The Favoured Child (54 page)

Minutes I stood there, half dazed and then – above the bird-song, above the pulse that was my own heart beating (though it sounded like a heart in the very land itself) -I heard a high sweet humming as if the waking earth were calling to me to come out and plough and sow and make it grow.

Ralph was already down at the field. We were starting with Three Gate Meadow, and then we would split the sowers into teams and ride among them to check the supply of seed-corn, the strength of the new ploughs and the ability of lads who had never ploughed a furrow before and men who had last ploughed fifteen years ago. I turned my mare towards Acre and Three
Gate Meadow, with no one to break the daze upon me which came from the sudden sunshine and the promise of the day and the magic of Wideacre which was part of my blood and bone.

I slid from my mare’s back and tied her to the gate. The sowers were in the field, and their great bags filled with seed-corn bulged before them like the fat bellies of pregnant women. They had chosen Jimmy Dart – the lost son of Acre – to take the plough for the first wobbly furrow for luck. As I walked through the gate, I saw the plough coming towards me, his slight city-starved body hanging on to the handles for dear life, his weight too light to keep it straight.

‘Speed the plough!’ I called, and everyone waiting around the field turned and smiled at me and called, ‘Speed the plough!’ in return.

Clary was by the gate, a great bag of seed-corn over her shoulder and she gestured to me to take it from her. ‘Happy birthday, Julia!’ she said sweetly. ‘I’ve been waiting for you. You sow the first seeds. Everyone ’ud like it. It’d be good luck. Take a handful of seeds and just scatter them out in a big sweep.’

I half staggered under the weight of the bag and waited until the first furrow had been cut. The great horses bent their necks to pull the plough, knowing the work better than Jimmy. I stepped into the furrow behind him and dug deep into the bag that was weighing me down. The seeds stuck, moist and pale, to my hands and I threw them in a great flinging sweep out to the very boundaries of Wideacre so the whole green world should grow at my bidding and there should never be hunger on my land again.

Again and again I cast the seed in generous prodigal fistfuls, up to the sky as if I wanted the greedy wheeling seagulls to share in the bounty of the land so that there should be no crying – not even the crying of gulls on this day. In my head was a great sweet singing as the seed flew out in acres of silver and fell on the deep thick mud. I felt so strong, and so magical, that I half expected it to sprout as it fell.

I hardly heard the sound of hooves in the lane, I was so
absorbed with keeping my balance on the heavy new-turned earth, and with the fascination of the damp sticky seed-bag and the sight of the flung seed. But then I heard someone call my name, and I looked around to the gate. There at the entrance to the field, sliding from his horse, with his black hair all curly and windblown and his eyes bright, was Richard.

I walked towards him in a dream, my hands still full of seed. He seemed to be the centre of the world whose heartbeat I had heard in my head this morning, his feet planted as surely as a rooted tree in the safe earth of Wideacre, his head warmed by the Wideacre sun.

The bedraggled muddy hem of my riding habit flapped around me as I staggered across the furrows, and the mud of Wideacre was caked on my boots. Richard reached out a soft white hand to me and drew me towards him, without saying a word. With the eyes of all of Acre upon us and with the plough-boys stopped to watch, I turned my face up to Richard like a common girl and let him kiss me long and passionately under the spring sky.

His arms held me tight to him and I was enveloped by his driving cape, which swirled around us. Sheltered by it, half hidden by it, I put my hands inside his cape and around his hard hot back, and clung to him as though I were drowning in the river. His head came down harder and I opened my lips under his and tasted his mouth on mine.

As if that taste had been poison, I suddenly leaped backward, struggling out of the folds of his cape, shrugging off his grip. Heedless of what he would think I put the muddy back of my hand to my mouth and rubbed hard, wiping away the taste of Richard’s tongue.

‘Don’t, Richard!’ I exclaimed and there was no magic between us, and no mindless delight left in me at all.

Richard’s face was as black as thunder. ‘I got your note…’ he started.

But then there was a warning call from Clary at the gate. ‘Look out, Julia, ‘tis your ma!’

I stumbled back another pace and looked guiltily down the
lane. Uncle John’s curricle was turning from the drive into Acre lane and coming towards us, but I guessed they would have seen nothing more than Richard and I exchanging a hug of greeting. I coloured scarlet in a great wave of shame. I could not raise my eyes from the ground. I could not look around the field for fear of someone beaming at me, or winking at Richard. Even if my mama had not seen, it was not fear of her disapproval which made me recoil from Richard. I had jumped back from his embrace because his touch – which I had once loved so well-seemed suddenly heavy with evil.

I did not look at him. What he was thinking, I could not imagine. And when I thought of James, and of myself as his promised bride, I felt hot and kept my eyes down.

Not Richard. He always had a way of sailing through scrapes and he turned from me and strode up to the curricle. ‘Mama-Aunt!’ he said with delight, and leaped up to the step to give her a hearty kiss. ‘And Papa!’ he said, and stretched across my mama to shake John’s hand. ‘You will think me undutiful,’ he said, ‘but as I rode towards home I saw some people coming this way and they told me it was the first sowing day. I would not have missed it for the world. And here in the middle of the field was Julia, casting corn away as if she were feeding seagulls.’

Uncle John laughed. ‘We came to see the ceremonial ploughing, but I see we are too late.’ He nodded at Ralph, who came to the gate to greet them. ‘Good day, Mr Megson. Here is Richard home on a surprise visit for Julia’s birthday and to see your sowing.’

Ralph nodded to Mama and to Richard. I knew him well enough by now to know he could be trusted never to breathe a word that I had fled into Richard’s arms as if we were acknowledged lovers. No one in Acre would ever betray me on purpose. Only Ralph knew that I was affianced to another man and Richard should be no closer than arm’s length, but Ralph of all people would not care for that. I moved towards the plough and scowled at Ralph to warn him against teasing me. I might as well tell the sun to stop shining.

‘Hussy,’ he said in a provocative whisper, and I flamed scarlet again and frowned at him.

No one now would expect me to take my breakfast in the field with the sowers and the plough-boys but I was stubborn. ‘You go on home, Richard,’ I said pleasantly. ‘You will have things you wish to unpack. Have breakfast with Mama and Uncle John. I will be home as soon as ever I can, but I have promised to do a full day’s work here. If you want to come out again, I shall either be here or in Oak Tree Meadow. I cannot leave the ploughing now it has just started, there is too much for one person to watch alone. Mr Megson cannot be left with the work like that.’

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.

M
ama 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?’