LITMIR.BIZ

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neither moved nor breathed.

      I could not see his legs.

      If they were whole, then the last months had been a nightmare and this was sweet reality. If they were gone, then the nightmare was with me and I was in its grip, but a million times worse than I had dreamed in my bed. The curtains of the bed cast deep slabs of shadow across the counterpane. I could not see his legs.

      I knew I must turn and face him.

      My face in the glass was the only bright thing in the dark room and it glowed like a ghost. I bit the inside of my cheeks for courage, and like a doomed man turned slowly, slowly, around.

      There was nothing there.

      The bed was empty.

      I croaked, ‘Ralph?’ out of my tightening throat and only the candle flame moved. I took three stiff steps and held the candle high to see every inch of the bed. There was no one there. The pillows and the embroidered silk counterpane were smooth and undented. I put a shaking hand out to touch the pillows and they were cool.

      No one had been there.

      I staggered to Mama’s dressing table, set the candlestick carefully down, and crumpled on to the stool, my head in my hands.

      ‘Oh, God,’ I said miserably. ‘Don’t let me go mad. Don’t send me mad now. Oh, don’t let it end in madness when I am so nearly at peace at last.’

      Long minutes passed in utter silence except for the steady ticking of the grandfather clock in the corridor. I took a deep breath and took my hands from my face. My face was as serene and lovely as ever and I gazed at it in the glass as if it belonged to someone else, a stranger’s beauty. Even I could not penetrate its calm looks or imagine what terrors were hidden behind that green cat-like gaze.

      Then a floorboard outside the door creaked and the door opened. I jumped with a scream in my throat, but only Mama stood there. For a second she did not move and I read her concern for me, and some hint of a darker thought in her expression.

      ‘It’s not like you to be preening in front of a mirror, Beatrice,’ she said gently. ‘Did I startle you? What were you thinking of, I wonder, that you should be so pale?’

      I smiled a strained smile and turned away from the glass. She said nothing but crossed the room and opened her top drawer and took out a handkerchief. The silence lengthened and I felt a familiar drumming of blood in my head as I became anxious, wondering what would come next.

      ‘You must have missed your pretty dresses when you saw Miss Havering this afternoon,’ my mother said, wrong as usual. ‘How lovely she looked, didn’t she? I thought Harry was most struck.’

      ‘Harry?’ I said mechanically.

      ‘There could scarcely be a better match,’ my mother said, spraying eau-de-cologne on the lace handkerchief. ‘Her dowry lands lie so convenient for our own – your papa always had his eye on them – and she is such a dear, charming girl. I understand she is accustomed to very difficult circumstances at home, and the poor thing is well used to adapting herself. Lady Havering assured me that, should there be a match of it, you and I would stay here as long as we wished. Celia would expect no alteration. I do not think that one could plan better.’

      I felt a growing chill inside me. Mama could not be talking about a match for Harry. Harry was my friend, my companion. We farmed Wideacre together. We belonged together, alone on Wideacre.

      ‘A match for Harry?’ I asked incredulously.

      ‘Of course,’ Mama said, not meeting my eyes. ‘Naturally. Did you think he would stay a bachelor all his life? Did you think Harry would forget his duty to his name and die childless?’

      I gaped at her. I had never thought of the matter at all. I never thought beyond this easy summer of my growing intimacy with Harry. Of the happiness I felt when he was so sweet to me. Of the warmth of his smile. Of the tenderness in his voice when he spoke to me.

      ‘I never thought of the future at all,’ I said, speaking truly of my youthful, feckless half-planning.

      ‘I have,’ said Mama, and I realized that she was watching me intently and that my face was unguarded before her. I had thought of her for so long as an unimportant pawn on the great chessboard of our fields that it came as a shock to recall that she had been watching me for all my life, watching me closely even now. She knew me as no other person could. She had given birth to me and watched me walk away from her, watched my growing passion for the land and my growing pleasure in running it. If she knew …! But I could take that thought no further. It was impossible to consider what she might think if she had dared to go beyond the barriers I had placed on my own mind.

      But she had been uneasy about me for years. Her little plaintive, nagging contradictions added up to a great suspicion that I was not a child of proper feelings. While my father had insisted that a Lacey of Wideacre could do no wrong, she had been forced to acquiesce and had assumed, as he had insisted, that her complaints about me stemmed merely from her town-bred conventionality. But now no rowdy, careless Papa was there to overbear her judgement and she could see me ever more clearly. She did not merely object that I did not behave in a conventional way – that would have been easily mended. She objected, she suspected, that I did not feel in my private heart as a young girl should do.

      ‘Mama …’ I said, and it was a half-conscious appeal to her to protect me, as a parent should, from my fear. Even though what I most feared were the thoughts behind her suddenly sharp eyes.

      She ceased her fiddly tidying of her chest of drawers and turned towards me, leaning back against the chest, her blue eyes scanning my face with anxiety.

      ‘What is it, Beatrice?’ she said. ‘I cannot guess what is in your mind. You are my own child, and yet sometimes I cannot even approach a guess at what you are thinking.’

      I stammered. I had no words to hand. My heart was still hammering from my foolish vision of Ralph. It was too much to have to deal with Mama, to have to face her only minutes later.

      ‘There is something wrong,’ she said with certainty. ‘I have been treated as a fool in this house, but I am not a fool. I know when there is something wrong, and there is something wrong now.’

      I put my hands out, half to stretch towards her, half to ward off the words and the thoughts I feared she had in her mind. She did not take my hands. She made no move towards me. She was not grateful for a caress; she stayed cold and questioning, and her eyes drained me of courage.

      ‘You loved your papa not as an ordinary child loves its father,’ she said definitely. ‘I have watched you all your life. You loved him because he was the Squire and because he owned Wideacre. I know that. No one cared what I knew, nor what I thought. But I knew that your sort of love is, somehow … dangerous.’

      My breath hissed in a gasp as she searched and then found that dreadful, illuminating word.

      My hands were loosely clasped to hide their trembling. My face upturned to my mama felt as white as a sheet. If I had been a murderer on trial in the dock I could not have seemed more aghast, more guilty.

      ‘Mama …’ I half whispered. It was a plea to her to stop this remorseless progress of ideas which could lead her all the way into the deep secret maze of the truth.

      She moved from the chest of drawers and came towards me. I nearly shrank away, but something, some pride, some strength, kept me rock-still. I looked into her face with my brave, lying eyes, and matched her gaze.

      ‘Beatrice, I am preparing for Harry’s marriage to Celia,’ she said, and I saw her eyes glisten with a hint of tears. ‘No woman welcomes the arrival of another into her home. No woman looks forward to seeing her son turn away from her to his bride. But I am doing this for Harry.’ She paused. ‘I am doing this for you,’ she said deliberately. ‘You must, you shall be freed from your fascination with this land and with its master,’ she said urgently. ‘With another girl a little older than you in the house, you will go out more. You can visit the Haverings, perhaps go to London

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