The Favoured Child

  Ralph measured him with a dark level look. ‘Yes, I think I understand,’ he said. ‘I won’t speak of this further tonight. But I am afraid you can do nothing about the wheat. The agreements have already been made.’

  Their eyes locked, like a pair of stags in battle. Richard was the master of Wideacre and Ralph was his agent. But Ralph would always be stronger, and it was Richard who looked away. ‘We’ll see,’ he said sulkily. ‘But do as I order, and tell Acre, Mr Megson.’

  Of course,’ Ralph said. He waited for a moment, and when Richard said nothing more, he pushed back his chair and went to the door. Richard lounged in the carver chair and watched him go, but I rose and went across the hall with him.

  He said nothing.

  I had expected a word from him, a word of blame, of disappointment, of condemnation of me as another Lacey woman who had been a fool and had betrayed the land. But I had nothing from him except a hard black look which was somehow full of pity. Then his hand was on the door and he was gone.

  He had left. He had left me alone, alone with Richard.

  I went slowly back to the library, twisting a fringe on my shawl. Richard had pushed his chair back from the table and tipped it on its back legs, balancing his weight with his booted feet against the table’s edge.

  ‘Megson all right?’ he demanded.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. I went to the window. The sun was going down behind the trees, out of sight. It had tinged the sky above the wood into cream and grey and rose. I leaned my aching head against the cool thick glass of the window and stood in silence.

  ‘I shall ride up to the hall tomorrow and see how the work is going,’ Richard said, ‘and on Monday I shall ask the foreman how quickly it could be completed if we doubled the workers. We shall move in there as soon as possible.’

  ‘Richard . . .’ I said. I turned towards him so I could see if he really was as calm and confident as he seemed. ‘Richard, we must talk. You cannot truly think that we can live together at the hall!’

  His face was as untroubled as a good child’s. ‘Why not?’ he demanded.

  I spread my hands out in a vague gesture and then brought them up to cradle my cheeks. ‘Richard!’ I said. ‘What John told us about our true parents alters everything.’

  Richard was blank. ‘Why?’ he asked.

  I leaned back against the window. It seemed to me that the world had gone mad all around me and that I had to hold on to my little corner of it or be engulfed.

  ‘We are brother and sister!’ I said as if he needed me to tell him. ‘Our marriage is invalid. And our child . . .’ I broke off. I could not say the word ‘incest’ and think of my poor little baby, so safe inside me, but so endangered by the madness of this outside world. ‘We will have to get the marriage annulled as John and Mama were going to do,’ I said. ‘Then we will have to live apart. I shall have to bear the shame of the baby somehow. I suppose you will have to live in London or somewhere.’

  Richard was as calm as the summer sky. He looked at me with tolerant sympathy, as distant from my confusion and pain as the early-evening stars. ‘Oh, no,’ he said sweetly, ‘it’s not going to be like that at all.’

  I looked blankly at him and waited.

  ‘Our marriage is already public knowledge,’ he said. ‘We have acknowledged each other, and I have acknowledged my child. We cannot withdraw from that.’

  My hands went out to him again, in a weak imploring gesture. ‘Richard…’ I said uncertainly.

  ‘We shall live here,’ he said. ‘And when the hall is built, we shall move into it. I shall take the name of Lacey, which we now know I have as much right to claim as you. We shall be Squire Richard Lacey, and his lady.’ He smiled at me. ‘It sounds well,’ he said equably.

  ‘Richard, we cannot!’ I exclaimed. The sense I had had of an insane world in which my lovely mama could be killed and I could find myself pregnant by my brother was slipping away from me. Coated with Richard’s silky tones, the mad mess which was my life sounded utterly reasonable. ‘We cannot!’ I said again.

  Richard’s chair rocked him gently as he bent and flexed his knees. ‘Why not?’ he demanded. In a sudden movement he dropped the chair down to stand four-square and turned in his seat to see me better. ‘We have announced our marriage; you are pregnant with my child,’ he said evenly. ‘We both know who it was permitted the conception, who it was insisted on the marriage. I agreed to it, to oblige you. I’m not now going to change tack because of a sudden whim of yours.’

