The Complete Wideacre Trilogy: Wideacre, The Favoured Child, Meridon

‘You disgust me,’ I said, speaking the truth, which leaped unstoppable to my lips.

Harry gave a whimper and slid from the pretty salon chair to his knees on the carpet at my feet.

‘I know it. I know I do,’ he said miserably. ‘I cannot help it. I am bewitched, I think. I have been wrong all my life. Only you can save me, Beatrice – though it is you who have done the bewitching. I am caught in your snare and I am helpless before you. For God’s sake be merciful with me.’

I smiled, the easy cruel smile of this new role Harry had cast for me in his fevered, oversexed, over educated imagination.

‘You are mine for ever, Harry,’ I said. ‘Your rumblings with your little bride, your friendships with men, your love for Mama or your work on the land – none of these are the real life. The real life is with me in secret, in a private locked room that only you and I know about. And you will get to that room only when I bid you, for only I have the key. And there I will take you into pain and beyond pain. And we will never, ever part; for I do not wish to go, and you –’ I smiled down into his upturned white face – ‘you would die without this pleasure.’

He gave a sob and buried his face in my skirt. I touched his head with my hand as gently as our mama would have done and heard his sobs renew at my tenderness. Then I gripped on to the long blond curls and pulled his head up so I could look into his eyes.

‘Are you my servant?’ I demanded in a whisper like a shard of ice.

‘Yes,’ he said tonelessly. ‘Yes.’

‘Are you my slave?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then go now for I have had enough of you.’

I said it cruelly, and I turned back to my desk. He shuffled to his feet and walked slowly and painfully to the door. His hand was on the doorknob when I said, in the voice I use to call my dogs, ‘Harry!’

He turned quickly and awaited my pleasure.

‘You will behave at dinner as if nothing at all had ever happened,’ I said. ‘This is a life and death secret and your silly open face must not betray you, or you will be ruined. Do it, Harry.’

He nodded, like a pauper taking orders at the workhouse, and turned to leave.

‘And Harry,’ I said with a new, languorous note in my voice, little more than a whisper.

I could see his back tense like a shudder, and he turned again.

‘I will unlock the door of my secret room tonight, and you may come to me at midnight,’ I said, softly.

He shot me a look of speechless gratitude. Then I let him go.

I was still left with the problem of John MacAndrew and, to tell the truth, the problem of my pleasure in his company, which I was loath to lose unless I had to. One solution was obvious: an easy lie. That Harry had quite misunderstood me, and that I enjoyed his friendship but I feared we would not suit as a married couple. I sat, musing, facing my desk with the papers I should be checking piled under a heavy glass paperweight – a deep red poppy embalmed inside it. I played the scene over in my mind – my dignified regret at rejecting John MacAndrew – and I tried some of the phrases of maidenly modesty in my mind. But my serious face kept breaking into a smile. It was all such fustian! And clever, sharp John MacAndrew would see through it in a trice. I had to find some lie to turn him from his course of marriage to me, and my exile to Scotland. But I would never convince him that I liked him only as a friend when he could see, as everyone could see, that I had a quick smile as soon as I saw him, and that no one could amuse me as he did.

I did not ache for him as I had for Harry. I did not see him with my conscious mind suspended utterly by the power of my body’s feelings as I had with Ralph. But I could not help smiling when I thought of him and the idea of his kisses delighted me. Not in my dreams – for I never, ever dreamed of him – but in daytime reveries and in the pictures that came into my mind before I slept.

While I was still turning over in my mind what I could say to him, I heard the noise of a curricle and pair and Dr MacAndrew’s expensive carriage bowled up the drive and stopped, informally, impertinently, outside my window. He looked down from the high box-seat and smiled at me. I crossed to the window and flung it wide to him.

‘Good morning, Miss Lacey,’ he said. ‘I have come to kidnap you from your business. It is too lovely a day to waste indoors. Come for a drive with me.’

I hesitated. To refuse would be ungracious and would only delay the proposal if his mind was set on marriage. Besides, now the window was open I could smell the hot end-of-summer scents of full-blown roses and gillyflowers and stocks. In the woods, pigeons were cooing their hearts out and the swallows were swinging and swooping in the air in their last picnic before their travels. We could drive around to watch them breaking the turf in the rested fields to ready them for sowing.

