Beckstone

Beckstone is a general novel set in 1712 on a fictional tenant farm in the Yorkshire Dales. The farmer, Will Black, is deeply in debt when the factor, Josiah Fitchet, turns up to claim back rent for the owner, a wealthy baronet. With him is the baronet's grand-daughter, Madeleine de Courtenay, his only relative but not his heir because she is female, although she does appear to have the promise of a dowry in spite of her relationship with her grandfather being dreadful. Madeleine is an army brat, whose mother, the knight's daughter, chose to marry a Huguenot soldier in the Duke of Marlborough's army. Worse still, she chose to follow her husband, bearing first a son - potentially his grandfather's male heir - and then a daughter, Madeleine, before dying soon after. The grandfather in his dotage sees Madeleine, who looks very like her father, as the cause of her mother's death. Illogically, she is also blamed for preventing her brother from returning home to the family estate instead of becoming a soldier like his father. When first the boy and then his father are killed in battle, a devastated Madeleine has to return to her grandfather's stately home to a life of gracious idleness totally alien to her. She has grown up in the army baggage train as a busy, innovative and determined individual trying to be 'one of the boys', learning highly unladylike skills like nursing, cookery, management, problem-solving and book-keeping while expected to obey orders the instant they are given. The dowry becomes relevant at the beginning of the book when Fitchet produces a document offering its exchange for the remission of years of back rent of the farm, provided Madeleine and Will marry. Although highly suspicious of Fitchet's part in the plan, they decide on a marriage for six months, secretly and on paper only, since both have powerful reasons to escape their current situations. First they need to draw up a very careful transfer document and a separate loan agreement which will give them the working capital not covered by the dowry. Then they must buy seed and stock and hire labourers willing to help them carry out an increasing number of ventures, while waging battle against ugly prejudice spilling from several quarters in the village. Set two years before the death of Queen Anne, by then childless, and five years after a sullen Scotland voted itself into political union with England, it is a time of turmoil and uncertainty. Marlborough has just been replaced as Captain General and the Spanish War of Succession rumbles on. The country is weary of war, losing its pity for the many jobless army casualties on the streets. The unsettling beginnings of both the agricultural and industrial revolutions are stirring and political perfidy is suspected at the highest level. All of these touch the new and disparate community struggling to establish itself at Beckstone Farm, with Will and Madeleine stretched to the limits of their differing abilities to keep the farm viable. Then there is the mysterious Mulberry Duck which young Timty, wise beyond his years, keeps saying is the source of their troubles. He turns out to be right in an unexpected way.