Philippa Gregory - Wideacre

I climbed up on the window seat like a girl slipping out to greet her lover. I swung open the window and stepped out. The rain was sheeting down in great thick rods, a wall of water. I gasped as it poured on my head. I was soaked in seconds, my silk gown a second skin.

Beyond Ralph the mob had stopped, watchful, fearful. The torches hissed, sizzling in the rain, paled by the great blinding flashes. I was deaf with the barrel-rolling thunderclaps, and blinded by the light, but my eyes were on Ralph’s face and his smile, as I walked towards him, my head high, right up to the great horse’s head. The lightning split the sky and shone bright on the knife in his hand. His gamekeeper’s knife, for slitting the throats of cornered deer.

I smiled and in the sharp blue light he saw my eyes gleam as he leaned down to me, as if he would catch me up to him, and hold me, and hold me, and hold me, for ever.

‘Oh, Ralph,’ I said with a lifetime of longing in my voice, and I held up my arms to him.

And then his knife hand came down like a thunder blow. And the lightning itself was black.

Wideacre Hall faces due south and the sun shines all day on the yellow stone, illuminating mercilessly the great black scorch marks on the two walls left standing, and the blackened, charred roof timbers.

When it rains the smoke stains run in great black smears down the honey-coloured walls, and the scattered rubbish from the house — Beatrice’s papers, even her map of Wideacre — blows around the garden, sodden, breaking into mushy scraps.

As winter comes and the nights are longer and darker the villagers from Acre will not go near the Hall. Mr Gilby, the London merchant, wants to buy the estate from the widowed Lady Lacey but he is hesitating about the price, afraid of the reputation of the local poor, afraid of the mob. If he buys, he will have to wait until summer to rebuild; and bring in labourers from outside the county. No Sussex labourer would touch the house. Neither will the villagers go into the Wideacre woods, although the old footpaths are reopened. Miss Beatrice’s body was found in the leaves in a little secret hollow near the garden gate, a childhood hiding place. And now they say the whole wood is haunted by her, crying and crying for her brother who died the same night, when his heart — weak like his mother’s — could not stand the bolt to Havering Hall. Crying and crying for the land goes Miss Beatrice, a swatch of corn in one hand and a handful of earth in the other.

If Mr Gilby does buy he will care neither for ghosts nor for profit. He is too practical a business man to mind the rumour of a ghost on his land. More important for the village, he cares little for profit. His money is made on guaranteed returns in the City. He does not put his faith in the weather, or the health of beasts, or the unreliable treacherous gods of Wideacre. He wants only to live in peace and enjoy his notion of country life. So his leases would be long, and the rents easy. But while he dithers, the footpaths are reopened and the new cornlands have self-seeded and gone back to meadow. If he does not come to Wideacre before spring he will find that the village has replanted the common strips again, and Acre is as it was; as if there had been no hard years, as if Beatrice had never been.

It will take more than a spring for the children and Celia and John to recover. Celia went in the night from the Squire’s Lady to an impoverished widow, living in the little Dower House. She is in mourning for another year, but her face beneath the black veil is serene. The children are a quaint pair, solemn in their black clothes. They hold hands on their long walks and their little heads are close together when they pray: Julia’s brown hair glinting with a tinge of copper, Richard’s curls glossy as a black horse. John MacAndrew also lives in the Dower House, to care for his son and help the widow adjust to her new life. All he has is an allowance from his father. There is some rumour that Miss Beatrice squandered his money on an entail and an unbreakable contract for his son. But in this part of Sussex there is nothing they would not say against Miss Beatrice.

She has passed into legend. The Wideacre witch, who turned the land to gold for three sweet seasons, and then scraped it dry in two cold years. How, when she walked in a field as a young girl, you could see the seeds growing in her footprint. How the fish swam to the bank when she walked along the Fenny. How the game was fat and easy to shoot when she had been in the woods. How she was a very goddess of Wideacre, as sweet and as bitter and as unpredictable as all goddesses.

So when she turned against the land men died. When she stopped loving, the sweetness of Wideacre went sour and people went hungry. No vegetables grew. The footpaths closed. And an old oak tree crashed down, rootless, when she lost her temper under it one uneasy summer’s day.

No man could have stopped her. Acre would have died of hunger in her second cold winter. Only another of the old gods, a legless man, half-horse, half-man, could have ridden like a centaur to the window of her house and plucked her out like a lover his lass. He rode away with her across his saddle and they found her body, but never heard of him again. He was gone.

Back to some secret place where the old gods live. Back to some heartbeating core of the earth where he and Miss Beatrice are golden once more, and smile on the land.

Wideacre Hall faces due south. It is a ruin now, and no one goes there. No one except little Richard MacAndrew and Julia Lacey who like to play in the broken summerhouse. Sometimes Julia looks up at the ruin with her wide child’s eyes. And she smiles as if it were very lovely to her.

About the Author

WIDEACRE

Philippa Gregory is an established writer and broadcaster for radio and television. She holds a PhD in eighteenth-century literature from the University of Edinburgh. She has been widely praised for her historical novels, including Earthly Joys and A Respectable Trade (which she adapted for BBC Television), as well as her works of contemporary suspense. The Other Boleyn Girl won the Parker Romantic Novel of the Year Award in 2002 and it has recently been adapted for BBC Television. Philippa Gregory lives in the North of England with her family.