The Favoured Child (31 page)

‘Land and loving,’ he said, making it sound like a proverb, ‘that’s what the Laceys want. And Lacey women want it most of all. Beatrice chose the land. I think you are choosing love.’

I scanned his dark face, his kind eyes with the pale lines streaked around them.

‘Is it worth it?’ he asked gently. ‘Is his love worth the sweetest land in the whole of England?’

‘Oh, yes,’ I said with confidence. I had loved Richard from childhood. I had promised to love him for ever.

Ralph nodded. ‘You’ve made your choice, then,’ he said gently. ‘For love. For love, and the indoor life, and being a young lady.’ He gave an abrupt laugh. ‘Beatrice ’ud take her hand to your backside if she were alive!’

‘I
have
to be a young lady!’ I protested. ‘I have no choice. I
was born a young lady. That is my part in life. That is what I am.’

‘Nay,’ he said reassuringly. ‘You’re no bread-and-butter miss. You’ve been mewed up like a young hawk all your life and it’s made you weak and foolish, so you fancy yourself in love with that young puppy and make a virtue out of letting him bully you. Such a little fool that you cannot even see what you want. You should be out on the land making it grow. You’re Beatrice’s heir. Of course your life will be quiet and empty if you live it in a little parlour thinking of nothing but being a young lady and loving your cousin!’

He smiled at me like a dark prophet telling some simple truth which I had always known but never before heard in words. Suddenly the Dower House seemed a strange forcing-house for turning a wild free little girl into a young lady who could be shouted at, abused, and who would pride herself that she could return love for pain. I scowled with concentration, trying to think what this view of myself meant.

‘What should I do, then?’ I asked.

‘Grow up,’ Ralph said, unsympathetically. ‘Work it out for yourself, Julia. You’ve got a brain not entirely addled by a ladylike education: use it. You’ve got a heart which can feel the land, a voice which can talk clearly to people and ears that can listen. So grow up.’

I gave him a level look in reply to his bracing tone. But he was unrepentant. He gave me a mischievous grin and a gentle push towards the gig.

‘Run along, Miss Julia,’ he said. ‘I’m always vexed when I am hungry. Remember never to interrupt a working man at his dinner break. Go home – and don’t think too much! And don’t promise anything to anyone until you’ve had a chance to find out what you really want.’ He untied the reins for me and gave me his hand to help me into the gig.

‘I am sorry to have vexed you, Mr Megson,’ I said in my smallest voice, keeping my eyes down. ‘I did not mean to make you angry.’

‘Nay!’ he exclaimed, instantly concerned, but then he caught a glimpse of my smile and realized I was mocking him. ‘Go home, Julia Lacey, go home!’ he said crossly. ‘Go and tease someone who has the leisure and the wit for it. I am a simple man, and I am hungry.’

I clicked to the pony, still laughing, and waved at him, and trotted off back home down the lane.

But I was very far from laughter the next morning when Jenny brought me my morning chocolate at half past five with the news that it was raining in a light penetrating drizzle and looked set to stay bad all day.

‘Oh, no!’ I said, rolling over and burying my face in my pillows.

‘’Tis cold too,’ she said with the cheeriness of someone who is up and dressed to someone who will soon have to be.

I sat up and looked out of the window. It was a miserable day, foggy and grey, with the raindrops dripping off the leaves of the trees of Wideacre Park.

‘Too wet to set the apple trees,’ I said.

‘Is it?’ she asked, looking out of the window.

‘No,’ I said crossly. ‘It’s perfectly all right. Jenny, do light me a fire. I cannot get up into winter weather without one.’

She gave me a nod and went down to the kitchen for some kindling and little logs. I watched her lay the fire while I sipped my morning chocolate and only when the chill was off the room could I find the courage to jump out of bed and dress myself.

I had yet another new driving dress, thanks to Mama, who had guessed that I would wear the first one thin in the first months of my outdoors work. She had ordered the Chichester dressmaker to make me two extra dresses to the same pattern and measurements; today I chose the thicker one of pale-grey wool with a matching hat. The grey took up the colour of my eyes and made them seem large and luminous in my pale face. It was cut well; a bit tight, in truth, for I had been eating like a hunter in training in the past few weeks. It made me seem tall and slim and elegant.

Jenny looked up from sweeping the hearth. Oh, Miss Julia, you look lovely!’ she said. ‘That colour do suit you!’

