Wideacre - Philippa Gregory The Wideacre Trilogy

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morning and had breakfast with my beloved papa, and ridden out in the afternoon to hide in the woods with my dark and clever lover, I should have wakened happy. And I should have been free of this pain of emptiness and longing and grieving and lost love.

      I smoothed the skin of my forehead in the unconscious gesture of an older, tired woman; then I turned and went downstairs. Even my light steps on the wooden stairtreads sounded lonely, and there was no laughter floating up the stairs from the breakfast room.

      There was no news. We sat in silence while Harry ate a hearty breakfast at the top of the table and Mama crunched toast at the foot. I drank tea and said nothing. We were a picture of domestic peace. When Harry had finished eating and my mother had left the room, Harry looked at me tentatively and said, ‘I have some odd news for you, Beatrice, that I hope will not upset you.’

      I had half risen and I sank back on my chair. My face was calm but my head was dizzy with fright.

      ‘Ralph, the gamekeeper’s lad, seems to have gone missing,’ my brother said uncertainly.

      ‘Missing!’ I exclaimed. My head jerked up to stare disbelievingly at Harry. ‘He can’t be missing!’ The picture of Ralph anchored so securely by his broken legs in the mantrap was so bright that I feared Harry would see two little reflections of it in my staring eyes. ‘How could he get away?’ I said, betraying myself.

      ‘What do you mean, Beatrice?’ Harry asked gently, shocked at my outburst. ‘Here,’ he said and handed me my cup of tea. I found my hands were shaking so badly I could not hold it and when I put it down on the saucer there was a click and the delicate porcelain had cracked. I must control myself; I must not break down. Aware of Harry’s eyes upon me I took a deep breath and tried to force myself to appear calm. This could be Harry’s way of breaking the news to me gently, but to hear that Ralph was missing rather than dead was like a flowering of the nightmare of the past four nights when I dreamed Ralph was crawling behind me, as fast as I could run, with the mantrap clanking at his bloody knees. I gave a gasp of fear and Harry turned with an exclamation and fetched the brandy from the dining room.

      ‘Drink this,’ he said. ‘Go on, Beatrice.’ I swallowed and felt the warmth spreading through me. I cleared my throat. ‘I am sorry, Harry. My wretched nerves. Were you saying something about Ralph?’

      ‘Another time, Beatrice, it doesn’t matter.’ Harry was patting my hand again. ‘I had no idea you were so distressed still, my poor sister.’

      I stilled his hand and tried to keep my voice steady. ‘I’m not really distressed, Harry dear,’ I said gently. ‘My nerves are bad, as you know. And I have had a premonition that Ralph is dead. I don’t know why. But please tell me if that is so?’

      ‘No, my dear, no,’ said Harry soothingly. ‘It’s not as bad as all that. He just seems to have gone missing. A loss for the estate, and for me especially because he was as good as a manager for me. But we will survive without him.’

      ‘Harry, I must know,’ I said. ‘How did he leave? Why did he leave?’

      ‘Well, that’s the mystery,’ said Harry, seating himself beside me and still holding my hand. ‘My man tells me that someone from the village called at Meg’s cottage and found their few things strewn around, their clothes gone and Ralph’s two dogs missing. No message, no word. They just seem to have vanished.’

      The nightmare was slowly becoming real. Somewhere, beyond the walls of the Hall, Ralph was alive and free. He would know, as no one else would, that I had planned his death, that I had left him in his agony to die. He would know that I had let him kill my father and then tried to destroy him. And now, outside the walls of the house, Ralph would be waiting for me. Waiting and waiting and never, for a second in all my life, would I be free from fear again.

      ‘What sort of state did they leave the cottage in?’ I asked. I could scarcely believe the coolness of my voice. It was as if I were thinking of re-letting the miserable heap.

      ‘Well, we’ll never get a local tenant for it again,’ said Harry. ‘There’s all sorts of nonsense about blood sacrifice and Meg’s witchcraft. Gossip I won’t repeat to you, my dear.’

      My mind shrank in fright, but I had to know. ‘Oh, I’m all right now, Harry,’ I said reassuringly. ‘Please tell me what people are saying. I would rather hear it from you than from my maid or someone in the village.’

      Harry needed little encouragement: the schoolboy in him was bursting with the news.

      ‘Well, it is odd,’ he said with ill-concealed relish. ‘Mrs Tyacke called to see what furniture Ralph wanted in her cottage. Ralph had told her he would be taking the place over. First she noticed the door open, and then she saw bloodstains on the step.’ Every fraction of my body froze rock still. ‘There were marks on the floor as if someone had dragged a kill into the kitchen. But what is equally odd is that there were bowls and buckets of bloodstained water all around, and Meg’s only sheet was all torn and bloody.’

      I could see the scene too well in my mind. Meg, warned by her second sight, coming home early, hunting for her son, perhaps guided by his cries of pain. Finding some lever and using all her strength to prise the jaws of the dreadful trap apart. Ralph tumbling to the ground and Meg picking him up and dragging him with all the strength of a passionate mother into the cottage, blood draining across the floor. Then her desperate attempts to staunch the flow, ripping up the one sheet and pressing cold cloths into the wound, and then … and then … and then …? Was Ralph dead? Had Meg hidden the body? She would not know it was not an accident. Perhaps even now she was mourning him in some quiet part of the wood and I was safe. I clung to that hope and turned an untroubled face to my brother.

      ‘Is that all?’ I asked.

      ‘Well, I should think it was enough!’ he said with the gossip’s relish for bad news. ‘But there is more actually. Although they left their furniture, they took an old handcart. Old Betty swears she saw someone who looked like Meg pushing the handcart with a body in it and two black dogs following up the London road three mornings ago. She never said anything before because she thought she was mistaken. But with the handcart missing and all, the village has put two and two together.’

      I nodded and kept my eyes and face down so my brother should not see my despair and my fear. It had all gone wrong. It sounded very, very likely that Meg had managed to save Ralph’s life, though he was too weak to walk. Ralph must have been able to tell her who set the trap, and who had baited it. If he had not told her, she would have instantly brought him to the Hall. But she did not! She had taken him away, far away from the Hall and out of my reach; away to her people, to her unknown gypsy family. Away to heal him so that he could get fit and strong and able to come back and confront me. Away from our lands and our influence, so he could move and plot and scheme and forever threaten my life and my future. Every waking moment from now on I would half expect to see him as I already did in every night’s dreams. Limping, or horribly mutilated, coming after me for revenge. The picture in my mind was so bright, so vivid, so inescapable, that it seemed to me Ralph was at that second heaving his legless body up the steps to the door of the Hall. I could control myself no longer.

      ‘I am ill, Harry. Call my maid,’ I said, and I dropped my head on the breakfast table in a swoon of terror.

      My mourning now looked real enough and I smiled no more at my mirror. I could not eat my food for fear that Ralph had been in the kitchen with one of Meg’s brews to poison me. I dared not even walk as far as the rose garden in case he was waiting for me in the summerhouse, or at the gate to the wood. Even in the house I was on the precipice of a collapse every second of the day, but especially when the early winter darkness came and the curtains were drawn, and there were dark shadows on the stairs and in the hall where he could hide unseen, and wait for me to pass. I slept little at night and awoke with screams of terror. My mother called the local apothecary and then a London surgeon and they gave me draughts to make me sleep. But the deeper the sleep, the worse the dreams, and for three, nearly four, months of cold, hard, iron season I endured, like a captured wild animal, inescapable days and nights of terror.

      But slowly,

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