The Complete Wideacre Trilogy: Wideacre, The Favoured Child, Meridon. Philippa Gregory
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and cottagers and galloping around the countryside without a chaperone.’
Papa’s blue eyes sparkled with temper. ‘Those rough men earn our bread and butter,’ he said. ‘Those tenants and cottagers pay for Beatrice’s horse, aye and even the dress on her back and the boots on her feet. A fine little city-miss you would have on your hands if she did not know where the wealth is made and where the work is done.’
Mama, a city-miss in her girlhood, looked up from the table and came perilously close to defying the convention that Ladies Never Raise Their Voices, Never Disagree with Their Husbands, and Keep Their Tempers Under the Tightest of Wraps.
‘Beatrice should be brought up in a manner befitting a young lady,’ she said tremulously. ‘She will not be a farm manager in later life; she will be a lady. She should be learning how a lady behaves.’
Papa was red to the ears – a sure sign of his temper. ‘She is a Lacey of Wideacre,’ he said, his voice firm and unnecessarily loud for the little breakfast parlour. The cups jumped and chinked as he bumped the table.
‘She is a Lacey of Wideacre, and whatever she does, however she behaves, will always be fitting. Whether she checks the sheep or even digs ditches, she will always be a Lacey of Wideacre. On this land her behaviour is the pattern of Quality. And no damned mincing, citified, pretty-pretty gentility could change that. And nothing could improve that.’
Mama was white with fright and temper.
‘Very well,’ she said through her narrowed lips. ‘It shall be as you order.’
She rose from the table and picked up her reticule, her shawl and the letters that lay by her plate. I could see her fingers tremble and her mouth working to hold back resentful, bitter tears. Papa detained her with a hand on her arm at the door and she looked up in his face with an expression of icy dislike.
‘She is a Lacey of Wideacre,’ he said again, trying to convey to this outsider what that meant on this, our land. ‘Bearing that name, on this land she can do no wrong. You need have no fears for her, ma’am.’
Mama tipped her head in cold acquiescence and stood like a statue till he released her. Then she glided, in the short dainty steps of the perfect lady, from the room. Papa turned his attention to me, silent at my breakfast plate.
‘You didn’t want to stay at home, did you, Beatrice?’ he asked, concerned. I beamed at him.
‘I am a Lacey of Wideacre, and my place is on the land!’ I said. He scooped me from my place in a great bear-hug and we went arm in arm to the stables, victors of a righteous battle. Mama watched me go from the parlour window, and when I was on my pony and safe from her detaining hand, I reined in by the terrace to see if she would come out. She opened the glass door and came out languidly, her perfumed skirts brushing the stones of the terrace, her eyes blinking in the bright sunshine. I stretched an apologetic hand out to her.
‘I am sorry to grieve you, Mama,’ I offered. ‘I shall stay at home tomorrow.’
She did not move close to take my hand. She was always afraid of horses and perhaps she disliked being too close to the pony who was pulling against the bit and pawing at the gravel, keen to be off. Mama’s pale eyes looked coldly up at me, sitting high, bright and straight-backed on a glossy pony.
‘I try and try with you, Beatrice,’ she said and her voice was sad, but also flawed with self-righteous complaint. ‘I sometimes think you do not know how to love properly. All you ever care for is the land. I think sometimes you only love your papa so much because he is the master of the land. Your heart is so full of Wideacre there scarcely seems room for anything else.’
The pony fidgeted and I smoothed her neck. There seemed little to say. What Mama said was probably true, and I felt a momentary sentimental sadness that I could not be the daughter she wanted.
‘I am sorry, Mama,’ I said awkwardly.
‘Sorry!’ she said and her voice was scornful. She turned and swept back through the door leaving me holding a restless pony on a tight rein and feeling somehow foolish. Then I loosened the rein and Minnie sprang forward and we clattered off down the gravel to the grassy track of the drive. Once in the shadow of the branches, which cast dappled bars of shade across my track while the early summer sunshine warmed my face, I forgot all about the disappointed woman I had left in her pale parlour and remembered only my freedom on the land and the work I had to do that day.
But Harry, her favourite, was a disappointment to her in another way. The high hills and the rolling chalk valleys and the sweet River Fenny flowing so cool and so green through our fields and woods were never enough for him. He seized at the chance of visits to our aunt in Bristol and said he preferred the rooftops and rows of tall town houses to our wide, empty horizon.
And when Papa broached the idea of a school, Mama turned white and reached a hand for her only son. But Harry’s blue eyes sparkled and he said he wanted to go. Against Papa’s certainty that Harry would need a better education than his own to deal with an encroaching and slippery world, and Harry’s quiet but effective determination to leave, Mama was helpless. All August, while Harry was ill again, Mama, Nurse, the housekeeper and every one of the four upstairs maids dashed around all day in a frenzy of preparation for the eleven-year-old hero’s departure for school.
Papa and I avoided the worst of the fuss. In any case, there were the long days we had to spend on the open downland pastures collecting the sheep to separate lambs from ewes for slaughter. Harry, too, remained secluded in library or parlour choosing books to take to school with him, and scanning his newly purchased Latin and Greek grammars.
‘You cannot want to go, Harry!’ I said incredulously.
‘Whyever not?’ he said, frowning at the breeze that had blown in with me as I flung open the library door.
‘To leave Wideacre!’ I said and then stopped. Once again Harry’s world of words defeated me. If he did not know that nothing outside Wideacre could match the smell of Wideacre’s summer wind, or that a handful of Wideacre earth was worth an acre of any other land, then I had no way to tell him. We did not see the same sights.
We did not speak the same language. We did not share even the similarity of family resemblance. Harry took after my father in colouring, with his bright blond curls and his wide blue, honest eyes. From Mama he had inherited her delicate bone structure and the sweetness of her smile. Her smiles were rare enough, but Harry was a merry-faced golden cherub. All the petting and indulgence he had from Mama had been unable to spoil his sunny nature – and his smiling good looks reflected his sweet and loving spirit.
Beside him I was a throwback to our Norman ancestors and the founders of the line. Foxy-coloured, like those greedy and dangerous men who came in the train of the Norman conqueror and took one look at the lovely land of Wideacre and fought and cheated and lied until they got it. From those ancestors I had my chestnut hair, but my hazel-green eyes were all my own. No portrait in the gallery showed a set of eyes slantingly placed above high cheekbones like mine.
‘She’s a changeling,’ Mama once said in despair.
‘She’s her own pattern,’ my blond papa said consolingly. ‘Maybe she’ll grow into good looks.’
But Harry’s golden curls could not last for ever. His head was cropped for his first wig as part of the preparation for school. Mama wept as the radiant springs fell all around him on the floor, but Harry’s eyes were bright with excitement and pride as Papa’s own wigmaker fitted a little bob-tailed wig on his head – as shorn as a lamb. Mama wept for his curls; she wept as she packed his linen; she wept as she packed a great box of sweetmeats to sustain her baby in the hard outside world. The week before his departure, she was in one continual flood of tears, which even Harry thought wearisome, and Papa and I found pressing business on the far side of the estate from breakfast to dinner.
When he finally departed – like a young lord in the family carriage with his bags strapped on the back, two outriders and Papa himself riding alongside for company for the first stage – Mama shut herself in her parlour for