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

Celia’s gaze came up to me again in an unspoken challenge, but I was looking at Harry and asking him about the newly appointed Master of the Hunt.

‘We’ll still keep the dogs here, of course,’ Harry confirmed. ‘And Mr Haller can come over and see them often. I would rather, in any case, see a good deal of him during this year of mourning because although he knows the runs he does not know the Wideacre woods as we do, Beatrice. And I want to make sure the foxes are kept down this year.’

‘Good,’ I said. Mr Haller was leasing the Dower House, a handsome square-built sandstone house like a half-size Wideacre, which was standing empty, halfway down the drive. He had rented the house for the sport and was delighted to find that the Wideacre Hunt was without a Master while Harry was in mourning.

‘How much I shall miss hunting,’ I said with longing in my voice. The tone made John’s shoulders tense. His wine glass was filled and ruby red before him; he could smell the bouquet.

‘Yes,’ said Harry. ‘And of all people Mama would have wished us to enjoy ourselves.’

I gave a gurgle of laughter. ‘Not me, Harry,’ I said ruefully. ‘She would have broken every convention in the book to please you, but she always wanted to keep me off horses, and indoors.’

Harry smiled and nodded. ‘That’s true,’ he said comfortably. ‘And I would not wish to be disrespectful to her memory. But it seems very hard to miss another season.’

He turned his attention to his plate and nodded at Celia.

‘This is excellent, my dear,’ he said.

She smiled and glowed a little at his praise.

‘It is a recipe Papa brought back from one of his London clubs,’ she said. ‘I thought you would like it.’

John’s shoulders had relaxed slightly and he was eating.

‘I am so glad to see you eating, John,’ I said sweetly to him. ‘I was so distressed when you were unable to eat.’

John’s fork fell back on his plate, untasted. Harry’s eyes on me were tender and sympathetic, but Celia looked slightly puzzled, and was watching my face. I smiled warmly at her and reached for my wine glass. John’s eyes were on the claret and I licked my lips in anticipation.

‘What shall you do tomorrow, Harry?’ I asked lightly, to turn the attention away from me again. ‘I had thought of going to Chichester to order a trap or some sort of curricle for me to drive while I may not ride in public.’

‘I shall come too then,’ said Harry. ‘I don’t want you thundering home in a high-perch phaeton!’

I laughed, a confident, seductive ripple. John’s fork clattered in his plate and he pushed his food away.

‘Oh, yes!’ I said. ‘Something sporty and racy and a pair of matched greys to pull it!’

‘I should like to come too, if I may,’ said Celia softly. ‘Julia needs some new shoes and I don’t want to take her to the Acre cobbler; he does not have soft enough kid.’

The servants cleared the plates and Harry stood to carve a brace of pheasants. Celia and I had breast meat and John a couple of legs with rich savoury gravy to pour over the large chunks of meat. He was looking down at his plate, and I guessed he was feeling nauseous, and probably longing for a drink. I waited until he had been served with vegetables, and had a bread roll on his plate beside him, and then I leaned forward.

‘Do try and eat,’ I said tenderly. ‘Don’t leave the table and go to your study, John.’

It tipped the scales. He pushed his chair back as if the seat was burning him and took two hasty steps towards the door. He turned and bobbed a bow at Celia.

‘I beg your pardon,’ he said briefly, and the footman sprang to open the door and closed it with a click behind him. I nodded; John’s plate and cutlery vanished smoothly, and Harry and Celia and I were alone.

‘It is a shame,’ Harry said compassionately. ‘You do your best, Beatrice. But, my God, it is a shame.’

I dipped my head as if I were hiding tears.

‘I am sure it will get better,’ I said in half a whisper. ‘I am sure he will learn to conquer it.’

I had thought I might escape a little talk with Celia by sitting with Harry over his port and then going straight to bed. But before breakfast the following day she tapped on my office door and asked if she might come in. In her morning gown of black she looked weary and far older than her twenty-six years. There were shadows under her eyes – she had clearly not slept – and her forehead was creased in a permanent frown of worry. Fresh-faced, smooth-skinned, and as sunny as the crisp blue-skied winter morning, I smiled at her and invited her to take a seat.

