The Favoured Child (81 page)

‘And you’ll be the mother of the next Lacey squire,’ she said. ‘You’ll keep the line going.’

‘No,’ I said with certainty. ‘Not I.’

She nodded at my swelling belly as I sat carelessly, legs half apart to carry the load. ‘Too late to be rid of it now,’ she said. Her face was hard.

‘It’ll be born,’ I said bitterly. ‘I cannot prevent that. But it will never inherit if I can help it.’

She gave a sad, rueful smile, the smile of Acre when it knew it had lost the greatest gamble a landless people can play, when the stakes are land and independence against a servitude of uncertain and low-paid work. It was the smile of a woman legally bound to a master, who cannot prevent conception and cannot stop the birth of a child.

‘you cannot help it,’ she said sadly. ‘We are all trapped now.’

There was silence in the little room, a silence so quiet that the noise of the flames flickering around the logs was quite clear.

‘I’ll be off,’ she said, moving towards the door. ‘My son Ted, and many others in the village, wanted to know how you were. I’m sorry to have no better news for them.’

‘I’ll live,’ I said dourly. ‘You can tell them I do not ail.’

‘I’ll tell them you are sick unto death in your heart,’ she said plainly. ‘And so you are at one with the land again, Miss Julia, and at one with Acre too. For the land is muddy and lifeless, and Acre is cold and hungry and idle and in mourning.’

Our eyes met in one level look which exchanged no warmth except the bleak comfort of shared honesty. Then she was gone.

In all that hard cold month she was my only visitor, Mrs Tyacke, the widow from Acre. No Quality visited me while I sat, idle and plump, in my black mourning. Grandpapa Havering had been taken ill in town and Grandmama had gone up to nurse him. She was afraid she would be away as I neared my time, but I wrote to her that it did not matter, she was not to worry.

Indeed it did not matter.

I thought that nothing mattered very much.

I thought that nothing would ever matter very much again.

The baby grew in my belly, as babies will, unbidden. I slept less and less at nights while the little growing limbs pressed inwards against me, or dug outwards against the soft wall of my belly. Towards the end of December I could sometimes discern a little limb pushing out, and once I felt with my fingertips the outline of a perfect tiny hand as the child flexed against the walls of its soft prison. It put me in mind of Ralph, in a prison where the gates would not open, where it was not warm and dark and safe. But as I sat in my chair, or gazed out of the window, or lay on my back on my bed, I could not even feel that Ralph mattered very much.

Richard was much away from home. I knew that they talked of it, in the kitchen, in the stable. Some nights he did not come
home at all but appeared at breakfast, bright-eyed and rumpled, speaking quickly and loudly of a cocking match at Chichester, or once of a bull which someone had brought on to Acre. It had been baited with dogs, and it had killed two fine mastiffs. When Richard told me how it had ripped out the belly of one dog, I turned pale and the breakfast table swam before my eyes. I saw Stride give a quick movement as if he would stop Richard from speaking, but Stride had been in service all his life, and could not stop the squire. No one could stop Richard.

They all feared him, both in our household and on our land. They feared him because he would use the vested legal power of the squire in any way he could. He would cancel their tenancies, stop their wages, throw them out of the parish or have them arrested for insolence. And they feared him because they knew, as all the animals around him had always known, that there was something bad about Richard.

Not I. I had recovered from my fear of him. I feared no one now. I feared neither injury nor death, and if Richard had come to me and tightened his hands around my throat, I would have felt no fear. I would not even have flinched. My mama was dead, Clary was dead, Ralph and Acre were betrayed. I had sworn the baby in my belly should not inherit. If Richard had murdered me on one of the nights he lurched against my door on the way to his own room, he would have done me a favour. I feared him no more. I feared nothing. Everything I had cared for was already gone. If he had opened my door on those nights when I heard him scrabbling on the stairs and giggling drunkenly, if he had stumbled into my room and offered once more to touch me, I think I would have welcomed him and let him lie on me in the hope that he would put his long strong hands around my throat and finish me. But he did not do so. He never touched me again.

