The Complete Wideacre Trilogy: Wideacre, The Favoured Child, Meridon. Philippa Gregory
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tediously blue French sky, and the wrong-smelling land and the strange bread and the stinky cheeses, and all the things that should have been a Wideacre spring and yet were so unlike home.
The sea was reassuringly calm for most of the trip, and I enjoyed the salt smell and the breath of wind from the south and I even learned to bear the heaving of the ship. My body had slowly lost its rounded shape and started to regain its familiar smooth sleekness, which reassured me that I was also returning to my true self. The early bright sun put summertime gleams of copper into my chestnut hair and started to dust my nose with the slightest of freckles. I was still a trifle plump around the neck and my breasts were fuller and heavier, but when I stripped naked and gazed at myself in a little mirror in the heaving cabin I thought it unlikely that anyone would ever guess I had given birth – not even Harry when he explored every inch of my naked body with his eyes and hands and tongue.
As soon as Celia had found the wet-nurse I had turned the child over to her and bound my breasts. I told Celia that the milk had stopped at once and indicated my new slimness as evidence. It was only partly true. When I heard the hungry wail my breasts ached and the tight, tight bindings grew wet around the hard nipples. If Celia had so much as dreamed I had milk, she would have had the baby fed, and well and happy again. But even as I oozed milk in a warm, unstoppable richness, I met her eye blandly and swore I was dry.
The horrid pink scratches of stretch marks were fading to a near-invisible whiteness as Madame had promised they would, and the shadows under my eyes went as soon as I insisted that the baby, wet-nurse and Celia all move cabins to take them out of earshot of my best state room.
In fact, they slept little. While I strolled on deck, or sat in the sunshine watching the blue waves slide by under the prow, or leaned over the stern to watch the wake gleaming white and vanishing like a disappearing chalk lane in the distance, Celia, as often as not, was pacing with the baby in the hot cabin below.
Apparently the baby did not like the seafaring life, and the French girl hired as wet-nurse had temporarily dried up during her bout of seasickness. Her milk would flow again provided the baby was put often to the breast, but in the meantime it was once more hungry and once more turning its nose up at pap and water. When I saw Celia’s face after a day of nursing the retching wet-nurse and a night of walking with a fretful baby, I nearly laughed aloud. If I had no other reason in the world to avoid motherhood, one glimpse of Celia’s wan face would have convinced me. She looked years older than the shy bride who had left England nine months ago. She truly looked the part of a woman who had given birth prematurely. She looked as if she had born triplets at least.
‘Rest, Celia. Rest,’ I said, patting the seat beside me and stroking my skirts in to make a space for her.
‘I can only sit for a minute while she sleeps,’ Celia said, perched on the edge of the bench, her ears alert for any noise from below.
‘What ails the child?’ I asked casually.
‘Nothing new, I think,’ said Celia wearily. ‘First the movement of the boat upset her. Then the milk began to fail and she grew hungry. Now I think the milk is coming through again and she did well at the last feed and then slept well.’
I nodded amiably, but with little interest. ‘Wideacre air will soon set her to rights,’ I said, thinking more of myself.
‘Yes, indeed,’ said Celia happily. ‘And the sight of her papa and her home. I can hardly bear to wait, can you, Beatrice?’
My heart leaped at the thought of Harry and home.
‘No,’ I said. ‘How very long it has been since we were at home. I wonder how everything is.’
Unconsciously I leaned forward to stare at the horizon as if to create a purple hump of land out of the flat line of sea meeting sky by sheer effort of will. My mind rolled over the problems and people I had left behind. First and foremost was Wideacre, but I already knew from Harry’s detailed letters that the spring sowing had gone well, that it had been a mild winter and the winter forage had lasted out, so no animals had been killed because of lack of feed. The tenant farmers were convinced that turnips could be used as a winter-feed crop now we had proved on the Home Farm that the beasts could eat them through the winter. The French vines Harry had brought back from Bordeaux had been planted on our south-facing slopes of the downs, and seemed no more gnarled and dead-looking than they did in France, so perhaps they would take.
On the debit side, without me to restrain him, Harry had suffered from two bouts of his experimental madness. One mattered little: the ploughing up of some old fields that could soon return to grass. The loss there was the goodwill of the people who used the footpath across them, and of the neighbouring farmer whose lane was impassable after the ploughing. Harry had ignored the advice of the old labourers, and had planned to plant an orchard on Green Lane Meadow. He soon found out that the lush green grass was thriving there because of an unusual clay bed. His ploughshares stuck as if he were farming in Devon, his trees wilted and the sticky mud turned to rock in the sunshine. The entire hundred-acre meadow was ruined for that year and the investment in young trees, money and time would have to be written off as one of the prices paid for Harry’s inexperience. It made me angry that I had not been there to prevent it, but glad, very glad, that the cost had been no higher. The wise old labourers, and even the young lads, would be shaking their heads over the young Squire’s folly, and there would be many whispers wishing Miss Beatrice would hurry up and come home.
Harry’s other nonsense could have cost lives, and that I found hard to forgive. He had some textbook clever ideas for controlling the flow of the Fenny, which, since time began, had been wide and fast and prone to flooding in springtime, and slow and sluggish in summer. Since everyone (everyone except Harry, of course) knows this, all the farmers whose lands run alongside the Fenny are ready for the spring floods and winter high water, too. In the flatter fields they leave unploughed the great dried-out ox-bows where the flood waters can overspill and roar and loose their speed and power before rejoining the main torrent. In an average season we may lose a sheep or a silly calf, or once – I remember – an ill-guarded child, in the flood. But this is no mountain torrent. It is just the sweet Fenny. It can be managed; it can be watched in the old, sound ways.
But they were not good enough for Harry. He calculated that if the water level were to be regulated at its source in a little steep-sided downland valley with a wall to hold back the growing river, then all the extra field space we allowed for flooding could be ploughed up and used. The empty extra curves around the riverbed, the water-meadows that flood twice a year, could all be put under his blessed plough to grow more and more of his damned wheat. So Harry listened courteously and politely to all the wise old men, and paid them no heed. My letters of excitable remonstrance he ignored, too. Too clever for his own good was Harry, and the old tenants sent their sons out to build his dam and fit its pretty little sluice gates and dig out its little channels, and they laughed behind their hands at the waste, and the cost and, I dare say, at what Miss Beatrice would have to say when she came home, and the rage she would be in.
What happened next could have been predicted by any fool except the fool who now squired Wideacre. The waters behind Harry’s, new-built dam backed up in the little valley far faster than he had anticipated. He had measured the flow of the Fenny, but not allowed for the fact that when the snow melts and we have heavy spring rains the whole land becomes wetter and there are streams where he had never guessed streams would flow. The swelling lake drowned a hazel coppice that was older than Wideacre itself, and waterlogged some good dry upland meadow fields. As the waters built up, the nice little sluice gates struggled to open and close to control the flood; the new plaster in the wall melted like springtime ice; the dam crumbled and a great wall of water, high as a house, thundered down the little valley towards Acre.
It knocked out the road bridge in the first splashy roaring collision and Harry could thank his fool’s luck that there were no small children sitting on the parapet or old men smoking and staring at the stream when that deadly wall of water ripped the sound old bridge out by its roots.
It spread then, a wide sweep of destruction as careless as a fan brushed across a table of ornaments. Crops, shrubs, bushes and even large shallow-rooted firs were bowled over in a broad swathe for