So they said I was too distressed at the loss of Mama to shake hands with all the mourners at her funeral, and the kindly respectful faces lined the lane as our carriage drove off. Surely there was no one here who would hide or shelter a gang of desperate men, enemies to the peace of the land? I reassured myself. Not one of my people, not one of them would hide the Culler on Wideacre land. Whatever their private mysterious loyalties and codes of peasant honour, they would surely turn a criminal like the Culler over to a Justice of the Peace if ever he came near my sweet peaceful boundaries. He might burn up to the very parish bounds, hidden and helped by people glad to see their masters humiliated, but on Wideacre I held hearts as well as wealth in my hands. While I was loved the Culler had no chance. Not even if he was Wideacre-born and bred himself. Not even if he had known and loved Wideacre as well as I.
A sob of fear escaped me, and Celia’s arm came round my shoulders and held me tight.
‘You are tired,’ she said tenderly. ‘You are tired, and there is no need for you to do any more work for today. You need not take dinner with the guests. You have worked so hard with all the planning and work for this day. There is no need for you to do anything more but rest, my dear.’
Indeed, I was weary. Indeed, I was horribly afraid. My bright, brave relentless courage and anger seemed all burned up like Mr Briggs’s woods, leaving nothing but black and smoky ground where no birds sing. With the Culler’s work making an ominous grey smudge on the horizon there would be neither rest nor peace for me until he was taken. My head dropped to Celia’s shoulder and she patted my back. Under my lashes, behind my veil, I stole a swift glance at my husband, sitting opposite me. He was scanning my pale face as if to read the very depths of my soul. Our eyes met, and I read his sharp, trained, professional curiosity. I shivered uncontrollably in the bright sunlight. The day, which had started so bright and with such a promise of heat, was clouding over and grey thunderclouds blurred with the smoke on the horizon. With the Culler less than a hundred miles from my home and John MacAndrew in my bed, I was endangered indeed.
And the stimulus of my fear, my collapse, was acting on John like a dram of whisky. His own horror was forgotten when he saw the look on my face, when he saw my terror. At once his clever, analytical brain shook free from nightmare, shook free of drink.
He suddenly leaned forward.
‘Who is this Culler?’ he asked, his speech clear. ‘What is he to you?’
I shuddered again, uncontrollably, and turned my face in to Celia’s warm shoulder. Her hand tightened comfortingly around me.
‘Not now,’ she said gently to John. ‘Don’t ask her now.’
‘Now is the only time we might hear the truth!’ said John brutally. ‘Who is the Culler, Beatrice? Why do you fear him so?’
‘Get me home, Celia,’ I said, my voice a thread. ‘Get me to bed.’
When the carriage drew up to the steps I let Celia lead me to my bedroom and tuck me up in bed as if I were a feverish child. I took two drops of laudanum to keep the clank of the mantrap, the clatter of a falling horse, and the sad soft sigh of my mama’s last breath out of my dreams. Then I slept like a baby until suppertime.
The will had been read in the afternoon, and most of the mourners had dispersed, concealing their pleasure or disappointment at the little bequests as well as they could. Mama’s small capital was divided equally between Harry and me. She never owned any land, of course. The earth beneath her feet, the rocks beneath the earth, the trees above her head and even the birds that roosted in them never belonged to her. In her girlhood she had lived in her father’s house. In her womanhood she had lived in her husband’s home, on his land. She never earned a penny, she never owned a farthing that she could in truth call her very own. All the money she left was no more hers than the jewels she had passed on to Celia when Celia married Harry. All she had ever been to Wideacre, to the bank account, to the jewels, to the house, to the land, was a tenant.
And all landlords despise their tenants.
But her rich poverty made the will a simple matter and the reading was over and done by teatime. By the time I emerged for supper at nine o’clock there were only John and Harry and Celia and I to dine with Dr Pearce, the Acre Vicar.
It was the first time that John had been in company since his return home and the night of Mama’s death, and for once I blessed Harry’s doltish insensitivity to other people’s feelings and to the tension in the room. Though slightly subdued by the day, he chatted loudly and easily to Dr Pearce as the three stood before the library fire. No one who looked at Harry, tumbler of sherry in hand, warming his breeches before the fire, would be able to believe that he had ever dragged John out of a stupor of alcohol in this room. Or that he had ever thrown his sister on the hearth and taken her with passionate desperation. But, to judge from John’s tense shoulders and scowl, he could imagine both events. Celia remembered his drinking bout too, and I saw her brown eyes anxiously straying to John’s face and to the glass in his hand. He turned aside from the window to smile down at her with a suddenly lightened face.
‘Do not look so anxious, Celia. I shall not break the furniture.’
Celia blushed rosily, but her loving brown eyes met his directly. Anyone looking at her could have seen her honest affection for him, her concern for his health.
‘I cannot help being anxious for you,’ she said. ‘It has been a most difficult time. I am glad you feel able to be with us today. But if you should change your mind and wish to dine alone in your room I should be happy to order a tray for you.’
John nodded his thanks. ‘That is thoughtful of you, Celia, but I have been enough alone,’ he said. ‘My wife will need my company and support, you know, in the days and weeks ahead.’ He said ‘my wife’ as one might say ‘my disease’ or ‘my snake’. His sarcastic voice was hard with detestation when he looked at me. No one, not even little loving Celia, could have mistaken his meaning, and thought his pretended concern sincere. Even Harry paused and glanced curiously at the three of us. John standing, his back to the room; Celia, her sewing falling unnoticed, looking up at him, her colour fading; and I, bent over the round table in the centre of the room, affecting to turn the pages of the newspaper, but as tense as a whip. John turned to the decanter and poured himself another full glass. He tossed it off as if it were medicine.
Then Stride announced supper and broke up the scene, and I enjoyed a small revenge, walking past John, so close that my train swept his legs, to claim Harry’s hand to lead me in to supper. Harry sat at the head of the table; I took the foot: Mama’s old place. Celia sat where she had been placed since her marriage, on Harry’s right, and John sat beside her with Dr Pearce opposite them. John’s nearness to me made me icy with affront, but I could tell it sickened him.
He made an effort at distant cold courtesy with Harry, but he could not bear to be physically near him. If Harry’s hand brushed his sleeve in passing John shrank as if from an infection. Harry disgusted him, and he loathed me. His hatred expressed itself in direct malice, in biting sarcasm, in concealed insult. All I could do against him was to torment him with my nearness, which reminded him of his past desire for me. He scarcely touched his food and I wondered, with malicious pleasure, how long his use of alcohol would be controlled under the twin pressures of his rage and enforced silence. He had a glass of wine, nearly untouched, at his place and I nodded to the footman to refill it.
Dr Pearce was a newcomer and sensed a little of the tension of this family party. But he was a man of the world and with interest and courtesy he encouraged Harry to talk about his farming experiments. Harry was proud of the changes taking place on our land, and the wealthier tenants were following his lead and making
