The Favoured Child Read online

  Mama held out her arms to me, and I slid to my knees before her and hugged her tight. Oh, my darling, I’m so very glad,’ she said softly. ‘You are a lucky girl indeed.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Oh, yes.’

  Mama smoothed my hair. ‘There, there,’ she said vaguely. ‘When did he say he will come back?’

  ‘He has to stay in London for two days,’ Uncle John said. ‘Then he has to take ship for Belgium. His father’s trade is expanding into Europe, and James has to make something of a tour. I promised that you might receive his letters, but he says he cannot give you an address to reply to. He does say he will be back in this country in eight or nine weeks. Between then and now his papa’s lawyers and mine will draw up your marriage contracts and you can be married whenever you wish.’

  I sat bolt upright at once. ‘As soon as possible,’ I said.

  ‘Not so missish?’ Mama said, smiling to Uncle John.

  ‘No,’ he replied.

  ‘You will need at least two months to get your clothes ready, and then there is also the house to be built,’ Mama said. ‘Even if you want a quiet wedding out of this house, there will still be a very great deal to be done. Unless you would want to be married in Bath, Julia? Or in Bristol?’

  ‘Here,’ I said without a moment’s doubt. ‘Here in our parish church with a party on the green afterwards. Here, where we are going to live and be happy for always.’

  I smiled as I spoke, but that odd shiver was cold down my spine. Everything was going to be all right. James would come back from Belgium, would come straight to me here on Wideacre. We would find a good site to build our house – I had half a dozen in mind already! – and we would marry. There was no obstacle, for both families were contented with the match. More than that, it was an ideal match! Bristol money and Sussex land. In James I knew I was giving the village a master who would spend all his time and money on furthering the schemes which Ralph and I had already planned so far into the future. There was nothing to give me unease in this.’

  And yet I feared in my heart that it would never happen.

  18

  ‘I am writing a letter to Richard,’ Mama said to me that evening. ‘You’ll want to write him a note to go in it?’ ‘Yes,’ I said. Indeed it was time.

  I had written regularly to Richard from Bath, but he had never replied. His work on the hall and in the village was sufficient excuse.

  Then, when the rebuilding of the Acre cottages was well under way, he had gone back to university. I knew he would have heard from Uncle John that I had made many friends in Bath, and that he would have heard of James Fortescue. But I did not know whether he would have guessed how far matters had gone between us.

  I was in love, and I felt careless. I was happy and I could not believe that anyone could begrudge me such happiness. Richard’s open enmity towards me before I left for Bath seemed part of the past when I had been so frightened and so distressed because the whole world seemed to be conspiring against me. I could forgive him his greed about the estate. We were both grown now, and I was engaged to marry the best man I had ever known. I felt able to be generous with Richard. So I wrote him a light-hearted note which said with certainty that I knew he would be happy to hear the news that I was engaged to marry James Fortescue. And – best news of all, as far as I was concerned-that James had seen and liked Wideacre and wanted us to live on the estate.

  I said little more about him. I wanted Richard and James to be friends. I had enough sense – even in my dizzy mood of courtship – to remember that Richard never liked to be anything but first. I thought that if they had a chance to meet without prejudgement on either side, they might be friends. In any case, I could not write at length, for Ralph Megson was waiting for me down at Three Gate Meadow where we had wild garlic growing in the very field we were ploughing for corn.

  Ever since my return from Bath, I had been out on the land from morning till dinner-time, checking the crops, checking the animals, organizing hedging teams, ditching teams and bands of women to weed and clear the fields. The roads were too muddy for anything but horseback, and Uncle John wanted to stay indoors to watch over Mama’s convalescence. The work of the estate was left almost entirely to me – and to Ralph Megson.

  He taught me. He taught me like a man handing over the reins of a most valuable carriage and pair to a novice. He never once met me in the lane, or at a barn, or just leaning on the bridge and watching the Fenny flow below me, without telling me something about the land, about the northerly movement of the birds, or about the weather we might expect.

  I was in training as an apprentice squire, and Ralph was a stringent master. He took me for long punishing rides all around the estate, teaching me the name of every field, showing me every sort of fungus or disease in the woods, naming the weeds which seemed to be shooting up even as we watched and arguing with me, constantly arguing, about who should own the land and the rights they had on it.

  We argued about poachers, we argued about gleaners, we argued about payment in kind, about house servants, about the rights of tenants. Every imposition a landlord legally makes on his workers to gain a little extra from them, Ralph opposed. He would have resisted every claim of a landlord, until in impatience one day I accused him of not being our farm manager at all, but owing all his loyalty to the village.

  Oh, yes,’ he said, quite unperturbed. ‘I am working for the good of Acre. I care nothing for the benefit of the Laceys.’

  I gaped at him. We were riding around the back of the cornfields on the common, checking that they had been properly fenced, for the common was overrun with deer that not even the appetite of Acre could keep down.

  ‘We pay your wages,’ I retorted. I should have been more sensible than to use such an argument with Ralph – it was simply giving him the victory.

  ‘Don’t be silly, Miss Julia,’ he said gently. ‘There aren’t wages minted that could buy my loyalty against my own people. You know that.’

  ‘But why did you agree to work for my Uncle John?’ I demanded. ‘He employed you as the Lacey manager.’

  ‘And I work as the Lacey manager,’ Ralph said. ‘The Laceys’ future depends on giving the land to the people who live on it and work it.’

  We turned our horses away from the field and trotted down the broad sweep of sand which cuts across the common. It was overgrown with bracken, and heather was encroaching on the edges.

  ‘This must be cut back,’ Ralph said, indicating the dead-looking heather clumps and the brown bracken. ‘It will soon be spreading over, and if you have a heather fire, it will blaze out of control. I’ll have a couple of men out on it before the end of the week.’

  I nodded. ‘Don’t turn the talk, Mr Megson,’ I said. ‘You know that Uncle John’s plan was profit-sharing. There was never any suggestion that there should be outright gifts from the estate. You cannot imagine that my uncle is going to give the Wideacre estate to Acre village.’

  Ralph smiled his dark slow smile. ‘Hardly,’ he said. ‘He’s a good man, but he was born to wealth and he knows the value of his land. He won’t be giving anything away.’

  ‘What are your hopes, then?’ I demanded.

  ‘I think you will give it,’ said Ralph as if it were the simplest thing in the world.

  He turned his horse’s head down the track towards the park and set it at a canter towards the little jump over the newly repaired wall. I gaped at him and nearly lost my balance as Misty followed his lead and popped over the wall without a touch of command from me.

  ‘I will?’ I asked, coming up alongside him. ‘Why should you think that I would give Wideacre away? After all you have said about Lacey women loving the land!’

  ‘Aye,’ said Ralph calmly, and then he chuckled to see my rising colour. ‘Don’t be so vexed, Miss Julia,’ he said comfortably. ‘I thought you were no true Lacey when I saw you trying to throw away your share of the estate and make yourself into something you are not. But the ideas I have for you and Wideacre