The Favoured Child

15

I had not been lying to James Fortescue when I told him that all the dances for the evening were taken. But he was right to be confident of me – I had saved the dance before supper so that he might take me from the bright crowded ballroom into the supper-room and sit down with me on a bench with half a dozen of the young people whom I now called my friends.

Mama had been playing cards and she came up behind me when I was at supper and dropped a hand on my shoulder to prevent me rising. ‘You stay,’ she said softly. ‘I don’t want you to leave early, but I have to go home. This beastly cold I took the other day outside the milliner’s has made me too hot to enjoy playing any more. It has so destroyed my judgement that I am likely to game away John’s fortune unless I leave.’

‘How will you get home?’ I asked.

‘I’ll take a chair,’ Mama said equably, ‘and I’ll send out one of Mrs Gibson’s men to bring a chair to fetch you home.’

‘Excuse me, Lady Lacey,’ James interrupted, rising to his feet, ‘but I beg you will not take such trouble. I will undertake to bring Miss Lacey safe home to you. And if you will allow me, I will go and make sure there is a chair waiting for you at the doorway now.’

Mama smiled. ‘Thank you, Mr Fortescue,’ she said. ‘I should have known that you would be so kind. I shall expect Julia home at eleven, when the ball closes.’

James gave her his arm and took her through the crowds of the supper-room to the bright hall beyond.

‘Lucky you!’ Mary Gillespie said under her breath. ‘I’d push my mama downstairs and break her leg if I thought James Fortescue would take me home.’

‘Mary!’ I exclaimed, and collapsed into giggles. ‘Anyway, it’s not true. You’d lock her in the cellar as well to be on the safe side.’

We were still laughing when James came back and he looked at the two of us suspiciously. ‘It’s true!’ he said. ‘My heart is set on Julia’s mama. She really is so fetching, Julia. She must have been stunning when she was young. Did she ever have a London season?’

‘I think so,’ I said. ‘But I believe she was shy and retiring and did not enjoy it.’

James nodded.

‘Like me,’ I added, keeping my face straight.

‘Very like,’ James said, equally grave. ‘I was saying to Marianne the other day that you would be quite pleasing if she could prevail upon you to put yourself forward a little more.’

‘You!…’ I started, but the quartet began playing in the other room.

‘Is this the last dance I can have with you this evening?’ he asked.

I flickered my dance programme before him with a smug beam. ‘It is,’ I said. ‘But there is no need to stay until the end of the ball. I dare say one of my other partners will escort me home if I ask.’

‘You are a baggage,’ he said feelingly. ‘Come and let me tread on your toes, Julia Lacey; and I hope I disable you for the rest of the evening.’

I laughed and went to dance with him, and then with George Gillespie, and with Sir Clive, and Major Peterson, and all the other new friends, until the quartet played the last dance and the clock struck eleven. The players started packing up their instruments, though Sir Peter Laverock went and begged them to play one more dance so that he could dance with me.

‘I am so sorry,’ James Fortescue said to him, sounding not at all sorry, ‘but I have promised Lady Lacey that I would see Miss Lacey home at eleven o’clock, and we must leave now.’

Sir Peter took one look at James Fortescue, and one look at my smiling face. ‘Well, really, James,’ he said. ‘I can’t like the thought of you walking all alone back from Gay Street. I’ll come with you both to see Miss Lacey safe home, and then walk with you.’

‘Very kind,’ said James. ‘But I couldn’t ask it of you.’

‘I insist,’ said Sir Peter, teasingly. ‘What do you say, Miss Lacey?’

James Fortescue offered me his arm with an air of absolute neutral courtesy, then he slid his hand on top of mine and pinched my fingers hard.

‘I will not trouble you, Sir Peter,’ I said politely, ‘and I’ll bid you good night and hope to see you tomorrow.’ Then, as we turned away, I said softly to James Fortescue, ‘And if I weren’t a lady, I’d kick you on the ankles!’

He laughed aloud at that and swept me to the entrance of the rooms. ‘Would you like a sedan chair?’ he asked. ‘Or can you brave the frosts and walk?’

