no harm with the people on the land.
‘When I started farming at Wideacre there were barely two day labourers on the place, and we used ploughs which were unchanged from Roman times,’ Harry said, on his hobby-horse again. ‘Now we have ploughs that can cut a furrow nearly up to the top of the downs and there are fewer and fewer squatters and cottagers on Acre.’
‘Small benefit to us all,’ I said drily from the other end of the table. I noted how John tensed at the very sound of my cool, silvery voice and reached unconsciously for his wine glass.
‘The cottagers who used to live in the hovels around the village have now become day labourers or even live in the parish workhouse and work in the workhouse gangs. And your new plough has ripped up old, good meadows to make surplus cornfields, which will create year after year of corn glut. The price of bread tumbles; the corn is hardly worth selling for years in a row, and then in the first bad year there is uproar because the price suddenly soars.’
Harry smiled down the table at me.
‘You are an old Tory, Beatrice,’ he said. ‘You hate all change and yet it is you who keep the books. You know as well as I do what the wheatfields pay.’
‘They pay us,’ I said. ‘They profit the gentry. But they do little good for the people on Wideacre. And they have done no good at all for those we used to call our people – the ones who lived in the hovels we cleared away and kept their pigs on the common patch we have now enclosed.’
‘Ah, Beatrice,’ said Harry, teasingly. ‘You speak with two voices. When the books show a profit you are pleased, and yet in your heart you prefer the old wasteful ways.’
I smiled back, forgetting John, forgetting the tension, my mind on Wideacre. Harry’s was a fair comment. Our disagreement was as old as our joint management of the land. If I ever thought Harry’s new methods were a real danger to the peace and prosperity of Wideacre then I would stop him in the same second. And there had been plans of his that I had vetoed and we had heard no more of them. What concerned me, as one of the handful of gentry among the millions of poor, was that Harry’s schemes and the trend of the whole country were to profit the gentry more and more and to make the poor yet poorer.
‘It is true,’ I said smiling at Harry with a softness in my voice and a tender light in my eyes for my land. ‘I am but a sentimental farmer.’
John’s chair scraped harshly on the polished floor as he thrust it back abruptly.
‘Excuse me,’ he said, pointedly ignoring me, speaking only to Celia. He walked heavily towards the door and shut it with a firm click as if to emphasize his rejection of us, and the candlelit room. Celia looked anxiously at me, but my face never wavered. I turned to Dr Pearce as if there had been no interruption.
‘But you come from the higher, colder north where I think there is little wheat grown at all,’ I said. ‘You must find our obsession with the price of wheat and white flour odd.’
‘It is very different,’ he admitted. ‘In my county, Durham, the poor still eat rye bread; black or brown bread, it is. Nasty stuff compared to your golden loaves, I admit, but they fare well on it and it is cheap too. They eat a lot of potatoes and pastry dishes made with the coarse flour as well, so the price of wheat matters far less. Here I think the poor are wholly dependent on wheat?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Celia in her soft voice. ‘It is as Beatrice says. It is well enough when the price of corn is low, but when it rises there is real hardship, for there is no alternative food.’
‘Then the damned fools riot,’ said Harry, with two-bottle bluster. “They riot as if we can help the rain spoiling the crop and making it too dear for them to buy.’
‘It’s not all chance,’ I said reasonably. ‘We do not profiteer and we do not hoard at Wideacre, but there have been some wicked fortunes made by withholding corn from the market, and by sending it out of the county. When merchants deliberately create a shortage they know full well that there will be hunger and then disturbances.’
‘If they would only go back to eating black bread!’ sighed Celia.
‘These are my customers!’ said Harry, laughing. ‘I would rather they stuck to white bread and went hungry in the lean years. The day will come when we have more and more land growing wheat and the whole country eats nothing but white flour.’
‘If you can grow it, and I say “if”, Harry, then good luck to you,’ I said. ‘But while I keep the books we will plant no more wheatfields. I believe the bottom will fall out of the market. It is all very well one farmer planting wheat, but every single Squire up and down the country is doing so. Come a bad year and there will be many wheat farms ruined. Wideacre will never be a one-crop estate.’
Harry nodded. ‘Aye, Beatrice,’ he said. ‘You are the planner. And we should not be boring Dr Pearce and Celia with this farming talk.’
He sat back in his chair and at a nod from me the servants cleared the plates. Dr Pearce and Harry chose cheeses from the board, and the great silver fruit bowl, piled high with our own produce, was placed in the middle of the table.
‘One would be foolish indeed to be bored with such work that produces such wonderful results,’ said Dr Pearce politely. ‘You eat like pagans in a golden age at Wideacre.’
‘I am afraid we are pagan,’ I said lightly. I took one of the plump peaches and peeled its downy skin to eat the sweet slimy fruit. ‘The earth is so good, and the yields are so high, that at harvest time I find it hard not to believe in magic,’
‘Well, I believe in science,’ said Harry staunchly. ‘And Beatrice’s magic goes well with my experiments. But, Dr Pearce, you would burn my sister for a witch if you ever saw her in a hayfield!’
Celia laughed. ‘It is true, Beatrice. Only the other day you were supposed to be taking Sea Fern to be shod and I saw him tied to the gate of Oak Tree Meadow and you in the middle of the field, with your hat off and your face tilted up to the sky with handfuls of poppies and larkspur in either hand. I was driving into Chichester with Mama and I had to point something out to her to distract her attention away from you. You looked like Ceres in a mummers’ play!’
I laughed ruefully. ‘I see I shall become a well-known eccentric and be jeered at by the apprentices in Chichester!’ I said.
‘Even I had not long arrived in Acre before I heard strange and ominous rumours,’ said Dr Pearce, twinkling at me. ‘One of your older cottagers, Mrs MacAndrew, told me that he always asks you to take tea and walk in the fields at sowing time. He swore it is a sure way to ward off rust mould on the seeds to have Miss Beatrice take a few steps behind the plough.’
I nodded at Harry. ‘Tyacke, and Frosterly and Jameson,’ I said certainly. ‘A few others like to believe it too. I think a couple of good seasons coincided with the time when I was first out on the land alone after my papa’s death, and that convinced them.’
A secret stab of nostalgia touched me at the memory of those good seasons. The first summer of my womanhood when I had met and loved with Ralph under the blue sky of a summer that seemed never-ending, and the second summer when Harry had been the Lord of the Harvest and brought in the corn like a Summer King. Then there was the third hot year and my third good lover, John, who had courted me, and kissed my hand and driven me miles around the estate on one sweet unlikely pretext after another.
‘Magic and science,’ said Dr Pearce.
