The Favoured Child (69 page)

Richard pushed me ahead of him up a narrow gangplank, and I kept my eyes on my footing and tried not to notice that half a dozen grubby faces had appeared over the side of the ship and were inspecting me and passing comment freely on my gown and my bonnet, and what we might want with their ship.

When we reached the deck, they had vanished, and Richard seemed to be deaf and blind to the discomfort of the situation.

‘Hey, there!’ he called confidently to one of the sailors who appeared, by his sprawling leisure, to be in charge of the crew who were slopping dirty water around the deck of the ship. ‘Where’s the captain?’

The man looked up from cleaning his nails with a long murderous knife, and eyed us carefully as if to consider whether or not we merited an answer. Richard put his hand in his coat pocket, and the chink of coins was a password. It struck me that Richard was very rich on this trip. Richard was very assured.

‘’Ee’s drunk again,’ the man said gloomily. He inspected us with open contempt. I flushed as he looked me up and down with disdain. He knew we were here for a secret marriage. He knew there was only one reason for a young girl of Quality to come to this dirty ship seeking out a drunken captain. He looked at me as though I were a wanton who might go with any man. I shrank back a little behind Richard’s shoulder, pulled my light cloak about my shoulders and turned up the collar to hide my face.

I had a feeling, an idea I could not have put in words, that there was some kind of omen for the future in that disdainful stare. I was to become the property of one man, but any man could look at me as he wished. I was a free woman no longer; and well might I shrink back behind Richard, for he was my protector. I would no longer command respect in my own right.

‘We’ll see him,’ Richard said. He did not notice my embarrassment, or he did not think it sufficiently important to check the man’s insolent gaze. The man shrugged, caring neither way, and then pointed rudely past us to a door. ‘Straight dahn there,’ he said, his accent sounding strange to my ears, which were accustomed to the gentle lilt of the Sussex voice.

Richard started for the companion-way, and I caught him up. ‘Richard,’ I said, staying him as he was about to descend. ‘If he is drunk, perhaps he cannot. . . Perhaps we should…Richard, wait!’ I said.

Richard set his feet either side of the ladder and slid skilfully down to the bottom. ‘Come down,’ he commanded me.

I hesitated. The crew on deck had stopped their work and were openly staring, and the man with the knife was watching me, expressionless. Even the sailors in the rigging were staring down at me. I gathered my skirts around me. Gripping the ladder in my hands, I clambered down till I was at Richard’s side.

The stench hit me like a physical blow. It was a smell compounded of vomit from a thousand seasick voyages, of old sweat, of injury and fear, of gunpowder and filthy clothes, of mouldy food and gangrene. I gagged and fumbled for my handkerchief and put it over my mouth, inhaling the smell of clean linen and eau-de-Cologne.

Richard looked at me, his expression hidden in the shadows of the ill-lit corridor. ‘What is it now?’ he demanded impatiently.

‘We cannot do it like this, Richard,’ I said urgently. ‘It is awful! There must be another way we can do this. We cannot be married here in this dirty place. It…it
smells
, Richard.’

He gave a quick exclamation under his breath and then he turned towards me and took hold of my arms, just above the elbows, in a grip so hard that I would have cried out had my fear of the place not been greater than the hurt.

‘Look here,’ Richard said savagely,
‘you
wanted us to be lovers.
You
lay back on the floor and smiled.
You
put your arms around my neck.
You
said no but meant yes.
You
came home on horseback with Jem and held out your arms to me. If you had been
unwilling, you would have struggled more. There is no such thing as rape, everyone knows that. You were willing, you could have stopped me, but you did not want to stop me. And when Jem found you, you told him that you had fallen from Misty. If you had been raped, you would have said so. You were willing. You were willing because you are a whore. And it is generous-very generous – of me to marry you.’

I gaped at him. His hard grip on my arms was nothing to the pain I felt under my ribs. Every time he said, ‘You’, the word was like a knife which made a little stab into my heart.

He was telling a partial truth, and in any case I was quite incapable of spotting an unjust accusation now. I had blamed myself from the moment I had realized what was happening on the floor of the summer-house. And a woman is always the one at fault. If I had been a true lady, if I had been truly pure, then Richard would not have done it. I had lost my virginity and that was enough to ruin me in everyone’s eyes – and in my own.

