The Favoured Child (77 page)

‘He smiled?’ I asked Jenny, for it mattered a great deal to me.

‘Bobby said so,’ she confirmed. ‘He said he gave the little grin he has when something has gone badly wrong on the land, and he says, “Damnation,” but does not blame anybody. Begging your pardon, Miss Julia,’ she added.

I nodded. ‘But what can they have taken him
for?
I demanded.

She looked at me forlornly as if it was her own lover which had gone. ‘Don’t you
know
, Miss Julia?’ she asked.

I gazed at her blankly. I had a dreadful cold frightened feeling that I did know. I shook my head in denial.

‘He was a rioter,’ she said, ‘when he was young. He led a gang in Kent, and a riot in Portsmouth. Nobody was ever hurt,’ she said swiftly. ‘It was just to get a fair price, Miss Julia. You know how they used to have riots for a fair price.’

I nodded. I knew.

‘And then he went to be a smuggler,’ she said softly. ‘He was pressed as a sailor too.’ She hesitated and looked at me. ‘Then he went against the gentry for a while,’ she said. ‘They called him the Culler.’

‘I knew of that,’ I said. ‘He told me himself.’

Jenny’s head was down, and she took one glancing sideways look at me. ‘No one in Acre would ever have betrayed him, not if we’d been burned alive,’ she said passionately. ‘Miss Julia,
who
can have called out the Chichester magistrate to take him in like that? Do you know?’

My hands were as cold as ice.

I knew.

‘What will become of him?’ I asked, my voice very low.

‘They’re certain to be able to prove at least some of the riots against him,’ she said.

I nodded. There were not many black-haired cripples riding horses in riots. ‘But they could not prove he came against the Laceys,’ I said as if my loyalty were with him, as if it were not my family he had attacked, as if it were not my own blood-mother he had killed.

‘No,’ said Jenny. She had her apron up to mop her eyes. ‘But just one witness from the other riots will be enough to finish him,’ she said with a little wail. ‘They’ll hang him for sure, Miss Julia!’

‘My God,’ I said. Jenny sobbed noisily into her pinny, and I sat in my chair with my hand on my belly, feeling the little comforting movement of the baby for which Richard longed as the next squire.

If he was indeed the next squire, he should not have waiting for him this inheritance of hatred and suspicion, and of fear. I could give my baby little indeed when I gave him Wideacre, but I could give him the chance to live on the land without the blood on his head of the best man in the village.

I looked at Jenny with sudden determination. ‘I won’t have it!’ I said. ‘I won’t have Ralph Megson hanged now for something he did years ago. I won’t have him hanged when everyone knows that he did the right thing, the thing that anyone would do if their family and friends were starving. He rid Acre of that generation of Laceys and there is no one who does not think that Beatrice was in the wrong and earned that riot. I won’t have Ralph Megson hanged.’

Jenny looked at me. She was in two minds about me. I had held command in Acre and she remembered the days when I was the only heir on the land, and I could call out a ploughing team. But when she looked at me now, she saw a young woman with her belly curving with motherhood. She saw a young wife, newly married, with a husband whom men feared. She saw a girl trapped into marriage and stripped of her wealth. I was no longer a figure of power.

‘How can you stop it?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know yet,’ I said. ‘I’ll think of something. I’ll think of some way. I’ll go out for a walk down the drive to the hall and I’ll think of something.’

She bobbed a curtsy and held the door for me, and I went out to take the air and to think. But though I walked all the way to the hall and watched the work there for a while, and though I walked all the way home again, no plan came to me.

When I went to bed that night, I knew that Ralph would see the wide yellow harvest moon criss-crossed with the bars across his window. I thought of his face turned up to the light, and his faint rueful smile as he faced the likelihood of his death. I tossed on the pillows all night until I heard the cocks crowing at dawn. I did not sleep at all.

And while I was thinking, while I was walking and walking,
like a ghost up and down the drive to the hall, walking with faster and faster strides as if my urgency could make a plan come into my head, the Chichester magistrates transferred the case to Winchester, because they feared a riot if Ralph was tried so near to his home. And the Winchester magistrates, no braver than their Chichester colleagues, transferred the case to London, where they said he could be kept more secure while witnesses were found who had seen riots of twenty years ago.

