The Favoured Child (43 page)

I laughed and smiled at Elizabeth, who looked not in the least piqued. She was a large fair girl, very placid and sweet-natured, and she bore her sister’s teasing with the equanimity of the eldest.

‘It is true!’ I said promptly. ‘I can think of nothing but him.’

‘But really,’ Mary said and drew my arm through hers, ‘you must like him, Julia. He is absolutely the catch of the season.’ She caught Elizabeth’s scowl and tossed her brown ringlets.

‘Well, I know it is vulgar, but he is! And he has simply heaps of money, and his papa would let him marry a church mouse as long as she had a good name and title to an estate – and Julia has both!’

I made a little grimace. ‘Not much of an estate,’ I said. ‘If you could see it, you would not speak of it like that. No house at all but a ruin, and only crops planted this season!’ I stopped, because just describing Wideacre like that brought a lump to my throat. I was very, very homesick. ‘And I have only a right to half of it,’ I finished gruffly.

‘Yes, but do you like him?’ Mary persisted, wanting to hear of love when my heart was aching for two hundred acres of mixed arable and woodland, common and downs.

‘Oh, no,’ I said absently, thinking of the smell of the wind that comes down the hillsides through Acre on cold days like this one.

‘Then it’s the cousin at home!’ Mary proclaimed triumphantly to her sister across me. ‘I knew it was all along! You’ve come to Bath to have your season and then you’ll go home and be married as soon as you are of age, and live in the lovely new house and we will all come to visit you when we have married our lords.’

I could not laugh at Mary as I usually did. ‘No, it is not my cousin,’ I said with a sigh which I kept to myself. I had had no word from Richard since I had come to Bath, not so much as a scrawl at the end of a letter from John. But I heard of him. He was becoming beloved in the village. He was working alongside Ralph. In the days of fine weather he was pressing on with the rebuilding of the hall; in days of bad weather he was in the new barn where the men were sharpening ploughshares. Richard was charming them in Acre, just as he could charm Mrs Gough, and Lady Havering, and Mama, and me. Every time I read that Richard had been helpful with one job or another I felt my heart sink a little lower, for I knew that while I was being taught to do without Wideacre, Wideacre was learning to do without me.

‘Well, then, you are certain to like James Fortescue enough in time,’ Mary said, pressing my arm for emphasis. ‘AH the girls in
Bath are wild about him. Elizabeth is not the only one who wants to push you in the Avon.’

We all three laughed at that but what she said was half true. And others had noticed that James Fortescue had danced with me twice. His papa and mama came to stay with Mrs Densham one weekend, and Mama and I were invited to dine with them. They wanted to see the girl who was the best friend of their daughter, Marianne, and a potential bride for their youngest son. And Mama wanted to inspect them.

They were all well pleased. I knew his family liked me; his mama kissed me on the cheek at meeting and at parting, and her warmth suggested she had heard many kind things about me. My mama measured their wealth and their sharp city-trader manners with a keen eye and smiled. The Fortescues were a family of Bristol merchants, great traders. They were not long-established landowners like us Laceys of Wideacre; but they had a position which many would envy. His papa was an alderman – well thought of in Bristol and his mama was related to the Kent family.

I came home from the dinner with something of a rueful smile. I knew I had been looked over and found satisfactory as much as if I had been a brood-mare. I also knew that Mama had been assessing them. I had learned some town gloss in Bath – I could not escape it, watching the workings of the Bath marriage market. We might all pretend we were here for the waters, or here to buy some fashionable clothes, or to meet acquaintances; but the season was all about courtship and marriage, as obvious a task of pairing as choosing stock. Mary’s vulgarity was nothing worse than a recognition that she, and her sister, and even I, were in Bath to see and to be seen, to choose and to be chosen, to like and to be liked. My delicate mama trod a very narrow road when she tried to ignore the vulgarity of arranging her daughter’s marriage to one of the most wealthy young men in society that season.

She would not have forced me. She had the right to do so, and there were many parents who would order their daughters to marry the man that had been chosen for them. But my mama had never been that sort of a mother. She would not even have
tried to persuade me if she had seen my mind set against this or that young man. But she would not have been human if she had not been flattered that her daughter should be dancing often with James Fortescue. She would not have been a good mother if she had not made sure that James Fortescue’s family knew that I was part heir to an estate which had once been great, and which would be great again.

