Harrys new-found zest for school could only widen the gulf between us. He had caught the schoolboys tone of arrogance like a galloping infection and, apart from boring me to tears about the demigod Staveley, scarcely deigned to speak to me at all. Towards Papa he was always polite, but his unconcealed enthusiasm for his studies made Papa at first proud, and then irritated that Harry should so obviously prefer to spend his days in the library when the windows were open and the cuckoos calling to everyone to take a line and rod and try for some salmon.
Only with Mama was he totally unchanged, and those two spent long, intimate days in easy companionship, reading and writing together in library and parlour while Papa and I, intent on wider, freer pursuits, watched the land under every light, under every season and under every sort of weather. Harry could come and go as he pleased; he was always a visitor in his own home. He never belonged to Wideacre as I belonged. Only Papa, the land and I were the constant elements in my life. Papa, the land and I had been inseparable since the first time I had seen Wideacre in its wonderful wholeness from between the hunters ears. Papa, the land and I would be here for ever.
2
I dont know what Ill do without you when you leave, Papa said casually to me one day as we rode down the lane to Acre village to see the blacksmith.
Ill never go, I said, my confidence unshaken. I was only half attending for we were each of us leading one of the heavy plough horses to be shod. That was easy for Papa, high on his hunter, but my dainty mare only came up to the work-horses shoulder, so I had to keep her alert and wide awake to follow his great strides.
Youll have to go some day, said Papa, looking over the hedges to see the plough using the second team of horses starting to turn over the sluggish winter earth. You will marry and leave with your husband. Perhaps youll be a fine lady at Court, not that theres much of a Court left and all filled with ugly German women, Hanover rats, they call em; but youll be away and care nothing for Wideacre.
I laughed. The idea was so ludicrous and adulthood so far away that nothing could shake my belief in the trinity of Papa, and me, and the land.
I wont marry, I said. I shall stay here and work with you and look after Wideacre, like you and I do now.
Aye, Papa said tenderly. But Harry will be Master here when Im gone, and I would rather see you in your own home than rubbing against him. Besides, Beatrice, the land is well enough for you now, but in a few years you will want pretty clothes and balls. Then who will watch the winter sowing?
I laughed again with my childish confidence that good things never change.
Harry knows nothing about the land, I said dismissively. If you asked him what a short-horn was, he would think it was a musical instrument. Hes not been here for months why, he hasnt even seen the new plantation. Those trees were my idea, and you planted them just where I thought they should be. The man said I was a proper little forester and you said I should have a stool made from the wood of my trees when I was an old lady! Harry cannot be Master here he is always away.
I still had not understood. Silly fool that I was. Though I had seen enough older sons inheriting the farms and enough younger sons working as day labourers or going into service before they could marry their patient sweethearts, I had never thought of them as landowners as we were.
I never imagined that the rule that favoured older sons to the exclusion of all others could ever, possibly, apply to us to me. I had seen village girls of my age working as hard as adult women to earn money for the family coffers. I had seen their sisters, a few years older, on the look-out for older sons always the eldest to marry. But I never thought that the rigid, crazy rule that the first boy takes all could apply to us. It was a feature of the lives of the poor, like early death, poor health and starvation in winter. These things were not the same for us.
Oddly, I had never thought of Harry as the son and heir, just as I had never thought of Mama as the Mistress of Wideacre. They were simply private individuals, seldom seen outside the walls of the park. They were the background to the glory of the Squire and me. So my fathers words had not disturbed me they had passed me by.
I had much to learn, the little girl that I was then. I had never even heard of entail, the legal process of tying up a great estate so it is always handed to the next male heir be he ever so distant, even if there are a hundred daughters loving the land before him. With childlike concentration I still had the ability to hear only what interested me and speculation about the next Master of Wideacre was as remote as the music of the spheres.
While I dismissed the thoughts from my mind, my father had pulled up his hunter to chat with one of our tenants trimming his boundary hedge of blackthorn and dogroses.
Good morning, Giles, I said, my seat in the saddle, the tip of my head, a perfect copy of my fathers friendly condescension.