  I put my hands to my temples. Richard’s view of the world and mine seemed so utterly different. I could not believe we had both been in the room when John had spoken of us with loathing as incestuous bastards who had repeated our parents’ black offence. ‘I cannot think!’ I exclaimed in the whirl of confusion.

  Richard stood up and came to me and pulled my hands from my face. ‘Be calm,’ he said firmly. ‘It is your condition which makes you so confused. Be calm, and trust me. I know what I am doing.’

  I let my hands stay in his comforting grip and I scanned his face.

  ‘You have no one else but me now, Julia,’ he said. ‘Don’t forget that you have no one else but me. You have to trust me. You can hardly manage on your own.’

  I took half a step towards him. I felt so very, very lonely. I leaned my forehead against his shoulder. After the icy touch of the glass his velvet jacket was warm, and I could smell the russet scent of his skin and curly hair.

  Oh, Richard,’ I said forlornly. His arm came around my waist and he stroked my back as one would comfort a sick animal.

  It was as if the world were a dangerous sea and Richard and I

  had been wrecked in the storms. All we could do now was to

  cling to each other and hope to stay afloat.

  *

  I carried on floating.

  I floated through the funerals when we laid the two of them in the Lacey vault. There was some muddle over the burial and they were placed side by side. I was glad of that. In the corner of my floating mind I was glad that they were close together in their death, that their dust would mingle. Grandmama gave a luncheon after the funeral and I received the condolences of the county, standing between her and Richard, speaking to people and hearing them speak as if we were all soundless fish, floating in a deep silky sea.

  Only one voice rang clear in the week which followed: Rosie Dench’s. She came with a package, not to the front door of the Dower House, but to the kitchen door. Stride showed her into the parlour where I sat, idly looking out. I was looking down the road as though I were waiting to see Mama and John rounding the corner in the gig, light-hearted after a drive.

  ‘I didn’t know what to do with them,’ Rosie said abruptly. ‘They were made for you, Miss Julia. Wideacre gloves for you. Whoever your choice is.’

  I turned back to the room. I could scarcely understand her. And then I remembered. Rosie had promised me some gloves. Gloves for my wedding day, for my wedding to James.

  She held out the package awkwardly. I tried to smile, but found I could not. I unfolded the wrapping-paper.

  They were the most beautiful gloves I had ever seen. Every inch of them glowed with colour. Wideacre colours – the colours of a Wideacre harvest. The background was pale, like the sky at dawn before the sun makes it rosy, to match a cream or a white gown, as my wedding gown should have been. On the back of each glove was a golden sheaf of wheat – yellow and gold – and a handful of wheatfield flowers: the scarlet poppies I love and deep-blue larkspur. Before the sheaf of wheat were crossed a sickle and a hook, as a reminder that wheat is not cut of its own accord. The gloves were longer than I usually wore them – Rosie might be an Acre field-girl now, but she would never lose her eye for fashion – and trimmed with a line of pale gold.

  ‘Rosie, thank you,’ I said. ‘You have a very great talent. If these were in paint rather than in silk, people would say you were an artist.’

  She ducked her head at that, and beamed. ‘I hope you’ll b
e happy,’ she said doubtfully. ‘I hope it was right to bring these.’

  ‘I’m very grateful,’ I said. ‘I won’t be able to wear them while I’m in mourning, but I shall keep them safe and next year, next spring, I shall wear them with my very best dresses.’

  She bobbed a curtsy and turned to go. It felt strange that after all that had passed between us there was so little to say. But Rosie could not tell me her true thoughts about my choice of a husband; and I was dead inside and could speak my heart to no one.

  ‘We writes to him,’ she said suddenly, turning in the doorway. ‘He asked us to write to him from time to time, to tell him that we are well, all of us, the Bath children.’

  I nodded. I knew she meant James.

  ‘Can I give him a message from you?’ Rosie asked. ‘If there was anything you needed to tell him, that wasn’t proper for you to write yourself, I could tell him.’ She stopped.

