The Favoured Child (70 page)

‘I sent the last of his letters back,’ Richard said nonchalantly. ‘In with my letter to him, I sent them back too. So there’s nothing for you to worry about.’

‘His letters?’ I exclaimed. ‘You said you had returned them over a month ago, when you met him on the road.’

‘Some of them then,’ Richard acknowledged, ‘but I kept some of them back to reread. There were some things he said that I wanted to study more carefully. I’ve sent them all back now anyway. He
did
write a lot, didn’t he?’

My hands were hurting and I realized I had been clinging to the seat of the curricle. My knuckles were white.

‘He really did love you,’ Richard said, as if it were grounds for congratulation. ‘I’ve never read anything so passionate. When he wrote about watching you in the glove-maker’s shop, it sounded like he half worshipped you, and when he praised you for finding that Acre pauper. He really did love you, didn’t he, Julia? And now you’ll never see him again.’

I took the inside of my cheek between my teeth and bit so hard I could feel the delicate skin swell. The pain of it gave me my voice back. ‘Yes,’ I said. My voice was hard. ‘Yes, he did love me very well. And I loved him. But the fact that you stole his letters to me and read them and returned them is not really important now. Even I know that. This is the last time I shall ever mention his name, and it should be the last time you name him to me, for you do not hurt me, Richard, and you do not make me angry.’

We travelled in silence then, for many miles.

‘We’ll be home in time for supper,’ Richard said. ‘Probably before dark.’

‘Yes,’ I said. I was numb.

‘I don’t think we should tell them right away. I have to go back to Oxford tomorrow. Let’s leave it until I come home.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘You probably won’t be showing it until then,’ Richard said cheerfully. ‘And if they do start becoming suspicious, you can always write to me at once and I will come home early.’

‘Yes,’ I said again.

‘You don’t seem very happy,’ Richard said impatiently. ‘It has all come out exactly as we planned when we were children, and you are going around with a face like a wet Friday.’

‘I know,’ I said. I said nothing more. I felt no need to apologize to Richard for being in the sullens. I felt no obligation to pretend I was happy. I was seventeen years old, and it seemed to me that I had been trapped and ensnared into a prison where my land would be taken from me, and my confidence that I was squire would be taken from me, and my happiness would be taken from me. The fact that I had entered the prison thoughtlessly, turned the key with my mind elsewhere and tossed it out of the window in folly meant that I could blame no one but myself for the mess I had made of my life.

So I turned my head away from Richard and looked at the fields slipping by, and the pretty villages, and the clean streams, and the ripening wheat, and I said nothing at all. I did not weep. I did not cry out. I looked at the landscape and thought I must find from somewhere inside me the courage to go on and on and on until I reached a safe haven and could stop.

But I knew I could not stop for a while.

I
had been right that sad afternoon in the curricle, driving home. I had been right to think that I had to put my head down like a shire horse dragging a harrow through mud which was too thick. I could almost feel a weight of guilt around my neck and I bowed under it, and leaned against it, and tugged and tugged it with me through every warm summery day.

‘Julia, you are getting quite round-shouldered,’ Mama said in surprise from the parlour window as she watched me cutting roses in the garden outside. ‘Do try to stand up, my dear, and don’t look so grim. Is anything wrong?’

‘No, Mama,’ I said. I obediently straightened my shoulders and raised my chin, but I knew that I would forget and slouch forward again. I had the weight of an illegitimate child in my belly; I had a cart-load of guilt on my shoulders. I could not help but lean against it, like a man walking into a wind blowing against him.

The wind was blowing against me all the last weeks of June and the first weeks of July while I waited for Richard to come home and thought about what would happen when we told them.

Uncle John and my mama conspired to leave me alone. They saw that my health was better. The sickness had passed and I was eating properly again, but they were worried at the lines around my mouth and the scowl I wore on my forehead all the time, like a mark of Cain.

I could not look at my darling mama without wondering how the news would affect her. And I found I was longing for her to be angry with me – really furiously enraged. The thing I dreaded
most of all was for her to look at me with stricken eyes and blame herself. I had to push the thought of her distress away from me every day of that summer. If I had thought of Mama breaking her heart for me, I could not have gone on.

