The Favoured Child Read online

  Inside me, in a burning pain under my ribs, was a great wrench as I saw the cart go, and I called out something into the wind and knew, with despair, that she would not have heard me. I shrieked it again, but the wind was too loud and the rain too strong. I did not even know myself what it was that I had called.

  I cried out in my sleep and the sound woke me. It was morning, it was the morning of my first Wideacre harvest, and the rain and the storm had been in my dream and not in real life. Yet I awoke with a sudden lurch of my stomach which felt like fear. As soon as I awoke I held my breath as if to listen, like a householder alerted in deepest sleep by the creak of a floorboard in a silent house. I lay quiet and listened to the fast thudding of my own heart.

  My bedroom ceiling was grey-white, and when I raised myself in bed, I could see the sky still unbroken, with slabs of clouds overlying each other, conspiring to roof us in. Tight as slates they lay along the crest of the downs over the roof of the Dower House; although I knew the bright sun was behind them, I could scarcely believe I should ever feel hot sunlight again.

  I gave a sigh as if I were not a young woman but an old lady, wearied with the heat of many summers, and I pulled the covers back and got slowly out of bed as if I were tired and defeated. The wooden floorboards were hard under my feet. The water in my ewer was cold. The sky outside the window was too bright and yet it was white, not blue. I splashed water on my face and felt my skin tighten. I dressed in my old grey riding habit, pulled my hair up on my head in a careless knot, crammed my hat on top and pinned it on. My eyes under the pale brim were dull and weary. Then I went down the stairs to the kitchen where Mrs Gough was up early, whisking eggs in a bowl.

  She poured me a cup of coffee and I drank it standing by the back door, looking out over the back garden. I felt it scald my tongue, but it did not warm me. It was heavy with sugar, but did not taste sweet. I gave a little sigh. There are some days when nothing seems right, and this day was one of them. She gave me my breakfast in a kerchief, a pastry, a bread roll with butter and honey, a few slices of meat and a peach from Havering.

  I went out to the stable; Jem had overslept and Sea Mist was not ready for me. I heaved her saddle out of the tack room and carried her bridle over my shoulder. I tacked her up on my own and hauled myself on to her high back from the mounting-block with no one to help me, and no friendly smile to wish me good harvesting as I trotted out of the yard and turned right down the drive for a canter over the common before I started the day’s work.

  The field was lined with people when Sea Mist came trotting down the hill from the wild side of the common, Ralph among them at the gate, watching Miller Green hand out sickles from his cart.

  ‘Good morning, Miss Julia,’ he said courteously, and I said, ‘Good day’ to him and to all the people around him who smiled and called to me.

  ‘Miss Julia!’ a voice said at my horse’s head, and I looked down. It was one of the carter’s children, a thin, blue-eyed waif, eight years old.

  ‘There are no biscuits for you, Emily, until you have done a morning’s gleaning,’ I said with mock severity.

  She giggled, showing a gap in her teeth and thrust a grimy fist in her mouth to stop the laughter. ‘Nay,’ she said, ‘but could I have a bit of ribbon off your gown, Miss Julia?’

  I followed her eyes. The grey habit was well past its best, and when I had finished ripping out my hems walking through the stubble of this crop, I would order another. When it was new and smart, it had been trimmed with satin ribbon and little bows at the cuffs and around the hem. Despite Mama’s coercion and my occasional repairs, some of the bows had gone missing. The one on my right cuff was hanging by a thread.

  ‘Of course,’ I said kindly. I imagined the child had seen few pretty things in her childhood in Acre. I tugged at the bow until the thread snapped, and I held it out to her. Her white face lit up and she bobbed me a little curtsy – an unschooled copy of her mama’s careful downward sweep – and scurried back to the group of her friends who were gathered in the lee of the fence.

  ‘You supervise this field,’ Ralph said to me. ‘I want to take a Chichester hay merchant around the stacks. Will you be all right on your own?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. I looked around at the men sharpening their sickles and the women rolling up their sleeves. ‘They hardly look unwilling!’

  ‘They can’t wait to cut it,’ Ralph said with satisfaction. ‘Your job is merely to stand by in case they have any problems. Anything you cannot resolve on your own, come to me. I shall be in the meadows by the Acre lane.’

  I nodded and moved my horse out into the middle of the field.

  They knew far better than I what they should be doing. Indeed, it seemed that my function was almost ceremonial. They arranged themselves in a line, each as carefully spaced as drilling guardsmen, and the reaper at the end nearest me looked up at me on top of my horse and said, ‘Wish us good harvesting, Miss Julia, and put some Wideacre magic into the wheat.’

  I gave him a rueful grin. I might not like my role as the spring goddess, as the Queen of the May, as the local harvest deity, but it seemed I could not escape it.

  ‘Good harvesting,’ I called, loud enough for everyone in the field to hear, and I reflected that it mattered very little whether or not I felt foolish and self-conscious if two words from me could please them so much.

  As if those words were a magic signal, they gripped the sickles and stepped into the waist-high crop and swung the blades in a great flashing rippling arc which said, ‘Swish, swish, swish’ into the standing corn, which fell before them like a regiment of Richard’s toy soldiers on an unsteady table. The sea of pale, feathery yellow collapsed into islands where the broken stalks piled up and were left behind as the row of reapers went in a long smooth line, wading into the crop, pushing it before them, for ever engulfed, for ever slicing, until they had reached the far end of the field and wiped their blades clean of the green blood of Wideacre.

  They took a moment to turn around, straightening their backs and chuckling to each other about the weight of the sickles and the forgotten effort of swinging them. They worked steadily and smoothly, faster, I am sure, than they would ever have worked in the old days when the heaps of pale yellow meant profit for the Laceys but the same small wage for the labourer. Now they knew they would have a share in the wealth and they cut up to the very edge of the field, to the roots of the hedges.

  The women and the other men coming behind gathered great armfuls of the crop and bound them roughly into stooks. It was new work for many of them. Acre had not touched corn since they burned down the barns fifteen years ago, and only a few of them had learned the skill as day labourers on neighbouring farms. Many of the stooks were lumpy or sloped to the left or the right, or tied too loose. I thought no one would take offence if I said they should be retied. Indeed, I had a rueful grin from Sally Miles, whose stooks were as slanted as a thatched roof.

  The breakfast was almost a party, with the reapers sprawled among the fresh stubble and the women handing out food with hands wet from the stalks. The little children were all around me, and I blessed Mrs Gough for the little packet of sugared almonds I found in the bottom of the saddle-bag.

  Then the men finished eating and dropped down to lie on their backs and gazed up at the sky, dozing and dreaming, and the women gathered into little groups to admire a nursing baby, or to make plaits and little baskets from the wheat.

  Old Mrs Miles was the centre of one of the groups, showing the young women how to make corn dollies. ‘I wish you’d show your granddaughter how to tie stooks,’ I said, and was rewarded with a ripple of laughter from the women and a laughing scowl from Sally.

  When that field was finished, we moved in a body to Three Gate Meadow, which Beatrice had turned over to corn and which now grew golden again.

  And that was the Wideacre harvest.

  Every day I rose early. Every day I came home late. Every day we cut field after field of pale shimmery wheat until I co