Philippa Gregory - Wideacre

She was standing frozen in the parlour door, the candles from the hall illuminating as bright as daylight the scene before her. Harry’s humping, moonlike, fat, white buttocks, and my pale face, staring speechlessly at her over his velvet-jacketed shoulder. The disaster dawned on us all as slowly as sunrise.

‘I left my novel,’ she said stupidly, as she stared at the two of us, coupled before the dying embers of the fire. Harry was frozen. He still lay on me but his head was slewed round to face her, his blue eyes goggling, his red face sweaty.

‘I came to fetch my book,’ she said. Then the candelabra dropped from her hand and she reeled backwards into the hall as if the sight of us, her two children, meant instant death to her.

Harry gasped, like a punctured bladder of wind, but her collapse had released me from my trance. I moved as fast as I could, but still with nightmare slowness — as if I was drowning in the Fenny and struggling through green weeds under a roof of ice. In one sleek movement I slid up and off Harry and pulled my petticoats and dress down, and retied my laces.

‘Get your breeches up,’ I hissed at him, jolting him into life, and he scrambled to his feet and fumbled for his clothes. I strode to the door and nearly fell over Mama, who lay in a crumbled heap beside her smoking candles. In the cruel light of the hall she looked not white but green, as if she too were trapped in an under-river world of horror. Some random instinct made me feel for a pulse in her neck, and then for her heart. She looked like death, and I could feel no heart beating.

‘My God!’ I said incredulously. Then, in rapid decision, I said, ‘Harry! Help me carry her to her bed.’

Wig off and wild-eyed, Harry scooped the body of our mother in his arms. I preceded him up the stairs, the single candle flame making hobgoblin shapes of Harry and his burden all the way up. He laid her on the bed and we gazed in joint consternation at her pallor and her deathlike stillness.

‘She looks very ill,’ said Harry. In my trance of horror even his words seemed to come slowly, from a long way away.

‘I think her heart has stopped,’ I said coldly. ‘I could not feel it beat.’

‘We must get John,’ said Harry, and moved to the door. I put out a hand instinctively to stop him.

‘No, Beatrice,’ he said firmly. ‘Whatever else takes place we must safeguard Mama’s health.’

I let out a long, shuddering, silent laugh.

‘Oh, yes,’ I said. ‘You do your duty, you threepenny-halfpenny Squire.’ And I turned my face from his with utter loathing.

Thus they found me, still as a statue, gazing down into Mama’s cold face, not touching her. Harry had half carried John up the stairs, John still reeling from fatigue and blind with drink. Harry had said nothing, merely shaken John awake and poured water over him. His real self was still unconscious in a whisky-aided morass of misery. But his professional training burned like a clear torch inside the collapse of his self. God knows it is the truth, and an odd truth; I loved him especially then when his self-discipline surfaced from the sea of fatigue, alcohol and misery, and guided his red-rimmed eyes over Mama’s greenish face and placed his shaky hands on her pulse.

‘Out, Harry,’ he said. His breath was foul with exhaustion and drink, but no one could have gainsaid him. ‘Beatrice, my bag is in your office. Fetch it.’

Harry and I fled the room like thieves, Harry to the parlour to set the rug straight, and to tidy up; I to the west wing for John’s medical bag. I straightened my dress as I went, but I had not time to clear my mind. It took me valuable seconds to find it, and then I returned, through the door into the hall, up the arching stairs to Mama, where she lay murmuring to the pillows and to the unresponsive roof of her four-poster bed, over and over, ‘Harry, Harry, Harry.’ I knew with some clear-sighted coldness that she knew what she had seen, and that her voice, her cracked hoarse voice, was calling her son back from the abyss of hell, back from the dark tunnel of sin, back from the embrace of his sister, back from his adult life, to be her boy, her curly-haired sinless child again.

‘Harry,’ she said in a moan, ‘Harry, Harry, Harry.’

In a sudden terror I looked from her to John. His eyes were blank, impassive. He had not yet put his skilled, his knowledgeable mind to what she was saying.

‘Harry!’ said my mother, in her dreamy monotone.

‘Beatrice.’

John’s eyes upon me were blank with incomprehension, but I knew it would not last. He would find his way to the centre of the maze. I had chosen this clever, loving man because he was the best I had ever met: the best suited for me, the cleverest mind to meet mine, the wittiest brain to grapple with mine. Now I had launched his wits against me, and I could not tell where he would make landfall.

‘I only wanted my novel,’ said Mama, as if that explained everything. ‘Oh Harry! Beatrice! No!’

But John was thinking only partly of what Mama was saying; he was also watching her breath, the movement of her hands across the sheets as they plucked at the counterpane in a ceaseless, worried gesture.

‘She has had a shock,’ John said to me, as if I were a medical student in the Royal Infirmary interested in diagnosis. ‘It nearly proved too much for her, and I do not know what it was. But she is deeply disturbed. If she can be kept from thinking of it, whatever it is, for one, maybe two or three days, it is possible that she will come to face whatever she fears without her heart stopping. It will be a close thing, but I think it can be done.’

He took a phial from his worn bag and a delicate medicine glass with a little spout to help a patient drink. He unstoppered the phial and counted the drops into the glass. His trained, disciplined skill kept his hand steady, though I could see the sweat on his face at the effort.

‘One, two, three, four,’ he said meticulously, with the alcohol slurring his words. ‘She’s to have four drops, every four hours. D’you understand me, Beatrice?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

He scooped Mama’s limp body into one arm and expertly fed her the glass, and then laid her back on the pillows, straightening the covers across her and smoothing the pillows beneath her twisting head.

‘Harry! Harry! Harry!’ she called, but her voice was a little quieter.

‘You will have to sit up with her; you, or Harry,’ he said carefully. ‘In four hours, not before, she may have four more drops. In four hours, not before, four more; until she sleeps naturally without seeming disturbed. Do you understand?’

‘Yes,’ I said again, my voice empty of feeling.

‘Any more, and her heart will simply stop,’ he said, warning me. ‘She cannot take any more. She needs rest. But too much laudanum and she will slip away. Do you understand?’

‘Yes,’ I said again in the same monotone.

‘Four drops, four-hourly,’ he said again. His repeated instructions, the insistent moaning from the bed, the knowledge of my sin and the trap closing in around me made the bedroom like a deep pit. The candles on the bedside table guttered and the shadows of the room wavered towards me. My husband could not meet my eyes. My brother, who had been taken with me in sin, was nowhere to be seen. And in the bed beside me, my own mother droned like a lunatic.

John shut his bag with an effort, and stumbled towards the door.

‘No more than four drops, no sooner than four hours. Do you understand, Beatrice?’

‘Yes,’ I said again.

He staggered from the room to the stairs. The clocks chimed midnight in an ominous chorus as he gripped the polished handrail to keep himself from falling. I held high the candelabra to light him down. His bag banged against each carved stairpost and nearly overset him. He staggered to the library door and nearly fell when it yielded under his hand. I set down the candles and glided downstairs like a ghost.