The Favoured Child Read online

  Ralph pushed back his chair from the table and stamped on his wooden legs to the door to throw it open and look out, up the little back track to Acre. ‘Look, you,’ he said, leaning on the doorpost and looking out. ‘This is a fine scheme, and a generous one from any landowner, even a bankrupt one. I respect that. But you are asking for someone to give up the way he has lived for the past fourteen years, wild, and without a master. Starving in winter maybe, but eating game and fish and fowl all summer. And free to work as he pleases, or poach as he pleases, or fish as he pleases every day of the year. You are asking a man like that to settle down into a routine of working.

  ‘And for what? You are not even offering a decent wage. You are offering the promise of a share in the profits on crops which are not yet in the ground. If the profits are small, you yourselves tell me that first out of the fund is the needs of the land, second is your share, and last are the workers. If there are no profits at all – well, you have the option to sell the land. And sell it now as a going concern with a village eager for work. But if there are no profits, then the people of Acre starve for another winter.

  ‘You landlords risk nothing – you have a derelict estate you cannot work or sell. If the village was to go for this scheme, you would have them back at work at no cost to you, and if they fail to work hard enough to make the profits your scheme needs, they are the ones who suffer. Landlords never suffer. They write the laws, they invent the rules. They make the world, and then they expect people to be grateful for small mercies!’

  Ralph leaned back against the doorpost and smiled at us both as though we were rather charming brigands. ‘You offer no guarantees,’ he said. ‘Acre is guaranteed to you. Everyone here is so poor that there is nowhere they can go, and no freedom they can take. But you can suit yourselves. You can play at being radical for a few years, or you can sell the estate tomorrow at a profit, to the first buyer who comes your way, rack-renter, corn-forestaller, whatever. There are no controls over the gentry,’ he said and paused. ‘There never are,’ he added.

  Richard and I sat in stunned silence. In everything Uncle John had said since his return from India, we had never seen the scheme like this. Ralph Megson, who was not of the Quality, saw the objections in a flash. And he had seen it as another ruse by the masters against the men, concealed, this time, in some persuasive egalitarian fair-share scheme, profiteering wrapped up prettily. I dropped my eyes to the tablecloth and coloured up to my ears with shame at my foolishness in not spotting such an obvious argument against the idea, and in my shame at being seen by Ralph Megson as one of the gentry who take what they have not earned and use what they have not made.

  He left the door open and the evening sunlight streamed on to the brick floor and turned the dust into little stars floating in infinity. He trod heavily back to the table and the stars swirled at his passing. As he went behind me, the back of his hand just brushed the nape of my neck, and I knew it was a touch which meant forgiveness.

  ‘Tell Dr MacAndrew I’ll think on it,’ Ralph said, surprisingly. ‘It’s a bold scheme and if there were such a thing as a landlord one could trust, it would be a good one. It needs some guarantees from the two of you, or you will never persuade Acre to do it; and you’d not have my support. But if the two of you are committed to the idea, it might work.’

  ‘If you advise that the land is best worked in the old ways, with the squire owning everything and good wages paid, I think my papa would take your advice,’ Richard said quickly.

  Ralph looked hard at him. ‘Do you now?’ he asked. And he said no more.

  ‘We must go,’ I said after a little pause. ‘Thank you for our tea, Mr Megson.’

  ‘You’re welcome,’ he said pleasantly. ‘Both of you must come and see me again.’ He nodded at Richard. ‘If you’re interested in hawking, my goshawk will be sent down from London in the next few days. I’d be happy to take you out with me.’

  ‘Thank you, I will!’ Richard said, and for the first time that afternoon his smile to Ralph was genuine – not the calculating charm he had donned since Mama and Uncle John had joined in backing Mr Megson against his accusation.

  Ralph walked with us to the gate and helped me up the step into the gig while Richard loosed the horse. I put out my hand to him.

  ‘Good day, Miss Julia,’ he said with the mocking courtesy I had dreamed of this morning. Then he bent his proud greying head and kissed my hand. At the touch of his lips on my fingers I shivered like a birch tree in a breeze. He stepped back into his patch of garden and waved farewell to us.

  8

  The news we brought of Ralph Megson’s reaction made Uncle John look anxious at supper and sent him into the library to look at the provisional leases he had drawn up. The next day he ordered the carriage for Chichester to see the Wideacre lawyers to ask them what they thought about a contract which would bind both the workers and the squires.

  He paused as he came down the steps. I was in the front garden, the very picture of a demure young lady in a high-waisted white gown and a sun-bonnet to shield my face. But my fingers were suspiciously muddy, and when Uncle John came down the path, I was not quick enough to tuck the little spade out of sight.

  ‘Gardening, Julia?’ Uncle John said. He sounded appropriately scandalized, but there was an undercurrent of laughter in his voice. ‘Julia! My niece Julia! What are we going to do with you! What does your mama say about you gardening?’

  ‘She tries not to know,’ I said, shamefaced. ‘Uncle John, I know it is not proper, but someone had to do it. And Stride is too old, and all Jem’s plants died. And there was no one else. And you know how Mama loves flowers,’ I said, striking the very note which would persuade him.

  ‘Mama and I agreed that I might do it providing that no one of the Quality sees me. And that is all right, Uncle John, because no one ever comes down the drive in a carriage in the morning. And I never do it in the afternoon.’

  Uncle John tried to look severe, but he cracked into a laugh of irrepressible merriment. ‘Miss Julia! You are having a clandestine affair with Nature!’ he said. ‘But how do you know anything at all about gardening?’

  ‘I just know,’ I said vaguely. ‘I knew of Mama’s favourite flowers from Wideacre Hall, and when I was very little, I collected the seed pods to give her. I planted them in little pots in my bedroom and when they grew, I planted them here so Mama should have her favourite flowers around her, so she should not be homesick for the hall, and the gardens.’

  Uncle John nodded, his face understanding. ‘That was well done indeed,’ he said. ‘But who told you where the plants should go? Whether they like light or shade?’

  I shrugged. I could not have explained. ‘I suppose I looked where they were growing and doing well in the old garden,’ I said, trying to remember. ‘But also, when I have a little bulb or a handful of seeds in my hand, I can somehow feel where they want to go. Whether they like the soil moist or dry.’ I broke off. ‘It makes no sense when I speak of it,’ I said. ‘But I seem to have been born knowing how to grow things.’

  Uncle John looked at me hard, and the laughter was gone from his eyes. ‘Do they always grow for you?’ he asked suddenly. ‘No diseased plants, no sudden disappointments? No seedlings all shrivelled when you thought they were doing well?’

  ‘No,’ I said, surprised. ‘But the earth is so good here, Uncle John. And the weather just right. And I am only planting things which are accustomed to Wideacre, which have already done well here.’ I took a few steps towards him and put out a rather grubby hand. ‘Why do you look like that?’ I asked shyly. ‘I can stop gardening now you are home. Now you are home, you can hire a gardener. I should miss it, but if you dislike it so much, I can stop doing it.’

  Uncle John shook his head, as if to clear a whirl of thoughts. ‘No,’ he said. ‘It is I who am in the wrong. I was a little shocked to find you resembling your Aunt Beatrice in this skill with the land. That was a talent she had. By the time she was dead, they had made it into