I knew he would need a lawyer, and I knew a London lawyer would cost a great deal of money. I had been poor all my childhood; I had worn shoes which were too tight as my feet grew, I had patched my gowns, I had done without gloves. But I never knew myself to be poor until I looked out of the window at the rich autumn colours of
my
trees on
my
land, and knew I had no money to help Ralph.

I could have asked Richard for some, but I knew he would guess why I needed it, and I knew he would refuse. I went to my grandmama.

‘Two hundred pounds!’ she repeated in amazement. ‘Julia, whatever can you need two hundred pounds for?’

I stumbled, trying to explain, but as soon as she understood it was men’s business she frowned. ‘You are no longer in control of Wideacre,’ she said. ‘And your former manager’s concerns are not yours. Have you asked Richard if he would pay for the man’s defence?’

‘No,’ I said quietly.

‘I dare say you have your reasons for that,’ she said, and there was a world of understanding in her voice. ‘But if you cannot ask your husband for a sum of money, it is unlikely you will be able to obtain it anywhere else, Julia. If I had it, I would give it to you. But my own fortune is tied up and his lordship does not provide me with that sort of sum as pin-money.’

She paused, and I saw her swallow her pride like a lump in her throat. ‘I have only twenty-five pounds’ pin-money a quarter,’ she said, her voice very low. ‘I have spent this quarter’s allowance, and I have no savings.’

I nodded. I was blinking hard, for there were tears in my eyes. ‘How
do
married women get money if their husbands will not give them enough?’ I demanded. I had some vague idea of loans, or of jewellers who would buy a trinket.

Grandma looked at me as if I were a little child once more and she was teaching me how to hold my fish-knife. ‘If their husbands do not provide for them, they have no money,’ she said blankly. Of course, a wife is dependent upon her husband’s goodwill.’

I looked at her as if I were a fool who could not understand plain English. I was seventeen years old and I still had not learned that I had no rights in the world. I had no money of my own and I had no land. Everything around me, the water I drank, the food I ate, belonged to Richard, for in marrying him I had made it over to him entire. And whether I wanted three halfpence of what I had once called my own, or whether I wanted two hundred pounds, I had to apply to him. And he could refuse me.

He did refuse me.

I buried my pride and told him I thought Ralph Megson wrongly accused and that I should like to send him some money to pay for a lawyer. Richard looked at me with a sparkle in his eyes as though I had said something most extremely funny.

‘Oh, no, Julia,’ he said, his voice very warm and indulgent. ‘Most certainly not.’

The days got colder, and it was grey when I awoke in the mornings and dark by dinner-time in the afternoon. I did nothing to help Ralph Megson in a prison far away in London. Jenny Hodgett told me they had put their savings together in the village and asked Dr Pearce to send them to him in London. Dr Pearce, torn between his horror at law-breakers and murderers and his pity for the distress of Acre, added to the little fund on his own account, and contacted his own cousin and asked him to see Ralph in gaol and keep the fees low.

I knew then that the time I had seen was here, the time when Ralph would not be able to help me and I would not be able to help him.

I was very lonely.

In autumn the countryside is very beautiful. A Wideacre autumn is a season when the world seems full of colour and you cannot believe that the bright leaves could ever fade. The hedgerows are full of glossy berries: the tulip-shaped scarlet hips and haws, the fat black bobbles of blackberries. The hawthorn trees are dotted with berries of a deep, dark redness, and the ivy flowers with waxy green delicate bouquets.

As the chestnut leaves started falling in great yellow fans on to the drive, I took to walking in the woods opposite the Dower House, going quite far in random sweeps, but staying under the trees as if they could give me some sort of comfort which the empty common lands could not.

Sometimes on my walks I would back against a tree and look up at the blue sky patterned all over with the copper, yellow and orange leaves. I would eat a handful of blackberries or crack beech-nuts open and eat the little sweet kernels. I would put my hands behind me and feel the rough bark of the tree and try to hear the beat of the land. But I could hear nothing at all.