In the meantime there were many new friends – not just the Fortescues. For, once I was in their party, I seemed to meet more and more young people, until our gilt mirror over the mantelpiece was rimmed with invitation cards, and the bowl at the foot of the stairs was filled with calling cards. Early every morning, before my visit to Dr Phillips, James Fortescue would drive his high-slung phaeton to our door and ask the landlady if Miss Lacey would care to come for a drive with him that day.

Miss Lacey almost always
did
.

He was good company, and he let me hold the reins, and when he saw how I handled his horses, he promised himself the pleasure of teaching me to drive a pair in earnest.

‘You have good hands,’ he said, and I laughed, remembering the last time I had heard that. He wanted to know all about it, and I found I was telling him about Dench and about the wild ride into Acre, and about Richard’s rescue. He hooted with laughter when I told him I had been riding astride with my gown all pulled up, and I had to make him swear to tell no one.

‘It sounds a wonderful estate, your Wideacre,’ he said wistfully. ‘I can understand my papa’s longing for a country home for himself, and a home for me. Your mama says that you could own it entire if you bought out your cousin.’

‘Yes,’ I said, and an awkward silence fell between the two of us as we both realized that my mama and his papa had been match-making.

He chuckled. ‘Don’t look so grave, Miss Lacey,’ he said. ‘My papa can perfectly well afford to buy his own estate. I need not marry to oblige him, and you need not think of obliging the two of us.’

I gave an irresistible ripple of laughter. It was quite improper to talk like this, but it felt so very much easier than pretending, for the sake of convention, that neither of us knew all of Bath had been planning our marriage for weeks.

‘I could always give you the estate outright,’ I said outrageously.

‘Yes!’ he said at once. ‘Please, I beg of you. Anything rather than having to act out this impossible part that I have to sustain. I have to pretend all the time that I like you, and I have to take you for drives, and ask you to dance. And next I suppose I shall have to send you flowers!’

‘And I have to accept,’ I said mournfully. ‘It’s terrible being such an obedient daughter!’

‘You could always elope with a footman,’ he suggested helpfully, ‘but you don’t have one, do you? What about the butler?’

I laughed aloud at that and forgot I was driving; I dropped my hands on the reins so that his horses lengthened their stride, and I had to lean back and put just an extra touch on the reins to steady them.

‘I am sorry,’ I said, ‘but you should see our butler! He is a dear, but he is old enough to be my grandpapa!’

‘Then it may have to be me,’ he said apologetically. ‘I like it no better than you, my dear Miss Lacey; but we shall have to reconcile ourselves.’

The laughter caught in my throat at his words, which seemed still to be part of our indiscreet jest and yet also seemed a little warmer. I shot a sideways glance at him and he was looking at me, his brown eyes intent and smiling.

‘It is just a joke,’ I said quickly. ‘One that I should not be making. I have no intention of marrying for many years.’

‘I knew it!’ he said with such energy that he made me jump; but then I saw he was smiling still. ? jilt! And one so young too!’

I could not help but laugh at that, though I knew full well I should not; and I was still smiling when he took the reins as we drew up outside the door. He leaned over to give me a hand as I clambered down, but refused my invitation to come in.

‘I shall have to see you at the ball tonight, I suppose,’ he said gloomily’ ‘and I suppose I shall have to dance with you.’

I turned at the front door and swept him a most dignified curtsy. ‘Not at all,’ I said helpfully. ‘Though thank you for asking. I regret I have every dance taken.’

He looked twice at me then, and I saw the confident smile on his face slightly shaken at the thought that we might not dance together. But then he coiled up his long carriage whip and pointed it at me. ‘Miss Lacey,’ he said firmly, ‘if you have not saved the dance before and after supper for me, and if I do not take you into supper, then I shall tell Marianne and all our acquaintance that you are a gazetted flirt. And I shall speak nothing but the truth.’

And I, conscious for the first time in my life of being pretty, conscious for the first time in my life of being desired, looked up at him, seated on the high carriage, and laughed in his face. ‘Wait and see,’ I said, and flicked around on my heel and went indoors without another word.