Mistress. Giles touched an arthritic hand to his head. He was years younger than my father but bent double with the burden of poverty. A lifetime of waterlogged ditches, muddy fields and frozen pathways had permeated his bones with agonizing arthritis which no amount of dirty flannel wrapped round his skinny legs seemed to cure. His brown hand permanently ingrained with dirt (our dirt) was as knotted and as gnarled as a holly trunk.
A grand little lady shes becoming, he said to my father. Tis sad to think shell have to leave us some day soon. I stared at the old man. My father picked a sprig of clipped elder from the hedge with the butt of his whip.
Aye, he said slowly. But a man must run the land and maids must marry. He paused. The young Master will be home soon when hes finished with his books. Time enough then to learn of country ways. The fields and the downs are good enough for a girl with the teaching her mother gives her, but these are bad times. The next Master of Wideacre will need to know his way in the world.
I listened, silent. Even my mare seemed to freeze as my father spoke and the great shire-horses dropped their heads as if to listen while my father tore down the secure world of my childhood with his quiet, deadly words.
Yes, shes a good girl and as sharp on the land as a bailiff for all shes so young. But shell be off to marry some lord or other some day, and young Harry will take my place. Hell be all the better for his learning.
Giles nodded. There was a silence. A long, country silence punctuated with the springtime birdsong. There was no hurry on that timeless afternoon which marked the end of my childhood. My father had said all he had to say and said nothing. Giles said nothing, thought nothing, gazed into space. And I said not a word for I had no words to deal with this pain. In a series of clicks, like the moving parts of some strange and cruel clock, all my pictures of the adult world were falling into place. The precious elder son always took the land and the redundant girls could go where they could find a man to take them. My residence at Wideacre was not an exclusive favour, and Harrys departure an exile but I was kept at home because I was not worth educating.
Harrys school was not an interruption of his Wideacre life but an essential preparation for it. While I had been revelling in the land and the freedom of being the only child at home, Harry had been growing stronger and more skilled and would return to expel me from my home. Papa did not love me best. Papa did not love me best. Papa did not love me best.
I took a deep shuddering breath, softly, softly, so that no one could hear. And I looked at my father with a new, strange clarity. He might love me tenderly, but not enough to give me Wideacre. He might wish the best for me, but he could see no further than a good match and permanent exile from the one place in the world that was my home. He might plan ahead for Harrys future but he had forgotten me. Forgotten me.
So that was the end of my childhood; that warm spring day on the lane to Acre with the two great shire-horses beside my papa and me, and Giles, blank as chalk scree, staring at nothing. The absolute security of owning the land I loved left me, then, in that moment, and I never had it fully back. I left my childhood with my heart aching and my mind full of anger and resentment. I started adulthood with a bitter taste in my mouth and a formless determination that I would not go. I would not leave Wideacre. I would not surrender my place to Harry. If it was the way of the world that girls left home, then the world would have to change. I would never change.
Youll have to hurry and change, my mama said in her continual, unconscious contradiction of me. She held the hem of her green silk dress clear of the puddles in the stable yard as we clattered in. Always, she had this way of innocently opposing me, just as she continually opposed my father. From her I learned early that you do not have to argue or to state your beliefs to oppose someone. You can simply turn your head from them; from their ideas, from their loves and their enthusiasms. Without Papa, she might well have been a more direct, a sweeter-natured, woman. With him, her sense of her own purpose had soured into frustration. What should have been directness and honesty had become unspoken opposition.
You must hurry and change into your pink silk, she repeated with emphasis as I slid from the saddle and tossed the reins to a waiting stable lad. Weve a special guest for dinner Harrys headmaster.
My father directed a long, silent look at her.
Yes, she said defensively. I did ask him to visit. I am worried about the boy. Im sorry, Harold, I should have told you earlier, only it is some time since I wrote and I thought he was not coming at all. I would have mentioned it before She broke off and stopped. I understood my fathers rising irritation. But his reply was checked, as a man all in black except for the white band of a clerical collar appeared at the rose-garden gate.
