The Favoured Child Read online

  All the equipment had to be bought new. What had been left after the ruin of the Laceys after the last harvest had been sold or bartered for pitiful amounts of food during the years of Acre’s poverty. We had to buy new ploughs, new work-horses, new seed. A whole generation of young men had to be trained to drive a horse and follow a plough, for they had never seen it done by their fathers, and they had never been plough-boys themselves.

  ‘It can’t be done!’ John would sometimes say to me when I came home tired out from a day’s riding and with a list of things which had to be ready before the spring weather came and set the land in its cycle of growth. ‘It cannot be done this year!’

  But, from somewhere, I had a great fund of confidence. I would smile at John not like a sixteen-year-old green girl but like someone far older and far wiser, and I would say, ‘It can be done, Uncle John. Mr Megson thinks so too, and I am sure it will be all right. Acre is working all the daylight hours to be ready in time for sowing. It can be done. And you, and I, and Mr Megson, and Acre are doing it.’

  As if the planning and the preparation for sowing were not enough, the flock of sheep Uncle John had bought were not hardy and took against the lower fields that we thought would suit them. We lost two or three lambs, and even a ewe, which was more serious. After that Ralph said that, cost what it may, the animals would have to lamb under cover.

  The barn they had used in autumn was too small for the whole flock, and it was too far for the shepherd to go every day. All the old barns had been pulled down years ago, the wood taken for firewood and the stones for building. So we had to have the flock in the Dower House stable block, with beams thrown across the yard and a loose thatch over the top. The smell was appalling and the noise they made! Mama said that she would never again read poems about the life of a shepherdess with any pleasure.

  ‘Hey Nonny No,’ John said at dinner, and grinned at her.

  We were not like Quality, that spring.

  ‘We are pioneers,’ Mama said; and I loved her for understanding that working Wideacre in this way felt less like farming an estate in the heart of England and more like building a new country, a fresh country where one might forget the mistakes of the past and try to make something new and clean.

  ‘Squire Julia,’ Clary Dench called me ironically when I met her in Acre lane. She had taken her father’s dinner to him and was coming home with a jug and a plate under her arm. He had been working on the ditches and Clary too was speckled with the sandy mud.

  ‘You’d better curtsy,’ I said dourly. I looked little smarter than she did. I was wearing my cream riding habit, but it had lost its early style and was now creased and crumpled with a darn on the skirt where I had taken a tumble and ripped it. I was on foot, leading two plough-horses down to the village to be shod and for the plough-boys to practise driving a team. Clary and I both walked awkwardly, with the glutinous mud sticking to our boots. Her boots were older, the soles patched and re-patched. But when we were both muddy up to our eyebrows, one could tell little difference between the young lady of Quality and the village girl.

  Clary laughed. ‘You look a sight!’ she said.

  ‘I know,’ I said ruefully. ‘I can hardly remember Bath now, and it’s not been that long.’

  She nodded. ‘Remember the time when the village was bad?’ she asked. ‘It’s not an easy life now, no one could say it was. Bui at least we can see where we’re going. This spring is going to bring the sowing, and then there’ll be haymaking and harvest-time. There will be a proper harvest home. All the old parties and fair-days will come back. My ma and pa can’t talk of nothing else but the sowing and the maying.’

  ‘Maying!’ I said, stopping the horses with difficulty. People like to think of the great plough-horses as gentle giants, but I had led these two down from the Dower House stables and I could attest that they were hulking idiots without a listening ear between them, and without a brain in their heads.

  ‘Woah! you two,’ I said crossly. ‘What happens at the maying, Clary?’

  ‘It’s the Whitsun festival,’ she said, ‘when all the sowing is done and the early spring work is over. It’s a celebration of the spring. All the young men and women, all the lads and maids go up on to the downs before it is light, before dawn. They cut branches of the hawthorn tree and they dress them with ribbons, and they see the sunrise and welcome the spring in.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ I said. It sounded rather tame. ‘Is that all, Clary?’

  She gave me a sideways smiling glance. We had both grown up from the little girls who fought in the woods. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘it’s no accident that there’s a lot of marriages six months after that day. There’s a lot of courting that goes on while the sun is coming up, you know, Julia. And there are no elders there, and no one thinks the worse of anyone who slips away up on the downs. No one watches and no one counts, because it is the maying, you see.’

  I smiled a little. ‘Oh,’ I said. I was a child compared to Clary, who had helped at childbirth and had wept already over a stillborn babe which would have been another sister for her. Clary and all the Acre children knew all about lust and birthing and dying, while Richard and I in the Dower House were naive beginners. But I had been in James’s arms, and felt his mouth on mine, and longed for his touch again. And I had Beatrice’s knowledge and Beatrice’s desires in my head. So I gave Clary a little smile and said, ‘Oh,’ which acknowledged that I was not squire, nor Miss Julia, but a maid like her with love to give and a longing to receive it.

  ‘Would you come out with us?’ she asked invitingly. ‘There’d be no harm. Many lasses just come out to watch the sunrise, and to cut the branches and take the spring home to their families.’

  ‘I should like that,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll tell ’em you’ll come out with us,’ said Clary. ‘Maybe they’ll make you the Queen of the May. And you tell your ma and your Uncle John that the village will take a week for the festival. At least some days.’

  ‘I will,’ I said. ‘But what happens?’

  ‘It’s the festival of misrule,’ Clary said. I turned the horses’ heads and she took one of the reins to help me lead them towards the forge. ‘Everyone dresses up in costume and there is a feast. The farmers with money give some when the band come around and demand a fee. The people who have no money give food for the feast. The Wideacre people go over to Havering, or to Singleton, or to Ambersham, and wherever they go, there is a party and dancing and free drink and free food. Then next year we have the other villages back to us. It’s been so long since Acre could dance that this year it is to be our turn.’

  ‘And who is the Queen of the May?’ I asked.

  ‘She’s queen of the feast,’ said Clary. ‘She wears a crown of hawthorn blossoms and she brings in the spring, and she sets the plough going, and the dancers dancing. And if I tell ’em all that you are coming, it will likely be you!’

  I beamed. ‘Tell them I’ll come, then, Clary, for it sounds such fun. And I’ll tell Mama and Uncle John that there will be a holiday.’

  Clary nodded and led the horse into Ned Smith’s yard, then waved goodbye to me and went home to her own cottage. I stayed only to see the plough-boys were waiting to take the horses when they had been shod and trudged home alone up the lane. I would be late for dinner again, but during those days of readying the land for the plough I was hardly ever on time.

  *

  We did not sow until quite late, the ground was so hard from the frost, and then so wet. But Ralph and John and I had to pick a day. ‘Let it be Miss Julia’s birthday, for luck!’ Ralph said. So we told the village when it would begin, and then crossed our fingers for luck that the village which had been away from the ploughshare and away from sowing for so long would remember how the work went, and would forget about the anger of the year they sowed pain and reaped a riot.

  The wind had warmed overnight and the sun was shining. All the wisps of cloud and the lumpy sleet thunderheads had been torn aside and rushed over the