  I shook my head. I could see again the little coffee-room of the coaching inn and hear the rattle of the wheels on the cobbles as James did not come, and did not come, and did not come.

  ‘No,’ I said dully. ‘Mr Fortescue and I are no longer friends. And I am now a married woman.’

  Rosie nodded, but her eyes were puzzled. ‘Goodbye, Miss Julia,’ she said. ‘We’ll see you in the village, won’t we?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. But I did not sound sure. ‘I will come when I feel better,’ I said. I spoke as if I never expected to feel any better. That was true.

  I could not weep.

  I could not mourn.

  I felt I was floating. And there was nothing to do but to carry on floating, and try to get through one day after another and try to forget that each one of these days added up to week after week after week.

  In the third week after the funeral my grandmama proposed a tea-party, to present me to the county as a married woman. I shook my head and said I did not want to go.

  ‘I don’t expect you to enjoy it,’ my grandmama said tartly. ‘I expect you to keep your head up and to answer when you are spoken to, and to remember that I am doing this to save your reputation for the sake of your mama, my daughter.’

  So I did as I was bid and floated through the afternoon. With my grandmama in the room no one would tease me about the precise details of the marriage. They might speak slyly behind their gloved hands when I was not there, but no gossip would harm me while I had Grandmama’s protection.

  When I was lucky I felt that I was floating. Sometimes, when I was alone in my bed at night, I would think that I was not afloat at all, but sinking, drowning, and too foolish to call for help. At the heart of the nightmare of those vague days was my worry that I could not be sure whether I was floating towards a safe harbour, with Richard’s love a reality which I should trust, and my grandmama’s protection around me, or whether I was sinking slowly into a slime of sin and trouble, ensnared by my own confusion and tricked by everyone around me.

  It was Ralph who said it.

  ‘He caught you, then,’ he said to me. I was driving to Havering Hall to see Grandmama, and Ralph hailed the carriage in the lane as I turned out of the drive. He had taken a load of Wideacre wheat to Midhurst market and was following the empty wagons slowly home on his black horse.

  I pulled down the glass of the window as he reined in alongside. ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I said steadily. It was pointless to encourage Ralph to speak of Richard as an enemy. We both had to learn to know our master; and Richard was the squire now.

  Ralph puffed out his cheeks in impatience. ‘He took you, he trapped you into marriage,’ he said. ‘Now he has Wideacre and no controls over his will, not even parents to protect you, or to protect Acre. All that stands between him and Acre is you and me. And you sit up there in your damned carriage and tell me you don’t know what I mean!’

  I felt my world shaking, but I said nothing.

  ‘I’m selling wheat in Midhurst as fast as I can,’ Ralph said, jerking a thumb at the empty wagons lumbering past us. ‘I won’t have Wideacre corn sent out of the county while there are poor families who need it at the proper rate. Not while I am manager here.’

  ‘What about the wheat for Acre?’ I asked softly.

  Ralph gleamed. ‘I’ve hidden it,’ he said briefly. ‘They can buy it in their penn’orths throughout the year. But young Richard won’t find it.’

  ‘It’s not at the mill?’ I asked.

  Ralph’s face darkened again. ‘I’ll not tell you where,’ he said. ‘You’re his wife now. You could be obliged to tell him. I’ll keep it safe, never fear. There’ll be no hunger in Acre this winter, even if the devil himself was squire.’

  I nodded. ‘I am sorry, Ralph,’ I said.

  ‘You’ll be sorrier yet,’ he said bleakly. ‘When’s the baby due?’

  ‘At the end of January,’ I said.

  ‘The hardest time of the year,’ Ralph said. There was a silence. ‘The hardest,’ he said. ‘You should have come with me to the gypsies that day, Julia.’

  I said nothing. It was useless to say anything.

  ‘Could we get the marriage annulled on some legal grounds?’ Ralph inquired, his voice as soft as a conspirator’s. ‘Are you sure it was properly witnessed and all, Julia? You were both minors, remember.’