‘I am prepared to marry you,’ Richard said fiercely, ‘but it is a favour I am doing
you
. I could just as well let you face Mama and John on your own, Julia. And if I told them that it was you that tempted me, you who insisted on us being lovers, I should think the shame would kill your mama.’

The torch in the bracket on the wall jumped and flickered in a draught which swept down the companion-way. In the sudden ripple of light I saw Richard’s face. He was smiling in the way he used to smile when he had trapped me in our childhood games. I remembered once he had called me up to a loft in a deserted barn by one of the derelict cornfields. ‘There is a barn owl’s nest,’ he had called. He had insisted that I climb the rickety ladder up to see it. I could not see what he was looking at, though he pointed to a dark hole in the wall close to a beam. Then, while I was straining to see, he had suddenly given me a push which caught me off balance and knocked me into the wall, and had run for the ladder. He was down it in a flash and had thrown it to the floor. When I peered over the edge to the floor twenty feet below, he was smiling. ‘I think you are stuck,’ he had said then.

‘I think you are stuck,’ he said now.

I looked at him and I was clear-sighted. I felt a breath of courage pass over me as fresh and as sweet as a wind on Wideacre. In the fetid cramped hold of a rotten ship, I felt my shoulders go back and my chin come up. I was not a silly whore taken in lust, I was a Lacey of Wideacre. I was my papa’s daughter and I was the heir and natural successor of Beatrice Lacey, the witch of Wideacre, who had made the land and wrecked the land to pave my way to the hall. After Beatrice, nobody in Sussex would ever think women were weak again. With the example of Beatrice before me – even Beatrice the land-killer, the wrecker – I could find some strength inside my young woman’s body and inside my loving, vulnerable mind.

I met Richard’s smiling gaze without flinching. ‘You are right,’ I said levelly. ‘I am stuck. So let us go into this nasty little room and see this drunken captain and get ourselves married. And then I shall have to go home, and later I shall have to tell my beloved mama and dear Uncle John. And I shall have to face their grief and disappointment in me. And I shall have to walk through the wreckage of their hopes for me. But I can walk through that wreckage,’ I said. ‘And it is true that I am still not afraid. Or when I
am
afraid, I do not stay afraid. And my fear does not disable me.’

Richard’s smile was wiped off his face and he was looking at me with something like respect. ‘Yes,’ he said softly, ‘I know you are not afraid, Julia. Even when you are scared about something, you always seem to find courage from somewhere to face it. I don’t know how you do it.’

‘I am a Lacey,’ I said grimly, and the very word seemed to bring the air of Wideacre into that close place. ‘Now, let’s go in, Richard, and get it over with.’

He raised his hand at my command and knocked at the door and went in. So, although he was partly lying when he said I was to blame for the conception of the child, it was certainly I who made the marriage. And I had an odd idea that the marriage would ruin me more than the rape had done.

It was horrid.

Of course it was horrid.

I had dreamed all my childhood, girlhood and womanhood of marrying under the great grey stone arch of Acre’s Gothic church, with the sun shining through the stained-glass window, making rainbow blocks of colour on my white gown, and Mama smiling in the Lacey pew behind me.

When I was a girl, I had dreamed that Richard would be there with his hand warm in mine and his kisses on my lips when he had given me the ring. I had seen myself, in my conceited dream, in a flurry of white muslin or figured satin. I even knew the flowers I would have carried: Wideacre flowers, for not all my girlish dreams were obvious conventions culled from the journals. I had thought I would carry the wild flowers of Wideacre in a jumble of a bouquet, with scarlet poppies bright in the middle. I would have worn white moon-daisies and blue cornflowers in my hair.

I dare say I should have looked very foolish, and I am sure my grandmama, Lady Havering, would not have approved. I should hardly have set a mode with a bunch full of weeds in my hands and daisies around my head. So perhaps it hardly mattered that I could not be a beloved bride in the church of my home, surrounded by friends and with the good wishes of a village around me.

