Harry tapped on the door and came in. His kiss on my cheek was the second he had given me that day, but it recognized that our first kiss of greeting at breakfast had been in public, as brother and sister. This one, no warmer or more loving, was a private one between old, familiar lovers.

‘Sit down,’ I said, and he drew up a chair to the table.

‘I shall be writing to the London solicitors this morning to raise the question of the entail with them, and when we know how much they estimate the purchase will cost, we will know better where we stand,’ I said in a businesslike tone.

‘Good,’ said Harry, nodding in assent.

‘But I think we should keep this matter between ourselves, until we know we can go ahead,’ I said. ‘I shall not tell John yet, and I think it would be better if you did not tell Celia.’

‘Oh?’ said Harry. ‘Why not?’

Oh, Harry,’ I said. ‘You understand so little about women! If Celia knows you are planning to make Julia your heir, she will know you believe she is barren. I think that would break her heart. Worse, she will know that I told her sad secret to you, so she will feel betrayed by me. Until we know for certain that we can buy the entail, indeed, until the entail is actually purchased and signed over to Richard and Julia, I think Celia should know nothing about it. It would only be a reproach to her for something she cannot possibly help.’

‘Very true,’ said Harry, with the quick tenderness he always had now for Celia, his pretty wife. ‘I should hate her to be distressed. But she will know that I think there will be no more heirs when the contract of partnership between Richard and Julia is signed.’

‘But then she will have the comfort of knowing that Julia’s future is secure and that at least she has played a part in providing Wideacre with an heir. Julia and Richard will inherit jointly.’

Harry nodded, and got up from the table to gaze out of the window. I heard the scrunch of footsteps on the gravel, and went to stand beside him. My husband was wandering aimlessly towards the rose garden. I could tell from the droop of his shoulders that he had found the drink I had left in the library and he had taken a glass to help him face the day looming ahead. All day without laughter, or joy, or love in a house that stank of sin. He had lost the quickness and lightness of his step. He had lost the pride that made him a swift walker, a fast dancer, a fine lover. I had taken the virtue, the strength and the power from him. If I could see my way to it, I would take more.

‘What about John?’ Harry asked in an undertone.

I shrugged. ‘As you see,’ I said. ‘I shall tell him of no plans. He is indiscreet, he is incompetent to judge. If he continues to drink in this way then I shall write to his papa and see if you and I can have power of attorney over his MacAndrew shares. He is not to be trusted with a fortune. He could spend it all on drink tomorrow.’

Harry nodded, his eyes still on John’s bowed back.

‘He is ashamed because he made a mistake with Mama’s dose?’ he asked.

I nodded. ‘I suppose that is it. He does not confide in me. He knows I cannot forgive his behaviour that night. If he had not been drunk our darling mama might have lived.’ I rested my head against the window frame. ‘I cannot stop weeping when I think of her in illness, and that clown muddling the dose.’

Harry’s face was flushed with anger. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘If we had only known! But, Beatrice, we cannot be sure. She always had a weak heart; we all knew that one day we would lose her.’

‘What I cannot bear is to have lost her through his folly!’ I said.

‘I wonder what set off Mama’s attack,’ Harry said, his cowardly eyes on my face. ‘Does John have any idea?’

‘No,’ I said, lying in my turn. ‘Mama collapsed just before she came into the parlour. Perhaps she came down the stairs too fast. John has no idea what caused it.’

Harry nodded. He was greedy for sweet untruths when reality was uncomfortable.

‘I know we cannot be sure,’ I said. ‘But you believe it, and I believe it; the whole house knows how drunk he was. All of the county knows he attended her although he was drunk, and that she was dead the next day. Of course I cannot forgive him. Of course he is ashamed. He has not shown his face off the estate except for her funeral since it happened. And he is not called out even to the poorest houses. Everyone believes he was drunk and made a mistake.’

Harry nodded. ‘It must be a bitter thing for him,’ he said. John was walking along the paths of the rose garden that led to the little summerhouse. As we watched he dawdled up the steps and sat down inside as if he were worn out.

‘It is indeed,’ I said. ‘His whole life and his pride was in his practice of medicine. I expect he wishes he were dead.’

