The Favoured Child (66 page)

Richard took a quick stride back to me and grabbed my arm. He marched me towards the door and flung it open. ‘You tell them, then,’ he hissed. ‘You tell your mama and your Uncle John that you are betrothed to him, and that you want them to get him back, to write to his family and get the marriage put on again. If this is the truth and you are prepared to swear it, you tell them it all. You tell them that you lay with me but that you did not want to. You tell them that I forced you.’ His voice grew louder. ‘Tell them that I am a rapist!’ he said.

I shot a frightened glance around the hall, wondering if my mama was in her parlour, where she would be certain to hear. ‘Tell your mama I am a rapist!’ he said again, his anger making his voice louder and louder. ‘Tell my papa! And then send to Grandpapa Havering and tell him! And he will have me taken to court, and I will be hanged like a sheep-stealer. Hanged so that you can satisfy your lust with one man and marry another! If that is the truth, then you tell them. Tell them now. Otherwise we shall always know that you are a liar.’

‘No!’ I said. ‘No, Richard. No, Richard. No.’ I put both hands out to him and drew him back into the dining-room. He resisted
only slightly. I shut the door behind him and tried to speak, though I was shaking so much I could hardly stand. ‘Please don’t say such things, Richard,’ I begged him. ‘You know I would not betray you. You know I would not tell them.’

‘You dare not,’ he replied instantly. ‘You know it is a lie and you don’t have the courage to say it aloud.’

‘It is not, it is not,’ I said. I could feel the tears in my eyes and on my cheeks, but I was not crying.

‘You desired me and you lay with me,’ Richard said coldly. ‘Any denial of that is a lie.’

I bowed my head; my tears were falling so fast they were spotting the silk of my morning gown.

He gave me a shake. ‘Isn’t it?’ he insisted.

‘Yes,’ I said, utterly defeated.

‘You can marry no other man now,’ Richard said.

I nodded.

‘Don’t forget that,’ he said softly.

I nodded again.

‘James Fortescue is gone,’ he said firmly. ‘Gone, and you will never see him again. There is no gentleman in the world now who will marry you. I have taken your virginity and you are my whore. You belong to me.’

I said not one word in contradiction. Then he pressed a gentle kiss on the top of my bowed head and let himself out of the room, and went quietly up the stairs to his bedroom to pack his books and clothes for Oxford.

Almost as soon as Richard had gone, I started to feel unwell. We had a spell of fine weather which brought the new hedges on so fast that they were bushy and impenetrable. All the trees in Wideacre Park were sweet-smelling with new leaves. The grass in the paddock was suddenly so bright it hurt my eyes, and Sea Mist danced on the springing verges at the side of the track to Acre as if the fresh grass tickled her hooves. I sat heavily on her, without nerves, but without pleasure. My hand was quite well and I could hold her steady. But I had lost my love of riding. I
rode her now as a job of work, to get from one end of the estate to another. And I had to ride her, because I had to work. Uncle John advised it and Mama supported him. They both thought me too pale and too nervous indoors. They both thought that working on the land would help me regain my cheerfulness.

It did not.

We had to weed and weed in the hayfields, trying to clear the thick wicked roots of burdock and dandelion to give the grass a chance to grow, and we had to keep the cornfields clear as well. Acre’s return to work happened all in a rush, and I rode out every day to check the progress in the fields, to see the sheep and the fattening lambs and to look at the broadening cows whose bellies were as lumpish and as rounded as the swallows’ nests stuck on the narrow beams of the barns.

Clary Dench was not forgotten in Acre. Nothing is ever forgotten in Acre. But with the land growing so green and so strong, the sun so hot and the clean wind blowing across the top of the downs, bringing with it day after day of warm weather, no one could keep a surly face and no one blamed me for failing to seek my friend among the shades with my sight.

Ralph Megson had not forgotten. His manner to me was changed; he retreated behind a wall of formality, which was worse, far worse, than his blazing rages. Though we worked side by side on the land, organizing the teams and checking the livestock and the crops, he never so much as smiled at me. And when I once reached out and touched his hand to show him something, he wordlessly withdrew his hand from under mine. His anger was too deep and too silent for any apology of mine; and I had no voice and no courage to broach a topic with Ralph. I did as he bid me on the land like a cipher. I sat at home with my mama like a girl content to have four walls around her. All my rebelliousness, all my keen Lacey courage seemed to have failed me, incongruously, in a season of wealth and growth and confidence.