I sniffed at the air. It was icy cold with a promise of snow behind it. I knew it lacked something, some scent I needed, and I turned my face up to the cloudless ink-black sky for some hint of it. I was missing the smell of my home, the faint scent of cold beech leaves, the hint of icy grass. I was far away from Wideacre tonight.

‘Let’s walk,’ I said, and we stepped out into the stars and I pulled the scarlet-lined hood of my new cape up over my head.

I had one hand tucked inside the furry recesses of my muff, and James Fortescue had the other under his arm, warm against his cloak. It was a brilliant night, as bright as only a winter night can be. The stars were as thick as meadow flowers across a purple-black sky, and the moon had that hazy halo which always means frost. Our footsteps clattered on the paving stones and we walked uphill from the Assembly Rooms with an easy, even pace, close together to get through the throng of dancers coming out and calling goodnight to each other. The chairmen shouted for people crossing the road to make way for them, and a linkboy ran up to us with a torch in his hand and said to James, ‘Light your way, sir?’

‘Starlight is enough tonight,’ James said gently, and he reached inside his cape seeking a coin.

I was looking at the lad’s feet. He had shoes, but they were gone at the soles, tied on with rags. Above the ragged tongue of leather his bare ankles were blue with cold, scarred with old flea-bites. His breeches stopped between knee and calf – a dirty pair of rags which had once been velvet. His jacket was a man’s coat folded over and over at the cuffs so that his skinny wrists showed and his hands were free. He was one of the scum of Bath that float on the rising tide of wealth in the city. He was one of the many that survive on a little luck, a little thieving and a little beggary. I had seen poverty in Acre, but country poverty is nothing compared to the degradation that the poor suffered in this most elegant of towns. One might throw a penny into an outstretched bowl at the market, or give to a special collection in church, but it was possible to spend all one’s days among the wealthy and the beautiful and to see no hardship at all. The city councillors kept it well hidden, fearing to shock their wealthy patrons. And we – the ones with the money and the leisure and the Christian compassion – we liked the streets to be clean and clear of paupers.

‘Here you are,’ James said kindly and the little lad looked up at him and smiled. He must have been about fourteen, but he was so slight and so thin that he looked younger. But there was something about his face which struck me, that square forehead and the deep-set eyes.

As I stared at him, the singing noise of Wideacre fell upon me like a waterfall and drowned out the street sounds and the street sights. All I could see was his pale peaked face and all I could hear was a voice saying, ‘Take him home! Take him home!’ in a tone of such longing and grief that you would have thought it was his mother calling for him.

‘I am going to take you home,’ I said, making it sound like the most simple thing in the world. ‘I am going to take you home.’

His sharp face turned up towards me, yellowy pale in the light from the torch. ‘To Acre?’ he asked.

And then I knew him for one of the lost children of Acre who had been taken for the mills in the north and never returned. ‘Yes,’ I said, and I smiled at him, though I could have wept. ‘Yes,’ I said again. ‘I am Julia Lacey. It is all coming right in Acre now, and there will be work for you if you will let me send you home. I am Clary Dench’s friend, and Matthew Merry’s, and Ted Tyacke’s. They are all working for wages in Acre now, and Ralph Megson has come home and is managing the estate.’

He thrust his torch at James and grabbed both my hands in his bare dirty grip. ‘Is that right?’ he said urgently. ‘Are they working in the village again? Can I really get home? Won’t they send me back here if I go home?’

‘No,’ I said firmly. ‘I am part heir to the estate. I am Julia Lacey, and what I say is done in Wideacre. There will be work for you, and I shall pay for your journey home. I shall write ahead and tell them that you are coming, and there will be a place for you to live and a job for you to do. I can promise you that, and I do promise it.’

He shook both my hands at once then as if we might suddenly dance together in the cold streets of night-time Bath. ‘I can hardly believe it!’ he said, and he was grinning and shaking my hands, and tossing his head as if to try to wake from a dream of good luck. ‘I can’t believe I should meet you like this!’

‘How did you recognize him?’ James asked quietly.