  I thought of my mama and John driving to London to get the marriage annulled and the black secret reason that they had carried with them, the seventeen-year-old secret of the evil lusts of Beatrice and Harry her brother. But those two were my parents, and it was now my secret. I did not have the strength to fight Richard through the courts of the land declaring our marriage invalid. Besides, I needed the marriage as badly as he did.

  ‘No,’ I said steadily. ‘There is nothing I am able to tell you which could make the marriage invalid.’

  Ralph’s face under his tricorne hat was black with gloom.

  ‘Remember I’m your friend,’ he said dourly. ‘You know where to find me if you need me, and anyone in Acre would stand with you. If you need help, you know where to come.’

  I nodded. There was a hot mist in my eyes and I could not see him. ‘Thank you,’ I said softly. ‘But I always knew there would come a time when you would not be able to help me, nor I you.’

  Ralph put his head on one side, apparently listening for something which I alone could hear. ‘Bad time coming for us both?’ he asked very low.

  I shrugged my shoulders helplessly. ‘I have not the sight for it,’ I said. ‘If I could see as well as they believe in Acre, I’d not be here now. It would all be different – for all of us.’

  He nodded grimly, and then he wheeled his horse around. I had seen him ride from me once when he was in a rage and watched him tear down the drive with the mud flying up from his horse’s hooves. This time he shambled into the village at walking pace. I watched him go before I pulled the cord to drive on. He rode with a slack bridle; his collar was turned up and his shoulders were as hunched as if he were riding in pouring rain.

  I was driving to my grandmama’s, for I no longer rode. My pregnancy was showing, and modesty and convention alike would keep me from Sea Mist and in a carriage until the birth. I hoped very much for a dry autumn and a mild winter. The lane was impassable when it got too wet, and if I was not allowed to ride, I should have to stay inside the Dower House for the last long three months of my pregnancy, with no visitors, with no company…except Richard.

  I was wearing an old black gown of Mama’s, hastily adapted for me. My grandmama had called her dressmaker from Chichester to come to Havering and take my measurements, and guess at my likely increase in size, so that I could have some new black gowns ready for the autumn and winter.

  I stood still, until I was weary with standing, while she kneeled at my feet and pinned one fold after another. She had a mouthful of pins between her lips, but she was able, by years of practice, to tell my grandmama all the Chichester gossip without dropping one. I watched this, fascinated for a time, but then I grew tired. Grandmama broke into
the flow of news when she saw my white face and said abruptly, ‘That will do! Julia, you must sit down for a rest.’

  So she took my measurements as I sat and then took her leave, promising that the gowns would be ready within the week.

  ‘Are you tired?’ Grandmama asked me, and at the kindness in her voice I felt my eyes fill with tears.

  ‘Very tired,’ I said piteously. ‘And, Grandmama, I do miss Mama so much. It is so lonely at home without her!’

  She nodded. ‘You were very close, you two,’ she said softly. ‘It’s quite rare to see so much love between a grown girl and her mama. She was very proud of you, you know, Julia. She would not want you to be sad.’

  I put the back of my hand to my mouth to bottle up the sobs. I tried to blink back the hot tears which were ready to flow down my cheeks. My grandmama’s consoling words helped me not at all, for I knew my mama had been mistaken in me, and that she had died knowing her mistake. She had not loved me when she had cut her dress into ribbons; she had not felt proud of me then. She had known me for what I was – a sensualist like my natural mother, Beatrice. She had hated Beatrice, and I was sure that at the very moment of her death she must have hated me.

  ‘Is Richard kind to you?’ my grandmama asked. ‘The two of you are so very young to live alone together!’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. I said nothing more.

  ‘He is not impatient with you?’ she asked. ‘When the two of you were children, your mama always used to fear that he bullied you.’

  ‘He does not bully me,’ I said steadily.

  ‘And I trust he is . . .’ Grandmama broke off and glanced down at her gown, black like mine, mourning like me. ‘He is not . . . insistent?’ she asked. ‘Insistent about your marital duties? At a time like this you would be best sleeping in your own bed.’

  I nodded. ‘I do, Grandmama,’ I said.

  She nodded. ‘Forgive me,’ she said. ‘You are a married woman now, and it is the business of your husband and yourself. No business of mine.’