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

linking Mama and me for the last time. Then I trod lightly down that eerie track and looked at her. She stirred as if she felt my green-eyed gaze on her, but she did not wake. I watched her pale face and heard her rattling, gasping breath, and smiled a gentle smile of certainty. I checked the clock, in another hour she would be ready for her next dose. I would wake Harry.

      I slid like a ghost from the room to tap at his door, but it was Celia, not Harry, who opened it.

      ‘Harry is asleep,’ she said in a whisper. ‘He told me that your mama is ill. Can I come and sit with her?’

      I smiled like a woman possessed. It was all coming easily to my hand just as the moonlight had shown me the way to Mama’s bed.

      ‘Thank you, Celia. Thank you, my dear,’ I said gratefully. ‘I am so weary.’ I had the phial of laudanum in my hand with the little medicine glass. ‘Give her all of this in half an hour’s time,’ I said. ‘John told me exactly what to do before he went back to the library. He said to be sure she takes all of it.’

      Celia took the laudanum bottle and nodded her comprehension.

      ‘I will make sure she does,’ she said. ‘Is John still weary?’

      ‘He is rested now,’ I said. ‘He was wonderful with Mama, Harry will tell you. And so clear with his instructions!’

      Celia nodded. ‘You go and sleep now,’ she said. ‘I will call you if there is any change, but you need your rest, Beatrice. Go and sleep now, and I will give her the laudanum just as John directed.’

      I nodded my acquiescence and left Celia at Mama’s door. I went soft-footed down the stairs. I paused outside the library door to hear a stertorous breath. I pushed the door open cautiously, and went in.

      Daylight was making the windows shady grey and I could just make out the wreck of the man who had once been proud to love me. He was still in his chair, but he had vomited, staining his plum travelling jacket and his riding breeches. At some time he had smashed his glass on the stone fireplace and instead drunk from the bottle, for it was almost drained dry. It had at last put him soundly to sleep. His medical bag was tumbled on the floor beside him, the pills and the little bottles spilling out of its open mouth.

      Keeping my eyes fixed on his sprawled, sodden, stained body I held my skirts outwards and stepped backwards, slowly, slowly and silently, until I could close the door and turn the key to lock him in. I wanted no loyal housemaid or young footman cleaning up Miss Beatrice’s young husband before she saw him, to spare her pain.

      Then, my silken evening gown whispering around me, I glided through the connecting door to the west wing, to my room.

      My maid was long since abed, for I encourage no one to wait up for me past midnight. So I shifted for myself and slid out of my gown and sweaty petticoats. Half a lifetime ago, these had been pulled to my waist to enable me to couple with Harry. Now they seemed soiled in the ancient past, and I left them: gown, stays, petticoat, stockings and all, in a heap on the dressing-room floor.

      From my cupboard I chose a light morning wrapper, as pink and promising as the rising sun, which I could see warming the rose garden. It was going to be a hot day. It was going to be a long hard day, and I would need my wits about me. The water in the ewer was cold, of course, but I splashed it on my face and all over my shivering body. Of all the people in this sleeping house I would need to be the most awake, the most alive. This day would be a trial in which my claim to Wideacre could turn on the flip of a coin. I would neglect nothing that would make me more alert, or stronger.

      I slid on the cold silk wrapper, wrapped a shawl around my shoulders, and settled in my chair to wait. It must have been about an hour since I had left Celia, but I was too wary to creep back to the main part of the house to listen. I was wise enough, and controlled enough, to sit with my feet resting on a little stool, and wait for events to turn the way I had ordered. Then I heard a door bang, and the library door rattle, and Celia’s voice sharp with fear calling for my husband.

      ‘John! John! Wake up!’

      I heard her bang the door to the west wing and I tore open my bedroom door to greet her on the stairs as if I had leaped from my bed on hearing her call.

      ‘What is it?’ I demanded.

      ‘It is Mama,’ she said desperately. ‘I gave her the laudanum as you said, and she seemed to fall asleep. But now she seems too cold, and I cannot find her pulse.’

      I held out my hands to her, and she gripped them hard, her face absurdly young and anxious, then we turned and fled down the stairs together.

      ‘John?’ I asked her.

      ‘I cannot wake him, and he seems to have locked himself in,’ she said, despairingly.

      ‘I have a spare key,’ I said, and opened the door and flung it wide so Celia could see the chaos.

      The morning light picked out the stains on John’s clothes and the splashes of vomit on the stone fireplace and on the priceless rugs. In his doze he had knocked over the final bottle and his head lay in a pool of sour-smelling whisky. The chair was kicked over, and there was manure from his boots on the window-seat cushions. My husband, the light of the healing profession, lay like a dog in his vomit, unstirring even when we erupted into the room calling his name.

      I strode over to the bell and rang a loud peal, and then picked up a jug of water and threw it into his face. He rolled his head in the wet and groaned. From the servants’ quarters I heard a clatter of pans and hurrying footsteps, and from above I heard Harry pattering barefoot down the corridor and down the stairs. He and the scullery maid arrived together.

      ‘Mama is worse, and John is drunk,’ I said to Harry, conscious that every word would be relayed to Acre village and far beyond by the girl.

      ‘Go to Mama,’ Harry said authoritatively. ‘I’ll wake John.’ He bent over my husband, and hauled him into a chair. ‘A bucket of cold water,’ he said to the girl, ‘fresh from the kitchen pump, and a couple of pints of mustard and warm water too.’

      ‘Then wake the stable lads and Stride,’ I said to her as I went towards the stairs. ‘Tell one of the lads to ride to Chichester. We need a competent doctor.’

      I ignored Celia’s gasp and went up to Mama.

      She was dead, as I knew she would be.

      She had not suffered, and I was glad of that, for Papa’s death had been hard and brutish, and Ralph had a long vigil of agony. But this last and, I hoped, final death for Wideacre had been easy drugged sleep. She was lying on her rich, lacy pillows in her fancy new white and gold bed. The drug had seen her on her way smiling at pleasant visions. Under the massive overdose given her by the loving hands of her sweet daughter-in-law she had slid away from the nightmare truth of our lives into a palace of hallucination where nothing could ever disturb her again.

      I kneeled at the bedside and put my forehead to her hand, and shed a few easy tears on the embroidered sheet.

      ‘She is gone,’ said Celia, and she knew there was no doubt.

      ‘Oh, yes,’ I said softly. ‘But so peacefully, Celia, I have to be happy she went in such peace.’

      ‘Although I ran for you and for John, I knew it was too late,’ said Celia quietly. ‘She was just like this then. I think she must have died as soon as I gave her the medicine.’

      ‘John said her heart might not survive it,’ I said. I rose to my feet and mechanically straightened the smooth covers, and then went to open the window and draw the curtains. ‘But I wish to God he had sat with her.’

      ‘Don’t blame him, Beatrice,’ said Celia, instantly tender. ‘He had a long hard journey. He could not have anticipated that your mama would become ill so suddenly. He had been all this time away, and we have been with her every day and noticed nothing. Don’t blame him.’

      ‘No.’ I turned from the window back into the shaded room. ‘No. No one is to blame. We all knew Mama’s heart was