yes, Beatrice. Let’s shake hands on the bargain. I promise you shall always be my best and closest of friends. I will always confide in you and you shall have thousands of favours from me. Anything you want that I can give shall be yours.’
I smiled and kissed her cheek to seal the agreement. She had only one thing that I wanted – that I would ever want – and she was far along the road to giving it me, my heart’s desire, my brother Harry.
I came home from that drive my head full of anything but turnips. Celia’s inarticulate murmurs about Harry’s courting had made my head throb with jealousy and longing. She might be happy to hand over to me the control of her married life, but it was still her downcast eyes that Harry watched, even when I was near by. And when we stood side by side looking at the turnip field, he had bent his head low to see her pale prettiness under her parasol.
I left her in the parlour and went to my room to take off my bonnet. I looked at myself in the little mirror but my reflection gave me scant joy. If Harry preferred sugar and cream then my clear strong beauty would help me little. My green eyes looked blankly back at me, dark with desire. I could not believe, I could not make my mind believe, that any man would refuse me if I set my heart on him. I sighed and pressed my forehead against the cool glass and longed and longed for Harry.
My skirts hissed as I turned from my room and went downstairs. Celia might not want his love, but she had it. And while I flinched at the sight of his courtesy to her and his gentle words to her as she sat sipping tea, it was worse to be in my room alone, knowing that downstairs he was beside her on the sofa. I might spend more hours with him but never, never could I sit, my eyes downcast, and feel his gaze scanning my face. Never could I look up in the delicious certainty that my eyes would meet his. We were much together, but our magical moments were few. We were always interrupted; Mama was always coming in and out and her eyes were sharp on her beloved son.
At the turn of the stairs I paused. Some careless maid must have left the back-stair door open and one of the stable cats had sauntered in and was sitting, proud as punch, in the first-floor corridor. Mama was ill whenever she was in a room with a cat and it was a house rule that all the stable cats were locked firmly out. I should have to rush this one back to the yard and then air the corridor, or she would have one of her painful gasping attacks when she could not breathe and her face went from white to yellow. Her heart was delicate and last time she had suffered an attack the London specialist had warned her most strongly against risking another. So the rule against cats was rigidly enforced and I should save someone a dismissal if I got the animal away before Mama came up to change.
But as I went towards it something made me pause. And then I stopped stock-still. I had no idea in my head, nor the shadow of a plan. But my passion for Harry moved me as if I had no will of my own. I was in the grip of such a longing to be alone with him that my aching sensuous body moved as if of its own volition. I feared Mama’s sharp eyes, her instinctive knowledge of me. The way she could almost smell my warm sighs. The cat’s eyes met mine, green to green, with a key to Mama’s absence as clear as a spoken word between us. Then my hand was on the latch of her bedroom door and the door yielded to my half-conscious touch. Like some obedient familiar the cat stretched and walked, tail proudly high, into the master bedroom and I shut the door behind it. I still could not be sure what I had done. I still could not have said whether I had let the cat in, or if the cat had let itself in with my hand only opening the door. Cat, Mama, Harry and I seemed caught in a web of someone else’s spinning. I was as unthinking as the cat itself. I went down to the parlour with my face as clear and calm as the Fenny on a summer’s day, and my gaze as opaque as the cat’s green eyes in my delicate mama’s bedroom.
I sat beside Celia and even accompanied her on the piano and sang a little duet with her, her thin warble keeping my richer voice more or less in key. Then Harry and she sang a folk song and I took the moment to excuse myself from the parlour and go back upstairs.
The blessed thing had made puddles all over the floor which I had to wipe up. But it had curled up on Mama’s bed and sunned itself on the pillow where her head would lie that night. I picked it up by the scruff of its neck and swept down the back stairs with it and set it on its feet outside the stable door. It gazed at me unwinkingly as if it knew we shared a secret – a discreet conspirator.
We retired early that night but I was disturbed around midnight by the sound of a door banging and running feet. Mama’s maid was probably carrying her a hot posset from the kitchen and a warming pan for her chilled feet. I half thought about getting up to see if I could help her, but my bed was too warm and I was too sleepy to move. Even as I thought I really should go to her, I fell asleep.
When I visited her in the morning the blinds were down and the room reeked of camphor and lavender water. She lay absolutely still on the great bed, her face white on the pillows where the cat had slept and licked its matted dirty fur.
‘I am so sorry, dear, but I cannot speak. I feel so ill, so very ill,’ said Mama in a thread of a voice. ‘Please tell Harry not to be concerned. I shall be better soon.’
I gave a small murmur of sympathy and bent over and kissed her. Her face was strained with pain and she was as white as her sheets. My own head ached in sympathy when I saw the skin drawn tight across her forehead, and my own heart thudded in fear when I heard how her breath rasped and saw her lips tremble. But my eyes gave away nothing, like the cat’s. I had planned nothing. I was guilty of no premeditated crime. The deceiving, unreliable old gods of the land had set magic at work on Wideacre and all I could do was to follow blindly wherever they were leading me. The insistent pull of my longing for Harry had brought the cat to wait for me outside my mother’s bedroom. Now she struggled for breath in a darkened room. Her pain made me ill. Ill with sympathy for her, and ill with anxiety on my own account.
‘Mama,’ I said weakly. I needed a smile from her to reassure me that this was only a passing illness. That although she looked as white as death she was still breathing, her fluttering heart was still working. She would be recovered in a few days, she would still have time to love me. She might still turn from her adoration of Harry and learn to value me. I might still become her beloved, her perfect child.
She opened her eyes wearily and saw my anxious face.
‘It is all right, Beatrice,’ she said with a hint of impatience. ‘Go to your breakfast and go out if you wish. I only need rest.’
I heard her tone of dismissal and it hurt me, as she was still able to hurt me. She turned her face away from me without the smile that I was waiting for. There was no need for me to stay. I closed her bedroom door behind me with the slightest of clicks and turned my thoughts from her all that day.
In her absence that afternoon, Harry led me into dinner and for the first time in our lives we faced each other at the head and foot of the candle-lit dinner table and dined alone. We spoke in hushed voices. Although Mama’s room was too far away to be disturbed by our talk, the murmur emphasized our privacy in the quiet house, the glow of the room a little island of peace and contentment in the darkened house on the dark land. I sat with Harry as he drank his port, and when he had finished we went to the parlour together. We played cards until Stride brought the tea table in. When I passed Harry his teacup our fingers touched, and I smiled at his touch but I did not tremble. Then we sat in companionable silence before the fire. When he glanced up from watching the burning logs in the grate, he smiled at me and I smiled back without a shadow of need.
It
