Philippa Gregory - Wideacre

Even inside the Hall the light made everything strange. Celia’s parlour was an undersea green, and her face was white coral, a drowned virgin. Her eyes were like brown hollows in her head and when she poured my tea her hands were shaking.

‘What’s the matter, Celia?’ I asked.

‘I scarcely know,’ said Celia. She tried to laugh but the lilt in her voice had a hard edge. John was alert, his eyes on her strained face.

‘Are you unwell?’ he asked precisely.

‘No,’ said Celia. ‘I suppose it is just this horrid weather. This endless threat of storm that never comes weighs and weighs on me. I feel hot and then shivery. I have been down in Acre today and it feels all wrong there too. Some of the women seemed to be avoiding me. I feel certain that there will be trouble over the grain wagons, Beatrice. The air is full of threat. I feel almost fearful. I feel that something most dreadful is going to happen.’

‘It’s going to rain, that’s what’s going to happen,’ I said drily, to shake Celia out of her fancies. ‘It’s going to pour. We had better take the carriage to the harvest dinner and not the landau.’

She nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I ordered the coach. One does not have to be as weather-wise as you, Beatrice, to feel this storm coming. I feel like a cat with my fur rubbed all the wrong way. I have felt thus for days. But I fear more than a storm. I fear the mood of Acre.’

‘Well, I shall soothe my nerves with a bath and a fresh dress,’ I said with pretended indifference. But I knew I had John’s eyes on my face, and I knew my eyes were dark with fear at Celia’s forebodings. ‘And then, I suppose, we will have to go. When did you plan we should be there, Celia? The carts will be unloaded within an hour.’

‘As soon as you wish,’ she said absently. As she spoke there was a rumble of thunder along the heads of the downs. Another flash, so bright it stabbed our eyes, lit the room with a blaze of blue and then vanished, leaving us blinking in total blackness. Celia laughed at her jump, but her voice had a high note of hysteria.

‘I will be quick then,’ I said. But I could not move fast. The air was too thick for me. It quivered around me with meanings and resonances with a stink of horror I could not face. I swam through it to the door and tried to smile casually at them. My teeth were bared in an awkward grimace and my eyes were dead and cold. John moved to open the door for me, and his fingers brushed my hand.

‘You are icy cold, Beatrice,’ he said, his professional interest kindled, but malice in his voice. ‘Have you a fever? Or are you, too, afraid of this storm? Do you also feel the tension, the hatred all around us?’

‘No,’ I said wearily. ‘I have been bringing in the corn for what seems like all my life. I have been out in the fields every day. While you two sit in the parlour and plot against me, and drink the tea my labour has paid for, I am out there in the baking sunlight trying to save Wideacre. But I would not expect anyone to understand that.’

‘I say, steady on,’ said Harry, roused at last from the plate of cakes on the little table before him. ‘You know why I cannot help, Beatrice. They pay no mind to me, and I cannot bear insult.’

My lips curved in a disdainful smile. ‘No reason why you should, Harry,’ I said. ‘I go out and bear it for you. For all of you.’ In my mind I saw again the obscene dollies and the wheathead cock and the crafty skill of the making, as they seemed to roll over and over with their perverse passion, falling from the stook in the middle of their thrust.

‘I am tired,’ I said with finality. ‘Please excuse me, all of you. I should go and wash my ill-temper away.’

But I should have known better than to hope for decent service while there was a party starting at the mill. Every one of the kitchen staff had taken leave without one word of permission from me. The cook had taken a day off and gone to Chichester with Stride in the gig. Only Lucy was left to serve me and she complained bitterly about every hot water can she had to lug up the two flights of stairs and along three corridors.

‘That’s enough, Lucy,’ I said finally when I felt rested and brave again. ‘Now tell me again, who is in the house?’

‘Only the valets, Lady Lacey’s maid and me,’ said Lucy. ‘All the others have gone down to the mill. There’s a cold collation laid for your dinner.’

I nodded. In the old days the staff shared in every party and feast that the village could dream up. Sometimes they begged permission to borrow the paddock for Wideacre’s own sports events. But now the easy uncounting, uncalculating days were past.

‘I’ll dock them a day’s pay,’ I said while Lucy draped a towel around my shoulders, unpinned my hair and brushed it in long sweeps. She nodded. Her eyes meeting mine in the mirror were cold.

‘I knew you would,’ she said. ‘They knew you would. So they asked Lady Lacey, and she said they might go.’

I met her gaze with a long hard look that I held until her eyes dropped to her hands.

‘Warn them not to push me too far, Lucy,’ I said, my voice even. ‘I am tired of impertinence in the fields and house. If they push me too far they may be sorry they ever started. There are many servants looking for places, and I no longer have much attachment to people born and bred on Wideacre.’

She kept her eyes on the tumbled silk of my copper hair and brushed it in steady even sweeps. Then she deftly bunched it into one hand and twisted it into a smooth knot on the top of my head.

‘Beautiful,’ she said grudgingly. I looked at myself in the glass. I was lovely. The days in the field had bronzed me into my usual summer honey and now that the strained weary look had gone from my face I once more looked like a pretty twenty-year-old. The colour was back in my cheeks and there was a dusting of tiny freckles over my nose and upper cheekbones. Against the honey tea of my skin my hazel eyes gleamed greener than ever. My hair, burnished with the sun, was bronze as well as copper, and some of the curls around my face had even been sun-bleached to red-gold.

‘Yes,’ I said coldly, acknowledging like her the physical perfection of the oval face in the glass.

‘I’ll wear the green silk,’ I said, rising from the glass and dropping the damp towel on the floor for her to stoop and pick up. ‘I’m sick of greys and dark colours. And no gentry will be there.’

Lucy opened the wardrobe and shook out the deep green sack dress. A matching green stomacher tied tight at the front and a wide swaying panel shimmered loose at the back.

‘Good,’ I said, as she slid it over my head and tied the stomacher tight. ‘But I cannot breathe in here. Open the window, Lucy.’

She threw open the casement window but the heat and the damp air flowed in like a river of steam from a kettle to scorch the inside of my mouth and nose. Involuntarily I gave a little moan.

‘Oh, if only this weather would break,’ I said longingly. ‘I cannot breathe this air. I cannot move in this heat. Everything is so unbearably heavy all around me!’

Lucy looked at me without sympathy.

‘It’s affecting the children, too,’ she said. ‘Master Richard’s nurse asked if you would step into the nursery when you were changed. He is fretting and she thinks he may be cutting a tooth.’

I shrugged my shoulders. The fresh silk was already feeling too warm and sticky.

‘Ask Mr MacAndrew to go,’ I said. ‘I have to get ready to go to the mill. Mr MacAndrew will know what to do, and Richard minds him.’

Lucy’s eyes met mine and I read her instant condemnation of a woman who would not go to her own child when he was in pain and calling for her.

‘Oh, stop, Lucy!’ I said wearily. ‘Just tell him to go to the nursery at once, and then you come back and powder my hair.’