunk himself into a stupor at this very table. As if my place could be challenged with impunity. As if I should take a seat down the board and give way to Harry’s child-bride. I smiled, a sour smile, and sat where they all wished me to be. And I noted with an inward promise of vengeance the quick exchange of looks between the youngest footman and a new lad. They would be looking for work after next pay day.

That night belonged to Celia.

And I saw she had earned it. A bluish bruise shadowed her cheekbone but her eyes were serene. I guessed that Harry had struck her, in anger or passion, but once, and then dissolved into apology and reconciliation. She had no glimpse of his real needs and thought that blow the single lowest moment of her married life. She did not know there was a pattern of punishment forming around her. She thought that blow the first and last she would ever have from Harry. And she thought she could bear it. With the life of Wideacre hanging on a thread she thought she had to endure it.

So she took her place at the foot of the table.

Her beloved brother-in-law drank lemonade on her left, and her husband beamed down the table at her. She bloomed in the candlelight like a carnation in sunshine. Her worries and her sense of horror had been stilled firstly by John’s calm acceptance of her garbled, hysterical story, and then by promises Harry had made her while they lay in bed. John had told her that he had not known of the plan to change the entail but he was not surprised. And that the contract could certainly be changed. That, as Richard’s father, he could and would resign Richard’s rights to inherit jointly with Julia. That Julia could inherit with his blessing, and that they would find some way of compensating Richard or himself for the use of the MacAndrew fortune.

John’s calm acceptance of the news, his easy packing and friendly departure from Dr Rose, pulled Celia back from the entrance to the maze. She began to think she had been mistaken. She forgot the evidence of her senses: the smell of sin around the house, the prickle on her skin when Harry would look at me during dinner and ask if I could spare him some time later that evening for business. The sight of a strawberry-red bruise on Harry’s back. And her bewilderment when she woke late one night and put her hand out to where her husband should be and found the bed cold. All that she could forget when John smiled at her with steady honest eyes and said, ‘Trust me, Celia, I can make it right.’

She had come home on a cloud of relief in her shabby dress, and with a growing anxiety that Harry would be angry with her; that he would not overlook her scream in the silence of the dining room; that he would press her for an explanation of her horror. For Celia and John, and Harry and I, all had our little deceptions and secrets. And we were all jealously guarding them.

But Harry had been easy. They had both conspired to silence. His blow had shocked her but had been followed by a string of kisses. With her love and loyalty half transferred to John she paid her dues to her husband, just as I paid rent to my landlord. Harry thrust himself into her like a fat foot into a silk slipper, forgave her indiscretion and asked nothing more.

They cleared the soup plates and served the fish. John was eating with relish. ‘This is wonderful,’ he said, nodding to Celia. ‘Salmon! How I have missed Wideacre food.’

‘Poor fare at the doctor’s, was there?’ asked Harry, his attention caught. ‘I feared there might be. You’ll be glad to be home.’

John smiled a warm smile at Celia, whose signature and passionate insistence had brought him home, but his voice when he answered Harry was cold.

‘I am indeed,’ he said.

‘What was it like there?’ Harry asked, tactless as ever.

‘It was well run,’ said John. ‘It was well organized. It was a good place for treatment. It was lonely.’

Celia’s hand twitched. She had been about to stretch it out to him in an instinctive gesture of sympathy.

‘I hoped my letters would help,’ she said.

‘What letters?’ said John. ‘I received no letters.’

My fork in my hand, I hesitated, but then moved steadily on, ate the piece of salmon and reached for my wine glass.

‘Did you receive my letters?’ I asked.

John’s eyes met mine with a hard, ironic, insulting smile.

‘No, my dear,’ he said politely. ‘Did you write to me often?’

‘Every other day,’ I said blandly.

‘And I wrote every week,’ Celia put in. ‘What can have happened to them?’

John’s eyes were on my face, his eyes like pale stones.

‘I can’t imagine. Can you, Beatrice?’

‘No,’ I said shortly. ‘Perhaps Dr Rose thought you were not well enough to receive letters from home. He forbade visitors, you know.’

‘I guessed there must be some reason I heard from no one,’ said John. It was like swordplay, talking to him. It was like an unending duel. But I was weary.

I gave up. I was almost ready to give up on the rest of my plans too. I was certainly ready to let one evening go without my controlling every move.

‘Excuse me,’ I said to Celia. ‘I am tired. I will go to my room.’

I rose to my feet and the footman sprang to pull back my chair for me. Harry rose and gave me his arm to the west-wing door.

‘It wasn’t Celia in your chair, was it?’ he asked with his usual doltishness. But I was too tired even to fire an opening shot in a battle over a chair, when my husband had looked at me with trained eyes and saw Death in my face.

‘No, it wasn’t the chair,’ I said wearily. ‘She can sit in the damned thing all night if she chooses.’ I turned from him and slipped through the door of the west wing. Lucy undressed me and I dismissed her. Then I took the key from my dressing table and locked the door. I jammed the chair under the handle for good measure. Then I fell into bed and slept as if I wanted never to wake up.

18

But I had to wake up. There was always work to do, and no one but me who could do it. I had to wake, and dress, and go down to breakfast and sit opposite John, with Celia at the foot of the table, and Harry smiling, at the head, and exchange inanities. Then I had to go to my office and pull out the drawer of bills and spread them out before me and puzzle and worry at them until my head ached.

They were a morass of demands to me. I could not see how we had got there; I could not see how to get free. The first simple debts with Mr Llewellyn I had understood well enough. But then the bad weather had come and the sheep had done so badly. Then the cows had some infection and many calves were stillborn. So I had borrowed from the bankers on some of the new wheatfields. But then that had not raised enough, so I had mortgaged some of the marginal lands — the fields on the borders with Havering. But the repayments on those loans were heavy too. I was borrowing and borrowing against the wheat harvest. Praying that the wheat harvest would be such a golden glut that I need never borrow again. That the barns would overflow with wheat in such a surplus that I could sell and sell and sell, and all my debts would vanish — as if they had never been. I spread the bills before me like some complicated patchwork before an inadequate needlewoman, and I sighed with anxiety.