‘I have brought you a present.’
I jumped down from the window seat and went to my dressing-table drawers for a ball of yarn. Like a fairy-tale princess, I dropped it from my window and Ralph tied a little withy basket carefully on the threads. I pulled it in as gently as if I were landing a salmon, and laid it on the window seat beside me.
‘Is it alive?’ I said in surprise when I heard a rustle of leaves inside the meshes.
‘Alive and scratching,’ said Ralph and held up a hand to show me a long red scratch along the back.
‘A kitten?’ I guessed.
‘Not for you,’ Ralph said dismissively. ‘Something more exciting.’
‘A lion cub,’ I said promptly and smiled to hear Ralph’s slow country chuckle.
‘Open it and see,’ he advised. ‘But open it carefully.’
I unfastened the little catch on the lid and peeped inside. A deep blue gaze met mine, a glimpse of ruffled, fluffed-out, angry feathers – a baby owl, rolled on his back with his sharp taloned feet pointing up at me in defence, a hoarse, cross squeaking coming from his open, red-tongued beak.
‘Oh, Ralph!’ I said, entranced. I glanced down; Ralph’s face was beaming with love and triumph.
‘I climbed the pine tree right up to the top for that one,’ he said proudly. ‘I wanted to give you something no one else could give you. And something from Wideacre.’
‘I shall call it Canny,’ I said, ‘because owls are wise.’
‘Not very wise,’ he said, teasing. ‘We nearly fell out of the tree when it scratched me.’
‘And I shall love it for ever because you gave it to me,’ I said, gazing at its mad, deep blue eyes.
‘Wisdom and love then,’ said Ralph, ‘and all earned by one little owl.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, with my heart in the words.
‘Coming out later?’ he asked casually.
‘I might,’ I said and beamed down at him. ‘I’ll be down at the mill straight after breakfast,’ I promised. Then I turned my head to listen for the noise of a maid stoking the kitchen fire. ‘I must go,’ I said. ‘See you at the mill, and thank you for my present.’
There was a small, disused store room among our outbuildings and there we decided to keep Canny. Ralph taught me how to feed the baby bird with raw meat wrapped in fur or feathers, and how to gently stroke its breast feathers so it hooded its blue eyes to doze.
That summer, Ralph would have climbed any tree, dared any risk for me. And I would have done anything for him. Or almost anything. One thing I would never do for him, and if he had been wiser, or less in love, he would have been warned by it. I would never take him into my papa’s bed. Ralph had a longing to lie with me there, in the great master bed, under the dark, curved wooden roof upheld by the four pillars as thick as pine trunks. But I would not. However much I loved the gamekeeper’s lad, he would never lie with me in the bed of the Squires of Wideacre. I evaded the question, but one day, when Papa and Mama were visiting in Chichester and the servants were on a half-day holiday, Ralph asked me directly to lie with him there, and was met with a direct refusal. His eyes went black with anger, but he said nothing and went alone to set snares in the woods instead. He soon forgot that one isolated refusal. A wiser man would have remembered and carried that reservation of mine through every day of that golden, timeless summer.
It was no timeless summer for Mama, who counted the days until the return of her golden boy from his school. She even made a little calendar, which she hung on the parlour wall, marked with the days of his term. Indifferently, I saw one day ticked off every evening. With little enthusiasm, and even less skill, I hemmed curtains and helped embroider the dragon counterpane for Harry’s new-style bedroom. And despite my ham-fisted efforts with the curly tail of the stupid beast, it was completed in time and spread on Harry’s bed to await the arrival of the emperor himself.
The first day of July, too good a day to waste at the parlour window listening for Harry’s carriage, saw us waiting for him. As soon as I heard hoofs on the drive I obeyed my instructions and called to Mama. She summoned Papa from his gun room and we stood on the steps as the carriage swept around the bend in the drive and drew up before the front door. Papa greeted Harry, who jumped boyishly from the carriage, without waiting for the steps to be let down. Mama surged forward. I held back, resentment, jealousy and some sort of fear in my heart.
Harry had changed in this last term. He had lost his rounded, puppy-fat face and looked like a clear, lean youth rather than a golden baby. He was taller. He greeted Papa with a frank smile of affection and beamed at Papa’s great bear-hug. He kissed Mama’s hand and cheeks with tenderness, but he did not cling to her. Then, and this was the greatest surprise of all, he looked around for me and his bright blue eyes lit up when he saw me.
‘Beatrice!’ he said, and jumped up the front steps in two long-legged strides. ‘How pretty you have grown! How grown up you are! Do we still kiss?’
I lifted my face to him with an easy smile in reply, but I felt my colour rise at the touch of his lips on my cheek and the soft prickle of the little growing hairs of his upper lip.
Then Mama swept upon him and took him into the house, and Papa talked loudly over her fluttering inquiries about the roads and the inns and when he had last dined, and they all left me alone on the sunny front door steps as if I had left the house and belonged nowhere at all.
But it was Harry who paused at the parlour door and looked back through the open front door and called to me. ‘Come in, Beatrice!’ he said. ‘I have a present for you in my bags.’
And my heart suddenly lightened to see his smile and the hand he held out to me. And I went with quick steps into the house and felt that perhaps Harry might not displace me, but could make my home a happier place for me.
However, as the days went on Harry’s charm wore a little thin. Every housemaid, every tenant’s daughter, had a smile for the good-looking young Master. His new confidence and awareness of himself won him friends everywhere he chose to ride. He was charming, and he knew it. He was handsome, and he knew it. We laughed that now I had to look up to him, for he was a head taller than me.
‘You will not bully me any more, Beatrice,’ he said.
He was still bookish: two of his trunks from school were filled with nothing but writings on philosophy, poems, plays and stories. But he had outgrown his childish illnesses and was no longer forced to spend all days indoors reading. He even made me feel ashamed that I had read so little. I might know more about the land than Harry ever could know, for I had spent years out on Wideacre and my heart was in it, as his never was. But that counted for little when Harry would toss off a reference to a book and say, ‘Oh, Beatrice! You must have read it! Why it’s in our library. I found it when I was about six.’
Some of his books were about farming, too, and not all of them were foolish.
This new Harry was the product of the natural growth of a boy nearing manhood. The ill health of his childhood was forgotten. Only Mama still worried about his heart. Everyone else saw his slimmer body, the strength in his arms, the brightness of his blue eyes and his conscious, sly charm with the pretty housemaids. But the principal influence was still Staveley. Staveley’s name was once more heard daily in Mama’s parlour
