‘Miss Beatrice, I need to speak to you. May I come to the Hall today?’
‘On a Sunday?’ I asked, my eyebrows raised in genteel disapproval.
‘I have called on many a working day and you have been too busy to see anyone from Acre,’ said Miller Green, breathlessly. ‘But I must have speech with you, Miss Beatrice.’
The other parishioners were coming from the church door, staring curiously at the miller, whose usually happy face was now strained. One hand on my carriage door, begging for one moment of my time.
‘Very well,’ I said with my new dislike of the Acre poor when they were all together in a group staring at me. ‘Very well. Come to the Hall at three this afternoon.’
‘Thank you,’ he said. He stepped back with a little bow and I saw that his plump cheeks were sagged and that his bright skin colour had gone. He looked sallow and ill.
I did not need a visit from him to tell me what was wrong. I had seen this meeting coming from afar off, as soon as Harry and I agreed to send Wideacre corn out of the county.
‘This will ruin me, Miss Beatrice,’ Miller Green said desperately. ‘If Acre people have no corn they will not bring it to me for the grinding. If your tenant farmers sell all their corn in the grain they will not use my mill to make flour. If you send the whole crop out of the county, where am I to buy my grain to grind for flour to supply the bakers who buy from me?’
I nodded. I was sitting at my desk, the window to the rose garden open behind me. The two children were playing in the paddock and John and Celia were strolling behind them, watching Richard’s nurse steering him along the footpath towards the wood. Celia’s cream parasol was an echo of the daisies, cream roses, and rare white poppies. I had seated Miller Green at the rent table and ordered him a glass of small beer, but it stood beside him, untouched. He twisted and turned on the chair like a dog with fleas. He was a proud man, a rising man. But now he was a man in a panic. He could see his plans and his newly won prosperity sliding away from him as water slides over his millwheel.
‘Miss Beatrice, if you do not want the millwheel, which your grandfather built, to lie idle, if you want the poor to eat, if you want our lives here to go on at all, you must, you must, reserve some of the crop for sale locally,’ he said desperately. ‘Miss Beatrice, there’s me and my wife and our three lads, all three working on the parish gang now for poor parish rates. Little money coming in from them, and much shame for them. If we lose the mill, it will be the workhouse for us, for we will be penniless and homeless in one night.’
I nodded again, my eyes towards the garden. John and Celia had reached the gate to the wood. With tender patience they turned back towards the house so that the children should have the smooth grass of the paddock under their tottery feet. I saw Celia nod, her little bonnet tip in emphasis, and saw John throw his head back to laugh at her. I could not hear them. The window was open but there was still a wall of glass all around me. The glass made it possible for me to watch my son learning to walk holding another woman’s hands, with utter indifference; to tell this good man, this old friend, that he would indeed have to go to the workhouse and die in poverty and sorrow; to tell him that my will was as strong and unstoppable as the grinding stones of the mill. And that he and all the grasping, desperate, poor of Acre should be crushed and powdered so that a little boy, just learning this day to walk, should ride tall over the land.
‘Miss Beatrice, do you remember the harvest three summers ago?’ Bill Green said suddenly. ‘Do you remember how you rested in our yard while we got the harvest supper ready? How you sat in the sun for an hour, listening to the wheel turning and the Missus’s doves cooing?
‘D’you remember how the wagons came singing up the lane and how you let the harvest into the barn with the Squire so young and handsome riding high on the sheaves?’
I smiled in nostalgia. Unwillingly, I nodded.
‘Yes,’ I said tenderly. ‘Of course I remember. What a summer that was for us! What a harvest it was that year!’
‘You loved the land then, and all of Acre would have laid down their lives for one smile from you,’ Bill Green said. ‘That year, and the year before, you were a goddess in Acre, Miss Beatrice. Since then it has been like you were under a spell and everything has gone wrong. Wrong. All wrong.’