We were in the very prime of a Wideacre early summer. The sky was full of birds, and the woods around Wideacre were
twittery with their excitement. Of all the springs and summers I had seen on Wideacre, I had never before had one where you could almost see the grass growing as you looked. The men at the hall were working all hours, and they even stayed late as the evenings grew lighter, so the hall seemed to be growing as sweetly and as naturally as everything else on the land.

Mama announced that she would have a garden to match the beautiful new house, and tied on a chip bonnet with determination and set three gardeners to work to weed and prune and tidy the garden and uproot the saplings and the encroaching woodland.

The warmer weather suited Uncle John, and he took to riding down to Acre on Prince, who went gently and sweetly with him. He took his regular clinic for the children, but found fewer and fewer patients.

‘I shall write a monograph on preventive medicine,’ he said to Mama as they took coffee together in the back garden one morning. ‘I really am amazed at the effect of good food on the health of the Acre children. It has cured them not only of hunger-related complaints, but also of diseases which I would have thought came from quite different causes.’

Mama nodded. ‘It’s surprising how much brighter the babies are when they are carried to full term and born of well-fed mothers,’ she said. ‘But also, John, there are few villages where they have a resident physician working for nothing!’

‘And few where the school dame is a baronet’s widow!’ John said, smiling back at her, ‘and quite the most exquisite relic I have ever seen.’

Mama burst out laughing. ‘Not a relic, John! What an absolutely hideous word! It makes me sound about a hundred!’

‘Well, I feel very aged and settled,’ John said comfortably. ‘I think everyone in Acre is going to be extraordinarily healthy and live for one hundred and twenty years. And I shall be the first to make a hundred and fifty.’

‘And what is your prescription for longevity?’ Mama asked him with a smile. She passed him the plate of Mrs Gough’s lightest cheese scones.

‘Coffee and scones at noon,’ John said. ? leisurely walk up to the hall at two. A thumping great big dinner at three, and an evening of songs in the parlour from you later on.’

‘It shall be as you order, Doctor,’ Mama said with mock deference. ‘The patient is a most important man, you know.’

‘A most blessed one, anyway,’ said Uncle John, and he leaned across from his chair to hers and kissed her gently on the cheek.

So it was a good season for everyone on Wideacre that year, except for Ralph, who was sad and silent, and except for me. The dreadful trembling which had shaken me for days after my fall had ceased, and I had even stopped crying without cause. But now I felt sick all the time. Whether I was riding or walking or resting, I felt all the time on the verge of sickness. It was worse in the morning when I could hardly bear to sit up in bed, because I knew the room would revolve before my eyes and I would feel nearly ready to retch. I asked my maid to bring me tea rather than chocolate in the morning, and I ate hardly any breakfast. By noon I could generally count on feeling better, but even as I rode up to the downs or along the drive to the hall, I knew something was wrong with me.

‘Still not hungry, darling?’ Mama said to me at breakfast when I had turned with a grimace from some medium-rare beef on the sideboard. The heart of it was pinky-red and it repelled me as if I were one of John’s Indian brahmins.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I have just lost my appetite these last few days.’

Uncle John’s eyes were sharp upon me. ‘Any fever?’ he said, ‘or do you have a headache, Julia?’

‘No,’ I said, curbing my impatience. ‘I’m just not hungry this morning.’

‘Perhaps John would have a look at you after breakfast,’ Mama said. ‘You are so pale since that fall of yours, my dear.’

I gave my lower lip a swift little nip. ‘I am quite well,’ I said, ‘and I should hate to be “looked at,” Mama, so please don’t fuss.’

Uncle John, with his instinctive tact, said no more. After breakfast, when I was out in the hall tying on my hat and looking at
my white face in the mirror, he stopped Mama from coming towards me, and said softly, ‘Leave her be, Celia. She cannot be seriously ill and riding every day as she does. If it is a reaction to the fall, it will right itself in a day or so, or she will come to you about it.’

That very day the weather changed and became cloudy and cooler. I was able to say at dinner that an east wind always made me irritable, and in the days that followed I continued to blame the weather. While the apple blossom went from pink to white and then snowed down upon the grass, we had week after week of low cloud and a glaring sky. The sky felt heavy, weighing down on the land. It was not grey, or dark, but bright, so bright I had to squint to look down the lane.