And I had to go on.

The wheat was ripening well on Acre and we had to ready the work-teams and the carts for harvesting. Even farms which have been harvesting for years find the preparation and the harvest a struggle, and we were all beginners on Wideacre. It is a struggle against the weather: the wheat has to ripen and then it has to be cut and stored at once. It is not like hay, which can survive a drenching and then dry off. Once wheat is cut, it has to be inside.

It is a struggle of organization: the men and the equipment and the gleaners and the wagons all have to be arranged before you start. It is a struggle of business: you have to decide how much of the crop to sell, the straw and the grain, how much to keep for your own use. You have to decide what price to charge: whether to sell as soon as you have harvested in a poor market or to keep the grain back until there is a shortage and prices are rising. And then you have to decide whether to profiteer on the backs of hungry people and refuse to sell at the proper rates, at the traditional rates, to let the price rise and rise and rise until people are starved.

That decision was an easy one on Wideacre. Never again would Acre people go hungry with a good crop in the field and full barns. But Ralph, Uncle John and I were agreed that a proportion of the crop should be sent out of the county and sold in the London markets for the best price it could command. And Ralph thought we would be in no danger of protest from the poor if they saw we were serving the local market first.

Only once in that warm sun-drenched time while I waited for Richard to come home and tell my mama was I directly challenged. It was Ralph Megson who spoke to me. It
would
be Ralph. I was not forgiven by him, though he was my friend, and always would be my friend. He had seen my face getting bleaker and the rings under my eyes getting as dark as bruises.

I had been in the carriage to Chichester to order a batch of sickles for harvesting. Ned in Acre had no time to make them with all the other work waiting for him outside his forge. I asked Jem to take me down to Acre so that I might leave a note for Ralph to tell him they would be delivered in the next week.

When we got to his cottage, he was sitting on the stone step by his front door, smoking a pipe in the sunshine. He smiled when he saw me and did not rise, but waited for me to come up his garden path and sit beside him.

‘Feel that sun,’ he said luxuriously. ‘The only thing I regret about coming home to Wideacre is that we do not have enough sunshine. I was out by the sugar islands for a time, Julia. It gets so hot there you cannot work out in the heat. I used to stretch out like a baking adder on the common and sleep all the day long in the sunshine.’

I sat primly beside him, and saw him smile and shut his eyes and turn his face up to the light. The sun did not warm me, though my skin grew hot. It felt like the blood which was feeding my little girl was a poison for my own flesh. Every time I smiled, or saw a growing leaf, or a playing child, or laughed at some jest, the poison took a grip on me and made me faint to think that soon, very soon, I should have to tell my mama that I was with child and shamefully married in secret to my cousin.

‘What ails you?’ Ralph said softly. ‘You’ve been as white as skimmed milk for days and as sour as lemons. It is not like you, Julia.’

‘Nothing,’ I said through my teeth.

‘Not with child, are you?’ Ralph asked casually. He had kept his eyes tight shut and his face turned up to the sun so he did not see me flush scarlet. He was keeping his eyes shut so I could talk freely.

‘No,’ I said.

‘If you were,’ he said as if the matter were of little interest,
‘if
you were, there would be no need to go rushing off to marry, nor confess to your mama or Uncle John. There are ways of getting rid of a child before your belly gets fat, if you catch it in time.’

‘Are there?’ I asked.

‘Aye,’ Ralph said. ‘If it was a little lass who was a friend of mine, I’d take her up near where the gypsies camp on the common, and see an old woman who is wise in these things. I could ride up there this very afternoon if you like, Julia.’

‘No,’ I said. My voice sounded dreary. ‘There is no need.’

Ralph opened his eyes and looked sharply at me, ‘I’m glad to hear it,’ he said frankly. ‘I was certain it was that which was pulling you so.’ He shut his eyes again like a blind fortune-teller and leaned his head back against the honey-coloured sandstone of his cottage wall.

‘A girl constrained into a betrothal is not bound by it, you know,’ he said to no one in particular. ‘And a lass who loses her virginity is not bound to marry the man. Even carriage folk. They’ll tell you that a young lady who loses her virginity would be better off dead. They’ll tell you that every young lady who wears white at the altar is a virgin. But that’s not true, you know.’