‘It’s to be hoped anyone can see me at all!’ I said, glaring out of the window at the greyness outside. ‘I shall blend in with that beastly fog and they will drive the tree cart over me.’

She laughed at my ill humour and went down to the kitchen. Stride was not yet up, nor Mrs Gough, but she had left me a saddle-bag packed with my breakfast. ‘We didn’t know if you’d eat your breakfast in the field or come home,’ Jenny said. ‘Beatrice always had her breakfast in the field, so Mrs Gough left that out for you if you wanted to stay.’ There was a momentary pause as both Jenny and I realized the casual comparison. But she went on, ‘And Mrs Gough said to ask you if you want your dinner sent down?’

‘If I’m not back by two, could you send something down for me?’ I asked. ‘But I dare say I’ll be back. It’s not the weather for a picnic’

I nodded farewell to her and went out by the back door. The great cedar tree in the garden had its high head in the clouds; its dark trunk was streaked with wetness. There was a steady patter of rain on the leaves. I bent down and touched the ground. The grass was soaked, but it had not been raining for that long. The trees could go in. The ground would be wet and difficult to work, but I was not afraid that the roots would get waterlogged. I knew the trees would take. I knew it as well as I knew my own name, or the outline of the downs beyond the mist.

Jem was in the stables and the pony was in the gig.

‘Thank you,’ I said. I had been unwilling to get up, but Jem was even worse. He had his greatcoat on, and I caught a glimpse of very dirty flannels underneath. He was not even dressed.

‘If Uncle John saw you like that, he’d turn you off,’ I observed.

Jem nodded. ‘I overslept,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d rather have your pony harnessed on time by me like this than brought to you by me in livery half an hour from now.’

‘I’d rather have it on time
and
you in your livery,’ I said.

He gave me his hand up to the gig and I gave him a smile. That was one of my first experiments in giving a reprimand, and I was not sure if I had done it right. ‘I hope you are not offended, Jem?’ I asked.

His dirty face creased into a smile. ‘You’re in the right,’ he said grudgingly. ‘Don’t get above yourself; you’ll do.’

‘Thank you,’ I said, and that little bit of extra confidence carried me through the day, even when the tree cart overturned and we had to lift the saplings out of the mud of the lane without breaking their springy branches; even when they put a row of trees too close to another, leaving no room for the pickers and weeders to get through, and we had to dig them out and do it all again; even when they vanished away to Acre early for their dinner break and were late back.

‘It won’t do!’ I said crossly to Ted Tyacke. ‘I took an hour for my dinner, and I had to go all the way back to the Dower House. If this is a partnership between the Laceys and Acre, then I should not be overseer and timekeeper here. You should be here on time because you want to be.’

And Ted, the friend of my girlhood, nodded and put out a dirty hand to help me down from the gig. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘I think we all find it hard to believe we are all working for the same end.’

After that exchange – in the muddy field with the pile of saplings behind us and half the field planted in unpromising spindly rows – the work went faster. They were learning their skills, even as I was; and when I had precisely worked out how many trees to a row, how many rows to the field, and then ended up with one extra sapling, they laughed so hard at my puzzled face that Ted had tear-stains down his grimy cheeks.

‘Oh, take the stupid thing!’ I said in impatience. ‘I’ve worked it out wrong, and now there’s no room for it! Plant it on the village green and the children can have the apples off it. Perhaps it will keep them out of this orchard!’

‘N-N-Nothing will keep them out of this orchard!’ Matthew
Merry told me, his brown eyes twinkling. ‘They’re b-b-brigands. Don’t you remember how we were?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘and look at us now!’

Clary came over to stand with us at the gate and we looked back at the field. Ralph had been wrong. I had been wrong. We had planted it in the day and, although it was dusk and time to trudge wearily home, we had done what we had promised ourselves. Indeed, we had done better.

‘I’m tired,’ she said.

I looked at her with quick sympathy. Her mother had just given birth to another baby and Clary had been walking with it all night, keeping it quiet so that her mother could sleep.

‘I’ll drive you,’ I said; and she and Matthew and Ted walked with me to the gig.

‘We’ll follow,’ Ted said. ‘We’d overbalance the gig and the pony couldn’t manage the weight. We’ll see you tomorrow Julia.’

