The Favoured Child (76 page)

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.’

I nodded. Once again we had come to the place where even my powerful grandmama would not support me. Once the door of the Dower House had closed behind me, I was Richard’s own. No one could come between the two of us. He owned me as surely as he now owned the land I had once called mine, my land, my horse, my little box of trinkets, my gowns, even my own body. All of them belonged to Richard, because I had once said, ‘I do’ in the rocking cabin of a dirty little boat.

Acre, and Sea Mist and I might all suffer under his ownership, and there was nothing anyone could do about it.

There was nothing I could do about it.

Richard and Ralph clashed almost daily. I heard about it when I drove into Acre. I heard about it from Grandmama, who had heard it from Lord Havering, who had been present when Richard had told Ralph that he wanted a gamekeeper on the estate and Ralph had said that he would not work with one. I heard about it from the kitchenmaid, who told me that Mr Megson and my husband had shouted at each other in the middle of Acre about whether old Mrs Merry should be evicted or not. ‘Terrible scene, it was,’ she said in awe.

Ralph had won the gamekeeper question by default, but it was still a victory. He had told Richard that he could not find a man from Acre who would do the job, which was true enough. They knew already, in the way the poorest of the poor sense things early, that the Wideacre experiment had ended almost as soon as it had begun, and that they should rue the day that they went back to work for a Lacey.

They had lost their reputation as the notorious village, the village which had killed its squire, and they had earned county-wide praise for being the fastest team of reapers in the county. If the estate had been for sale, there would have been many, many buyers. Acre had been mastered, and anyone will buy a horse which has been well broken and learned its paces.

They had trusted the Laceys again. They had trusted the Lacey word. It was coincidence that we went back on our word as soon as the wheat was in the barn, on the very day that the harvest was completed, but poor people have little faith in coincidences. Those who still loved me said I was trapped by Richard. Others, who were older and bitter, said it was a skilful ploy by the Laceys to fool Acre once more. The village was back to work, and they had lost their free access to the fields, to the park and to the common, and all around the village were fences they themselves had erected. So the older, wiser ones scented a plot and smiled sourly, and doffed their hats to me with a knowing look in their eyes that recognized a clever victor.

They could not pull down all the fences, all at once. They had learned to hope and they had lost their anger. They could not move against us, they could only mutter and mouth curses against the name of Lacey. They had consulted the Chichester lawyers who drew up the contracts on the land and they had found, as Ralph had once predicted they would, that the law belongs to the landlords. They could not sue us for breach of contract with them, for we had not breached a contract. All we had promised to do was to share profits with them once the costs of running the estate had been subtracted. Richard made sure that the costs cut the Acre share down to a subsistence wage. All the other promises, about loans for seed and equipment and stock, were voluntary offers from the Laceys. They could be withdrawn. Acre needed no one to tell them that they
had
been withdrawn.

There was nothing they could do to bind the Laceys down as they were bound down. All they could do was to look surly and to start poaching. So no one from the village came forward for the job of Richard’s gamekeeper, and anyone who set foot on the estate looking for the work was quietly taken to one side by Ralph, or one of the other older men, and warned off. They always went.

It could have been worse for the village where I had once been loved, the village where I had talked of a land-sharing scheme, a share-cropping scheme. They still had rabbits and hares, and
even pheasants and venison, and fish from the river. They also had a reliable supply of wheat.

‘Where are they buying their wheat?’ Richard asked me abruptly one morning at breakfast. The coffee-jug was before me, and I poured myself another cup while I thought what I should say. I was in the fifth month of my pregnancy and I found I had become slow and dreamy as I had grown heavier and broader.

‘I saw a great wagon of grain outside Miller Green’s, and when I asked him who it was for, he would not answer me,’ Richard said with irritation. ‘I am sure he was grinding it for the village. I don’t understand the returns Megson made from the Midhurst market. I wonder if Acre has hidden some wheat somewhere, to take them through the winter.’

I looked out of the dining-room window, past Richard’s head. The trees in the orchard were heavy with fruit, the blackbirds glutted on the windfalls. Through the open window I could sniff the cider-smell of rotting fruit. The branches were bowed to the ground with the crop. The apple trees I had planted were yielding too; Ralph had gangs out every day, picking and packing them for the Chichester fruit market. The land was rich. The Laceys were rich. Acre was dirt poor.

‘Where would they hide it, Julia?’ Richard demanded. ‘You know the estate as well as anyone. If you wanted to hide a couple of wagonloads of wheat where would you put it?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said carelessly. In truth I felt careless. I sipped the coffee and gazed out of the window at that green shoulder of the downs above the orchard. The beech coppice was changing colour already; the green was going and the strong brassy colour was shining through. The cedar tree in the garden was dark purple and the sky was very blue above it. I wondered if all wives have this longing to be elsewhere, a longing which is not even as clear as a wish for freedom or a dislike of one’s husband. It is just a vague, wordless sense that there should be something more, something more than being inside a window looking outwards for ever.

‘Are you listening to me, Julia?’ Richard was sharp. I dragged my eyes from the window and looked at him.

Of course,’ I said. ‘I do not know where I would hide a couple of wagonloads of corn on Wideacre. I do not know that anyone has done so.’

‘Would you be told if such a theft had taken place?’ Richard asked. ‘And if you knew,’ he continued sweetly, ‘would you keep it from me? Would you side with your precious Acre against me? I hope you would not, Julia. But I cannot be entirely sure.’

