Wideacre - Philippa Gregory The Wideacre Trilogy

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would choose to lead, but Gaffer Cooper had never had different and never settled to regular work and called no one master. In his dirty little shanty, sleeping on a bed of bracken, rolled up in rags, Gaffer Cooper called himself a free man; Papa, who had a sensitive eye for other men’s pride, always called him Gaffer Cooper and never John. And so did I.

      Sorrel was tired of standing still, and chilled, so I gave him a brief canter down the snowy lane and back before turning right down the track that leads towards the cottages. The wood was silent, magical in the snow. The deep green pine trees and firs each held a thick line of snow along their branches and pointy fingers. Even the tiniest pine needles were capped with a sliver of ice. The silver birches looked grey instead of white against the icy brightness, and the beech trees’ grey trunks were pewter-coloured. As I rode I could hear the Fenny clattering louder around the ice-floes and I went closer to see the green water sliding secretly under little silver skins of ice to make silent pools under the white ceiling.

      The snow in the woods was pockmarked with animal tracks. I saw the two round two long prints of a rabbit and the little dots of a weasel or stoat following close behind it. There were fox tracks, like a little dog’s, and even the scuffed trail of a badger whose low belly brushed the thicker drifts.

      Looking up through the tracery of snow-laden branches, I could see from the sky that we would have more snow later in the day and I put Sorrel into a canter to get home before dinner. Someone had been down the track before me. A stout pair of boots and a pair of wooden clogs, so Gaffer must be ill indeed if he was being visited.

      As we rounded the bend to his cottage I guessed I was too late. The door of his cottage stood wide open, something that happened generally only on the most scorching of summer days, and coming out was Mrs Merry, midwife and layer-out in Acre parish – and owner, as befitted her rank, of a good pair of boots.

      ‘Good day, Miss Beatrice. Gaffer’s gone.’ She greeted me matter-of-factly.

      I drew rein beside the fence of hazel sticks.

      ‘Old age?’ I asked.

      ‘Aye,’ she said. ‘And the winter takes them.’

      ‘He had enough to eat, and enough clothes?’ I asked. Gaffer was not one of our people. He was neither tenant, labourer nor pensioner, but he had scraped his living on our land and I should feel to blame if he had died in want.

      ‘He ate one of his hens only last night,’ said Mrs Merry. ‘And he had survived many winters in those clothes and in that bed. You need have no fears, Miss Beatrice. Gaffer’s time was come and he went peacefully. Would you care to see him?’

      I shook my head. There was no family in Acre who would be offended by my refusal. I could please myself.

      ‘Did he leave any savings?’ I asked. ‘Enough for a funeral?’

      ‘Nay,’ she said. ‘It’ll be a pauper’s grave for him. We have found nothing.’

      I nodded. ‘I’ll stand the coffin and the service,’ I said briefly. ‘Set it in hand, Mrs Merry. I won’t have Wideacre folk buried in shame.’

      Mrs Merry measured me with her eyes and smiled.

      ‘Eh, but you’re so like your papa!’ she said, and I smiled in return at the compliment: the best that could be paid me.

      ‘I hope so,’ I said and nodded my farewell.

      In a day or two the plain whitewood coffin would take Gaffer’s remains to the churchyard and he would be buried in the far corner where the water pump is and the tools are kept. I would pay for a plain wooden cross with his name on it. The service would be read by the curate to whoever was there, idling from work, for Gaffer had few friends. A couple of the other cottagers might attend to pay their respects to one of their own from the village within a village, but Acre itself would be little touched. I would pay the extra penny necessary to toll the funeral bell for him, and at the sound the men ploughing in the fields, or trimming the hedges and digging ditches, would stop their work and pull off their caps to be bare-headed for the passing of the old man who never earned such a mark of respect in his life.

      Then the bell would cease and the caps would go back on to the quickly chilled heads. The men digging would spit on their cold hands, grasp the spades again and curse the life that forced them to stand knee-deep in icy water in mid-January with no break until dinner, and no chance of being warm and dry until dusk.

      The freezing weather was hard enough on the labourers but this winter it was a nightmare for the shepherds. It was especially hard because the snow fell so thick and so early that the sheep had not been gathered off the downs in time for them to lamb on the lower, more accessible hills. Day after grey snowy day we toiled up that blocked track to the top of the downs to poke about with long sticks in the snow to try to find the firm white lump that meant a buried sheep, and then set to the miserable job of digging the thing out.

      We lost remarkably few because I made sure the men were out from dawn to dusk and they cursed me with language that should have dropped me faint with horror from the saddle, but that instead made me laugh.

      They learned a great, if grudging, respect for me that winter. Unlike the labourers and tenants who saw me almost daily, the shepherds worked alone. Only at a time of crisis like this one when most of the flock was buried under six-foot drifts did they work in a gang commanded by me. They noted the advantage the horse gave me and cursed me roundly when I trotted past them up the track, or when they slipped and fell into great deceiving hills of snow while I rode dry-shod. But they knew also that not even the oldest, wisest one of them could match me for sensing where a sheep was buried or guessing where a little flock would have huddled. Then, when they were digging, more often than not I would be side by side with them in the snow, probing for the buried animal, and feeling for its head.

      And when it came to rounding up the chilled and silly things to move them downhill, the shepherds knew that although I was tired and cold I would ride behind the stragglers and bawl at the dogs until we had them all safe in a lower meadow.

      Only then, when the gate was pulled shut and hay thrown on the snow, would our ways diverge. The men would go home to their little cottages to dig out potatoes, or swedes, or turnips for their dinner, or reluctantly go to work their tract on the common fields. Or they would go out to set a snare for a rabbit or mend a leaking roof. Working, even in the dark, working, working, working, until they fell into their beds and slept, sometimes still in their wet clothes.

      But I would trot home and toss the reins to a stable lad, climb the stairs to my room and sink into a tub before the fire while Lucy poured ewer after ewer of hot water over me and said, ‘Miss Beatrice! You will scald! You are all pink!’

      Only when my skin was stinging with the heat would I heave myself out and wrap up in a linen towel while Lucy brushed my hair and piled it up and powdered it ready for the evening.

      I found I could chat to Mama at dinner, and she showed some interest in my day, although the weight of her disapproval curbed my tongue. She disliked what I was doing, but even she could see that when a fortune of wool and meat lay buried in the snow one could not leave it to paid labourers to dig out, when and how they fancied.

      But once the covers were removed I became quiet, and by the time the tea tray came into the parlour I was weak with sleepiness.

      ‘Really, Beatrice, you are good for nothing these days,’ Mama said, looking pointedly at a spoiled piece of embroidery which had been in and out of the work basket every night for a sennight. ‘It is hardly like having a daughter at all,’ she said.

      ‘I am sorry, Mama,’ I said in sudden sympathy. ‘I know it seems odd. But we have had such bad luck with the sheep. Another couple of days and they will all be in, and then Harry will be home in time for lambing.’

      ‘In my girlhood I did not even know the word lambing,’ said Mama, her tone plaintive.

      I smiled. I was simply too tired to try to restore her to good humour.

      ‘Well, as Papa used to say, I am a Lacey of Wideacre,’ I said lightly.

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