He did not like me. He only half knew his own madness; I don’t think he ever clearly saw what he had done. I think that chilling little giggle was the closest he ever came to knowing what it was he had done, or what he could do. But on that one occasion when he had touched me and seen my eyes go dark with
horror and then grow like pale glass with madness, he had known then that I was crazed. And knowing I was mad was like an enchanted mirror held up to his own face. Our joint corruption was too strong even for him.

Now I no longer feared him, because he feared me. I carried around with me a great strength and a great power: the magic of my growing belly which housed the child he so badly wanted, and the utter potency of not caring whether I lived or died. Richard could never frighten me again.

But nothing could touch him. In the little world which enclosed the Laceys nothing could touch Richard. With Lord Havering away, Richard’s word was law for miles in every direction. If he had killed again, there would have been no hue and cry after the murderer. Richard was his own master and was safe from every threat I could imagine.

He feared only one thing. Fool that he was, he let that fear show in front of me.

We were at breakfast and Richard was in one of his sulky tired states. I sat at the foot of the table with a letter from my grandmama by my place, sipping tea. Richard had a hearty meal of cold meat, bread, hot potatoes and eggs and small ale. He was reading the newspaper as he ate, careless of the splattering of fat on the pages.

‘Good God!’ he said, around a mouthful of food. Some tone in his voice made me jerk up my head like a pointer in August, with the half-forgotten scent of pheasant on the ground. I think I actually sniffed like a dog. There was a sudden smell of fear in the room, unmistakable. Richard was sweating with fright, and the scent was as good to me as frying bacon to a starving pauper. He shot a quick, furtive look at me, and my gaze was blank. I could have been deaf, I could have been insensible. Then he glanced at Stride, whose face was wooden.

‘Excuse me,’ Richard said, and he crumpled the newspaper in his hand and left the room, his plate abandoned, piled with steaming food, his small ale cold and inviting in his mug.

‘Get me a copy of that newspaper, Stride,’ I said levelly, my eyes on my letter once more.

‘Yes, Miss Julia,’ Stride said, his tone equally neutral.

He must have sent to Midhurst at once, for he had it at coffee-time and brought it to me in the parlour with the silver tray and the coffee service.

I did not have to scan the columns. The story which had sent Richard from the room was on the first page inside. It was headed: ‘Notorious Rioter Escaped’, and it named Ralph Megson as among three men who had broken out of the prison disguised as members of a gypsy family who had been brought in to play for the prison warders. It was thought that the men had fled with the gypsies and would travel with them. There was much lordly huffing and puffing and alerting of the local Justices, but there was also a clear acknowledgement that three men could easily disappear into that secretive underworld and never be seen again. There was a detailed description of Ralph, and of the other two, and a massive reward of two hundred pounds for information leading to the capture of all three.

That reward made me pause and wonder if there could be any safety for Ralph. Then I thought that Ralph was not a man to be taken by surprise, except on that one time when he had been betrayed in Acre. I did not think he would be betrayed by his own people, by his mother’s people, his gypsy family. And I had a shrewd idea that Ralph would know exactly how long they could be trusted to resist the lure of such a fortune, and he would be away on a smuggler’s vessel the day before temptation became too great.

I squeezed each page of the newspaper into a ball and tossed them one by one on to the fire, and watched each little ball flame and blacken before I took up the poker and mashed up the ashes. I did not want Richard to know that I knew about Ralph.

That was the first time in my life I had effectively conspired against Richard.

He did not come home for dinner, and Stride served me in solitary state at the great mahogany table. I sat with a book beside my plate, a novel from the Chichester circulating library, and between mouthfuls I read about Clarinda’s wants and needs,
and her unfailing tenderness for the hero. I wondered a little whether I should ever again be a woman who thinks that love, a man’s love, is worth the world, or whether from now on I would always feel that one’s own freedom, one’s own individual pride, is worth so very much more.

I took my novel with me into the parlour, and slouched in my armchair to read it. But I laid it down often and looked into the fire. I had not thought to feel happiness again. But Ralph was free, and some bars had gone from my inner eyes. Ralph could look up at the sky tonight and see the sharp light of the stars which means that it is going to snow. Ralph could see that halo around the moon which warns of frost. Ralph could face north, south, west or east, and go where he willed again.

