The Favoured Child (44 page)

‘I could not do that,’ he said gently. ‘But I should be a fool
indeed if I said that anything I could not do was beyond the ability of anyone else. Perhaps you have a special gift. Perhaps you should cherish that gift and use it, rather than trying to knock it out of yourself.’

I was about to reply – searching for words to thank him for that brief sentence which had suddenly returned to me a share of my lost confidence in Wideacre, in myself as an heir to Wideacre – when Marianne and Emily and Mary and Elizabeth came to the table in a flurry of bandboxes and news, and the moment when I could have thanked him was gone.

But I did not forget it. Although my days were now a whirl of outings, shopping, dances and conversations, each night before I slept I used to lie for a few minutes and think about the day. It seemed to me that I was gaining a new sort of assertiveness, that even while Dr Phillips stole from me my bright faith in myself as the squire of Wideacre and the favoured child of a magic tradition, Bath was teaching me the assurance of a pretty girl who could give an answer – pertly enough, maybe – and who could hold her head up and deal with her peers as equals. And as the acknowledged favourite of the most eligible young man in Bath that season, I had a confidence I would never have learned at home. I had James to thank for that too.

I
had not been lying to James Fortescue when I told him that all the dances for the evening were taken. But he was right to be confident of me – I had saved the dance before supper so that he might take me from the bright crowded ballroom into the supper-room and sit down with me on a bench with half a dozen of the young people whom I now called my friends.

Mama had been playing cards and she came up behind me when I was at supper and dropped a hand on my shoulder to prevent me rising. ‘You stay,’ she said softly. ‘I don’t want you to leave early, but I have to go home. This beastly cold I took the other day outside the milliner’s has made me too hot to enjoy playing any more. It has so destroyed my judgement that I am likely to game away John’s fortune unless I leave.’

‘How will you get home?’ I asked.

‘I’ll take a chair,’ Mama said equably, ‘and I’ll send out one of Mrs Gibson’s men to bring a chair to fetch you home.’

‘Excuse me, Lady Lacey,’ James interrupted, rising to his feet, ‘but I beg you will not take such trouble. I will undertake to bring Miss Lacey safe home to you. And if you will allow me, I will go and make sure there is a chair waiting for you at the doorway now.’

Mama smiled. ‘Thank you, Mr Fortescue,’ she said. ‘I should have known that you would be so kind. I shall expect Julia home at eleven, when the ball closes.’

James gave her his arm and took her through the crowds of the supper-room to the bright hall beyond.

‘Lucky you!’ Mary Gillespie said under her breath. ‘I’d push my mama downstairs and break her leg if I thought James Fortescue would take me home.’

‘Mary!’ I exclaimed, and collapsed into giggles. ‘Anyway, it’s not true. You’d lock her in the cellar as well to be on the safe side.’

We were still laughing when James came back and he looked at the two of us suspiciously. ‘It’s true!’ he said. ‘My heart is set on Julia’s mama. She really is so fetching, Julia. She must have been stunning when she was young. Did she ever have a London season?’

‘I think so,’ I said. ‘But I believe she was shy and retiring and did not enjoy it.’

James nodded.

‘Like me,’ I added, keeping my face straight.

‘Very like,’ James said, equally grave. ‘I was saying to Marianne the other day that you would be quite pleasing if she could prevail upon you to put yourself forward a little more.’

‘You!…’ I started, but the quartet began playing in the other room.

‘Is this the last dance I can have with you this evening?’ he asked.

I flickered my dance programme before him with a smug beam. ‘It is,’ I said. ‘But there is no need to stay until the end of the ball. I dare say one of my other partners will escort me home if I ask.’

‘You are a baggage,’ he said feelingly. ‘Come and let me tread on your toes, Julia Lacey; and I hope I disable you for the rest of the evening.’

I laughed and went to dance with him, and then with George Gillespie, and with Sir Clive, and Major Peterson, and all the other new friends, until the quartet played the last dance and the clock struck eleven. The players started packing up their instruments, though Sir Peter Laverock went and begged them to play one more dance so that he could dance with me.

‘I am
so
sorry,’ James Fortescue said to him, sounding not at all sorry, ‘but I have promised Lady Lacey that I would see Miss Lacey home at eleven o’clock, and we must leave now.’