I nodded. I had the papers under my hand that showed it was all going wrong. Ruin was on the way. As surely and as steadily as the coming of the Culler. I could smell the hint of smoke in the summer air. The creditors were presenting their bills before the quarter day. They knew; I knew. Wideacre was overstretched. They could smell ruin like horses can smell a storm in the air. As I can smell smoke.
‘Set it right!’ Bill Green’s Sussex drawl was a longing whisper. ‘Set your hand to it, and make it right, Miss Beatrice! Come back to us, come back to the land, and set it right!’
I gazed at him blankly, dreaming of a return to the land, of a return to the old ways. But my face was as hard as one of his stones, and as cold as his millpond.
‘It is too late,’ I said, and my voice was dry. ‘The corn is already sold. I have already been paid. The agreement is made, and I can do nothing. This is the way farming is done these days, Miller Green. You may indeed face ruin. But if I do not farm as the other landowners farm, then I would be ruined too. I do not choose how the world should be run. I have only to find my way in it.’
He shook his head like a stunned prize fighter.
‘Miss Beatrice!’ he said. ‘This isn’t like you. It’s not your voice that could say these things. You were always for the old ways. The good ways when men and Master worked alongside and men were paid fair and had a little land, and a day off, and kept their pride.’
I nodded. ‘Yes, I was,’ I said. ‘But the world is changing, and I have to change too.’
‘That’s the Quality!’ he exclaimed with sudden bitterness. ‘Never say, “Aye, I did it. I want more money and I shall get it whatever the cost to the poor.” It’s always “the way of the world”. But the way of the world is the way you, and the Quality like you, decide it should be, Miss Beatrice! All of you — landowners, squires, and lords — make the world the way you want it and then say, “I can’t help it, it’s the way of the world.” As if it were not you who decides how the world should be.’
I nodded, for he was right.
‘Well then, Bill Green, have it your way,’ I said coldly. ‘I chose that Wideacre should be wealthy. That my son and Miss Julia shall inherit. And if it costs you your mill, if it costs every life in Acre, then so be it.’
‘So be it,’ he muttered, as if he could not understand. He fumbled for his hat, his Sunday hat, and put it on his head. His glass of beer was growing flat and stale.
‘Good day, Miss Beatrice,’ he said like a man in a dream, a dream of misery.
‘Good day, Miller Green,’ I said, honouring him with the title he would not keep long.
He walked from my office like a man half dead. Soundless, speechless, incredulous.
His dappled grey mare was hitched outside, and he heaved himself into the saddle, still in his dream. I saw him ride past the window and saw John call out to him as he and Celia came through the gate into the rose garden. Miller Green tipped his hat instinctively at the sound of a Quality accent, but I doubt he heard or saw anything. His horse ambled down the drive on a loose rein, the stocky rider slumped in the saddle. He had tragic news to take home. There would be tears in the pretty sunny parlour of the mill this afternoon, and dinner would be spoiled.
John and Celia dawdled at toddler pace through the rose garden and then walked to the terrace up to my office window, Celia pausing to see that Nurse had Julia’s hand over the sharp stones of gravel.
‘What did Miller Green want?’ asked John through the open window, as if it were his business.
‘Arrangements for the harvest dinner,’ I said blandly.
‘He came all this way, on a Sunday, to plan a dinner his wife has organized for years?’ a
sked John in his most sceptical voice.
‘Yes,’ I said, and added cruelly, ‘I said Celia would make all the arrangements.’
Celia jumped as if she had been pricked with a pig-sticker and I could not conceal the gleam of my amusement. ‘Set it in hand will you Celia? You know so much about the village these days. It should be about three weeks on Saturday. That should be nearly the right time. A day or so here or there makes little odds as long as there is enough fresh food for eighty or a hundred people, and it keeps fresh.’ She looked utterly aghast, and I could not repress a short spiteful laugh.
‘Excuse me, I have work to do,’ I said to the two of them. And I leaned forward and banged the casement shut in their faces. John’s eyes met mine through the glass. But even he seemed so very far away.
I had been right when I predicted a good crop. But wrong when I thought it would be reaped in three weeks. Even with a hot, hot sun that made midday work a torment, and an extra reaping band from the Chichester parish, it was the second week in August before we were done.