I nodded and smiled, too tired myself for extra words. But Matthew touched Clary’s hand as she gripped the side of the gig and hauled herself wearily up.

‘I’ll come around tonight,’ he said, ‘about nine o’clock. I’ll walk the baby tonight when she wakes.’

Clary nodded and leaned forward to pat his cheek with her hand. Then I slapped the reins on the pony’s rump and he set off up the muddy track for Acre. The rain had stopped, but the clouds were still low and it was very dark and quiet under the trees.

‘Matthew helps you with the baby?’ I queried.

‘Aye,’ she said shortly. ‘He’d do the cooking as well if I let him. But he gets enough teasing about nursemaiding for my family without that as well.’

‘That’s kind of him,’ I said. ‘But he always loved you.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We’re betrothed now, you know, Julia. Properly. And we’ve spoken to Ralph Megson about a cottage. He says we can have that empty one on the green.’

I gave her hand a squeeze. ‘I’m glad,’ I said. ‘I always liked
Matthew. And I’ve always liked the way he treated you. But how will your mother manage without you?’

Clary gave a little sigh, her head half turned from me so she could look out into the woods with the trees going past us, ghostly slow.

‘I’ll take the two older children to live with me, and Alice is going into service at Midhurst. So that’ll only leave Ma with Joe and the new baby.’

I nodded. Clary had mothered her brothers and sisters for so long that I could not have imagined her leaving them. Hearing her talk like that made me feel more than simple pleasure at a friend’s happiness. I felt as I did when I saw the saplings going in, or when I saw the ditches newly dug or a ploughshare going into fallow ground. That Acre was coming right. Coming right for the land and for the people.

‘What about you?’ asked Clary abruptly. ‘Is it to be Richard for you?’

I nodded. ‘It’s a secret,’ I warned her.

‘Pretty well known for a secret, then,’ she said with a smile. ‘Everyone in Acre has known you two would be married ever since you were born.’

‘They may know it in Acre,’ I said drily, ‘but if it gets back to Mama or Uncle John, I should be in trouble.’

Clary shot a sideways glance at me. ‘Are they
still
against it?’ she asked. ‘Even now that there is money?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘They’ve not changed on that.’

‘Maybe your ma thinks you could do better,’ Clary suggested tentatively.

‘There could hardly be a better match for the estate,’ I protested, but Clary shook her head.

‘Not for the estate, Julia,’ she said. ‘For you. Someone who would come to you fresh, who would love you, who would see you for yourself and not as part of his childhood and his fortune.’ Her voice was so low I could scarcely hear her. ‘Someone who would treat you tender,’ she said softly.

We had reached her cottage gate and I checked the pony and sat very still in the twilight.

‘We can’t all have a Matthew,’ I said at length. ‘I love Richard and I don’t complain.’

‘I know,’ she said. And we were both silent.

‘Drat,’ she said in a quite different voice looking at the dark silhouette of her cottage. ‘The fire’s gone out again.’

‘I’ll come in and help,’ I offered.

‘Nay,’ she said kindly. ‘You’ve done a full day’s work too. I reckon you were working harder than any of us. You were up and down those rows twenty times measuring the distance.’

‘And then I got it wrong!’ I said.

Clary laughed. ‘That was the funniest thing I ever did see,’ she said. ‘I thought Ted was going to choke.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Well, at least Acre’s got an apple tree out of it. Are you sure you don’t want me to come in?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘The sooner I start, the sooner I’ll get done.’ She got down from the gig, stiff with tiredness as if she were an old lady and not a lass of seventeen. ‘Eh,’ she said ruefully, ‘I shan’t be dancing tonight!’

‘Me neither,’ I agreed, and she turned up the path to her little cottage as I waved my whip at her in farewell and headed the pony for home.

‘J
ulia! Julia!
Julia!
I say! Are you deaf!’ It was Uncle John’s voice, shouting up the stairs. I jumped from my bed and pattered across the floor to open the door. ‘What is it?’ I called down.

‘A surprise,’ he said. ‘Come down at once!’ I threw off my wrapper and pulled on my oldest gown, a muslin sprig, which had once been pink but was now pale as a lily with much washing. In obedience to Uncle John’s haste, I did not wait to dress my hair, but tied a ribbon around my head and let it tumble down my back as if I were still a little girl. Then I pulled on my sandals and scampered downstairs.