Philippa Gregory - Wideacre

Despite my rising irritation with Harry, I could be angry with no one when I walked in the lanes of Wideacre with the great chestnut trees showering crimson and white petals on my head from their fat candle flowers. The grass grew so green — so brilliant a green it made you thirsty for the rain that had made it that astonishing colour. Every hedge was bright with greenness, every north-facing tree trunk was shadowed with the deep wet greenness of moss or the grey of fat lichen. The land was as wet as a sponge. All along the hedgerows there were the pale faces of the dogroses and the white flowers of the blackberry bushes. In the better cottages, vegetables were thriving and flowers edging the garden paths made even the smallest houses look bright and prosperous. The grass, the pathways, even the walls were speckled with summer flowers growing with irresistible joy in the cracks and crannies.

Yes, Harry and I had a score to settle. No man would walk past me to another woman and not regret it, but on that long, slow journey home I felt, as I felt for the rest of the summer, that I first had to come home to Wideacre; that Harry was the least important issue in this homecoming. That Harry and I could wait until I had met the land again.

Come home I did! I swear not a cottage on our estate but I banged on the door and pushed it open and smiled, and took a cup of ale or milk. There was not one house but I inquired after children, and checked profits with the men. Not one new hayrick did I miss, not one springing field with the soil so rich and wet did I neglect. Not even the seagulls wheeling above the ploughshares saw more than me. My horse was at the door every morning, and while Harry was up early keeping baby hours, I was off to brood like a laying hen over the land.

I loved it still — infinitely more now that I had been elsewhere, now that I had seen the pitiful dry French farms and the ugly rows of vines. I loved every fresh, easy fertile acre of it and I loved the difficult hill fields and the plough-free downs as well. Every day I rode and rode until I had quartered the estate like a hunting barn owl and marched its borders as if it were Rogation Day every day.

Mama protested, of course, at my riding out without a groom. But I had unexpected allies in the happy couple.

‘Let her go, Mama,’ said Harry easily. ‘Beatrice is beating the bounds; she’s been long away. Let her go. She’ll take no harm.’

‘Indeed,’ Celia assented in her soft voice. ‘Indeed she deserves a holiday after all she has done.’

They smiled on me, the soft foolish smile of doting parents, and I smiled back and was off. Every step of the paths, every tree of the woods I inspected, and I never rested for one day until I knew I had the estate firmly back in my hand.

The estate workers welcomed me back like á lost Stuart prince. They had dealt with Harry well enough for he was the Master in my absence, but they preferred to speak to me, who knew, without being told, who was married to whom, who was saving a dowry and who could never marry until a debt was paid. It was easier to talk to me for so little needed saying, while Harry, in his awkward, helpful way, would embarrass them with questions where silence would have been better, and with offers of help that sounded like charity.

They grinned slyly when they confided that old Jacob Cooper had a brand-new thatch on his cottage, and I knew without being told more that the reeds would have been cut, without payment, from our Fenny. And when I heard that it had been a remarkably bad year for pheasants, hare and even rabbits, then I knew without being told that they had all taken advantage of my absence to be out with their snares and their dogs. I smiled grimly. Harry would never see such things for he never noticed our people as people. He noticed the tugged forelock, but never saw the ironic smile beneath. I saw both, and they knew it. And they knew when I nodded my head that the sparkle in my eyes was a warning against any one of my people overstepping the line. So we all knew where we were. I was home to take the estate, the people, and every greening shoot back in my hand. And it seemed to me, on every hard daily ride, that the estate, the people and even the greening shoots were better for my return.

I rode everywhere — down to the Fenny to see the marshy water-meadow where the yellow flags were blooming, rooted into the two crumbled walls that were all that remained of the derelict mill. My horse was knee-deep as I urged her up to look. The building where a girl and a lad had lain and talked of love would never shelter lovers again.

It seemed so very long ago now that it felt as if it had happened to someone else, or that I had dreamed it. It could not have been me that Ralph had loved and romped with and rolled with and ordered and plotted with and risked his life for. That Beatrice had been a beautiful child. Now I was a woman afraid neither of the past nor of the future. I gazed unemotionally at the ruined barn, and at the new marshy empty meadow and was glad to feel nothing. Where there had been regret and fear there was now an easy sense of distance. If Ralph had survived, even if he had survived to lead a gang of rioters, he would be far away by now. Those days on the downs and the secret afternoons in the mill would be almost forgotten to him, as they were to me.

I turned my horse homewards and trotted through the sunny woods. The past was behind me, the River Fenny flowed on. I had a future to plan.

10

I started with my own quarters. The builders had finished in the west wing and it was ready for me. The lovely heavy old furniture, which had been exiled from Harry’s bedroom on his return from school to his mock-pagoda, had been bundled into a lumber room at the top of the house, and I had it taken out and polished until it gleamed with the deep shine of Jacobean walnut. Knobby with carving, so heavy it took six sweating men to carry it. ‘So ugly!’ said Celia in gentle wonderment. It was the furniture of my childhood and I felt a room was insubstantial without it. The great carved bed with the four posts, as thick as poplar trunks, with the carved roof above, I moved to my bedroom in the west wing.

Now I had a room that looked out on the front not the side of the house and I could see from my window the rose garden, the paddock, our wood and the lovely crescent of the downs rising behind it all. The carved chest stood beside it, and a great heavy press for my dresses loomed in the adjoining dressing room.

Once the lumber room upstairs was cleared of the heavy old furniture, I found much there that had belonged to my papa. Servant-like, the maids had bundled away his things into a mess of saddles, riding crops, hacking jackets and thongs of whips. My papa had fancied himself as an amateur saddler and his saddle rack and a wooden horse had also been thrown in the room. Once the furniture was set in the room below, the horse stood, forlorn, in the little room at the top of the stairs. Some whimsicality, some respect for my papa, stopped me throwing it out with the odd saddles and the whip he had been mending. Instead I put them all in the centre of the room and set myself to learning the skills that had come so easily to him. Long afternoons I spent there, my fingers busy with pulling threads through leather, my palms rosy with the sting of the saddler’s needle, oddly at peace.

Downstairs I had collected Papa’s old rent table: a great round table that looked as old as Arthur’s and could be spun so each labelled drawer faced the Squire in the great carver chair. Each drawer bore a letter of the alphabet and all the papers relating to each tenant were kept under the letter of his name. Beside it I placed the great money chest and here, monthly or quarterly, I collected the rents and, weekly or daily, paid out the wages. This was the office, the centre of the great money-spinning business of Wideacre, and I held the keys. I had ordered from Chichester an artist’s easel and commissioned a detailed scale map of the estate, so boundaries could at last be precisely recorded instead of being argued out on the spot in the old way. I had also purloined my papa’s old desk from the library — one with pigeonholes and two secret hiding places — to stand beside the window, so I could look up from the accounts to gaze across the roses to the paddock and the green woods and see the sun roll across the top of the downs, smiling on Wideacre crops and Wideacre profits.