I turned towards him. I had quite forgotten he was there. He had thrust the torch in a bracket on the railings and was leaning against them, watching the two of us. ‘I don’t know. I just guessed, I suppose,’ I said with the lie I had learned from Dr Phillips who had taught me to disbelieve my own senses. Then I hesitated. I had trusted James Fortescue with the truth about my dreams and my seeings. ‘No, that’s not true,’ I said simply. ‘It was the sight. I knew I had to take him home; but I did not know why. I did not know who he was. But now I come to look at him, he does look Sussex-bred to me.’

‘I’m Jimmy Dart,’ he said. ‘My ma was in service at Havering Hall and when she got big with me, they sent her away. She stayed in Acre and worked for Wideacre. But when I was five or six, she run off, and they took me on the parish. They put me in the workhouse. When Mr Blithe came around for paupers, they sent me and the others. We worked for him in his mill. Cruel work that was. Then he could get no more cotton and he shut the mill and we all had to leave. They wouldn’t take us on the parish, because we hadn’t been born and bred there, and they wouldn’t take us back on Wideacre. Julie heard that paupers could get into Bath, but we had no money for the journey. It was winter an’ all. Cold, and we had no shoes. We walked. A long walk, and little Sally died on the way. Just curled up in a field and wouldn’t walk no more. We stayed with her till she was cold and stiff and then we left her. Didn’t know what else we could do. Julie cried then. She said it was the last time she ever would cry. Then we got to Bath, and I had a fight with a boy and won it, so I got his torch.’

‘He gave it to you?’ I asked.

‘I killed him,’ Jimmy said, off-handedly. ‘In the fight. I choked him. It wasn’t much, he was only a little boy. But I got his torch, so I could start earning us money. I’ve done it for a long time now.’

I put a hand out to steady myself on the railings. ‘You killed him?’ I asked faintly.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We got the place where he used to sleep as well after that. We stay there now.’

I said nothing. Jimmy looked me over in the silence, taking in the handsome pelisse with the rich gold fringe and the fur muff.

‘You couldn’t give me a penny, could you?’ he asked. ‘Then I could buy some gin for Julie. She’d like that. It’s better than bread for us if we can buy gin.’

I was about to say no, that I could not bear them to buy gin, that they should have food and clothing and a passage to Wideacre, but that they must not drink gin, never drink again. But James Fortescue stepped forward and put a hand under my elbow. ‘Yes, you shall have some money at once,’ he said gently. ‘Is this Julie from Wideacre too?’

Oh, aye,’ Jimmy said, watching the movement of James’s hand in his pocket, and watching him bring out a shilling glinting as bright as a knife in the moonlight. ‘We stayed together, us Wideacre paupers. Not little Sal who died, and not George who threw himself in the river last winter when he was drunk, but the rest of us live down by the Fish Quay.’

James handed over the shilling. ‘Would the rest of them like to go home?’ he asked. ‘To Wideacre, if it could be arranged?’

A smile spread over Jimmy’s face like the sun rising over the downs. Oh, aye,’ he said, ‘I reckon they would.’

‘I’ll come and see you all,’ I said with sudden decision. Whatever they had done, however they now lived, they were Acre children who should have been raised on Acre. The little girl who had died in the field and the youth who had jumped into the river were in cold water and hard earth far from their homes. And that was the fault of the Laceys. The Laceys, and the squires, and the world which works the way we like it, with very many poor people, and very few rich. ‘I’ll come and see you, and I’ll write to Acre tonight,’ I promised.

‘You’ll never find it on your own,’ Jimmy said. ‘I’ll meet you down at the Fish Quay in the morning if you like.’ He nodded at James. ‘You’d best come with her,’ he said. ‘Some of them are rough.’

‘I’ll be there,’ James said grimly. ‘We’ll come at about nine o’clock.’

Jimmy nodded, and picked up his torch. ‘I can go straight home now,’ he said, stowing the coins carefully inside the ragged jacket and turning to leave. Then he paused. ‘You will come, won’t you?’ he said, suddenly doubting.