‘I’ll fetch my hat,’ I said with a smile, and I swept from the room.

But I had not considered Mama. She met me at the great staircase, and insisted that I change into a pretty walking-out dress and not clatter about the country in my morning gown. While I fretted at the delay, Mama called her maid as well as mine and laid out a choice of gowns before me on the bed.

‘Any one, any one of them,’ I said. ‘I am only going for a drive to the fields with Dr MacAndrew, Mama. I’m not off to London for the season, you know.’

‘There is no reason why you should not look your best,’ Mama said with unusual force. And she chose for me a deep green gown, smart jacket and voluminous skirt, which would bring out the green in my eyes and show my clear honey skin to perfection. The little matching bonnet had a veil of green lace, which I complained gave me spots before my eyes but actually delighted me with the way it hinted at the brightness of my eyes and drew attention to my smiling mouth. Mama’s own dresser piled up my hair in fat coils and Mama herself pinned on the hat and pulled down the veil. Then she took both my gloved hands in her own and kissed me.

‘Go on,’ she said. ‘You look lovely. I am very, very happy for you.’

Not only Mama seemed to think I was off to hear a proposal. Half the household had found a job to do on the staircase or in the hall that morning, as I made my way down to the front stairs. Every one of them bobbed a curtsy or tipped a bow to me and they smiled as if the whole of Wideacre was in a conspiracy to see me wedded.

The front door was flanked by our entire staff of footmen and parlourmaids as if we were entertaining in state. Both halves of the great double door were flung ceremoniously open by the butler and, gawping out of the parlour window, as Dr MacAndrew handed me up, were Celia, Nurse and, of course, Baby Julia.

‘You’ve had a fine send-off this morning,’ he said teasingly, noting the flush of scarlet on my cheeks.

‘It’s more usual to wait until you are accepted before you make an announcement,’ I said acidly, my scene of maidenly refusal forgotten in my irritation.

He choked with laughter at my indiscretion.

‘Now, Beatrice, try for a little tone,’ he implored, and for all the world I could not check a laugh in response. But this was no way to lead up to a refusal – and besides all the house staff had piled out on to the terrace to see us go, and could see me driving away with my suitor with a smile on my face.

We swept down the drive at a spanking pace. He was driving his matched bays and they were fresh and going well. Although he held them to a trot on the twists and turns, I was looking forward to feeling the speed when we reached the road to Acre. The lodge gates were waiting for us opened wide, and Sarah Hodgett was there with a curtsy and a meaningful smile for me. I glanced accusingly at John MacAndrew’s profile as all the Hodgett family crowded out of the house to point and wave at pretty Miss Beatrice and her young man. John MacAndrew turned his head and grinned at me, unrepentant.

‘Not me, I swear it, Beatrice. So don’t look daggers at me. I said not a word to anyone save your brother. I imagine the whole world has seen how I look at you, and how you smile at me, and has been waiting for us while you and I are taken by surprise.’

I considered this in silence. I disliked the easy tone of confidence but I was interested in whether I was surprised at the proposal. I had been amazed at the day of the race, but I was even more disbelieving of my own behaviour now. Sitting up high on the box of his racing curricle, with a laugh trembling all the time on my lips and no words of refusal anywhere in my mind.

That I should refuse to leave Wideacre was, of course, self-evident. But I could hardly refuse him before he proposed, and every second the assumption that I would accept him, and even the impression that I had accepted him, seemed to be growing. John MacAndrew had been clever enough to let the proposal of marriage become an understood thing between us without chancing a refusal.

As we came out of the drive and into the lane he turned, not as I had expected towards Acre but right towards the crossroads where our lane meets the main road between London and Chichester.

‘Where do you imagine we are going?’ I inquired drily.

‘For a drive, as I told you,’ he said lightly. ‘I have a fancy to see the sea.’

‘The sea!’ I gasped. ‘Mama will have a fit. I told her I should be back for dinner. I am sorry, Dr MacAndrew, but you will have to go shrimping alone.’

‘Oh, no,’ he said coolly. ‘I told your mama we would be back after tea. So she will not expect us earlier. She agrees with me that too much desk work is bad for young women.’

I gasped again at this further evidence of John MacAndrew’s tactical flair. ‘Is my health suffering very badly?’ I asked sarcastically.

