The Favoured Child Read online

  Uncle John nodded his approval, but I saw the shadow cross Richard’s face. ‘I know everything comes second to the Wideacre crop,’ he said.

  ‘It is not that,’ I said softly. ‘It is just that I promised to work here today and I cannot break my promise.’

  ‘Well, come home as soon as you are done,’ Mama said tactfully, ‘and do be home in time for an early dinner, Julia. Mrs Gough is planning something special for you.’

  ‘I will, I will,’ I said, smiling.

  Richard came close to help me up into the saddle. ‘I shall be waiting for you,’ he said softly. ‘You are mine.’

  I knew it was wrong.

  I knew he was wrong to say it and I should contradict him at once. I should remind him that the childhood betrothal had not been a serious wish of his for many years now. It was me who had clung to that game long after it should have been outgrown. The last time we had been together he had not behaved anything like a lover.

  I let it go for now. The shock of seeing him at the gate when the world seemed so lush and fresh and fertile, when I had seeds still clinging to my hands like some spring goddess, had been too much for my thin veneer of town gloss. If he had wanted to lie with me in the furrow then and there, I would have done so. I was as amorous as this morning’s wood-pigeon, as naturally fertile as the new-turned soil. I was a Lacey woman on Wideacre, and Lacey women care for nothing more than love and the land. This morning, with Richard waiting for me at the side of a newly ploughed field, I could not resist.

  But we would not always meet at a field gate. As I rode home, I knew there would be words between Richard and me and that when we spoke, I should use the wisdom I had learned in these last few months. I should use that wisdom to defend myself against him. I was not the child who had left for Bath, left her home to be run by someone else, frightened of herself and of the land, and ready to give the land away as carelessly as a shanty cottage. I was not the child who feared her own nature, who feared male authority, who feared everything.

  I had stood against the most fashionable doctor in Bath and shrugged aside his influence as if he were an outgrown toy. I had raised my voice in the best modiste’s shop in Bath and felt my cheeks blaze with anger. I had looked into the eyes of the man I loved and learned that he was just an ordinary man, with ordinary failings; and loved him just the same. I was no longer Richard’s plaything for the bidding or the breaking. I might have been in a dream of pleasure with seeds in my hands this morning, but this afternoon I would be my own self.

  I cantered home in an easy stride with the dusk falling around me and a clear sky above me promising good weather for a working day tomorrow. Behind me were two fields, nearly ploughed and sown, under the sickle moon, and around me were acres of land waiting for the plough under the cold skies.

  I tossed the reins of my mare to Jem and made my way indoors and up to my bedroom. Stride was crossing the hall as I went upstairs. ‘You’ve not long before dinner, Miss Julia,’ he said warningly.

  I gave him a grimace and put my hands together in a mock prayer. ‘Stride, have a little pity,’ I said. ‘I have been in the fields since early morning. If you want to eat Wideacre bread again, you must treat the sowers well. Please delay dinner for me for half an hour so I can soak in a bath and get the stiffness out of my body. I feel like an old lady.’

  It was another measure of the way things had changed that Stride did not scold me as he would a naughty child late for dinner. Instead he looked at the grandfather clock at the foot of the stairs and said, ‘Very well, Miss Julia, I will tell Lady Lacey and Dr MacAndrew that dinner will be delayed.’

  So I had a bath so hot that my skin turned as pink as a river trout, and I came downstairs with my face damp from the sweat at the heat of it, smelling expensively of best Bath soap and toilet waters and dressed in a silk gown of pale blue.

  Richard saw my newly acquired confidence. He saw it in the way I joked with Uncle John, and in the way I nodded to Stride. He saw how I had changed towards my mama – no less loving and tender than in the childhood days, but we now talked as equals. Bath had put a veneer of fashion on me. Bath had curled my hair and taught me how to dress and how to dance, and how to make small talk. Conquering my fear of Beatrice and my fear of the sight had turned me into a woman who could make decisions, who could give and take orders, who could make a promise and keep it and who would never, never be bullied by imaginary fears.

  Or so I thought that evening.

  It was my evening. There were hot-house flowers at my place and a basket full of prettily wrapped presents from as far away as James’s hotel in Belgium, and as near as Jimmy Dart’s cottage. But it was also Richard’s evening. We all wanted to know how he found university life and whether he had made many friends. We wanted to know about his lodgings, and about his tutors, and whether he liked his studies. Richard laid himself out to be entertaining and had us laughing and laughing with tales of the older students in his college.

  ‘They sound fearfully wild,’ Mama said anxiously. ‘I hope that is not your set, Richard.’

  ‘Nonsense, Mama-Aunt!’ Richard said cheerfully. ‘They are the greatest of fellows, but they won’t have a thing to do with me. Students who have just arrived in town are just about the last entrants on the great chain of being, I assure you! They have no time for me at all!’

  He laughed heartily at that, but I knew my cousin Richard, and I knew that a state of affairs in which he was not highly regarded would not strike him as amusing at all. It was odd indeed that at the very time when I had been finding my feet on the land, discovering I was a young woman with desires of my own and finding a serious job to do, Richard had become the youngest and least important young man in a town where young men were not taken seriously.

  I looked at him with judging eyes. He would always be my darling cousin, and today the earth and the sky and the humming in my head had been too much for me and I had gone to him and he had held me and he could have taken me, as if I knew nothing of the indoor Quality life at all; but when I was back in my senses, I could see him clearly. I think I saw him that evening for the first time…and I saw a young man whom I would not trust with a ploughing team.

  I laughed out loud at that thought and Mama asked me what had amused me, and I had to invent some taradiddle to divert the attention away from me. For now Richard was home from Oxford and I had been out on the fields all day, it was obvious, as it had been obvious at the start to Acre, to Ralph Megson and to Uncle John, that I was the one who had inherited the Lacey love of the land, and Richard would never love it and care for it and work it as I did.

  19

  Mama had held Acre, and all of us in the Dower House, to strict observance of the sabbath, and even in the middle of ploughing she could not be moved from it. To my surprise Ralph Megson agreed with her, and when I had said, ‘Lose a ploughing day?’ he had given me one of his sideways glances and asked, ‘And you would add up all the Sundays worked and give the village a week’s holiday every month and a half would you?’

  The carriage took us to church in the morning and back for breakfast, but Mama agreed that provided we stayed inside the boundaries of the estate, we might ride in the afternoon.

  ‘I have to leave tomorrow first thing,’ Richard said, ‘so will you come out at once, Julia?’

  ‘Indeed I will,’ I said, ‘but I shall have to change.’

  ‘Be quick, then!’ he said in his familiar peremptory tone of command.

  I fled up to my bedroom. I had a choice of three riding habits now: my original one in cream, now sadly shabby, and the two newer ones, one in a soft grey with a grey tweeded jacket, which matched my eyes and which I thought fearfully smart, and the other a deep purple. When I had first worn the grey one downstairs, John had drawn in his breath with a little hiss and his eyes had met Mama’s in a look I could not fathom.

  ‘It is just that she always wore her riding dress,’ Mama had said, ‘and she had a grey one that she wore in second mour