The Favoured Child

14

I truly was a Sussex milkmaid, for it took me several days to realize that I had been adopted by the best society that Bath had to offer this season.

That first day set the pattern for my days in Bath. In the morning I would go to the doctor and sit in his soft armchair by the flickering fire and tell him about Wideacre and about the dreams. I tried to hold tight to what I was saying, to keep as much as I could from him. There was so much I did not want him to know: the lightning glinting on the blade of the knife and Ralph’s face in the thunderstorm when Beatrice went out in the rain to meet him; the dream I had of love-making in the summer-house with Ralph and the knowledge I had that no young lady should have of that delight, the secrets of Acre, the way animals feared Richard, that night of dark unsayable pleasure before the fire; and the dream that had come over and over again of the falling spire and me standing under the lich-gate calling the people to pull down the cottages to make the village safe.

I did everything I could to lie to Dr Phillips and to lock the Wideacre secrets safely away in a corner of my mind. But he was clever, and the room was too hot, and the firelight flickered as I watched it, and day after day he drew more and more from me until I felt robbed and betrayed, and I knew I was losing my Wideacre self. It was being sucked from me and I was becoming an empty, pretty shell.

‘Now, tell me,’ he would say insinuatingly. And something inside me would flinch as if a snail had crawled on to my hair as I lay in the grass. ‘Tell me about this woman, your Aunt…Beatrice, is it? Tell me why you think you are like her.’

And I would start haltingly to tell him, trying all the time to tell him as little as possible. ‘I look like her, I suppose,’ I ventured. ‘And everyone in the village says I look like her.’

‘Have you seen her picture?’ Dr Phillips asked.

‘No,’ I said slowly. I shifted in my chair. The cushions were very deep and soft, the firelight flickered on my face.

‘Then how do you know you look like her?’ he asked. Whenever he asked a question like that, his voice took on a slightly querulous note of surprise. He was inviting contradiction.

‘Because…’ I broke off. ‘They all say I do,’ I said.

‘I don’t think so!’ he said sweetly. He almost sung the words. ‘I don’t think that is why. Have you dweamed her, Julia? You can tell me, you know.’

‘I have not seen her in dreams,’ I temporized. But he was quick to hear the note of deception.

‘But you have dweams with her in them?’ he asked.

I sighed. There was a strange perfume about the room, as if the windows were never opened, as if all the air had been burned away by the flickering flames, as if I should never be free, like some poor Persephone, underground, for ever.

‘Yes, I have dreams with her in them,’ I said wearily.

‘And yet you say you do not see her?’ His voice was very soft, very sweet.

‘Only in a mirror,’ I said.

‘In a mirror’ he repeated as if that were a little bon-bon to be savoured. ‘How do you see her in a mirror? Are you beside her?’ He did not wait for me to reply. ‘Beside her? In fwont of her? Behind her?’

‘I am her!’ I broke in, suddenly impatient. ‘I dream that I am her!’

I expected him to be shocked. Instead he put his pudgy fingers together like a little tower over his rounded waistcoat and said softly, ‘Vewy good, and I think that is enough for today.’

It was like that every time. At the very point when I thought I had said something so startling that it would break the spell of the room, shake his poise, release me, then it was always time for me to go. The next day when I went again, he would start from where we had left off. And somehow, in the interval, the shock had gone from what I said. It had become his information. My dream had become his dream. I was, each day, diminished by the loss of my dreams and my secrets.

There was nowhere I could be renewed. Every morning the dreams I spoke of seemed more and more remote. The sight seemed less likely, a mistake, or a lucky guess. Soon Dr Phillips was not just listening to me, he was telling me that I must have misunderstood, that things could not happen the way I had thought, that Beatrice could not walk Wideacre and see through my eyes, that the land had no heartbeat.

Bath itself eroded the bedrock of my certainties. Ralph Megson was right when he said that if one was to choose anywhere to forget the land, then Bath would be a good place. I sighed for the smell of Wideacre air as I walked in the parks and gardens. Bath was so paved and cobbled and tiled that I never saw a scrap of pure earth all the time I was there. I never saw a leaf that had not been trimmed into some fashionable shape. I never saw a flower which had grown of its own free will. Even the river, flowing through the town, was walled in and channelled and guided under the pretty bridge and over the stone-built weir.

As for the hot springs, I thought them simply disgusting. Not just disgusting to drink, which Mama insisted we did – three glasses every day! – but I found the very idea of hot water coming out of the ground quite repellent. It was hot enough to bathe in! Every time we passed the bath-houses and smelled the steam coming out and the hot metallic odour of the water, I longed for the downs at Wideacre, where all along the spring line the water comes out from the chalk as cold as ice and tasting of clean rain.

I longed for Wideacre then, when I smelled the baths. I longed for Wideacre when I awoke in the morning and looked out of my window and saw row on row of stone-tiled roofs, stretching, it seemed, for ever and ever. I longed for Wideacre at night when I could not get to sleep. The rattle of the coach-wheels on the cobbles seemed to be sounding inside my head, and my bedroom grew bright and then black as the dipping light of a link-boy went past, instead of being lit by the cool beam of a Wideacre moon. I longed for Wideacre at meal-times when I thought the bread looked grey and the milk tasted strange, and we did not know where either had come from, whose cows had given the milk, whose wheat had made the flour.

I longed for Wideacre most of all when I walked in the park and all there was to see was a frozen patch of ice with sulky ducks around it begging for bread, and nowhere to walk but meandering little paths which ran round and round in circles instead of going the quickest straight route as we do in the country. But in the country we walked because we wanted to get somewhere, not because we wanted to waste time. In Bath wasting time was all people ever did. Every day I spent there was full of minutes and hours when my only occupation was spreading out little tasks to fill up the emptiness. Then I would walk in the park and look at the toes of my new half-boots – which would not have survived one minute in the mire of Acre lane – and wonder what on earth I was supposed to do with myself to fit myself for the life they wanted me to lead. I did not know how I could bear to change that much.

One day I was so deep in such hopeless rebellion that I did not hear at first when someone called my name.

‘Julia!’ the voice said again, and I looked up and saw Mary Gillespie.

‘You were far away!’ she said teasingly. ‘Were you dreaming of James Fortescue? Elizabeth will hardly speak to you this morning. You danced twice with him last night, you know!’

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.

‘I could not do that,’ he said gently. ‘But I should be a fool indeed if I said that anything I could not do was beyond the ability of anyone else. Perhaps you have a special gift. Perhaps you should cherish that gift and use it, rather than trying to knock it out of yourself.’

I was about to reply – searching for words to thank him for that brief sentence which had suddenly returned to me a share of my lost confidence in Wideacre, in myself as an heir to Wideacre – when Marianne and Emily and Mary and Elizabeth came to the table in a flurry of bandboxes and news, and the moment when I could have thanked him was gone.

But I did not forget it. Although my days were now a whirl of outings, shopping, dances and conversations, each night before I slept I used to lie for a few minutes and think about the day. It seemed to me that I was gaining a new sort of assertiveness, that even while Dr Phillips stole from me my bright faith in myself as the squire of Wideacre and the favoured child of a magic tradition, Bath was teaching me the assurance of a pretty girl who could give an answer – pertly enough, maybe – and who could hold her head up and deal with her peers as equals. And as the acknowledged favourite of the most eligible young man in Bath that season, I had a confidence I would never have learned at home. I had James to thank for that too.