‘Indeed, yes,’ he said without hesitation. ‘You are becoming round-shouldered.’

I choked down a laugh – and then laughed out loud.

‘Dr MacAndrew, you are a complete hand, and I will have nothing to do with you,’ I declared. ‘You may have kidnapped me today, but I shall be more careful of you another time.’

‘Oh, Beatrice,’ he said, and he turned his face from the road to smile very tenderly towards me, ‘Beatrice, you are so very clever, and so very, very silly.’

That left me with nothing to say. But I found I was smiling into his eyes, and my colour was rising.

‘Now,’ he said, dropping his hands and letting the pair break into a smooth fast canter, ‘now we are going to have a lovely day.’

Indeed we did. His housekeeper had packed a picnic that a lord might have envied, and we dined at the top of the downs with all Sussex at our feet and God’s clear sky above us. My extraordinary performance of the night before dropped from my mind as if it had never happened and I revelled in the relaxation of being neither goddess nor witch but simply a pretty girl on a sunny day. After Harry’s frenzied worship, it was restful not to have to pretend, not to have to dominate. John MacAndrew’s smile was warm, but his eyes were appraising and quick. I should never have him grovelling at my feet in a wet heap of remorse and lust. I smiled at him in easy approval and he smiled back. Then we packed up the picnic gear and drove on.

We reached the sea at teatime. He had chosen the stretch of shoreline nearest to Wideacre – almost due south – where there is a tiny fishing village of half-a-dozen shanties and a most villainous-looking public house. We pulled up outside and John MacAndrew’s shout brought the landlord running, very surprised and very certain he had nothing in his house fit for the Quality. So, too, were we. But in the boot of the curricle was a complete tea service with the best tea, sugar and cream.

‘I dare say it will be butter by now,’ said John MacAndrew, spreading a rug on the shingle of the beach for me to sit. ‘But a simple country girl like yourself does not expect everything to be perfect when she condescends to leave her estate and visit the peasantry.’

‘Indeed not,’ I retorted. ‘And you will not know the difference, for I dare say you tasted neither butter nor cream until you crossed the border.’

‘Och, no,’ he said instantly, adopting the broadest Scots accent. ‘All we drink at home is the usquebaugh!’

‘Usquebaugh!’ I exclaimed. ‘What is that?’

His face darkened with some private thought. ‘It’s a drink,’ he said shortly. ‘A spirit, like grog or brandy, but a good deal stronger. It’s a wonderful drink for losing your senses with, and a good many of my countrymen use it to forget their sorrows. But it’s a poor master to have. I’ve known men, one of them very dear to me, ruined by it.’

‘Do you ever drink it?’ I asked, intrigued at this serious side to John MacAndrew that I had glimpsed before only in his professional work.

He grimaced. ‘I drink it in Scotland,’ he said. ‘There’s many places where you can get nothing else. My father serves it at home instead of port in the evening, and I cannot say I refuse it! But I fear it rather.’ He paused and looked at me uncertainly, as if considering whether or not to trust me with a secret. He took a breath and went on. ‘When my mother died I had just started at the university,’ he said quietly. ‘The loss of her hit me hard, very hard indeed. I found that when I drank usquebaugh – whisky – the pain left me. Then I found it good to drink all the time. I think it is possible to be addicted to it – as I warned you some people become addicted to laudanum. I fear addiction for my patients because I’ve had a taste of it in my own life. I’ll take a glass of whisky with my father, but I’ll take no more. It is a weakness of mine I do well to guard against.’

I nodded, understanding only dimly what he meant, but knowing well that he had trusted me with some sort of confession. Then the landlord came out from the public house carrying, with awestruck concentration, John MacAndrew’s silver tea service, the silver pot filled to the brim with perfectly brewed Indian tea.

‘I shall expect to be attacked by highwaymen on the way home, all after your sugar tongs,’ I said lightly. ‘Do you always travel with such vulgar ostentation?’

‘Only when I am proposing,’ he said so unexpectedly that I jumped and some of my tea spilled in the saucer and splashed my gown.

‘You should be horse-whipped!’ I said, dabbing at the stain.

‘No, no,’ he said, teasing me even further. ‘You misunderstand the nature of my proposal. I am even prepared to marry you.’