The lane itself blazed white and green; the gypsy’s lace on the verges was as thick as whipped cream, and the hawthorn flowers rose above them in clusters of whiteness like snowdrifts on the shiny-green hedges. The air was filled with the heavy scent of the summer flowers and weeds. The new cloverfields were purple with flowers and loud with the noise of addicted bees. On the common the bluebells were as thick as sea mist and on the downs the lower slopes were yellow with cowslips, and the air smelled of honey.

The chestnut trees flowered and then dropped their petals, and still the heavy clouds lay unmoving. The men from Acre stripped down to breeches to weed in the cornfields, but there was no sun, so their bodies stayed oddly white, like chalk men out of the chalk land. Sitting at the parlour window, listening to Mama play the pianoforte, I could not catch even a breath of wind. The sky sat on the hills of the downs like a cloth over a bowl of dough set out to rise. Under the soft lid, in the steamy heat, the grass grew and turned pale. The cream roses in the garden at the hall bloomed like an ominous reminder of the bowl of cream roses in my dream, and down the lane their lesser cousins, the dogroses, spotted the banks and the hedges, all as pale as fever patients against the vivid greenness of the bright patchwork counterpane of the Wideacre fields.

I had said I was perfectly well to Uncle John and Mama, but I had lied. I was not; I felt nauseous and tired. One morning, getting to my feet too swiftly from bending over a map in the library, I had stumbled with dizziness and was afraid I would faint. I was not hungry at mealtimes, but found I was tempted to Mrs Gough’s jars of bottled fruits and dried plums in the kitchen. My face was thinner and paler; my eyes, when I looked in the mirror, were hazy and fey. I was headachy and weary too, and for days at a time I made excuses and avoided riding out.

‘Come out for a drive,’ Mama said invitingly to me one morning. ‘It is not half so hot and humid this morning. Take me out in the gig and show me the hayfields. Mr Megson told me that they are nearly ready for cutting.’

I nodded and languidly went for my hat and gloves, but I saw the glance between Mama and Uncle John and his approving nod to her.

Mama was right, the weather had lifted. The feeling of the air being too thick to breathe had gone, and the light on the downs was clear and bright rather than too vivid. I clicked to the horse and we bowled down the road to Acre, the bit jingling with the brisk trot. The shadows of the trees flicked over us and the wind of our brisk passing blew in my face and brought some colour to my cheeks. The hay field I wanted to see was on the far side of Acre, and as we drove through the village, I twirled my whip in greeting to a couple of women working in their front gardens and waved to Ned Smith who was unloading charcoal in his yard.

A hayfield ready for cutting is a sea of palest green, knee-high, studded and scattered with blazes of colour: the scarlet of poppies, the deep blue of cornflowers, the pastel pinks and mauve and white of Lady’s smock, all growing spindly and tall up to the sunlight, pushing their bright faces through the grass. On the borders of the field the banks were bright with flowers: sweet-smelling clumps of cowslips, starry dogroses with their pale-pink faces and mustard-yellow stamens. And breathing over it all was the perfume of the wild bean flowers, sprawling over the hawthorn hedges and twining up the hazel and elder bushes.

‘It’ll be ready in three, four days of this weather,’ Miller Green said cheerily to me as we drew up alongside the lower meadow, where he leaned on the gate and smoked his pipe. I sniffed discreetly at the blue smoke. Tobacco. Miller Green had been smoking hawthorn leaves when he struggled to survive in a silent mill with no corn to grind. Now there were wages coming in, and he could buy his pinch of tobacco again.

‘It looks nearly ready,’ I agreed.

‘It’s the wheat I’m wanting,’ he said with longing. ‘I’ve been to the common field every day to see it. It’s a good crop, tall and strong, and thick as nettles on a dung heap!’

‘Good,’ I said. I got down from the gig so I could stand on the lower bar of the gate and scan the field to see if it was indeed near ready for cutting.

‘Thanks to you, Miss Julia,’ said the old man with a sly smile on his face.

‘Nonsense,’ I said evenly, but without heat. ‘You know that is nonsense, Miller Green. It’s a good crop because it was good-quality seed, thickly sown with the weather to suit it. Anything else is old wives’ nonsense.’