hurt. You could tell Harry he should be given to me.’
The thought of Ralph riding one of my father’s high-bred horses made me flush with anger and an icy cold rage was steady behind my eyes, but my smile did not flicker. It was only words and plans.
‘Of course, Ralph,’ I said gently. ‘There will be many changes you will want to make.’
‘Aye,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘And when I’m master here, even more.’
The word ‘master’ on his lips made my skin crawl, but my eyes stayed fixed on his face and their green hazel gaze never wavered.
‘I must go,’ I said again and he held out his arms to me in farewell. We kissed goodbye, a long sweet kiss, and I broke from it with a sob to turn my face into his shoulder. His rough fustian jacket smelled so good – of woodsmoke and clean sweat and the inimitable heart-wrenching smell of his skin. The familiar pain of first love mounted inexorably and ached at my heart. My arms tightened around his waist in a fierce hard hug of farewell to the strong, lovely body I had known so well and loved so much.
With my head against his chest I heard his quickened breath, and his heart speeding, as his desire for me rose again at my closeness. He kissed the top of my head hard, and turned my face up with a pinch on my chin.
‘What’s this?’ he said tenderly. ‘Tears?’ He dropped his head and, gently as a mother cat, licked each wet eyelid in turn. ‘There’s no need for tears now, my bonny Beatrice. No need for your tears ever again. Everything is going to be different from now on.’
‘I know,’ I said, speaking from a heart so full of pain I could believe it might break. ‘I know everything will be different. That’s what made me sad. My love, my darling Ralph. Nothing will ever be the same again.’
‘But it will be better, Beatrice!’ He looked questioningly at me. ‘You surely regret nothing?’
I smiled then. ‘I regret nothing,’ I confirmed. ‘Now or later. What has been done you did for me and for Wideacre. What is going to happen is also going to happen for Wideacre. I have no regrets.’ But my voice quavered as I spoke and Ralph’s grip on me tightened.
‘Wait, Beatrice,’ he said. ‘Don’t go while you are so sad. Tell me what is wrong.’
I smiled again to reassure him, but the ache under my ribs was growing into such a pain of grief I was afraid I might weep.
‘Nothing is wrong. Everything is as it should be, as it has to be,’ I said. ‘Now goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye, my darling.’
I really thought I should never find the courage to leave as he looked at me so tenderly, so concerned and so trusting in my love for him. I kissed him once more – a gentle, final kiss on the lips – and then I pulled myself from his arms. I felt as if I had left half my soul with him. I walked away and then turned to see him. He raised a hand to me and I whispered, ‘Goodbye, my love, my only love,’ so low he could not hear me.
Then I saw him turn into his cottage and stoop his dark head under the low door. I drew into the thick bushes at the side of the track and counted a slow and careful three hundred. Three hundred in counted seconds. Then I waited. My love and my anger were one mesh of pain and rage in my head. I was half blind with the conflict. It was as if the Furies were in my head – not after Ralph at all – but tearing me apart with two loyalties, two loves, two hatreds. I gave a little silent groan of physical pain and then saw on my closed eyelids once again the stare of my murdered papa carried past me into the darkness of the Hall. Then I took two deep shuddering breaths, opened my mouth and screamed as loud, as shrill, as panic-stricken as I could:
‘Ralph! Ralph! Help me! Ralph!’
The door of the cottage exploded open and I heard the noise of his sprinting feet up the track. I screamed again and heard him swerve from the track towards my guiding voice. I heard his feet pounding through the deep leaves and then the deep and dreadful twang of the mantrap’s forged iron spring, and simultaneously the sound of his legs breaking – a clear and unmistakable snap! snap! like chopping wood – and Ralph’s hoarse, incredulous scream of pain. I dropped to the ground as my knees buckled under me and waited for another scream. My head against a tree trunk I waited and waited. None came. My own legs were useless, but I had to see him. I had to know I had done it. I clawed my way up the beech tree’s comforting grey trunk, clinging to it for support and so that its rough bark pressed against my face would keep me from fainting before I had seen – because I had to see.
There was still no sound.
For long minutes I clung to the tree, feeling, but not aware of, the reassuring sun-warmed bark under my fingers, and the familiar, safe smell of dry leaves. The silence seemed as if the world that had been cracked apart by Ralph’s shriek was quietly rebuilding itself.
Somewhere, a blackbird started to sing.
Then I ceased to take comfort from Ralph’s long quietness and was filled with a horrid senseless fear. What was happening only yards away from me, hidden in the bushes? My legs moved as stiff as a cripple. As I left the beech tree I staggered and nearly fell, but I had to see him.
I parted the bushes and gave a whimper of horror as I saw my lover caught like a rat in the trap I had baited with love. He was slumped over the upright jaws. He had fainted from the pain of his crushed knee bones, and the teeth of the trap held his legs as stiff as a marionette’s, while the top half of his body slumped like a doll’s. One of the sharpened teeth of the trap seemed to have severed a vein and the steady flow of blood darkened his breeches and soaked down his leg into the black earth.
Faced with the wreck of my lover, my knees buckled again and I put out my hands to save myself as I collapsed before him. My hands clenched on the dark peaty earth as if I was hanging to a rope to pull me from a crevasse of horror. Gritting my teeth, I got to my feet again, and then, as quietly and as carefully as I had come, as if I feared to wake a beloved, weary husband, I walked backwards, one stiff, courtly step at a time, with my eyes never moving from his crumpled body while his lifeblood drained into the earth; left to die like vermin.
I crept home like a criminal and slipped in by the open kitchen door. Then, remembering, I went back to the little store room and fetched the owl, Canny, and carried him up the back stairs to the landing outside my room. I met no one. I glanced out of my window at the rising moon, a sad thin sickle of a waning moon with a little rejected teardrop of a star beside it. Ten lifetimes ago I had sat at the window and felt Ralph’s eyes shining on me, laughing at me. Now I could not face starlight. I wondered with one sharp corner of my mind if he was dead yet, or if he was lingering, like a rat in a gintrap, in unrelieved pain. If he had recovered consciousness and was crying my name, hoping I would come and help him, or if he guessed it was my trap and was facing his death, staring grim-faced into the darkness.
Canny was perched, wide-eyed, alert on the top of the wardrobe. He was fully fledged, nearly ready to fly. Ralph had promised to hack him back to a wild life in the woods, to feed him little by little until he had learned to hunt. Now he would have to fend for himself. In this new harsh world lit by the sickly yellow moon, we all had to learn how to survive, and there was no help. Trust I had felt for my papa in the golden summer of my childhood, or Ralph had in my smiles, for my lying direct eyes, trust and keeping faith had gone. So I lifted him down, his talons gentle and feathery on my bare hand, and untied the jesses on his bony legs. His foot, which had been up inside his fluffed-out feathers, was endearingly hot. I opened the window and held him out. The night breeze ruffled his feathers.
‘Go then, Canny,’ I said. ‘For I do not know love and wisdom any more.’
His grip tightened as the wind rocked him, and his head bobbed as his body moved, but he stayed quiet, looking around him.
‘Go!’ I said, and I cruelly tossed him, aiming him direct at the moon as if he could fly away and take all the pain and sorrow with him. Instead he fell, tumbling like a feather duster over and over down from my second-floor window and I gasped to see him fall. But even as I gripped the sill I hardened myself. I had learned one thing in this painful struggle into adulthood: that