I choked on a laugh and he rescued my teacup and put it on the tray behind him.

‘Now I will stop,’ he said, suddenly serious. ‘I love you, Beatrice, and I want with all my heart that you should be my wife.’

The laughter died on my lips. I was ready to say ‘No’ but somehow the word would not come. I simply could not bring myself to spoil this lovely sunny day. The waves splashed and sucked at the shingle; the seagulls called and wheeled in the salty air. The words of refusal seemed a million miles away, even though I knew I could not possibly accept.

‘Is it Wideacre?’ he asked as the silence lengthened. I looked up quickly in gratitude at his understanding.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I could live nowhere else. I simply could not.’

He smiled gently, but his blue eyes showed hurt.

‘Not even to make a home with me and be my wife?’ he asked. The silence lengthened, and it seemed that I would indeed be forced to frame some sort of absolute refusal.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I truly am. Wideacre has been my life, all my life. I cannot begin to tell you what it means to me. I cannot go away from it.’

He reached across the rug and took my hand in both of his. He held it gently, and then turned it palm up and pressed a kiss into the warm, cupped hand, and then he closed my slim fingers over the kiss as if to hold it in.

‘Beatrice, know this,’ he said, and his voice was very grave. ‘I have seen you, and watched you for a year now and I knew you would be likely to refuse me and to choose instead to stay at home. But hear this: Wideacre belongs to Harry and after him to his heirs. It will never, it can never, be yours. It is your brother’s home; it is not your home. If you and he should quarrel – I know, I know, how impossible that seems – but if he insisted, he could throw you off tomorrow. You are there only at Harry’s invitation. You have no rights at all. If you refuse marriage for Wideacre then you are refusing your future home for a place that is only a temporary place to stay – it can never be either secure or permanent.’

‘I know,’ I said, low. My eyes were on the sea and my face was stony. ‘It is as secure as I can make it,’ I said.

‘Beatrice, it is a special place, a wonderful place. But you have seen very little of the rest of the country. There are other places equally lovely where you and I could make a home of our own, that would become as dear to you as Wideacre is now,’ he said.

I shook my head and glanced at him.

‘You do not understand. It could only ever be Wideacre,’ I said. ‘You do not know what I have done to try to win it, to make a place for myself there. I have longed for it all my life.’

His clever eyes were on my face. ‘What you have done?’ he said, repeating my indiscreet words. ‘What have you done to try to win it that commits you so deeply?’

I hovered between a collapse into a heart-easing conscience-saving confession to this wise, this gentle, lover and a clever, habitual lie. My instincts and my hungry cleverness warned me away, away from confidence, away from trust, away from love, away from real marriage.

‘Beatrice …’ he said. ‘You can tell me.’

I paused, the words were on my tongue. I was about to tell him. Then I glanced down towards the sea and saw a man, bronzed as a pirate, looking curiously at us.

‘It seems I was right about your silver sugar tongs,’ I said lightly. John followed the direction of my gaze and exclaimed and started to his feet. Without hesitation he went towards the fellow, his boots scrunching on the shingle. I saw them exchange a few words, and then John glanced uncertainly back at me, and came back towards me with the man following a few steps behind.

‘He recognizes you as Miss Lacey of Wideacre,’ John said, rather bewildered. ‘And he wants to speak with you about something, but he will not tell me what it is. Shall I send the fellow about his business?’

‘No, of course not!’ I said smiling. ‘He may be about to tell me where to find buried treasure! You count the spoons and repack the tea things and I will see what he wants.’

I rose to my feet and went towards the man who pulled his forelock as I approached. I could tell he was a sailing man; he had none of the heaviness of a farming labourer. His skin was tanned a deep dirty brown, and his eyes narrowed with staring over bright waters. He had a pair of flapping trousers, wide-bottomed, and shoes – not boots like a farm labourer would. He wore a handkerchief tied over his head with a characteristic little plait of hair poking out behind. A complete villain, I judged, and I had a wary smile for him.

‘What d’you want of me?’ I said, certain it was a loan or some favour.

‘Business,’ he said, surprisingly. ‘Trade.’

His accent was not local and I could not place it. West country, I thought. I started to have a glimmer of an idea what his business might be.

‘Trade?’ I said sharply. ‘We farm, we don’t trade.’