‘It is about John,’ she began. I smiled. Celia diving into a conversation, Celia seeking me out, Celia anxious about my husband, was a novelty indeed.

‘Yes?’ I said. I had remained seated at my desk and I let my eyes drift to the papers before me.

‘Beatrice, he went to his study last night, and he started drinking again, although he promised me he would try to stop,’ Celia said in an earnest rush.

‘Yes,’ I said sorrowfully. The papers were a comparison of yields on Wideacre since I had started keeping records. I thought that they might show the sort of profits we could expect if we followed Harry’s idea of farming Wideacre as a business and not as a home.

‘Beatrice, I am sorry to intrude,’ said Celia. But she did not sound sorry. I was reminded suddenly of her barging into my bedroom in France with words of apology on her lips, but with a hungry baby in her arms and an absolute determination that I should feed the child. There was not one ounce of selfish strength in Celia, but give her someone to mother and she became in an instant a heroine. I should have been wary, but I was only amused.

‘You are not intruding, Celia,’ I said politely, and let her see that she was. ‘Please go on.’

‘When John went to his study last night there were two open bottles of whisky on the table. He drank them both,’ she said. I showed her a shocked face.

‘How did they get there?’ asked Celia baldly.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘John probably ordered his valet to bring him some. He has been drinking like this for four months, remember, Celia. The servants have just got into the routine of bringing him what he wants.’

‘Then we must tell them not to,’ Celia said energetically. She leaned forward on the table, her brown eyes bright and her tiredness gone. ‘You must tell Stride that on no account is John to be supplied with drink, and we must not have wine on the table, or drink in the house, until he is cured.’

I nodded. ‘You may be right, Celia,’ I said. ‘And John’s health must come first. We must find some way to help cure him. Perhaps we should send him away. There are some wonderful doctors who specialize in cases such as this.’

‘Are there?’ asked Celia. ‘I didn’t know. But would he agree?’

‘We could insist that he goes. We could legally bind him to take treatment,’ I said, deliberately vague.

Celia sighed. ‘It may come to that, I suppose. But it sounds dreadful. We could start to help him by not having drink here.’

I nodded. ‘If you’re sure that’s the way, Celia,’ I said uncertainly. ‘I only ordered wine served last night because I thought John should get used to drinking lemonade while other people around him drink wine. When he dines out, there will always be wine at table, and port, you know.’

‘Yes,’ Celia said. ‘I had not thought of that. But I feel sure we should keep drink completely away from him for the first few days. Will you order that, Beatrice?’

I smiled at her. ‘Of course I will, Celia. Anything. Anything, to make my husband well again.’

She looked carefully at me, scanning my face. The little, loving Celia, who thought the world as gentle as herself, was learning fast. And the silly child who thought everyone was like herself, spoke like her, thought like her, loved like her, had the pit of otherness opening beneath her feet. She was coming to learn that I was different from her. But she could not begin to understand me.

She returned to her usual good manners. ‘I should beg your pardon,’ she said. ‘I had no right to give an order without your knowledge. It was my concern for John that made me thoughtless. I just wanted to clear the table of wine.’

I blew her a kiss with an airy wave.

‘It doesn’t matter, Celia!’ I said lightly. ‘And you were probably right. We will clear the house of drink and that may help John, as you say.’

‘I’ll go and tell him then,’ she said, and slipped from the room with a whisper of black silk.

I returned, with interest, to the yields. I did not need to eavesdrop on the conversation, for I knew, as clearly as if I had been there, how it would be. Celia would beg John to drink no more; John in pain from the whisky he had had last night, in pain at his own loss of manhood, of pride, of control, would miserably agree. Celia, her face glowing with hope and tenderness, would tell him that she had managed to make it easy for him. That the house would be free of drink. That if he came to dinner tonight there would be no sherry scenting the air of the parlour, and no ruby glow of wine cast over his plate at dinner.

