The Favoured Child Read online

  ‘Oh, good!’ she exclaimed, seeing me waiting for her. ‘I wanted you to help me choose a new brocade for the seats and the curtains in the dining-room.’

  I crossed the room to her and hugged her tight. ‘You know I have no eye for colour,’ I said, ‘but I shall agree with you. I want to work indoors this afternoon, Mama,’ I said, ‘and I wish you would find me something to do indoors tomorrow as well. The sun hurt my eyes in the garden this morning, and I feel weary,’

  Her soft brown eyes examined my face carefully. ‘I had thought you were not yourself,’ she said gently, ‘when you were so irritable at dinner. What is the matter, my dear?’

  ‘It’s…’ I started and then stopped. Then I spoke in a rush. ‘It is since I put up my hair and Uncle John came home, and I reminded him of Beatrice, Mama. Everyone in the village, and even Mrs Gough and Stride, look at me as if they half expect to see her. It makes me feel so odd. And she was not even a very nice woman, was she?’

  ‘No!’ Mama said instantly. ‘She was many things, but she was never that. There is much about her that I feel I should tell you, my dear. But not while we are here on Wideacre. Not while there are so many people around us who are still so haunted here. While we live here, I just want you to remember that you are Beatrice’s kin, but you are my daughter. Any resemblance between you and her is because you have the Lacey pride, and the Lacey tilt to your head. All else is fancy and the fault of this tiny little world where no one goes anywhere but Chichester, and there are long nights to make up nonsense and frighten each other half to death with ghost stories.

  ‘You are my child,’ she said firmly, as if that were the key to keep me safe. ‘Whatever your breeding, I reared you for my own. I am not haunted by Beatrice or Wideacre, and you need not be either. Anyway,’ she said, reliably prosaic, ‘you are just a girl growing up, my dear, and they are the moodiest people in the world. My half-sister was a thousand times worse than you at your age. She once threw a plate at a footman! My mama had her whipped. You will have to learn to curb your temper and your tongue, whatever your feelings. Everything else is just fancy.’

  I shifted along the window-seat and laid my head on her shoulder, and she put a protective arm around me. I closed my eyes and sniffed the sweet flower water she wore on her hair and silks, and we sat in the sunshine in the bow-window for a long, long time, until the sun started dropping behind the higher trees of the park, and I no longer ached for Ralph, Beatrice’s young lover, Ralph, nor shied away in fear from the thought of him.

  After tea in the parlour, when Uncle John did not join us, nor Richard return home, Mama ordered Stride to lay up a little tray with a scone and some jam and cream, a couple of macaroons and a pot of fresh-brewed Indian tea – the way Uncle John liked it, strong and black with neither cream nor lemon nor sugar-and carried it herself into the library. She closed the door behind her, but I heard his soft words of welcome to her and his exclamation at the pretty tray, and then her voice explaining something to him, asking something of him. I guessed that she was talking about me and took care to close the parlour door so I should not be tempted to eavesdrop. I took my seat in the parlour, the tea-urn still hissing softly before me, and I longed to be the girl my mama thought she had, a good daughter whose only wildness was due to her being reared with a boy cousin in rural isolation, and whose only moodiness was due to her becoming, slowly and awkwardly, a woman.

  I did not open my eyes, even when the tea things were cleared. It was not Stride waiting in the parlour, but Jenny Hodgett from the lodge gate, who had been trained at Havering Hall and was now back to work on Wideacre. Her parents had kept the gate at the hall for my papa and for his papa before him. When the hall was burned down and the squire died, no one thought to evict them. So they stayed on, keepers of an open gate, guardians of a deserted drive. She cleared the things as softly as she could and took the urn from the table without disturbing me. I heard the door close behind her and then I think I dozed, for when I opened my eyes again my mama was there, and she had been in the library with Uncle John for some time.

  ‘Tired, my dear?’ she asked gently.

  ‘A little,’ I acknowledged, smiling to take the invalidish tone out of the words.

  Mama nodded and went to her usual seat at the hearth, where the grate was now filled with a little pot of pale peonies I had dug up in the garden of Wideacre Hall and brought on in the warmth of the room.

  ‘I have been speaking to your uncle about his plans for us all,’ she said. ‘And I have some ideas of my own too!’

  ‘Were the Chichester solicitors helpful?’ I asked politely. ‘Can he offer some guarantees for Acre?’

  ‘Yes,’ Mama said. ‘The Wideacre heir and Acre village have to be equally bound by a legal contract, and they will both contribute to a savings scheme. Both can withdraw, but Acre keeps the fund. And if Acre is sold within five years, then a proportion of the profit is to be paid to Acre as compensation.’

  I nodded. ‘Is Uncle John going to ask Mr…Megson what he thinks?’ I asked. I hesitated over his name, and it sounded odd in my voice.

  ‘Of course,’ said Mama. ‘John thinks that Mr Megson is the key to winning Acre to the plan. It will only work if all of us, Mr Megson, Richard, you and I are prepared to work very hard until the village is put to rights again, she said. ‘John wants me to take responsibility for the health and education of the village children and babies. He wants Richard to supervise the rebuilding of the hall, and he wants the two of you to assist Mr Megson on the land.’

  I said nothing, but looked at her wide-eyed. She gave me a little smile. ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ she said wryly. ‘You are thinking that you have never seen me involved with Acre. That I was afraid of the village and did not like you going there. That was once true, but it all must change. Everything must change on Wideacre if this experiment is to work.

  ‘And I was not always afraid of Acre,’ she said honestly. ‘There was a season, two seasons, when I was very much, involved in the lives of the village people. Now I have something to offer them, something more than mere sympathy. I want to go back into the village and set things to rights, as I should have done earlier if we had had the money to do it.’

  I looked at her with new respect. This was a side to Mama that I had not seen before when I had thought of her as the frightened widow in the Dower House, dependent on her step-papa’s charity for her food and on her brother-in-law’s gifts for her money. Something of that must have shown in my eyes, for she gave a little chuckle of amusement.

  ‘I am well aware, Julia, that you think that no one knows the land but you and Richard! But I do assure you that I am not entirely incompetent!’

  ‘Not at all, Mama!’ I said hastily and untruthfully. ‘But what does Uncle John want me to do? And when do I start?’

  ‘You may as well start at once,’ Mama said calmly. ‘And so may I. Mr Megson is coming this evening, and if he agrees to the new proposals, then I shall go down to the village tomorrow and speak to Dr Pearce about opening the village school again. You and Richard and Mr Megson will have to decide about priorities on the land. I suppose you’ll start ploughing and sowing?’

  ‘Too late this season,’ I said. ‘But if Uncle John plans to use turnips, and also wants to try some new crops of fruit, we could get them in ready for them to be productive next year.’

  Mama looked at me shrewdly. She had supervised my education, taught me my letters and the names of the birds and flowers. She had seen me learn Latin and Greek at Richard’s shoulder. She knew full well that no one had ever taught me the times when the land should be readied and crops sown, and that I had never seen a ploughing team on Wideacre. ‘How do you know?’ she asked softly.

  I met her wary look with absolute honesty. ‘I don’t know,’ I said truthfully. ‘I just do.’

  She nodded as if it confirmed something she had already heard from John. ‘It would be possible to make a great deal of fuss about that,’ she said levelly, ‘and