‘Free trade, I should have said,’ he said, watching my face. I could not control the flicker of a smile.

‘What d’you want?’ I said briskly. ‘I’ve no time to waste talking to rogues. You can speak to me briefly but we don’t break the law on Wideacre.’

He grinned at me without a flicker of shame. ‘No, miss,’ he said. ‘Of course not. But you have good cheap tea and sugar and brandy.’

I grinned ruefully at him. ‘What d’you want?’ I said again.

‘We’ve trouble at the place where we usually store our goods,’ he said in an undertone, keeping a wary eye on John MacAndrew, waiting alert by the curricle. ‘We’ve got a new leader and he suggested storing in the old mill on your land. The goods would be there only a few nights each run, and you need know nothing about it, Miss Lacey. There’d be a couple of kegs left behind for you if you would be gracious enough to accept them, or perhaps some fine French silks. You’d be doing the Gentlemen a favour, Miss Lacey, and we never forget our friends.’

I could not look severe at the cheeky rogue and there was nothing unusual in what he was asking. The smugglers – the Gentlemen as they were called – had always come and gone up the hidden deep-banked lanes of Sussex, and the two Preventive Officers, whose job it was to control smuggling along the whole long, inlet-ridden coast, spent their nights snug in bed and their days writing reports. One of them was a professional poet and had been given the job to provide him with time to write. So in Sussex we had the joint benefits of duty-free spirits and fine poetry, an excellent, if comical, result of the muddle over the excise laws, and the gifting of government jobs to deserving young gentlemen.

Papa had permitted smuggled goods in out of the way barns and had turned a blind eye to occasional reports of half-a-dozen horses passing quietly down the lane through Acre late in the night; Acre village itself would keep curtains drawn and mouths shut. The Gentlemen were generous to their friends but they would find and kill a tale-bearer.

So there was very little reason why they should not store goods on our land and the permission was on my lips, but the mention of the old mill and the new leader made me curious.

‘Who is this new leader you have?’ I said.

The man winked. ‘Least said, soonest mended,’ he said discreetly. ‘But he’s a fine planner and good man to follow. When I see his black horse at the head of the ponies I feel at ease.’

My mouth was suddenly dry. I swallowed with difficulty.

‘Did he choose the old mill as a store?’ I said. My voice was a thread and I could feel sweat making my face clammy.

The man looked curiously into my face, which was suddenly white.

‘He did, miss,’ he said. ‘Are you ill?’

I put my hand to my eyes and found my trembling fingers were wet with sweat.

‘It is nothing, nothing,’ I said desperately. ‘Is he a local man then?’

‘I think he was born and bred near Wideacre,’ said the man, impatient with my questions and worried at the way my hands were trembling and how my eyes had gone dark. ‘What shall I tell him?’

‘Tell him that the old mill is washed away and that everything is different,’ I burst out, my voice rising with my fear. ‘Tell him there is no place for him on Wideacre. Tell him to find another store, another route. Tell him he may not come near me or near my land. Tell him my people will not allow it. Tell him he was always an outcast and I was always loved.’

My knees were buckling but suddenly I found John’s haul arm around my waist. He held me up and one hard look from him sent the man scuffling down the shingle to slip between the upturned fishing boats.

John MacAndrew, professional that he was, scooped me up like a baby and tossed me up into the curricle without a word. From under the driver’s seat he produced a flask of his Scottish whisky and held the silver bottle to my lips. I turned my head away in disgust at the smell but he forced a couple of mouthfuls on me and I found that it warmed me and stopped my panic-stricken trembling. We sat in silence until I could hear the frightened beats of my heart slowing again. My mind was blank with fear at this sudden apparition – this ghost on a clear day. There were surely a hundred better things I could have done than to break down, and that in front of a man who was led, no doubt, by one of our expelled poachers, or one of Acre’s ne’er-do-wells, or by one of the farm labourers pressed into the navy and run off to the smugglers. The black horse alone meant nothing. I was a fool to panic. A fool to be afraid.

But even now, sitting up high in the curricle in the warm afternoon sunshine with hundreds of pounds’ worth of MacAndrew silver in the boot, and hundreds of guineas of bloodstock between the shafts, I felt utterly vulnerable and abasingly afraid.