I put a hand on his shoulder, I could feel the sharp shoulder and collar-bone through the thin jacket. ‘I promise,’ I said. ‘You could always come to me. We are lodging with Mrs Gibson at number twelve Gay Street. You can always find me there. But I shall come to you tomorrow morning.’

He nodded at that. ‘Till tomorrow, then,’ he said, and turned on his heel and melted into the shadows of the elegant streets of Bath, for the very poor – if they are not working – are better invisible.

James took my hand and we walked on in silence. TU call for you at a quarter to nine,’ he said as we reached the doorstep of the lodging-house. I glanced up. Mama’s bedroom shutters were lined with light; she was waiting up for me.

‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘but I could go alone. Jem Dench would go with me.’

James shook his head with a smile, but did not trouble to reply. ‘You knew at once, didn’t you?’ he asked. ‘I saw your eyes go all hazy, and you smiled as if someone was calling your name, and then you said, “I’m going to take you home.” You knew him at once, didn’t you?’

‘Yes,’ I said simply.

‘It’s a great gift,’ he said. ‘You are a lucky woman.’ He paused then as a thought struck him. ‘Why don’t you cancel your appointment with Phillips tomorrow?’ he suggested. ‘You may find you need to spend some time with the Wideacre children.’

‘I shall,’ I said. I hesitated. ‘I hope he will not mind,’ I said. ‘And then there’s Mama…’

James stepped back a little and looked at me with his head on one side. He was smiling. ‘I should perhaps not suggest this,’ he said mischievously, ‘but until you know more about the situation, do you think it would be very wrong simply to play truant? If your mama is unwell tomorrow, she will not go with you to Dr Phillips. You could tell her afterwards that you had not gone, and explain why.’

‘Mr Fortescue!’ I exclaimed. ‘That would be deceitful and dishonest.’

‘Yes,’ he confessed at once.

‘And very convenient,’ I acknowledged. ‘I shall decide what best to do in the morning. But whether I explain to Mama or not, I shall be ready for you at quarter to nine.’

He bowed and smiled to hear that note of decision in my voice. I put out both hands to him in sudden gratitude for the way he had been with Jimmy and the way he seemed to understand. ‘Goodnight, James,’ I said.

‘Goodnight, Julia,’ he replied.

And then sleepy-faced Meg let me in the front door and I crept upstairs to my bedroom. After writing to Ralph, I tumbled into bed and slept as well as if I were home.

In the morning the Fish Quay was noisy and crowded with women buying for the lodging-houses and restaurants of Bath and occasional eccentric gentlemen, choosing their own catch, who eyed James and me with surprise. It was impossibly busy, with people bidding and shouting, and calling their wares, fishermen crashing great crates down on to the cobbles and fishwives shoving their baskets around and tying muslin squares over the top. But at least it was light there, and it only smelled of old and rotting fish.

The streets beyond it, where Jimmy led us, stank of fish, and vomit, and excrement. The lane was wet with slurry, and little streams of filth formed pools in the gutters where rubbish blocked their path. There was no pavement, there was no paving. The lane was a mud track, heaped with muck and refuse thrown from the windows of the overarching houses on each side. It was as dark as twilight, since the buildings stood so close, and not a breath of wind came down it. As we walked along, me with my skirts bunched in one hand to try to hold the hems clear of the muck, James with one hand firmly under my elbow, we could hear from each house, from each blocked doorway and unglazed uncurtained window, the crying of little babies and the moaning of old and ill men and women, and the ceaseless quarrels of those with breath and energy to be moved to anger rather than silent despair.

Jimmy glanced at James’s dark face. ‘The best we can afford,’ he said defensively. James nodded; he was not surprised.

We had only gone a little way before they started following us. At first people looked at us from doorways and from the windows, but then they fell in behind us, a murmuring crowd who looked like they might heckle or stone or rob us. The grip on my arm tightened and James and Jimmy exchanged a look.

‘Nearly there,’ Jimmy said anxiously. ‘I oughtn’t to have asked you,’

I wanted to say that my place was there. If Wideacre children were living here, then I should know how they were living. But the smell of the street made me keep my mouth shut, and I did not feel brave and determined. I felt sick and I wished very much that I had not come.