That would make him hopeful. He would think that whatever sweet, tempting, teasing smiles I could give him, and however breathtakingly lovely I looked, however desirable I was, at least he would be spared the other sight – of two fresh bottles of whisky dewy-sided in his study, and a key in the lock so he could be alone with them.

So at breakfast we drank tea and lemonade, and Harry huffed into his pint pot, but said nothing. Celia gave up her drive to Chichester with me, preferring to stay home. If I knew my sister-in-law, she planned to tempt John out for an airing, to fortify him with sweet tea, and to keep him by her, with chatter and smiles, and play with Julia until dinnertime. She was fighting for his soul, and she would put all her loving, loyal little heart into it.

So Harry and I drove alone to Chichester and tested our new resolve to save money for Wideacre against the beauties of carriages that the carriage-maker showed us. Harry’s resolve, predictably, wavered. But I held firm. What I needed was a smart little gig or trap to get me round the estate, and the well-built low-slung models were both too costly and too unstable for the rutted lanes that I would need to travel on if I wanted to spare myself a walk in the winter snow to check on the lambing.

‘I’m exhausted,’ I said, affecting a sigh when we had finally reached a decision. ‘Let’s go and beg some tea from the de Courceys.’

Lady de Courcey was an old friend of Mama’s and her two children were only a little older than Harry and me. Of all the Chichester families the de Courceys were the nearest to us in rank, according to Mama’s precise calculations. They owned no local land, but they were wealthier. They were an older family, but they had not been in the same house for years as we Laceys. We visited the bishop, whoever the present incumbent might be, of course. We visited two or three other families, but we were friendly only with the de Courceys.

Although we had now lost Mama’s chilling sense of social gradations, Harry and I had not yet moved out of her chosen circle to make new friends. Partly it was because we lived at such a distance from Chichester as to make a visit there something of an expedition rather than a regular event. But also it was the nature of our Wideacre life. Like Papa we met only the people who lived close to us, or hunted with us, or kin. The roads were often muddy, and in mid-winter utterly impassable. Our work on the land was time-consuming and physically tiring. And, perhaps more than anything else, Harry and I, and now Celia and John too, were an absorbed self-centred little group. Given the choice, I would have been willing never to leave Wideacre for a single day, and while no one loved the place as I did, they all confessed to being content to stay inside the park walls for weeks and months at a time.

The Haverings were our friends, and the de Courceys. We occasionally had relations of Mama’s to stay, or sometimes some of the Lacey family. But, like many families of our rank, we were a little isolated island amid a sea of poor people. No wonder Mama, who saw those beneath her as an anonymous mass, nearly invisible, had been lonely. No wonder I, catching the slightest hint of threat from those surrounding hundreds, thousands, felt sometimes afraid.

It was different for town dwellers. The de Courceys’ house stood well back from the road among Scotch firs and was surrounded by a high wall topped with handsome, vicious, metal spikes. When Harry and I drove up there were three carriages already standing on the gravel sweep of the drive and I grimaced at him.

‘A tea party,’ I said. ‘Don’t desert me to the old ladies.’

Harry chuckled and handed me up the shallow flight of steps, while our footman hammered on the door. The de Courceys’ butler escorted us over the black and white marble floor and threw open the parlour door.

‘Mrs MacAndrew, Sir Harry Lacey,’ he announced, and Lady de Courcey hurtled towards us from her chair.

‘Beatrice! Harry! Darlings!’ she said, and kissed us both soundly on both cheeks. I was slightly taller than her, and had to stoop for her kisses. She always made me feel as if she were too young to have been my mama’s friend. She seemed to me to be eternally the twenty-year-old beauty who had captured the whole of London for a season and then scooped the best suitor on the market, Lord de Courcey. With no money and no family, she had got to this beautiful house and to her wealth on her looks alone. She struck me, with my keen eye for advantage and ownership, as an adventuress. But there was never a hint of that in her behaviour. She was a pattern card of social graces. It was only my view of her, as having gained wealth and position solely by a pretty face, that made her seem to me a clever cheat.