My heart should have been singing. It was a wonderful harvest. We started on the newly enclosed common fields and the reapers marched in a great wide sweep, up and down, up and down, the three gentle slopes of the levelled field. Wave on wave of greeny-golden, sound, dry corn rippled down before them. In the mornings of the first days, now and then, a voice would start a song, forgetting, in the pleasure of the smell of the ripe corn, in the crackle of the dry stalks, in the rhythm of the line, that this wealth and beauty were not, this year, a promise of a safe hunger-free winter.
‘I love to hear them sing,’ said Harry, reining in beside me after he had been for a ride on the downs. I had been all day in the field. I trusted this crop, which could save Wideacre, to no other.
I smiled. ‘So do I,’ I said. ‘They keep time better and the work goes faster.’
‘I might take a sickle out myself,’ said Harry. ‘It’s years since I went reaping.’
‘Not today,’ I cautioned him. ‘Not on this field.’
‘As you wish,’ he said, dense as ever. ‘Shall we wait for you at dinnertime?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Tell them to leave something for me in my office. I may well stay over their dinner break to see they are back to work promptly after they have eaten.’
Harry nodded and wheeled away. As his horse passed the reapers who had reached the end of the field he pulled up to watch them straightening their backs, with a grimace from those who were crooked with rheumatism. They cleaned their sickles with weary sad faces, and fell into line again like pressed infantrymen. Harry cried a cheery ‘Good day! Good harvesting!’ to them. I doubt very much that he noticed no one replied.
They worked until noon and still the field was barely half cut. They were not going slow — I would have been on to that in a flash and they knew it. And they were too unused to the idea that this harvest would profit them not at all to cheat on the work. They still loved the great pale forest of wheat as I did, and they swung along in a steady easy river of movement expressing their joy in the great fertility of the land in every purposeful, painful swing. But still the field waved high. It was so huge! Only now, when I saw the gang reaping and reaping for half a day, did I realize what a massive acreage I had laid to wheat, and what a triumph this wheat harvest was.
The women and the children and the old folk followed the reapers, clasping great heaps of wheat to their bodies, banging the stalks against their knees and twisting a plait of wheat around to make a tight heavy-headed stook. The women had fewer illusions than the men about this explosion of fertility from the new field, and I watched them like a covetous hawk as they snapped off the odd head of wheat and stuffed it into their apron pockets. Poor beggars! Turning their backs to me that I should not see them pocket the traditional favours of the harvest. Gazing around with innocent-seeming, sly eyes and dropping a few stalks of wheat to the ground so that one of them, not even the culprit, might have some good gleaning later.
It was the tradition, always had been the tradition, that the gleaning at Wideacre was generous. The land grew so rich, the crops so tall, that no Squire had ever done more than smilingly grumble at the rituals of the informal robbery.
But now it was different.
It had to be different.
I waited until the little children had come down the lane with the pitchers of ale and the hunks of bread and cheese for their parents’ dinners. This year I saw the bread was greyer than it should be, made with as little flour as possible eked out with powdered pease or grated turnip. There was no cheese for anyone. And the pitchers held only water. These men and women were working under a burning July sun with only a hunk of grey bread to eat, and water to drink. No wonder they looked pale beneath the grime and the sweat. No wonder the dinner break was no longer a time for laughter and jokes and sharing of gossip and baccy. They were smoking hawthorn leaves in their pipes. And when they laid back to doze, the younger men put their hands behind their heads and stared silently at the sky as if they longed to see a future there that might free them from this unending round of poor drudgery.
After they had had thirty minutes, to the second, I called in my clear confident voice ‘All right! Back to work!’
The men and the women got to their feet as willingly as pigs coming out of mud to the killer. They glared at me, surly and cross, but no one did more than mutter. The sun was at its highest now. Mounted on my horse, unmoving, I could feel the heat of it baking on the coiled hair at the nape of my neck and the sweat making my silk gown damp. The men who had been hobbling, bent-backed, back and forth through the corn, swinging their sickles, looked like fever patients, so white and drenched in sweat. And the women look drained, mortally ill.