‘Here,’ Jimmy said suddenly, and turned abruptly to the side.

It was not a doorway at all, but a basement window. Someone had built a little plank bridge down to it, but that was scarcely needed now; so much rubbish and dirt had been dropped from the street that if you had a strong stomach and stout boots, you could have walked from the lane to the window-sill.

‘Mind you don’t slip,’ James said, and walked ahead of me and put a hand out to me when he was half-way along the plank. We tumbled together into the room and I heard something scurry away at the noise we made. I blinked in the darkness, and then, as my eyes grew accustomed, I could see there were four people in the room.

A girl, about my age, lay sprawled on the floor, an old pelisse under her, a dirty greatcoat over her, a tin mug at her side. Her hair, which might have been copper if it had been washed, was half pinned, half tumbled down. Her eyes were heavy with dark paint around them and crusty with sleep. She was as thin as if she were starving and her cheeks were bright as bright with rouge.

‘This is Julie,’ Jimmy said, and anyone could have heard the love and pride in his voice.

‘Hello,’ I said quietly. ‘I am Julia Lacey.’ As I said it, I realized that we had the same name. She was probably a year younger than me and she had been called after me, in the tradition of Wideacre. She raised herself on her elbow and looked at James Fortescue and then at me without a change of expression. ‘Aye,’ she said, ‘Jimmy told us you’d come. I didn’t believe it.’ She reached for the tin mug and took a gulp from it.

This is Nat,’ Jimmy said.

A boy as black as an African slave got to his feet and came towards us. He was a little taller than Jimmy, but about the same age, I thought. In the darkness of the room I could scarce make out his features; all I could see were his shining eyes, bright blue, looking odd in that blackened face.

‘He’s a sweeper’s lad,’ Jimmy said. ‘He can’t talk because of the soot in his throat. He lost his voice – last winter, it was, wasn’t it, Nat?’ The boy nodded vigorously. A cloud of soot rose from his mop of hair. ‘But he’s getting too big,’ Jimmy said. ‘He can’t get up the chimney, whatever he does. Pretty soon he’ll have no work. Won’t even be able to beg without a voice.’

Nat nodded again, and then turned to a heap of paper on the floor. They were old newspapers, and I thought for a moment that he was going to show us some item of news. But he burrowed among them, and I realized they were his bedding. He came out with some small object cupped in his blackened palm and proffered it to me.

‘It’s his flint,’ Jimmy said in explanation. ‘When they took him from Acre, his ma gave him a flint off the common to remember his home by. D’you know flints like that? Flints like that on the common?’

I held the sharp little stone in my hand and closed my palm on it to keep the tears out of my eyes and out of my voice. ‘Yes, I do,’ I said. It was white on the outside, like a shell, and dark crimson and shiny inside, a hard little keepsake to carry for years. I gave it carefully back to him. ‘What is his family?’ I asked.

‘He’s the son of Tom Brewer,’ Jimmy said. ‘His pa used to work in the Midhurst breweries until they laid him off because of him living in Acre. Are they still there?’

I glanced at Nat. He looked indifferent, as if he had learned long ago that his family had surrendered him to the greater strength of the legal authorities and that he should surrender to them.

‘They are,’ I said. I remembered the cottage under the falling spire. ‘They have a new cottage in Acre,’ I said. ‘It is being built now. And at home you have two little sisters and a new brother.’

The sooty head nodded, suggesting the news was of interest, but not of vital importance.

A movement in the corner of the room caught my eye.

‘That’s Rosie Dench,’ said Jimmy. ‘She’s sick again.’

I went cautiously towards the heap on the floor, and then I stopped by her. At her head, on a sheet of startling whiteness in that grime-encrusted room, was an exquisite pair of gloves covered in embroidery, with a great full-blown pink rose coiling around the wrist and around the fingers of the glove. The work was some of the finest I had ever seen.

‘What’s this?’ I asked. ‘It’s beautiful.’

