The Favoured Child Read online

  Richard gave me a shake so my head nodded. ‘I have every right,’ he said harshly. ‘You put his letters there so that I might find them. You wrote the journal for me to read. I know you did, you know you did. You were hoping to make me jealous. You plotted with him against me, to take your share of the estate away from me. But you are such a hot little whore that you could not help yourself. Not in the field at the ploughing, not in the summer-house at the maying. You lay back and smiled. You put your arms around me. You stuck your tongue in my mouth, you dirty little whore. I didn’t even know that women kissed like that until you did it. That disgusts me! And then you ran off to Midhurst to meet your other lover to say, “Oh, James, I am sorry. But can we still be married?”‘ Richard had adopted a falsetto whine. ‘What were you going to say? “Oh, James, I didn’t mean to do it. I thought I was Beatrice!” or “Oh, James, I was thinking of you!”‘ He flung me away from him and I stumbled against the table.

  ‘It wasn’t like that. . .’ I tried to say.

  ‘I am sure you wish it wasn’t!’ Richard said harshly. ‘But you tell one lie after another, Julia. I don’t think you even know what the truth is any more.’

  ‘I love him,’ I said. I drew a deep breath of the stuffy air of the room, thick with breakfast smells and raw anger. I was shaking; but I clung to the edge of the table, and to that one certainty. ‘I love him,’ I said again. ‘And I did not want to lie with you.’

  Richard took a quick stride back to me and grabbed my arm. He marched me towards the door and flung it open. ‘You tell them, then,’ he hissed. ‘You tell your mama and your Uncle John that you are betrothed to him, and that you want them to get him back, to write to his family and get the marriage put on again. If this is the truth and you are prepared to swear it, you tell them it all. You tell them that you lay with me but that you did not want to. You tell them that I forced you.’ His voice grew louder. ‘Tell them that I am a rapist!’ he said.

  I shot a frightened glance around the hall, wondering if my mama was in her parlour, where she would be certain to hear. ‘Tell your mama I am a rapist!’ he said again, his anger making his voice louder and louder. ‘Tell my papa! And then send to Grandpapa Havering and tell him! And he will have me taken to court, and I will be hanged like a sheep-stealer. Hanged so that you can satisfy your lust with one man and marry another! If that is the truth, then you tell them. Tell them now. Otherwise we shall always know that you are a liar.’

  ‘No!’ I said. ‘No, Richard. No, Richard. No.’ I put both hands out to him and drew him back into the dining-room. He resisted only slightly. I shut the door behind him and tried to speak, though I was shaking so much I could hardly stand. ‘Please don’t say such things, Richard,’ I begged him. ‘You know I would not betray you. You know I would not tell them.’

  ‘You dare not,’ he replied instantly. ‘You know it is a lie and you don’t have the courage to say it aloud.’

  ‘It is not, it is not,’ I said. I could feel the tears in my eyes and on my cheeks, but I was not crying.

  ‘You desired me and you lay with me,’ Richard said coldly. ‘Any denial of that is a lie.’

  I bowed my head; my tears were falling so fast they were spotting the silk of my morning gown.

  He gave me a shake. ‘Isn’t it?’ he insisted.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, utterly defeated.

  ‘You can marry no other man now,’ Richard said.

  I nodded.

  ‘Don’t forget that,’ he said softly.

  I nodded again.

  ‘James Fortescue is gone,’ he said firmly. ‘Gone, and you will never see him again. There is no gentleman in the world now who will marry you. I have taken your virginity and you are my whore. You belong to me.’

  I said not one word in contradiction. Then he pressed a gentle kiss on the top of my bowed head and let himself out of the room, and went quietly up the stairs to his bedroom to pack his books and clothes for Oxford.

  Almost as soon as Richard had gone, I started to feel unwell. We had a spell of fine weather which brought the new hedges on so fast that they were bushy and impenetrable. All the trees in Wideacre Park were sweet-smelling with new leaves. The grass in the paddock was suddenly so bright it hurt my eyes, and Sea Mist danced on the springing verges at the side of the track to Acre as if the fresh grass tickled her hooves. I sat heavily on her, without nerves, but without pleasure. My hand was quite well and I could hold her steady. But I had lost my love of riding. I rode her now as a job of work, to get from one end of the estate to another. And I had to ride her, because I had to work. Uncle John advised it and Mama supported him. They both thought me too pale and too nervous indoors. They both thought that working on the land would help me regain my cheerfulness.

  It did not.

  We had to weed and weed in the hayfields, trying to clear the thick wicked roots of burdock and dandelion to give the grass a chance to grow, and we had to keep the cornfields clear as well. Acre’s return to work happened all in a rush, and I rode out every day to check the progress in the fields, to see the sheep and the fattening lambs and to look at the broadening cows whose bellies were as lumpish and as rounded as the swallows’ nests stuck on the narrow beams of the barns.

  Clary Dench was not forgotten in Acre. Nothing is ever forgotten in Acre. But with the land growing so green and so strong, the sun so hot and the clean wind blowing across the top of the downs, bringing with it day after day of warm weather, no one could keep a surly face and no one blamed me for failing to seek my friend among the shades with my sight.

  Ralph Megson had not forgotten. His manner to me was changed; he retreated behind a wall of formality, which was worse, far worse, than his blazing rages. Though we worked side by side on the land, organizing the teams and checking the livestock and the crops, he never so much as smiled at me. And when I once reached out and touched his hand to show him something, he wordlessly withdrew his hand from under mine. His anger was too deep and too silent for any apology of mine; and I had no voice and no courage to broach a topic with Ralph. I did as he bid me on the land like a cipher. I sat at home with my mama like a girl content to have four walls around her. All my rebelliousness, all my keen Lacey courage seemed to have failed me, incongruously, in a season of wealth and growth and confidence.

  We were in the very prime of a Wideacre early summer. The sky was full of birds, and the woods around Wideacre were twittery with their excitement. Of all the springs and summers I had seen on Wideacre, I had never before had one where you could almost see the grass growing as you looked. The men at the hall were working all hours, and they even stayed late as the evenings grew lighter, so the hall seemed to be growing as sweetly and as naturally as everything else on the land.

  Mama announced that she would have a garden to match the beautiful new house, and tied on a chip bonnet with determination and set three gardeners to work to weed and prune and tidy the garden and uproot the saplings and the encroaching woodland.

  The warmer weather suited Uncle John, and he took to riding down to Acre on Prince, who went gently and sweetly with him. He took his regular clinic for the children, but found fewer and fewer patients.

  ‘I shall write a monograph on preventive medicine,’ he said to Mama as they took coffee together in the back garden one morning. ‘I really am amazed at the effect of good food on the health of the Acre children. It has cured them not only of hunger-related complaints, but also of diseases which I would have thought came from quite different causes.’

  Mama nodded. ‘It’s surprising how much brighter the babies are when they are carried to full term and born of well-fed mothers,’ she said. ‘But also, John, there are few villages where they have a resident physician working for nothing!’

  ‘And few where the school dame is a baronet’s widow!’ John said, smiling back at her, ‘and quite the most exquisite relic I have ever seen.’

  Mama burst out laughing. ‘Not a relic, John! What an absolutely hideous word! It ma