Dr Yately! my father said in a tone of convincing delight. How good to see you! And what a surprise! I should have been home to meet you had I known you were coming.
The tall man nodded and smiled and I gained a quick impression of a cool, astute man of the world. I dipped my curtsy and shot another look at him as I rose. This was no social call. He had come for a purpose and he was anxious to complete his mission. I saw his wary eyes assessing Papa, and I wondered what he wanted of us.
He had come, it was clear, to do Mamas work for her. She still longed to have Harry home to fill the gap his absence had left in her life. Dr Yately, for reasons I could not yet guess, was ready to take the part of the pale wife against the Squire himself. For some reason, he was as anxious to be rid of Harry as Mama was to have him home.
I attended dinner in the girlish dress of maidenly pink and correctly said not a word except in reply to a direct question and I had few of them. I sat facing my mother. It was one of my fathers foibles that a male guest should take the foot of the table and he the head. So Mama and I equally unimportant sat in silence while the men talked over our heads.
Dr Yately had evidently come to persuade my father to remove Harry from his expensive, exclusive school. But if he succeeded, he stood to lose a pupil who had taken every costly extra, who was likely to need a tutor from the school to attend him to university, and who might well choose to take that tutor with him to Europe on the Grand Tour. With the disappearance of Harry, Dr Yately could say goodbye to thousands of pounds of fees. So why should he want to be rid of him? What could Harry have possibly done that was too gross a secret for a frank explanation to my father, and too shameful for Dr Yately simply to overlook and continue to pocket the fees?
The clever man knew his business. He kept off the subject of Harry but praised the roast beef and relished the wine (only our second-best claret I noticed). He clearly knew nothing about farming but he drew my father out to talk about some of the new techniques we might try. My father grew expansive, jovial. He even offered Dr Yately the chance of a few days hunting next season if he could take a holiday. Dr Yately was polite, but noncommittal.
Once Papa started melting towards the visitor and broached another bottle, Mama was in a hurry to leave the gentlemen together. With the sharp regret of a fourteen-year-old girl who had been on horseback all day, I watched some apple charlotte returning untouched to the kitchen. But Mama rose from the table and Dr Yately and Papa politely bowed us from the room and settled down to their port and talk.
My mothers pale face was flushed with pleasure as she opened her workbox and handed me my embroidery.
Your brother Harry will come home as soon as term ends, and never go to that dreadful place again, if only your papa agrees, she said, elated.
So early? I asked, keenly defensive of my position. Why? What has he done?
Done? Her eyes met mine directly, no subterfuge in their pale shadows. Nothing! Whatever could he do? Its what those brutes of boys have done to him. She hesitated and chose a strand of silk.
When he was last home for the holidays he needed a chest plaster, do you remember? Of course I did not. But I nodded.
Both Nurse and I saw marks on his poor body. He had been beaten, Beatrice. He begged me to say and do nothing, but the more I thought of it the more certain I was he should be taken away from that school. I wrote to Dr Yately and he replied that he would see what was happening. Then he arrived here today! My mothers voice was full of pride that she had taken action that had produced results, and dramatic results. He tells me that Harry has been forced to join one of the boys gangs, and that in their games they have some shocking rules and punishments. The worst boy the ringleader is the son of She paused. Well, never mind who, precisely. But it is someone the Doctor simply must not offend. This boy has established some sort of hold over Harry. He made him sit next to him in class, have his bed next to him in the dormitory and has teased and bullied him all term. Dr Yately says he cannot separate them and he suggests Oh! I hope your papa agrees that Harry is of an age when he could pursue his studies at home and learn about the estate at the same time.
Unseen by Mama, my head low over my embroidery, I raised ironic eyebrows. Harry learn about the estate, indeed! He had lived here all his life and did not even know the exact lie of our borders. He had driven through Wideacre wood every Sunday, and yet he did not know where in the wood there was a nightingales nest, or where in the stream you could always find trout. If Harry was going to learn about the estate it was to be hoped he could find it in a book, for he had never even glanced from the library windows when he was last home.