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

little while, do you, Celia?’

      She kept her head down to her work, a poor liar and she knew it.

      ‘Of course not,’ she said, her voice steady.

      ‘Very well then,’ said Harry. ‘It is decided. I shall see the landlord.’ He paused at the door. ‘I hope this is agreeable to you, Celia?’ he asked politely.

      ‘Of course,’ she said generously. ‘Whatever you and Beatrice wish.’

      Harry went out and Celia held her tongue until the door had firmly shut behind him. Then she regarded me with awe.

      ‘Beatrice, you did almost nothing, and yet everything came out as you wanted it,’ she said.

      I smiled and tried to keep the smugness from my voice.

      ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It always does.’

      Harry sailed, but our last night together was one of lingering sweetness. He was ready to be sentimental at our parting. We had not spent one night apart since we landed in France, and we had slept every night under the same roof since we had become lovers. Now he was off to take responsibility for the running of a great estate, a full-grown man and a husband. I felt a glow of pride in him as I lay beside him, and smiled on him.

      ‘My God, Beatrice. You grow lovelier every day,’ he said, with pride of ownership in his voice. He leaned over me and buried his face in the warm valley between my newly plump breasts. ‘I adore you, this bit fatter,’ he said, his voice muffled as he kissed up one smooth slope and took a nipple in his mouth. I rumpled his hair and pushed his head down. Further down over the rounding curve of my newly hard belly so his tongue could trail a hot wet path lower, and lower and lower.

      This was just playing at love – teasing each other’s satisfied bodies after a long night of lovemaking. I sighed with pleasure, not only at the delightful little darts of sensation trailing hotly under my skin, but also at the knowledge that we had all this early morning alone, secure from interruption.

      ‘When I come home,’ I said idly, ‘let’s make sure that we spend afternoons and nights together like this. I shan’t want to hide out on the downs or creep round the house like we did before.’

      ‘No,’ said Harry absently, rearing up to lay his head beside me on the pillow again. ‘I have ordered them to open up the adjoining door from my dressing room into the west wing so I can be in your side of the house without anyone knowing it – and without having to cross the hall. I will be able to come while the others are asleep.’

      ‘And at tea time,’ I said smiling.

      ‘And breakfast,’ he said.

      He rolled over and checked his watch lying on the bedside table.

      ‘I must get dressed,’ he said. ‘Celia will soon be back from buying provisions for the voyage and I have to make sure she packs all my papers.’

      I nodded but did not move.

      ‘Write to me as soon as you get home,’ I said. ‘I shall want to hear about Wideacre. Remember to tell me which cows are in calf and how the winter wheat is looking, and if the hay will last.’

      ‘And about Mama,’ said Harry.

      ‘Oh, yes, and about Mama,’ I concurred.

      ‘And you take care of yourself,’ said Harry tenderly, reaching for a clean shirt. ‘I wish you would come home with me now, Beatrice. I do hate the thought of leaving you all alone here.’

      ‘Nonsense,’ I said gently, and slid out of bed. ‘Celia and I will be perfectly all right. We will enjoy a leisurely journey home and we can travel with Lady Davey and her daughters as soon as they arrive in town. Then you can come and meet us at Portsmouth, or even if you wish come over to France.’

      ‘I may well do so,’ said Harry, brightening. ‘But only if I get my sea legs this time. I do dread the voyage, I must admit. You are well out of it, you little coward.’

      ‘Chicken-hearted,’ I agreed, smiling. I turned my back to him and swept up my long hair so he could fasten the little buttons I could not manage at the nape of my neck. His fingers fiddled with the little fastenings, and when he had done he bent his head to kiss me on the hairline, and tenderly grazed the strong muscles of my neck with his teeth. I leaned against him, enjoying the shivers that ran down my spine at the touch of his mouth. On the tip of my tongue was the confession that we were expecting a child. I thought for a moment that if only we were as we seemed to be – a mutually adoring married couple – how blissfully happy Harry would be at the news.

      But my caution and my keen cool brain held me back from a confession grown out of the sweetness of love in the early morning. Harry’s loyalties were already divided. I could not risk him protecting Celia from the injury that was coming to her. She might be too naive and silly to realize that in accepting my son as her own she would displace her own children for ever – but Harry was not. He would never consent to have my bastard son (even though fathered by himself) as his heir, when his wife could have other legitimate boys of her own.

      My mood of relaxed love and trusting confidence passed. I would never trust anyone with all my secrets, not even my darling Harry. We had grown close and relaxed on this long easy journey, but there was a cutting edge in me, a sharpness of wit that Harry lacked. Harry was my lover, my desire, but he did not make me shudder as Ralph could, with one sideways glance. And I could not imagine Harry wading through sin and crime to come with bloody hands to me. With Harry I was the master; with Ralph we were sensual, passionate equals; equally sharp, equally wise. Good hard lust I had for Ralph; Harry gave me worship and kisses and cuddles like some lovesick youth.

      I had two hanging crimes locked in my heart, and passing off a bastard was no light offence either. No one would ever again see fully into my heart as Ralph had done in the early days. No one ever again would hear a straight answer from me. Ralph was not the only one crippled in that dreadful trap – my honour, my honesty, was broken there, too. And I was right to be cautious with Harry. His next words proved it.

      ‘Take care of Celia, Beatrice,’ he said, tying a fresh cravat and eyeing it critically in the mirror. ‘She has been such a little darling on this trip. I would not want her to miss me too much. Look after her and remind me to give you some spending money before I go, to buy whatever little things she wants.’

      I nodded, and said not a word as he frittered away money from Wideacre, needed at Wideacre, on French trifles for a woman who already had enough.

      ‘I shall miss you,’ he said, turning from the mirror to hold me again. I slid into his arms and pressed my face against his clean starched shirt, sniffling with pleasure the clean smell of the linen and the warm smell of Harry underneath.

      ‘Do you know,’ he said in sudden surprise, ‘I shall miss you both! Come home as quickly as you can, won’t you, Beatrice?’

      ‘Of course,’ I said.

      

9

      Of course I lied.

      The circumstances made it easy for me to lie. But first I waited, waited a month in the old Bordeaux hotel until I heard from Harry in England. I smiled when I opened the letter because it was as I had expected. Our loving mama had her boy home again and she was not going to let him go. Harry – in a boyish anxious scrawl – wrote me that there were problems with the land, much poaching of the coverts, a field we had wanted to lie fallow had been mistakenly ploughed, and one of the tenants had had a fire in his barn and needed a loan.

      ‘Mama seems quite overwhelmed by the work necessary to run the estate,’ Harry wrote. ‘I arrived to discover that she is suffering from very serious spells of breathlessness, which leave her