‘I would not, Richard,’ I said. I met his eyes without flinching. We had been living in the same house alone for some weeks and I had learned to lie to him. I might not always convince him, but he was often prepared to close his eyes to his uncertainty. Unusually for Richard, he was ready to let things go between us, and I still did not know why that should be.

‘Are you sure that Megson has said nothing to you?’ he demanded suddenly, as fast as a swooping falcon to my lie.

I shook my head, and half consciously put my hand on my swelling belly.

Richard’s face changed at once. ‘It does not matter! It does not matter!’ he said swiftly. ‘Don’t think about it, Julia I shall resolve the problem. Do not you trouble yourself with it. The Chichester accoucheur, Mr Saintly, said that of all things you
must
avoid worry. Don’t think about it any more.’

‘Don’t fuss, Richard,’ I said. He had risen from his place and come around the table to me. He was looking down at me and his face was filled with concern, but also with some eager hunger that I could not explain.

‘Are you thinking of me or the baby?’ I asked shrewdly.

‘Of you, of course,’ he said, but his eyes were on my swollen belly. ‘And the baby too, naturally. My son,’ he said, and his voice was full of longing. ‘My son, the next Lacey, the heir to Wideacre.’

‘What about the wheat, then?’ I asked, interrupting Richard’s meditation on the baby he was certain was a son. ‘Even if they have stolen a couple of wagons and hidden it, Richard, that is no
more than they were promised by Uncle John and me. It would be difficult to find, and it would cause much bad feeling in Acre if you took it to market now. Surely the best thing to do is to leave things as they are. Acre will need a supply of winter corn, you know. And the price is going up all the time.’

Richard nodded absently. He reached out a gentle hand and touched my rounded belly. ‘Yes, yes,’ he said softly. ‘Don’t you trouble yourself with it, Julia. You just stay quiet and at peace, and concentrate on breeding a strong baby for the Wideacre cradle.’

‘I can’t be at peace if I think you are in conflict with Acre,’ I said. ‘I know the village seems quiet now, but remember Ralph Megson himself telling us about bread riots and corn riots. It need not always be violent and dangerous, Richard, but the poor believe they have a right to fair-priced wheat, sold and grown locally. I should hate Acre to try to take the law into its own hands.’

Richard nodded at that. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘and I know that he is still a bread rioter at heart.’

‘Maybe,’ I said, ‘but he would never go against the owners of the land unless he thought they were behaving wrongly. If he has taken some corn, it is to ensure that the contract John and I made with Acre is honoured by you.’

Richard’s face was dark. ‘Well, don’t think of it, Julia,’ he said. ‘I don’t want you worrying about it when you should be resting and making the baby strong.’

‘But I
do
worry about it,’ I said, and I thought myself very clever to use Richard’s passionate concern for our unborn child against his hardness of heart. ‘There is only one way I can
stop
worrying, Richard: if you stop giving me cause. Every time there is trouble in the village, I hear of it, and of course it distresses me. If you truly want to save me anxiety, you should take Mr Megson’s advice. I don’t think Uncle John ever went against him, and it was Mr Megson who got Acre back to work.’

Richard looked hard at me, and his eyes gleamed, but I thought I had a way to rule him and to help Acre. I was not cautioned.

‘You admire Megson very much, do you not?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Indeed I do. If you knew him better, Richard, if you had seen him this spring and summer, you would admire him too. He has done wonders with the estate. Uncle John always said that nothing could have happened without him. And the people of Acre love him and trust him, far more than they would ever love and trust one of us. I do wish you could learn to work with him, even if you cannot like him.’

Richard showed his white even teeth. ‘I like him well enough,’ he said. ‘And I am coming to understand him more and more. I shall ask him directly about the missing corn, Julia. And I shall act on what he says.’ The hard brightness left his face and he smoothed my belly again with a proprietory hand. ‘So do not upset yourself and upset my son,’ he said earnestly. ‘Promise me you will rest while I am out this afternoon.’

I did not much like being loved only as the bearer of the heir to Wideacre. And I did not like how Richard was so set on a son. There was some hint of something old and dangerous in the way he so longed for another heir for this land to which the Laceys had clung for so many years.

I hoped very much that the child would be a girl, and that she would be free of the land. I would have her love it as I loved it, as the sweetest best country that anyone could work, not as Richard loved it, with this dark passion for ownership.

I thought I had won my way and won Acre its winter wheat, and so I smiled at Richard and promised I would rest. I would rest quiet while he went out. I kept my promise and went to my bed, which is why I was asleep when the soldiers came for Ralph Megson.

I
heard of it from my maid, Jenny Hodgett, the gate-keeper’s daughter. She was walking out with Bobby Miles from the village. Bobby had been in the Bush tavern when the two soldiers had ridden down the street with the carriage behind them.

They had pulled up outside Ralph’s cottage in the pearly-grey twilight of the Wideacre evening, soft and quiet with the birds going to roost and the stars coming out. An officer with the county militia had got out of the coach and gone into Ralph’s cottage without knocking on the door.

By this time everyone who had been drinking in the Bush was outside staring, of course. All the women were at their doorways, and all the children were out in the lane, their mouths agape.

There was no noise inside the cottage, there were no raised voices. Only a few minutes passed before Ralph came out, pulling on his brown jacket, with the gentleman walking very close at his shoulder. Ralph had glanced around at the faces and hesitated, as if he would say something, but then the gentleman tapped his shoulder with his cane – a bit impertinent, Bobby Miles had thought. Ralph had shrugged off the touch, given a little smile to Acre and climbed awkwardly on his wooden legs into the carriage.