Now her drawing room was filled with some of the best of Chichester society. Most of the faces we knew, and I was led to make my curtsy to the old tabbies, and to shake the Bishop’s hand. Harry, eyeing a plate of cakes, chatted to Lady de Courcey’s daughter-in-law behind the tea trolley, and to her son Peter, standing by the fire.

Half a tedious hour we stayed before it was courteous for us to take our leave and then I turned on impulse to Isabel de Courcey and asked her if they would care to dine with us. Peter was keen to come; Lady de Courcey smilingly gave permission; in ten minutes they were ready, and the informal, impromptu invitation excused as part of my impulsive charm.

Celia was watching for us from the parlour window and came out on the doorstep when she saw the second carriage with the de Courcey arms emblazoned on the door following behind.

‘How delightful,’ she said, with her easy sweet manners. But I saw a shadow on her face, and I knew why.

She had spent all day with John keeping him from alcohol, nerving him for dinner with me, assuring him there would be no wine on the table. Now, dressed for dinner and waiting for him to come downstairs and for us to come home, she discovered with horror that he would be faced with a gay social event, and not the quiet helpful dinner party of a loving family.

I left the de Courceys with Celia and flicked up the west-wing stairs to change. This evening I had a gown of black taffeta, cut low along the square neck, and I wore a pair of jet ear-rings that dangled low and emphasized the length of my neck. I glanced at myself in my glass as I turned to the door and was well pleased with what I saw. The look of me, the perfect shape, would fill any man with desire. I knew, as surely as I knew where I was going, that to see me so lovely and to hate me so much, every night of his life, would destroy John MacAndrew.

He had gone through a stage when, fired with drink, he could attack me. He had gone through a stage when he needed a drink to face the sight of me. Now he discovered that the drink that had been his support, that had kept him alive through the nightmare of the recent months, was no help to him at all. He saw now why there had always been a bottle placed by his bedside, always a glass on his morning tray. He saw now that the bottle in the study, in the library, in the gun room, was no accident. That I had ordered it so. And he learned now, slowly, that he had two enemies and they were allied. One enemy was the woman he had loved. And the other was the drink he could not now refuse. He feared he was near defeat. He could feel himself falling. He could not bear his life, filled as it was, with loss. No child, no wife, no work, no pride, no affection from any source except Celia. And she was pouring her love to help him in a reform he feared he could not sustain. He feared also that failure.

I smiled to myself and saw how my mirror showed a woman so radiant that you would think I was still a bride on my wedding day. Then I sped down the stairs, the taffeta billowing behind me. Stride was in the hall, loitering for me.

I smiled at him with my quick awareness.

‘I know,’ I said, half laughing. ‘But we really cannot expect the de Courceys to drink lemonade. Serve sherry in the parlour and wine in the dining room. We will have the best claret with the meal, and I think, champagne with the fruit. The gentlemen will have port as usual.’

‘Is Mr MacAndrew’s glass to be filled?’ Stride asked, his voice neutral.

I showed no flicker of my awareness that Stride, and thus the rest of the household staff, had ceased to call my husband ‘Doctor’. He would be ‘Mr MacAndrew’ to them now for the rest of his life, and they would hear no reprimand from me.

‘Of course,’ I said, and passed Stride and went into the parlour.

They were all there. John had himself well under control and Celia’s eyes were on him full of love. Harry was looking around for the sherry decanter as Stride brought it in, and he poured with a liberal hand for the de Courceys, for me, and for himself. Celia took a glass of lemonade, and John held the pale yellow drink in his hand, untouched. I could see his head was up, turned towards Harry, and with my keen instinct, I knew he was scenting the air, smelling the perfume of the sherry, warm in the firelight.

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