I tried to count my blessings, but something must have been wrong with my arithmetic, for I could not make it come right. I knew I loved Richard with a long love with its roots in my earliest childhood and its flower in my belly, but I could find no happiness in knowing that we were at last where we had longed to be: a married couple on Wideacre.

I thought that was because Wideacre felt like my familiar home no more. Acre had changed already, and would change again when Richard was out on the land with the ploughing teams. I would be indoors with the new baby so there would be no smiles for me, and no calling of ‘Speed the plough!’

But I knew also that there would be no smiles for Richard. The special magic of Wideacre – that masters and men could try to work together in unity – had quite gone. Never again would the fastest reaping gang in the country celebrate their triumph in the Bush at Acre. Next year there would be hired hands, paid labourers. Never again would they stand waist-deep in their own
corn and laugh for joy at the richness of the land which had grown such a crop, and boast of their own skill in cutting it.

Acre was different, and I was different too.

I was mourning my mama still. Even now it had been less than two months. I was haunted by her in dreams which made me happy while I was asleep, but made me weep and weep when I awoke. I dreamed once that I was sitting before my mirror and pinning on my hat when she walked into the room as though she had been out in the garden picking flowers. In my dream I said, ‘Mama! Oh, Mama! I thought you were dead!’ and she said with such a sweet smile, Oh, no my darling. I’d never leave you in such a pickle!’ I was so persuaded that she was alive and loved me still that I could not believe it when I woke in the quiet early-morning house and remembered she would never call me her darling again.

I dreamed she walked into the parlour and asked me where her clothes had gone. I stammered that I had given them away because I had thought she was dead. Then she laughed, a clear easy laugh, and called out of the window to John to share the joke. I gazed from one bright laughing face to another and was as certain as I could be that there had been some foolish mistake and my lovely mama was still alive.

It was pointless for me to try to accept her death. Grandmama Havering urged me to come to terms with it and put it behind me. I smiled vaguely and did not reply.

I did not try to accept it, but neither did I try to escape it. I simply could not believe that I would never see her again. And, although I often wept for her on my long walks and found that I was crying from longing for her hand on my forehead, her smile and the love in her voice, I could think two sad, silly thoughts at once: that I would never see her again, and that it was not possible that she could have left me for ever.

I was very lonely.

She had been my companion and best friend, and I had never noticed before how the autumn kept us so much indoors. When
it grew colder and my walks grew shorter, I found I was spending most of the days in the parlour. Sometimes I would sit before the roaring fire and try to be glad that I was inside warming my toes, and sometimes I would sit in the window-seat and press my face to the glass and watch the rain sluicing down the cold windows, and wait for dusk, and wait for night and sleep, and then lie sleepless and wait for morning.

As I grew heavier and more and more tired, I was not glad of the rest, but impatient with this lumpish body which kept me isolated in the little room in the little house while Richard could ride down to Acre or up on the downs, or across the common and drop into any tenant’s house and take a pot-luck dinner.

He was popular only with our wealthy neighbours. The poorer farmers saw their interests as at one with Acre. They depended on wage-work to supplement their farming and they needed Wideacre to be a generous employer. They bought much wheat from us, and fodder and straw; and they needed Wideacre to sell at a fair price in the local market. But the bigger farmers nearby were happy to farm hard and sell high, they liked the lordly way Richard condemned ‘new-fangled levelling notions’.

There was always a place ready for the handsome young squire at their tables, and Richard came home from these dinners in good humour, tipsy with port, flattered by deference, bursting with charm and conceit.

He had grown so strong since he had become owner of Wideacre. No one had been able to stand against him, and the complaints about him in the village were so soft that only I could hear them.

He had grown so confident. I, who used to laugh at the people who called me Squire Julia, had become a fat tired woman who sat alone in her parlour and longed for her mama who was dead, and for her friend who was in a London gaol, and feared the birth of her child as another Lacey to run the land.