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

the sheets as they plucked at the counterpane in a ceaseless, worried gesture.

      ‘She has had a shock,’ John said to me, as if I were a medical student in the Royal Infirmary interested in diagnosis. ‘It nearly proved too much for her, and I do not know what it was. But she is deeply disturbed. If she can be kept from thinking of it, whatever it is, for one, maybe two or three days, it is possible that she will come to face whatever she fears without her heart stopping. It will be a close thing, but I think it can be done.’

      He took a phial from his worn bag and a delicate medicine glass with a little spout to help a patient drink. He unstoppered the phial and counted the drops into the glass. His trained, disciplined skill kept his hand steady, though I could see the sweat on his face at the effort.

      ‘One, two, three, four,’ he said meticulously, with the alcohol slurring his words. ‘She’s to have four drops, every four hours. D’you understand me, Beatrice?’

      ‘Yes,’ I said.

      He scooped Mama’s limp body into one arm and expertly fed her the glass, and then laid her back on the pillows, straightening the covers across her and smoothing the pillows beneath her twisting head.

      ‘Harry! Harry! Harry!’ she called, but her voice was a little quieter.

      ‘You will have to sit up with her; you, or Harry,’ he said carefully. ‘In four hours, not before, she may have four more drops. In four hours, not before, four more; until she sleeps naturally without seeming disturbed. Do you understand?’

      ‘Yes,’ I said again, my voice empty of feeling.

      ‘Any more, and her heart will simply stop,’ he said, warning me. ‘She cannot take any more. She needs rest. But too much laudanum and she will slip away. Do you understand?’

      ‘Yes,’ I said again in the same monotone.

      ‘Four drops, four-hourly,’ he said again. His repeated instructions, the insistent moaning from the bed, the knowledge of my sin and the trap closing in around me made the bedroom like a deep pit. The candles on the bedside table guttered and the shadows of the room wavered towards me. My husband could not meet my eyes. My brother, who had been taken with me in sin, was nowhere to be seen. And in the bed beside me, my own mother droned like a lunatic.

      John shut his bag with an effort, and stumbled towards the door.

      ‘No more than four drops, no sooner than four hours. Do you understand, Beatrice?’

      ‘Yes,’ I said again.

      He staggered from the room to the stairs. The clocks chimed midnight in an ominous chorus as he gripped the polished handrail to keep himself from falling. I held high the candelabra to light him down. His bag banged against each carved stairpost and nearly overset him. He staggered to the library door and nearly fell when it yielded under his hand. I set down the candles and glided downstairs like a ghost.

      ‘Watch Mama,’ I said to Harry, who stood, like an overstaying guest, at the parlour door. He nodded, in dumb misery, and I waited until he had climbed the stairs to Mama’s room and shut the door, and then, for the second time that day, I gathered every scrap of courage I had, and opened the library door to face my husband.

      He was back where he had been all day. But he had a fresh bottle of whisky gripped between his knees, a fresh glass of the amber liquid in his fist, his filthy boots up on the window-seat cushion, his head rolling on the armchair wings.

      ‘What could have caused Mama’s attack?’ I asked, approaching the chair lit only by icy moonlight pouring in from the eerie silver landscape.

      He looked at me, his face as puzzled as a small child who wakens in a darkened room and does not know where he is.

      ‘I do not know,’ he said. ‘She keeps saying, over and over, “Beatrice” and “Harry” as if you two could help her. But I do not know what she means. Nor why she should keep saying, “I only came to fetch my novel.” Do you understand that, Beatrice?’

      ‘No,’ I said, hoping that my lie, my certain lie, would carry the weight I needed. ‘I do not know, John. Something has obviously upset her, but I do not know what it can be. I do not know what she was reading.’

      He turned his face from me then, and I knew that he had forgotten his patient and remembered his wife.

      ‘Go now, Beatrice,’ he said piteously. ‘You know I long to forgive you and make all well between us, but I am exhausted. I have cared for your mama as well as I am able. Her condition is stable; there is nothing more I can do for her tonight. I promise you she will live. I promise you I will speak to you tomorrow. But right now I feel that I must be alone. I must mourn. I came home a man full of dreams and I cannot tolerate the sudden change. Everything in my life is upside down. Give me a little time. Just give me tonight and I will be myself again.’

      I nodded, and bent to kiss his forehead.

      ‘I am sorry,’ I said, and I told no lie. ‘There is much that I have done wrong – how much you may never know. But I am sorry for the grief I have caused you. I love you, you know that.’

      His hand touched mine, but he did not take my fingers in his firm grip. ‘I know it, Beatrice. Now grant me a little time alone. I am drunk and tired and I cannot talk.’

      I bent and kissed him again, and then I walked as silently as I could from the library. At the door I paused and looked back at him. He was in his own private world of drink and fatigue. As I watched he poured himself another glass of whisky and took a deep draught, holding the spirit in his mouth to savour it. The world seemed very unfair and bitter to me then. If only there could have been a different path to Wideacre.

      But I could not sit in a library and say I needed time to think. Upstairs my mother moaned on her bed and my brother listened in mounting fear. Outside the land called and called for a clear master to rule it. I could never rest. There was always work to do for me.

      Harry was sitting with Mama, his face as white as hers.

      ‘Beatrice!’ he said, as soon as I entered the room. He drew me away from the bed and spoke in a frantic undertone. ‘Beatrice, Mama knows! She saw us! She is talking in her sleep, and she knows! Whatever shall we do?’

      ‘Oh, stop it, Harry!’ I said abruptly, too exhausted to soothe his conscience while my husband needed to rest from the sight of me, and my mama’s heart stopped at my approach as if I were an angel of death.

      ‘Stop it, Harry! It is all bad enough without you playing queen o’ the may.’

      Harry gaped at me and at the hard tone of my voice, and I pushed him ungently from the room. ‘One of us has to sit with Mama and give her laudanum,’ I said tersely. ‘I’ll stay up with her till three or four, then you can do the rest of the night. Go now, and sleep.’

      He would have argued, but I gave him another two-fisted shove. ‘Oh, go, Harry!’ I said. ‘I am sick of this night, and I am sick of you. Go and sleep now, so that I can sleep later, and in the morning we will find some way out of this coil. But for pity’s sake go now.’

      Some tone of desperation in my voice cut through Harry’s old-maidish flappings, and he kissed my clenched fists without another word, and disappeared down the corridor to his bedroom. I turned on my heel and went wearily back into Mama’s bedroom like a prisoner walking to the scaffold.

      She was tossing on her pillows and moaning in horror. Now and again she would say ‘Harry!’ or ‘Beatrice!’ or ‘No! No!’ but the laudanum kept her from saying more. It was no pleasant vigil I spent there beside the shadowy bed. Downstairs my husband dozed and drank rather than look at me. Along the corridor Harry crept into the sheets longing for Celia’s sinless honest warmth. In her bed my mama’s heart struggled to keep beating despite its deadly knowledge. Only I was awake that night. Like a witch I sat in the moonlight and in the shadows and watched the silvery light make a magic path across the floor from my chair to Mama’s bed. I gathered power around me from the sleeping black land outside the windows, and I