Sir Peter took one look at James Fortescue, and one look at my
smiling face. ‘Well, really, James,’ he said. ‘I can’t like the thought of you walking all alone back from Gay Street. I’ll come with you both to see Miss Lacey safe home, and then walk with you.’

‘Very kind,’ said James. ‘But I couldn’t ask it of you.’

‘I insist,’ said Sir Peter, teasingly. ‘What do you say, Miss Lacey?’

James Fortescue offered me his arm with an air of absolute neutral courtesy, then he slid his hand on top of mine and pinched my fingers hard.

‘I will not trouble you, Sir Peter,’ I said politely, ‘and I’ll bid you good night and hope to see you tomorrow.’ Then, as we turned away, I said softly to James Fortescue, ‘And if I weren’t a lady, I’d kick you on the ankles!’

He laughed aloud at that and swept me to the entrance of the rooms. ‘Would you like a sedan chair?’ he asked. ‘Or can you brave the frosts and walk?’

I sniffed at the air. It was icy cold with a promise of snow behind it. I knew it lacked something, some scent I needed, and I turned my face up to the cloudless ink-black sky for some hint of it. I was missing the smell of my home, the faint scent of cold beech leaves, the hint of icy grass. I was far away from Wideacre tonight.

‘Let’s walk,’ I said, and we stepped out into the stars and I pulled the scarlet-lined hood of my new cape up over my head.

I had one hand tucked inside the furry recesses of my muff, and James Fortescue had the other under his arm, warm against his cloak. It was a brilliant night, as bright as only a winter night can be. The stars were as thick as meadow flowers across a purple-black sky, and the moon had that hazy halo which always means frost. Our footsteps clattered on the paving stones and we walked uphill from the Assembly Rooms with an easy, even pace, close together to get through the throng of dancers coming out and calling goodnight to each other. The chairmen shouted for people crossing the road to make way for them, and a linkboy ran up to us with a torch in his hand and said to James, ‘Light your way, sir?’

‘Starlight is enough tonight,’ James said gently, and he reached inside his cape seeking a coin.

I was looking at the lad’s feet. He had shoes, but they were gone at the soles, tied on with rags. Above the ragged tongue of leather his bare ankles were blue with cold, scarred with old flea-bites. His breeches stopped between knee and calf – a dirty pair of rags which had once been velvet. His jacket was a man’s coat folded over and over at the cuffs so that his skinny wrists showed and his hands were free. He was one of the scum of Bath that float on the rising tide of wealth in the city. He was one of the many that survive on a little luck, a little thieving and a little beggary. I had seen poverty in Acre, but country poverty is nothing compared to the degradation that the poor suffered in this most elegant of towns. One might throw a penny into an outstretched bowl at the market, or give to a special collection in church, but it was possible to spend all one’s days among the wealthy and the beautiful and to see no hardship at all. The city councillors kept it well hidden, fearing to shock their wealthy patrons. And we – the ones with the money and the leisure and the Christian compassion – we liked the streets to be clean and clear of paupers.

‘Here you are,’ James said kindly and the little lad looked up at him and smiled. He must have been about fourteen, but he was so slight and so thin that he looked younger. But there was something about his face which struck me, that square forehead and the deep-set eyes.

As I stared at him, the singing noise of Wideacre fell upon me like a waterfall and drowned out the street sounds and the street sights. All I could see was his pale peaked face and all I could hear was a voice saying, ‘Take him home! Take him home!’ in a tone of such longing and grief that you would have thought it was his mother calling for him.

‘I am going to take you home,’ I said, making it sound like the most simple thing in the world. ‘I am going to take you home.’

His sharp face turned up towards me, yellowy pale in the light from the torch. ‘To Acre?’ he asked.

And then I knew him for one of the lost children of Acre who had been taken for the mills in the north and never returned. ‘Yes,’ I said, and I smiled at him, though I could have wept. ‘Yes,’ I said again. ‘I am Julia Lacey. It is all coming right in Acre now, and there will be work for you if you will let me send you home. I am Clary Dench’s friend, and Matthew Merry’s, and Ted Tyacke’s. They are all working for wages in Acre now, and Ralph Megson has come home and is managing the estate.’

He thrust his torch at James and grabbed both my hands in his bare dirty grip. ‘Is that right?’ he said urgently. ‘Are they working in the village again? Can I really get home? Won’t they send me back here if I go home?’

