the Waste and the cultivated land and also served as a , windbreak, since the fields lay directly to the south of it. Between the end of the Dyke and the opening where the ride which he intended to take ran into Layer Wood he halted and looked out across the two great open fields. They lacked interest at this season. The one nearest the wood, known as Layer Field, had just enjoyed its fallow year and all but a few of its many sections had been ploughed during the last few weeks so that the frost, when it came, could do its part in making the soil friable. The other, slightly larger field, called Old Tom, had been left with the stubble on it after harvest, and the village livestock had been turned into it, to lick up the fallen grains of corn, to nibble the greens tuff which sprang up through the stubble, to knead with their hoofs and manure with their dung the soil which would this year lie fallow. They were gone now; most of them to the butcher, thus fulfilling the year’s pattern. Stock beasts, the cows and a bull or two were kept alive through the winter, the rest went into the brine vat. That made the Squire remember Fuller … and turning his darkening glance he looked out over Old Tom. There in the level afternoon light the even furrows lay, acres and acres of them, each man’s sections divided from his neighbours’ by a narrow unploughed baulk. One side of each furrow shone pale violet in the light, the other was chocolate-coloured. And they wanted to alter all this. People who called themselves ‘progressive’—all sorts of people, from members of parliament down to dung-booted fellows like Fuller—they wanted to do away with the big, beautiful open fields, to chop them into little piddling pieces, fenced round and given over to pernicious ruinous experiments—no fallow year, for example. These so-called progressive fellows wanted to grow clover or turnips or some such nonsense instead of resting a field that was wearied from a corn crop. It might make money for them for a year or two, as it had Fred Clopton, but at what a price. The spoliation of the good soil which had been tilled in the sound, tried old way ever since Domesday Book. Sir
Charles knew that that was true, for somewhere in the cluttered records in his library he had a copy of the particulars of Clevely as it had existed then; it was on sheepskin, and the writing was illegible, but the map was amazingly accurate and the two great fields, the common pasture by the river, were just as they were today. All those hundreds of years the fields had given a harvest, rested a year, been sown again, and nobody was going to tell him that a system that wasn’t good could have lasted so long! Fuller’s words came back to his mind, ‘You can’t hold back the tide.’ It Was the threat of change, not the insolence of the remark which rankled. As a rule he ignored the thought of his own mortality as firmly as he ignored anything else which displeased or discomfited him; but he knew, of course, that one day, like everyone else, he must die. What then? How would Clevely fare when he was no longer there? He would have given a great deal to have been able to say, ‘My son will uphold the good old traditions.’ Instead he had been obliged to face the glaring, appalling fact that unless he was prevented Richard would fall upon Clevely with the ferocity of a tiger upon a lamb….
Nowadays he seldom thought of his son, save at moments like these when he was thinking of Clevely’s future. There was nothing to be gained by cherishing sentiment or regret about something that was over and done with, and which could not be helped. God knew he had tried, been patient, indulgent, tolerant to the point of folly, always bearing in mind that Richard was Felicity’s son as well as his own.
Staring out over the peaceful fields, he allowed himself to look back over his years as a father and found himself in no way to blame, unless overkindness were blameworthy. He’d loved the boy; they’d had seventeen very happy years together; then Richard had gone wrong. Completely wrong, bad to the very marrow of his bones. One failing, one vice, would have been different, if he’d been merely drunken, merely a wild gambler, merely lecherous, merely spendthrift; but he was all four, and more—there
wasn’t a vice or a folly or an insane extravagance which Richard hadn’t taken to with the avid ease of a suckling taking its mother’s milk. When Sir Charles looked back upon what he had borne between Richard’s seventeenth and thirtieth year he was amazed at his own forbearing. Debts and scandals, promises made just to be broken, insolence, ingratitude and, worst of all, that frightening feeling that there was actually something lacking in the boy, that there was nothing there to get hold of, to appeal to, to reason with. It was like having to deal with an imp out of Hell.
He’d gone on, for thirteen long years, thinking it couldn’t last, Richard must come to his senses; gone on blaming bad company, loose women, changing times; gone on making conditions—‘I’ll pay this time if you give me your word never to see this Mrs Davison again’, ‘We’ll forget all this, if you’ll swear to keep away from Angelina’s’; and knowing, knowing all the time that the imp was laughing at him, making its own plans for his defeat and mockery.
There could be, of course, only one end; and it had come just on ten years ago when he had said, ‘I’ve done with you. Go to the Devil your own gait. If you show your face here again the servants have orders to deal with you as they would any other intruder.’
He had never regretted it. Like many another fearfully postponed act, it had hurt less than he had expected. He could now think of Richard as though he were dead. And the handsome, merry, high-spirited boy whom he had loved was dead; some strange evil thing had come and devoured him and taken possession of his body and made use of his name. Sir Charles would not own that thing as his son.
So Clevely had no heir-apparent; Richard would inherit the title and would become lord of the manor, which nowadays meant little beyond some say in the rights of the Waste. The estate was not entailed and Sir Charles had his own ideas for its disposal. Sir Richard, when the time came, could come home to England and build himself a
hovel next door to Amos Greenway’s and live like Matt Juby for all Sir Charles cared. And if Fuller and others like him were looking forward to enclosure at Clevely as soon as Sir Charles was gathered to his fathers they were in for a surprise. One day—not tomorrow or even next week, naturally—but one day, all in good time, he was going to send for old Turnbull of Baildon and make a good water-tight will; everything he owned, down to his gold watch and chain, was going to be left to the Guildhall Feoffees, that august body of guardians who administered several trusts bequeathed by a man named Nankyn Reed who had died rich and heirless in the year 1540. Nothing in the care of the Feoffees ever changed; even the bequest which provided for thirty red-hot pennies to be thrown among thirty poor boys every Christmas Eve was solemnly and faithfully administered. They would keep Clevely exactly as Sir Charles had kept it, an everlasting memorial to good sense and tradition. The income which he now enjoyed could be used towards reducing rents in bad seasons, for maintaining the property in better order than he had been able to afford to do, and to help individual deserving men who had fallen on evil days through no fault of their own. He had it all worked out; it would be no more than an hour’s work for old Turnbull to write it down with the appropriate number of ‘aforesaids’ and ‘whereases’.
As always, his mind came comfortably to rest upon this thought and his face was calm again as he turned into the green, moss-carpeted, tree-shaded ride which led through Layer Wood. He was on his way to the loneliest place in the district, a keeper’s cottage even more remote than the one concerned with Amos Greenway’s deed of heroism. It was not his cottage, nor was its occupant his keeper; Fenn was a Mortiboys man, and his interest in the boy he was about to visit was the result of sheer benevolence.
Three years before, at the enormous Harvest Horkey which he gave every year on the day after the last load of corn was safely in, and to which everybody in Clevely was bidden, he had seen a small, pale-faced, hunchbacked