The relish in my voice penetrated even Harry’s dullness.

‘You hate him that much?’ he asked. ‘Because of Mama?’

I nodded.

‘I cannot forgive him for failing Mama, for failing me, for failing in his duty. I despise him for his drunkenness that night, and for his drunkenness every night since. I wish I had never married him. But with your support and help, Harry, we will ensure he cannot harm me.’

Harry nodded. ‘Aye, it’s a bitter shame for you, Beatrice. But you will always be safe here with me. And if his father does indeed invest the MacAndrew shares on you and takes them away from John, then he will be harmless. He will be able to do nothing if he has only what you give him, and has to live where you permit.’

I nodded. ‘It will have to do,’ I said, half to myself. ‘It will do, at any rate, until we know about the entail.’


Two long months passed before we had news. In London the lawyers consulted their dusty files and traced back through hundreds of years the decision to invest only boys of Wideacre stock with the power to inherit. It was the usual way. In the earliest days, when my ancestors first came to Wideacre and saw its dreaming hills and the little cluster of mud and lath buildings, they were fighting men, arrived with the Norman conqueror, hungry for land. Women to them were carriers and breeders and rearers of soldier sons. Nothing else had any value. Of course they settled it that boys and only boys should inherit.

And no one ever challenged it.

Generations of women came and went on this land. Married, bedded, bore children with pain and with courage and were left to run the estate alone. Mothers and daughters-in-law inherited responsibility but no power, as husbands and sons gave the orders, took the profits and took themselves off. Crusading Squires left Wideacre for years in the care of their wives and came back to find the fields peaceful, the crops yielding, the cottages repaired and newly built, and the land fertile. Strangers on their own land, tanned brown from foreign suns, they retired at last to their home and took back the power without a murmur from the women who had poured their own lives and love into keeping Wideacre Hall and Wideacre land strong and thriving.

They are buried in Wideacre church, these absentee Lords. There are great effigies of them in their armour, on their backs, their hands piously clasped over their metal bellies, their feet uncomfortably crossed. Their eyes stare sightlessly at the church roof and I imagine they sometimes lay in bed like that, beside their sleeping wives, gazing at the roof of the great wooden bed that I now sleep in, but seeing in their mind’s eye the desert, and the bands of infidels, and Jerusalem on the horizon.

The wives would be as sound and as deeply asleep as I am after a day when I have worked so hard and so long on the accounts that the figures dance before my eyes until I take my candle and go to bed in a haze of tiredness. Or on the days when we have to round up sheep and I spend all day riding around the silly things in circles and bawling like a peasant at the dogs. Or when harvesting goes badly and is interrupted by rain and I have to be out all day to keep the men working and say, ‘Hurry! Hurry! Hurry! The storm is coming! The autumn is coming! And the crops are not in!’ The crusaders’ wives would be as tired as I am after days like that, and they would sleep as I do — the sleep of a woman who runs the house and the land. We have no time to dream, or go riding off to find wars and battles and glory. We are left with the home to run and the land to run, and no glory, no power, and no wealth.

Wideacre Squires were not great Lords like the Havering family, nor great merchants like the de Courceys. They stayed home a little more than the greater men, but still they roamed. With Wideacre at their back and Wideacre wealth at their beck and call they rode out for the King during the war, and lived long years in exile. Wideacre wives ran the estate then too. Writing letters, sending money from coffers that grew steadily more and more empty. Arguing, dealing, persuading the Roundhead army to leave the hay standing, the horses in the field.

In the long years of the Protectorate the Wideacre women were exiles on their own land — staying quiet, staying unobtrusive, hoping that they would be left to live their lives in peace and security. Of course they managed it. What woman does not know how to melt into a threatening landscape so she becomes half invisible and can concentrate on surviving — without power, without wealth, without help?

So when the Stuart Squires came riding home in triumph there was a tired, pale woman on the doorstep ready to welcome the Master home. And he stepped from his horse and into the Master’s chair as if he had never been away. And she turned over the books to him, the keys to him, the plans and the orders and the decisions to him, as if all she knew was her needle. As if she had never been anything else but a peg to hang clothes on, an arranger of flowers, and a singer of little songs.