‘No,’ I said firmly. ‘I am part heir to the estate. I am Julia Lacey, and what I say is done in Wideacre. There will be work for you, and I shall pay for your journey home. I shall write ahead and tell them that you are coming, and there will be a place for you to live and a job for you to do. I can promise you that, and I
do
promise it.’

He shook both my hands at once then as if we might suddenly dance together in the cold streets of night-time Bath. ‘I can hardly believe it!’ he said, and he was grinning and shaking my hands, and tossing his head as if to try to wake from a dream of good luck. ‘I can’t believe I should meet you like this!’

‘How did you recognize him?’ James asked quietly.

I turned towards him. I had quite forgotten he was there. He had thrust the torch in a bracket on the railings and was leaning against them, watching the two of us. ‘I don’t know. I just guessed, I suppose,’ I said with the lie I had learned from Dr Phillips who had taught me to disbelieve my own senses. Then I hesitated. I had trusted James Fortescue with the truth about my dreams and my seeings. ‘No, that’s not true,’ I said simply. ‘It was the sight. I knew I had to take him home; but I did not know why. I did not know who he was. But now I come to look at him, he
does
look Sussex-bred to me.’

‘I’m Jimmy Dart,’ he said. ‘My ma was in service at Havering Hall and when she got big with me, they sent her away. She
stayed in Acre and worked for Wideacre. But when I was five or six, she run off, and they took me on the parish. They put me in the workhouse. When Mr Blithe came around for paupers, they sent me and the others. We worked for him in his mill. Cruel work that was. Then he could get no more cotton and he shut the mill and we all had to leave. They wouldn’t take us on the parish, because we hadn’t been born and bred there, and they wouldn’t take us back on Wideacre. Julie heard that paupers could get into Bath, but we had no money for the journey. It was winter an’ all. Cold, and we had no shoes. We walked. A long walk, and little Sally died on the way. Just curled up in a field and wouldn’t walk no more. We stayed with her till she was cold and stiff and then we left her. Didn’t know what else we could do. Julie cried then. She said it was the last time she ever would cry. Then we got to Bath, and I had a fight with a boy and won it, so I got his torch.’

‘He gave it to you?’ I asked.

‘I killed him,’ Jimmy said, off-handedly. ‘In the fight. I choked him. It wasn’t much, he was only a little boy. But I got his torch, so I could start earning us money. I’ve done it for a long time now.’

I put a hand out to steady myself on the railings. ‘You killed him?’ I asked faintly.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We got the place where he used to sleep as well after that. We stay there now.’

I said nothing. Jimmy looked me over in the silence, taking in the handsome pelisse with the rich gold fringe and the fur muff.

‘You couldn’t give me a penny, could you?’ he asked. ‘Then I could buy some gin for Julie. She’d like that. It’s better than bread for us if we can buy gin.’

I was about to say no, that I could not bear them to buy gin, that they should have food and clothing and a passage to Wideacre, but that they must not drink gin, never drink again. But James Fortescue stepped forward and put a hand under my elbow. ‘Yes, you shall have some money at once,’ he said gently. ‘Is this Julie from Wideacre too?’

Oh, aye,’ Jimmy said, watching the movement of James’s hand in his pocket, and watching him bring out a shilling glinting as bright as a knife in the moonlight. ‘We stayed together, us Wideacre paupers. Not little Sal who died, and not George who threw himself in the river last winter when he was drunk, but the rest of us live down by the Fish Quay.’

James handed over the shilling. ‘Would the rest of them like to go home?’ he asked. ‘To Wideacre, if it could be arranged?’

A smile spread over Jimmy’s face like the sun rising over the downs. Oh, aye,’ he said, ‘I reckon they would.’

‘I’ll come and see you all,’ I said with sudden decision. Whatever they had done, however they now lived, they were Acre children who should have been raised on Acre. The little girl who had died in the field and the youth who had jumped into the river were in cold water and hard earth far from their homes. And that was the fault of the Laceys. The Laceys, and the squires, and the world which works the way we like it, with very many poor people, and very few rich. ‘I’ll come and see you, and I’ll write to Acre tonight,’ I promised.

‘You’ll never find it on your own,’ Jimmy said. ‘I’ll meet you down at the Fish Quay in the morning if you like.’ He nodded at James. ‘You’d best come with her,’ he said. ‘Some of them are rough.’