‘Gather round,’ I said peremptorily, and waited until they stood around me docile as cattle in a head-bowed half-circle. I noted, with a shiver of displeasure, that no one stepped on my shadow. When Tobermory shifted his weight so the shadow moved, the crowd swayed like a wheatfield with him, so my shadow touched no one.
‘Turn out your pockets,’ I said baldly. And my gaze drifted over every head bent with weariness and humiliation at this fresh shame.
‘Turn them out, I say.’
There was a dull silence. Then one of the young men, one of the Rogers lads, stepped forward.
‘Those are reaper’s rights,’ he said. His young voice clear as a mellow-toned bell.
‘Let’s see yours,’ I said instantly on the attack. ‘Turn them out.’
He clasped his hands over the pocket flaps of his leather breeches.
‘Those are reaper’s rights,’ he said. ‘You should not muzzle the ox that treads the corn. We’re not oxen in Acre, yet. We’re reapers, skilled reapers. And a handful of corn, morn and night, is the reaper’s due.’
‘Not any more,’ I said coldly. ‘Not on Wideacre. Turn out your pockets or turn out of your cottage, young Rogers. The choice is yours.’
He glared at me, baffled.
‘You’re good for us no longer, Miss Beatrice,’ he said in despair. ‘You held to the old ways once, and now you’re worse than a workhouse ganger.’
He pulled up the pocket flaps of the breeches and took a dozen heads of wheat out of one pocket, and a dozen from the other.
‘Throw them down,’ I ordered. He did so without another word. But he kept his eyes to the ground. I had a fleeting insight that he would not look at me so that I should not see that he, a youth earning a man’s wage, was weeping.
‘And now the rest of you,’ I said without emotion.
One by one they stepped forward like mummers in a play and threw down the heads of wheat until it made a tiny, insignificant pile in the deep rich field before me. A meagre theft. Enough to make little more than a couple of loaves. They would have used it for thickening soup, to stretch the bacon and water a little further. To make some gruel for the children, or some pap for the unweaned baby who cried and cried at a dry breast. Altogether it was little gain
for the village, and a loss to the estate of a few pence.
‘This is thievery,’ I said.
‘Reaper’s rights!’ someone called from the back of the crowd.
‘I heard you, Harry Suggett,’ I said, raising neither my eyes nor my voice so there was a ripple of fear at my instant identification of the anonymous challenge.
‘This is thievery,’ I said again quietly. ‘You know what Dr Pearce says about thievery: that you will go to hell. You know what the law says about thievery: that you will go to gaol. Now hear what I say about thievery. Anyone I catch with one grain, just one grain, of wheat in their pocket will be handed over to a Justice of the Peace at once, and his or her family, every one of them, will be homeless that same night.’
There was a breath from the crowd, almost a groan, a great ‘ooohhh’, instantly stifled.
‘And there will be no gleaning for Acre until the Chichester workhouse gang have been through the fields gleaning for me first,’ I said firmly. ‘Only when the field is cleared as I wish may you come to see if there is anything left.’
Again there was the sigh of consternation. But they could say nothing. At the back of the crowd was a woman, a young girl, Sally Rose, a mother but no husband to provide for her and the babe. Her coarse apron was up over her head and she was weeping very quietly.
‘Now get to work,’ I said gently. ‘If there is no thieving, and no cheating, you will not find me unfair.’
At the softer note in my voice their eyes flashed to my face. But they were full of suspicion and unease, and all around the circle hands were clenched in the old sign against black magic.
I stayed out in the field all day, and we still had not cut it all. It was an unbelievable harvest, a miracle of a harvest. The untouched common land grew corn as if it had been longing all those innocent heather-filled years to burst into ripple upon ripple of pale yellow. No one filched wheat as far as I could see, and my eyes were sharp enough to see all around the field, although my mind was sluggish and cold and slow.
Wideacre (Wideacre Trilogy) Page 67
