Philippa Gregory - Wideacre

‘She had no more than the proper dose?’ he said. His speech was still slurred and his head was weaving like a fighter who has suffered too many blows to the head.

‘As you ordered,’ I said. ‘Celia did as you said.’

‘Celia?’ he said. His pale eyes squinted against the bright sunlight. He put up one dirty hand to shield his face from the bright light of the Wideacre sun. ‘I thought it was you who was there, last night.’

‘Get to bed, man,’ said Harry coldly. ‘You’re still half foxed. You left Beatrice and me to nurse her, then Celia took my place. You yourself were little help.’

John stumbled to a chair near the door and stared at the floor.

‘Four drops,’ he said eventually. ‘Four drops, four-hourly; that should not have been too much.’

‘I don’t know in the least what you’re talking about,’ I said, and my voice was like a sharp stone skimmed over a frozen river. ‘You gave me a phial and told me to give it to her. Celia did so, and then she died. Are you telling us now you made a mistake?’

John squinted at me through his sandy lashes as if he was trying to see something in his memory that had escaped him.

‘I don’t make mistakes with medicines,’ he said flatly, holding on to that one certainty.

‘Then no mistake was made,’ said Harry impatiently. ‘And now get to bed. Mama has just died. You should show some respect.’

‘Sorry,’ said John inadequately. He stumbled as he rose to his feet. Harry, resigned, went to support him and nodded me to his other arm.

‘Don’t you two touch me!’ he exclaimed, and he spun on his heel for the door. The swift movement was too much for his spinning head and his knees buckled. He would have fallen but Harry grabbed him and I went unwillingly to hold his other arm. We marched him, sagging between us, up the stairs to the west wing and slung him on to his bed.

I turned to go but John grabbed at my wrist with sudden strength.

‘Four drops I said, didn’t I, Beatrice?’ he whispered. His eyes were suddenly bright with comprehension. ‘But I know too what she was talking about. What she had seen. What she found when she came for her novel. Beatrice and Harry. I told you four drops, but you told Celia the whole phial, didn’t you?’

I could feel the delicate bones in my hand starting to crack, but I made no effort to free myself. I had been readying for this since dawn and he could break my arm, but he could not defeat me. It hurt me still to lie so bold-faced, to the only other man who had loved me honestly, but I gave him look for look and my eyes were like green ice. Energy coursed through me for I was fighting for Wideacre. Against me, he was weak, just a drunk dreaming a nightmare.

‘You were drunk,’ I said bitingly. ‘So drunk you could not choose the medicine. You spilled your medical bag all over the library floor. Celia saw it this morning; the servants have seen it. You did not know what you were doing. You did not know what you were saying. I trusted you because I believed you were a great doctor, a truly great physician. But you were too drunk even to see her. If she had an overdose of laudanum it was you who put the drug in my hands and told me to give it to her. If she died because you gave her too much, then you are a murderer and should be hanged.’

He dropped my wrist as if it had scorched him.

‘Four drops, four-hourly,’ he panted. ‘I would have told you that.’

‘You remember nothing,’ I said with utter conviction, with utter contempt. ‘But what you should remember now, now you are sober, is that if there is any murmur of a question, any whisper of a question, about Mama’s death, it needs only one word from me and you will hang.’

His pale eyes were wide with abhorrence and he gazed up at me from the pillow of the big bed as if I smelled of sulphur from the very depths of hell.

‘You are wrong,’ he whispered. ‘I do remember; at least I think I remember it all. It is like a nightmare, so infamous I cannot believe it. But I do remember it, like a dream in delirium.’

‘Oh, fustian!’ I said, suddenly impatient. And I turned to leave. ‘I’ll send you up another bottle of whisky,’ I said with disdain. ‘You seem to need one again.’

And then I wavered.

All the time while I prepared for Mama’s funeral, arranged the ceremony, invited the guests, discussed the dinner menu with Celia and organized the servants into black trimmings, I wavered. In the week before Mama’s funeral my hand was on the doorknob to John’s bedroom, I think, once a day. I had learned to love him so recently; I loved him still, in some small corner of my lying heart, so very much.

But then I would pause and think what he knew about me. I would think with a shudder what would become of me if he spread his foul talk into Celia’s ears. If she and he together speculated about the father of Julia. And then my hand would drop from his door and I would turn away, my face hard, my eyes stony. He had seen into the depths of my crime. I saw a reflection of myself in his pale eyes that I could not bear. He knew the humiliating evil price I had paid to make myself secure on Wideacre and before him I was not just exposed and vulnerable. I was shamed.

So in all the bustle and confusion to plan and execute a respectable Wideacre funeral I did not forget to order Stride to take a fresh bottle of whisky up to Dr MacAndrew’s bedroom and study every midday and dinnertime. Stride’s eyes met mine with unspoken sympathy, and I managed a wobbly smile for him. ‘Pluck to the backbone’ was the verdict on me in the servants’ quarters, and although John had prompt service to his ring for a fresh glass, or more water to take with his drink, he was despised in the servants’ hall.

The rumour that his incompetence had caused Mama’s death had spread through the Hall and beyond to Acre village, and for miles around. It had reached the ears of the Quality through a thousand tattling maids and valets. When John wished to return to the normal world of visits and parties and dinners he would find doors closed against him. There would be no entry for him into the only world he knew unless I reintroduced him with all my charm and power.

He was not even summoned as a doctor to the yeoman farmers’ homes or to the Chichester and Midhurst tradesmen. Even the families of the middling sort had heard the gossip and there would be black looks for him in every village for a hundred miles around: for his drunken incompetence with Lady Lacey, and for grieving Miss Beatrice, the darling of the county.

My grief for a few days was real indeed. But as my fear of him and my sense of shame about his knowledge grew, I found I became colder and colder towards him. By the day of Mama’s funeral, only one week after I had threatened him with a hanging if he tried to betray me, I knew I hated him, and I would not rest until he was off Wideacre and silenced for good.

I had hoped he would be drunk on the day of the funeral, but as Harry handed me into the carriage John came out of the front door into the bright June sunlight. He was meticulously dressed in a neatly cut suit of black, his hair perfectly powdered, his black tricorn trimmed with black ribbon. He was pale, pale and cold, despite the hot sun. Or at least he shivered when his eyes met mine. But he had taken no more than he needed to face the day, and to judge from the hardness in his eyes, he was determined to see it through. Beside him, Harry looked plump and bloated and self-indulgent. John came towards the carriage steady-paced like some white-faced avenging angel, and stepped in to seat himself opposite me, without a word to any of us. I felt a touch of fear on my heart. John drunk was a public humiliation for me, his wife. But John sober and vengeful could ruin me. He would have every legal right to order and control me. He could legally watch my every movement. He would know if my bed had been slept in. He had a legal right to come into my room, into my bed, at any time, day or night. Worse, and even more unbearable — I clasped my black-gloved fingers in my lap to keep them from trembling — he could move away from Wideacre and sue me for public divorce if I refused to go with him.