I said nothing. Ralph still did not look at me.

‘So if you’ve been romping with your cousin up on the downs, you’re not bound to him,’ he said to the sunlight on his eyelids. ‘You could refuse him and marry another man tomorrow and no one would know. Anyone who did know would only be Acre folk, and they’d not think the worse of you for it’. He paused. ‘And no husband you brought here would ever hear any gossip from us,’ he said.

I got to my feet. Ralph opened his eyes and shaded them with his hand, for I stood against the bright sky. My face was in deep shadow.

‘Thank you, Ralph,’ I said formally. ‘I know what you have been saying, but I have no need of any help which you could give me.’

Ralph made a little dismissive gesture with his hands. ‘I am yours to command,’ he said ironically. ‘Excuse me for not getting up.’

I smiled at that; despite my cold darkness I smiled at his
flowery courtesy and his idleness. I turned on my heel and went out of that humming flowering summery garden and drove up to the Dower House where my mama was singing at the pianoforte, not knowing that in a few days I was going to walk into the peaceful home she and John had so painstakingly made and break her heart.

The wheat was ripe before Richard was due to come home.

I was glad. Even in the depths of my despairing sorrow I could be glad that we might get this first Wideacre crop safely gathered in and threshed and stored before I was forced to let loose the storm on our heads and before Uncle John and I could no longer talk of farming.

The weather had got sultry again, and when I met Ralph down at the mill, he spoke of letting the wheat go another few days so that the storm might pass. ‘Funny sky,’ he said, squinting up at the thick-bellied white clouds and the sun shining so hot on them, but not breaking through.

‘It feels as if there should be a storm,’ I said, ‘but it was like this at haymaking and the weather never broke properly then.’

‘If I was at sea, I should run for a port,’ Ralph said. He was looking towards the horizon where there was a yellow tinge to the sky over the top of the downs.

‘How long can the wheat wait before we cut it?’ I asked.

‘It can’t,’ he said with finality. ‘We have to start tomorrow unless the storm actually breaks tonight. We cannot tell how long the sickle gangs will take; the old men are badly out of practice and the young ones have never reaped in a gang before. Some of them have even had to go to their fathers to learn how to use a sickle. We can’t waste time waiting for bad weather which may not come. We’ll start tomorrow.’

‘I’ll tell John,’ I said and turned to my horse which was tethered in the mill yard.

‘Aye,’ said Ralph. ‘And you’ll be down to the common field yourself in the morning, won’t you, Julia? Everyone would want you to be there.’

‘I wouldn’t miss it for a fortune,’ I assured him with a smile. ‘It’s my first harvest too, you know.’

I smiled at him, but my face felt stiff. It was the golden time of the year, but I was in shadow. The wheat was ripening, but I felt like ice. I rode home like one of Richard’s childhood lead soldiers on a lead horse. My heart felt like lead too.

We dined early and I went to bed early, with Mama and Uncle John wishing me a good day’s harvesting tomorrow and promising to visit me in the field with my dinner in a box.

I fell asleep almost at once. Then I had a dream.

Where it came from, I do not know – perhaps Ralph’s reference to the gypsies, perhaps my memory of the gypsy who played for us last Christmas. I dreamed almost at once of a gypsy girl who sat at the front of a cart pulled by an old black horse, a horse as big as a hunter, well bred and ill suited to the work of pulling a tawdry painted cart. It was night and the weather was foul, and we were on some empty waste land, perhaps the common. In my dream she was holding a baby in her arms; the reins for the horse were slack on its back and her man was walking by its head. The pots on the side of the cart, the carved sticks for sale and the withe baskets holding clothes-pegs jiggled as the cart rocked on the uneven surface of the track. She went past me, soundless, and I turned to see her go. The rain scudded into my face and I could scarcely see her for the darkness and the driving rain. She had an old cape or a blanket over her shoulders and pulled up to cover her head, and the silhouette of her back was shapeless. One little lantern bobbed at the side of the cart; and it was going away from me.