The Complete Wideacre Trilogy: Wideacre, The Favoured Child, Meridon. Philippa Gregory

back to the Hall. Or could I? I quickened my pace a little, my heart thudding faster again, not at the speed but at the dawning of fear.

      He would almost certainly wait for his letters. He might even be waiting for me to return. With a little luck I should walk up the path through the rose garden and see him standing on the terrace, sniffing at the air and smoking a cigar with the morning paper under his arm. The thought of him there was so clear in my mind I could almost smell the blue cigar smoke drifting on the air. I dropped into a trot. He was there, I had a certainty he was there. Looking at the roses, wondering what took me out of the house in such a tearing hurry, and waiting for the boy to come back with the mail from the early coach from London. The trot speeded into a run. I knew he was there, but I had been so frightened today that I wanted to see him. I wanted to race up to him, even hot and dishevelled and sweaty as I was, and feel his strong heavy arm around me in a hard hug, so I could know for certain, know for sure, he was safe. That I could not possibly harm him. Even if I had wanted to. I had a sharp pain under one of my ribs that made every breath a little gasp as a red-hot needle pricked me with each step. And I could feel an ominous tightening in my calf muscle. Although I knew, I knew, he was safe, it seemed some sort of magic that I should run as fast as I could. I was not in terror for him, but I would not feel easy until I saw him, until I could take his arm and say, ‘Today, I shall ride with you all day.’ Or even say to stupid Harry, ‘If you are riding with Papa today you must be with him all the time, and you must promise that.’ Harry would promise, and Harry would keep his word. So my papa was safe. I just needed to see him.

      I was running as fast as I could again, and the bushes were tearing at my skirt and the noise from the Fenny, rippling beside the path, was as loud as the thudding of my heart, and the thundering of my boots on the soft earth. I raced over the fallen tree that made a bridge to the paddock gate, tore it open and banged it behind me. With sweat in my eyes I could not see the terrace clearly and the run had given me dancing flecks before my eyes as if I was looking through a veil. Papa was on the terrace, I was sure of it. I could not see him, but I felt he was there. There safe. And Ralph might wait in the woods all day and it would not matter.

      At the gate to the rose garden I blinked to clear my eyes and scanned the front of the house. I could not see him, but the front door stood wide open; he might that moment have gone back inside for another cigar or another cup of chocolate. I trotted along the flagged path, looking towards the front door, expecting to see him at any moment, strolling out into the sunshine unfolding the paper and heading for one of the stone seats. I was up the steps and into the hall so quickly I was blinded by the darkness after the brightness of the sun outside.

      ‘Where’s Papa?’ I asked one of the maids, a tray in her hands coming from the breakfast parlour.

      ‘Gone, Miss Beatrice,’ she said, dipping a curtsy. ‘Gone out riding.’

      I stared at her disbelievingly. This could not be happening. All there had been was one little rolling pebble of an idea and it was growing and growing into what threatened to become an avalanche.

      ‘Gone riding?’ I said incredulously.

      She looked at me a little oddly. Since Papa rode every morning of his life my tone of horror must have sounded strange.

      ‘Yes, Miss Beatrice,’ she said. ‘He left about a quarter of an hour ago.’

      I turned on my heel then and went to the front door. I could have called for a horse from the stables and ridden desperately down the drive, or spent the day chasing round the estate looking for Ralph or for my papa, or for both of them. But I felt like a sailor must when he has been throwing ballast over the side, and pumping out water, and yet still the ship is sinking. The luck was all against me today. It might be the luck was all against my papa also. He had ridden out this sunny morning on to his land where a murderer might be waiting for him. And there was nothing I could do. Nothing. Nothing. Except protect myself. I slipped up the stairs to my room like a shadow. I wanted to wash and change before I met Mama or Harry. What was happening out there in the woods was beyond my control, beyond my responsibility. I had helped in the germination of a deadly seed. But it might not grow. It might not grow.

      That afternoon they brought my father home. Four men shuffled slowly and stiffly at the four corners of one of the withy fences we use for penning sheep. It was bowed in the middle under his weight, and the weave was splitting. He lay on his back. His face was crumpled like a ball of parchment. The real person, my beloved, vigorous, spirited papa was gone. All they brought home to Wideacre was a heavy bundle.

      They carried him through the front door and across the hall, their dirty boots marking the polished floorboards and the rich carpet. The door to the kitchens banged and half-a-dozen white faces peered. I stood motionless, holding the door as they carried him past me. There was a great crater of a wound on the side of his skull. The father I had adored was gone.

      I stood like a tree frozen in mid-winter as they shuffled past me so slowly. They crept past as if it were a dream and they were wading thigh-deep in thick water. They dragged their feet as if we were locked in a nightmare and they wanted me to see the dreadful wound in my papa’s head. The great, deep gash half into his skull, and inside the great hole some grainy mess of bones and blood.

      And his face! His face was not like my lovely papa at all! His face was a mask of horror. His brave, bright, laughing face had gone. He had died with his teeth, yellowish, bared on a scream, and his blue eyes popping at the sight of his murderer. The colour had gone from him and he was as yellow as the sandstone of the Hall. He was a statue of horror in Wideacre stone, and the withy fence bowed under him as if the very wood could not bear the burden of this death.

      The slow, clumsy march of the men passed me at last and my father’s unseeing, staring blue eyes passed by me and were gone, no longer meeting my blank gaze of terror. Every step of the great staircase creaked as they humped their burden up to the master bedroom, and somewhere in the house I could hear the nagging noise of someone crying. I wished I might cry. I stood unmoving in the brightness, still holding the door, staring unseeingly at the shaft of sunlight shining on the polished floor where the mud from their boots was drying. Outside, waiting, were half-a-dozen of our tenants, the men bare-headed, the women with their aprons to their eyes.

      They said his horse must have thrown him. He was found dead beside the little wall separating the park from the farmland on the northern boundary. The horse, unhurt, was grazing near by and the saddle was pulled round as if the girth had been too loose. He had set the horse at the wall and then tumbled off on the Wideacre side. The unwanted, inescapable picture of Ralph hiding in the lee of the wall and then reaching up to grab the horse’s reins and to club my father with one of the stones from the wall came to my mind unbidden. The only comfort I could find was the idea that my father had died on the park side of the wall, under the trees he loved, on the land he loved. But there was no other comfort for me.

      Ralph had done this. Ralph had committed this assault. This filthy attack. This dark wicked sin. While my mama wept and wept easy tears that cost her little, and Harry wandered round the house in a haze of shock, I found my mind clearing and sharpening to a point of utter hatred. Ralph had done this thing. He alone was responsible.

      Aye, I had been there, on the tree trunk spanning the river. My lips had met his. I had said, ‘Accident’, and ‘It would work’, but I had not known it would be like this. I had agreed. But I had not known what I was setting in train. Ralph had known. Ralph had knifed deer, skinned hares, hand-chopped rabbits. Ralph knew all about death and he invited my consent to his dark plots while I was a mere child. I had not known. I had not understood. And when I did, it was too late. It was not my fault.

      I did not wish my father dead! I wanted him to turn to me again with his blue eyes bright with love. I wanted him to insist once more on my company when he was rounding up sheep. I wanted him to call for me as easily and naturally as whistling his dogs. I wanted him to forget Harry and Harry’s claims to the land. I wanted Harry to slip from his mind again, as Harry had gone once before. I wanted to be first in his heart again and first on Wideacre, and safe in his love and safe in the land.

      Now Ralph had killed him and my papa would never love me again.

      But