I hoped he would guess that I had learned my lesson, that although I sat at Richard’s fireside on Richard’s furniture in Richard’s house on Richard’s land, I knew at last that I was dispossessed. And that I had become, at this last, a Lacey woman who knew that it was the ownership of the land which mattered more than the chimera of love.

But I thought also that I was a new version of a Lacey, because I rejected the Lacey right to own the land and its crops, and the people themselves. If it had been mine again, I would have given it away at once, without hesitation and mumbling of profits. I would have given the land to Acre, to the people who work it and live on it. And I wished very much that I could see Ralph just once more to tell him that I at last knew what he had been trying to teach me. That there can be no just squires, no kindly masters. For the existence of squires and masters is so deeply unjust that no gentle benevolence can make it right.

I had had to become a servant, Richard’s servant, before I knew the injustice of servitude. I had had to be a pauper, Richard’s pauper, before I learned that dependence is a death sentence. And the only want that was left me, the only wish I had, was that I might see Ralph once and tell him that I understood, that I too was an outlaw from this greedy world we Quality had made.

Stride tapped at the door and came in with the tea-tray, and Richard walked in behind him. He had been riding and was not dressed for dinner. He asked Stride to bring more candles and sat opposite me on the other side of the fire as though nothing were wrong. But I saw he was as tense as a trip-wire, and he glanced at the curtains when they stirred in the draught.

‘I have been to Chichester,’ he said without preamble when Stride had set a five-branch candelabra on the table and gone. ‘I read some news this morning which disturbed me very much.’

I raised my eyes from the tea things and their gaze was as clear and as warm as the wintry sky.

‘There was a report.’ Richard spoke with some difficulty. ‘There was a report in the paper that some men had broken out of the London prison where Ralph Megson was held. You remember . . .’ He broke off. He had been about to ask if I remembered Ralph Megson, but not even Richard had sufficient gall for that. ‘I went to Chichester to seek more perfect information,’ he said. He took his dish from me and a drop of tea was spilled on the cream hearthrug. Richard’s hand was not steady. ‘It turns out that the report is true,’ he said. I inclined my head, and took up my own dish.

‘Magistrates have been warned to be alert for gypsies,’ Richard went on. ‘Gypsies or travelling folk of any kind, The three men escaped with some gypsy musicians. It’s thought they may try to get to the coast travelling with a gypsy family.’

Richard stopped talking and glanced at me. My face was impassive; he could read nothing from it. ‘Do you think he would come here, Julia?’ he demanded. ‘Do you think he would come here with some sort of idea of revenge? Do you think he would come here and hope that Acre would hide him?’

Richard’s voice had his old charming appeal. He needed me. I had always been at his side when he needed me. Indeed, it had been the joy of my life to have him need me, to have him ask for my help as he was asking for it now.

‘I think he might blame me for his arrest,’ he said with driven candour. ‘I spoke to the magistrates in Chichester, and they said
there was little they could do to protect us, us Laceys, Julia! Unless we had some clear idea of where he might be.’

Richard put down his dish of tea and held out his hand to me. ‘Julia?’ he asked. It was as if we were small children again and he was in trouble, as if he were a little boy whose scheme of mischief had gone badly wrong, calling for his best friend, his sister, to help him.

I held my tea with both hands. ‘Yes?’ I asked.

‘Do you think he would come here?’ Richard withdrew his hand and put both hands together on his knees, ignoring the slight.

‘No,’ I said honestly. It is not my way to tease and torment a person. And I spoke with regret. I was very sure I would never see Ralph Megson again, and I thought myself the poorer for it.

‘Not with the gypsies who winter on the common?’ Richard said eagerly. ‘They come from London way, don’t they? And they are late this year! It would not be them who got him from prison, would it? They are musicians too, remember, Julia! We had them to play at Christmas, do you remember?’

I nodded. I remembered. I thought I remembered everything in a great long tunnel of pain back to my childhood and babyhood when I had loved Richard and loved Wideacre with a great constant rooted love which I thought nothing would ever spoil or change.