But nothing could have been worse than that filthy cabin, and the captain and the mumbled promises read in a croaky voice from his little prayer book. When he looked at me to ask for my response, the stale drink on his breath blew in my face. His cabin smelled of dirty clothes, and there was a plate with rancid chop bones on it tucked under the bunk.

But it was legal, and binding, and when he said, ‘I now pronounce thee man and wife’, we were as much married as if we had made our promises in a grand society wedding in Chichester Cathedral.

‘You may kiss the bride,’ he said, leering at Richard.

Richard dipped his lovely dark head down to me and I raised
my face for his kiss. His lips were like ice, and mine were no warmer.

‘I thought we had to be married at sea,’ I said in a small voice.

‘I falsified the ship’s log,’ said the captain, his rotten teeth showing in his smile. ‘If anyone ever asks you, you were here this morning when we were off the Isle of Wight. A marriage for the two of you, and extra sea-time for the young officers in training!’ He gave a dirty smile at Richard. ‘Thought you’d be in a hurry to get the little lady home,’ he said insinuatingly.

I turned away at that while Richard paid him, and I went out into the companion-way and up the ladder, caring little this time for my skirts, and I turned my collar up against the chill and against the sadness of this mess that I was in. We went back down the gangway, walked to the inn, drank a silent cup of coffee in the parlour and then went outside to the curricle.

Richard whistled a tune, in high good humour, and turned the horses north for home. The road off Portsmouth is like a causeway over mud-flats and tidal reaches. The tide was in and it was like a sheet of silver, with boats rocking at anchor and a beautiful schooner coming up on the afternoon tide, sailing low in the water from the weight of her load.

‘Home,’ Richard said with satisfaction, ‘and it’s my real home at last. For I’m the squire there now; there is only one squire there and it is me.’

The horses tossed their heads and lengthened their stride, and I said nothing while Richard tightened the reins and the curricle stopped its swaying. My heart was like a lump of weighty ice inside me, and the sickness I felt was no longer from the baby but from the knowledge that I had lost my control over Wideacre and that I had given Acre a master I could not trust. I had given myself a master I could not trust.

Already I had learned the slavish skill of watching my words. I waited until the horses’ pace was a controlled smooth canter and then I cleared my throat and said levelly, ‘There have been promises made by me in Acre, and contracts signed by me for the two of us. Some things cannot be changed, for they have
been promised and we are honour bound to keep those promises.’

Richard smiled at me and his eyes were empty of all guile. You could not look at him and not trust him. Of course, Julia,’ he said, at his sweetest. Of course, my dear cousin. My dear wife, I can now say! I was just thinking that now Wideacre is mine, you need not take responsibility for Wideacre in the way that you have done. Wideacre will be my job now, not yours. And besides,’ he went on, and his smile was warm, ‘you will be busy indoors, my darling, for in seven months’ time there will be work for you which no one but yourself can do.’

I nodded, for that was true enough. But it chilled me when he spoke of Wideacre in that tone.

‘I shall always want to work on the land,’ I said. ‘You will be the squire, but I have been working the land since Uncle John came home. I could not give it up now just because we are married.’

Richard said nothing; he was steering the horses past a cart piled high with newly stitched sails. We were clear of the town and I raised my head and smelled the clean air and felt the smells and the humiliation of that horrid ship blow away from me.

Richard took his eyes from the road and glanced sideways at me and saw the colour coming back into my cheeks.

Oh!’ he said, pretending he had suddenly remembered. ‘I’ve written to James Fortescue.’

‘You did what?’ I asked.

‘I’ve written to James Fortescue,’ Richard said lightly. Of course I did, Julia. I wrote and told him that we were to be married today. I had a feeling – I don’t know why – that you had neglected to tell him yourself. In any case, a gentleman should inform another gentleman of such an event.’

My mouth was numb, as if Richard had smacked me in the face. ‘I had not told him,’ I said, half to myself. ‘I thought there was no need, after you had informed him our betrothal was over.’

‘Well, then,’ said Richard agreeably, ‘now you won’t have to!’

I sat in silence. I could not imagine what James would feel when he opened a letter from Richard telling him that I was married. I could not imagine how he would tell Marianne, or his parents, who had been so kind to me. I could not bear to think how he would feel, or what he would think of me.