I did not like him just for those drives in the cold wintry sunshine. I was not yet entirely an ordinary girl who would have her head turned by a posy of flowers or the fact that he was recognized as being the most desirable young man in Bath. I had called out a ploughing team, so I was far from thinking that the most important thing in the world was the whiteness of a man’s gloves and the number of dance-steps he could perform. More than anything else I liked James Fortescue because of how he was with his sister Marianne. Against the opinion of all the family and the family doctor, he maintained that there was nothing in the least wrong with her. His impossibly rude imitation of a duck quacking every time someone mentioned Dr Phillips, did not only bring a smile to Marianne’s face, it also made me feel more cheerful about the long draining hours which I spent in that close room.

‘What does he do with you?’ James Fortescue asked me as we sat at a table in a coffee-house waiting for Marianne to join us from taking the waters.

‘He talks at me,’ I said gloomily. ‘To start with I was talking all the time. He wanted to know everything I thought. Bit by bit, the more I told him, the more the feelings slipped away from me, until now I hardly know what to think. I know I miss my home more than I thought possible to bear; but the special feeling I had – a sense of being somehow magic there – has almost gone from me.’

‘How do you mean? Magic?’ James asked gently. I glanced up at him quickly, but he was not laughing at me. He was not patronizing me in the way which sent my hackles on the rise when Dr Phillips spoke to me. This was a young man, my own age, with a good deal more experience of the world than I had. But he trusted his own counsel, and I thought I could in turn trust him.

‘There’s a long tradition,’ I said awkwardly. ? belief that my family is somehow special on the land, that the Lacey heir can make the land grow, can make it especially fertile. And I feel that. I believe when I put my face to the ground, I can almost hear a heart beating at the very centre of the earth – as if it were a living thing and it loved me.’

Someone dropped a spoon and it clattered against a plate near me. I jumped and looked around me. I was not on Wideacre, I was many miles from my home. I was suddenly aware of the dozens of people in the coffee-house, of the hundreds of people in the town, and of my own arrogance and folly in claiming to be special. I shot a nervous look at James Fortescue. He was watching me, and in his face I could see nothing but quiet attentiveness.

‘Or at least, I did,’ I said. ‘I was very sure of it. But since I have told Dr Phillips, and had to explain it over and over, I am not so sure. I expect it was all nonsense.’

James Fortescue huffed in temper and caught one of my restless hands. ‘That is
exactly
what I don’t like about this Dr Phillips,’ he said. ‘It is the same thing for Marianne. When she started going to see him, she certainly did have trouble in eating proper food at proper times. I had some ideas about why that should be.

‘You have a small family and perhaps you live peacefully together,’ he said diffidently. ‘It is not the same everywhere. My papa and my mama have differences of opinion, and there are five of us generally sitting down to dinner together. When there is a disagreement, there is an argument which is often long and loud. You will know by now how sensitive Marianne is; she simply cannot tolerate raised voices. By refusing to eat, she was excused dinner with the family. I was certain that was the start of the difficulty, and at one time she thought so herself. But since she has been seeing Dr Phillips, she does not know herself what the matter might be. He has taken all her certainty from her and has nothing to put in its place but a vague sense that it is her fault and that she is somehow in the wrong.’

I nodded. I had already had some idea of this from Marianne herself. James would not have spoken of it if he had not known I was in her confidence.

‘I cannot imagine how she could blame herself,’ I said hesitantly.

‘I can,’ he said, ‘and you should be able to imagine it. When you came to Bath, I dare say you thought it perfectly all right that you should feel so special about your home. Now you think that feeling somehow wrong, and you are even in danger of losing it altogether!’

‘Oh no!’ I said. ‘I was already unhappy about what Wideacre meant to me…’ I broke off and looked at him.

‘Why?’ he asked, as gentle as a sister.

I hesitated, and then I found I could tell him. I did not tell him the version which Dr Phillips had persuaded me was the truth: that I had been awakened by the storm and calculated the danger of the spire falling on the village, that I had made a lucky guess. I told him that I believed I had been given a premonition, and that I had acted on it. I finished the story of that strange night in a rush and I kept my eyes down. It sounded so bizarre. But then I felt the brush of his fingertips on the back of my gloved hand and I looked up.