will be many changes now,’ she said. The carriage rocked as we turned right up the drive. ‘The estate is entailed on Harry, of course. He will have to get a bailiff to run it for a while. Or do you propose to help Harry?’
‘Of course I will help all I can,’ I said delicately. ‘We never have had a bailiff and Papa thought they were not a good idea. I would prefer if we could manage without. But that is a decision for you, Mama … and Harry.’
She nodded. There was a pause. The horses’ hoofs were muffled where the drive was carpeted with autumn leaves.
‘The only thing Beatrice loved more than her father was his land,’ said Mama, musingly, gazing out of the window. Harry and I exchanged a startled glance. This vague, seer-like voice was so unlike Mama. ‘There never was a girl who loved her father as much as Beatrice, but she loved the land, Wideacre, even more. If she had been forced to choose between them I think she would have chosen the land. It will be a great consolation to Beatrice to think that although she has lost her papa she still has Wideacre.’
Harry’s shocked blue eyes met mine.
‘There, there,’ he said feebly, patting Mama’s black-gloved hand. ‘You are upset, Mama. We all loved Papa and we all love Wideacre.’
Mama turned her gaze from the tall trunks of the trees and the fields and stared at me as if she would read the very depths of my soul. I met her eyes look for look. It was not my crime. I need take no blame for it.
‘I shall help Harry as much as I can,’ I repeated steadily. ‘My papa will not seem so very far away. I shall do what he would wish. I shall be the daughter he deserved.’
‘There, there,’ said Harry, deaf to all meaning, but catching the tone of my voice. He reached out his hand to me and his other to Mama. Handfast we arrived outside the Hall and sat for a moment in silence. I swore once more, before I let their hands go, that Ralph would pay for the injury he had done us all. He would pay at once. He would pay that night.
My papa’s will was read that afternoon. It was the straightforward work of an honest man. My mama had the dower house and a fair income from the estate for her life. I had a substantial dowry in money invested in the City, a home on Wideacre until my brother married, and then with my mother wherever she might choose to live. I kept my eyes on the table at this easy disposition of me and my love for the land, but my colour rose.
Harry inherited, by unquestioned right, all the fertile fields, the rich woodland and rolling downs. And if he died before providing an heir, the whole lovely land would go intact to the nearest male relation, as if I had never been born. My entire family, Papa, Mama and Harry, could all die in pain and horror and still I would be no nearer to the ownership of the land. There was a barrier against me no skill of mine could overleap. Generations of men had built defences against women like me, against all women. They had ensured we would never know the power and the pleasure of owning the earth beneath our feet and growing the food that went on our tables. They had built a great chain of male control, of male power and beastly male violence between me and my need for the land. And there was no way, enforced by male-dominated laws and male-established tradition, that I could overthrow them.
His father had served him well. Harry took the land, the produce of the land and the joy of ownership. His to enjoy, to use, to exploit or to abuse as the whim took him. There were no surprises in such an inheritance, and no sense in any heart (except mine) that what seemed so fair on the surface was part of a conspiracy to defraud me of my beloved home and to exile me from the one place on earth to which I could ever belong. My home was given away to the male newcomer, to the male stranger; he neither knew the land nor loved it, and yet it was his.
I heard the will read in a haze of hatred. Not towards Harry, who benefited despite his doltish silliness, but towards Ralph who had cost me my papa in return for this pittance of a dowry and this treasure for Harry. Harry had everything. I had lost the love of my papa, who would never have let me go, unhappy, into exile. And Ralph’s foul scheming had benefited only Harry.
After the petty bequests and little gifts, there was a personal message from Papa to Harry, exhorting him to care for the poor of the parish: standard rhetoric that no one would take seriously. But then Papa had written, ‘And I commend you, Harry, to take care of your mother, and my beloved daughter Beatrice – most dear to my heart.’
Most dear to his heart. Most dear. The tears, the first since his death, stung in my eyes and I choked on a great sob of grief that seemed to be tearing its way out of my chest.
‘Excuse me,’ I whispered to Mama and rose from the table and hurried from the room. In the open air on the front steps my sobs were stilled. He had called me ‘beloved’; he had told them all I was ‘most dear’. I breathed the smells of a late summer twilight and felt an ache like an illness, which was my longing for him. Then I walked bare-headed through the rose garden, through the little gate into the paddock and towards the wood down to the Fenny. My papa had loved me. He had died in pain. And the man who had killed him still lived on our land.
Ralph was waiting for me at the old mill. He lacked his mother’s gypsy second sight and he did not see his death when it walked towards him, smiling. He held out his arms to me and I went into his embrace and let him hold me and kiss me in the dark shadows of the barn.
‘I have been longing for you,’ he whispered in my ear as his hands moved quickly over my body, opening the front of my dress. I sighed as he smoothed my breasts and he bent his head and kissed me. His stubbled chin scratched my cheek and then my throat as his head dropped down the open gown. I shivered as I felt his warm breath on my neck.
Above us the last late swallows lined up on the old beam. I saw and heard nothing but the dark outline of his head and the steady, rapid sound of his breath.
‘Oh, it is so good to touch you,’ Ralph said earnestly, he pressed me backwards to a heap of straw and lifted my skirts and petticoats.
‘When we have each other and Wideacre, that will be a pleasure, eh, Beatrice? When we make love as man and wife in the great master bedroom at Wideacre? When I come to you like this, in the great carved bed under embroidered quilted covers and between fresh linen sheets like I was gentry born and bred?’
We closed together, and his words went unanswered as I clung to him, begging him to move faster and faster, harder and harder. I groaned like a dying man as easy passion overwhelmed our destiny and the world grew dark and still as if a great wave had washed over me and drowned me. Alone, I was yet enveloped and held by Ralph as he thrashed, and he groaned too and lay still. Then the feelings drained from me, and left me weak but clear-headed and cold as ice. I had a sense of deep, sudden sorrow for the pleasure that had gone so fast and left me so empty. And because that moment, that precise moment, would never come again.
‘That’s a good, dutiful wife,’ Ralph said, teasingly. ‘That is how it will be in the master bedroom. I shall sleep between linen sheets every night of my life, and you may bring me coffee in bed every morning.’
I smiled at him under my half-closed eyelids.
‘Shall we spend all our time here?’ I asked. ‘Or shall we go to London for the season?’
Ralph sighed luxuriously and lay back beside me, hands behind his head, his breeches still around his ankles.
‘I’m not sure,’ he said deliberately. ‘I’ll have to decide. Winter in town would be nice, but there’s the fox hunting and shooting here. I wouldn’t want to miss that.’
My lips curled