‘It’s my work,’ she said hoarsely. She raised her head a little from the cloth under her head. Her face was very pale and her lips red from the sores around them. ‘When the light is a little brighter, I’ll do some more. I gets paid for them; they sell them in Mrs Williams’s millinery shop. They pays me well for them too ‘cause I make ’em up as I sew. I don’t need a pattern drawed for me.’ She stopped to cough and she turned her head away from the spotless cloth and the exquisite glove. She coughed into a corner of the rags that were covering her, and in the gloom I could see that her spittle was dark.

‘I know that shop,’ I said. I had thought it too dear, and Mama and I had gone elsewhere for gloves. They had been selling them at five pounds a pair. ‘You could buy a month’s work from a ploughing team for that,’ I had protested. Mama had laughed at the comparison, but we had bought our gloves in a cheaper shop.

‘Five shillin’s, they pays me!’ she said with pride. ‘Five whole shillin’s. And if the light is good, I can do a pair in three weeks’ working.’

I said nothing. I said absolutely nothing. I looked from the exquisite glove to the white face of the Acre girl, and suddenly the embroidered rose did not look beautiful any more. It looked like a parasite growing over the glove, feeding on her pallor and hunger and ill health.

‘Are you one of the Acre Dench family?’ I asked softly. ‘Clary Dench is one of my best friends.’

‘Aye,’ she said, ‘Clary is my half-sister. Her and me have the same pa, but he never married my ma. When she died, I used to live with Clary’s ma, in the cottage at the end of the lane. But when Mr Blithe came, they had to let me go with him. There were too many of us to keep fed. I don’t blame them for it. Besides, he’d have had the law on them. The parish overseer said all the children he wanted had to go.’

‘I’ve come to take you home,’ I said. ‘Acre is different now. They’re getting it back to work. Ralph Megson has come home and he is managing it for my uncle, John MacAndrew. We will make a profit on the crops next year and Acre will have a share of the profit – not just wages, but fair shares. I wrote to Ralph Megson last night to tell him I had met Jimmy. May I write today and tell him that you will come home?’

She glanced sideways at the gloves. Td have to finish them first,’ she said. ‘But then I’d go.’

‘Finish them!’ I exclaimed. ‘I’ll take them back to the shop for you myself. Why should you finish them when you are so ill and so poorly paid?’

‘I owe,’ she said.

I stared at her blankly.

‘They pays me a pair behind,’ she said. ‘And I had to borrow from them to buy my own silks and needles. Aye, and pins. If I don’t finish the work and take it back, they’d have me for stealing the goods.’

I was speechless. I looked around for James.

‘I think we can make that all right,’ he said gently. ‘If you would like Miss Lacey and me to take the gloves back to the shop for you as they are, we could discharge your debt.’

I was about to protest, but James shot me a quick frown which warned me to be silent.

‘If it can be done,’ she said hesitantly.

‘Yes, it can,’ James said firmly. ‘And if the shop owner – Mrs Williams, is it? – is disappointed at losing such a good worker, well, it matters little, for you will never work for her again. You will be in Wideacre with your friends.’

She nodded her head, and dropped back. She had been pale when we started talking, but she was deathly white now.

‘I will write, then,’ I said, looking around and speaking to them all. ‘But while we are waiting for a reply, we must find somewhere for you to live where you will all be more comfortable. And Rosie should see a doctor.’

Jimmy and Nat were looking at me with hard sharp looks, wondering if I would keep my word.

‘May I make some arrangements for a lodging-house?’ I asked.

They nodded, wordless.

‘I will go and see what I can do, and then I will come back. Will you still be in this afternoon?’ I asked.

‘Nat will be at work,’ Jimmy said, ‘but Rosie and Julie and me will be here. Julie and me work at nights.’

‘I will be back before dinner,’ I promised. ‘I brought you some money to buy your breakfasts.’ I had put half a crown in the pocket of my jacket and I put my hand in. The pocket was empty.

James shook his head resignedly. ‘I didn’t see a thing,’ he said. ‘It was quickly done, whoever did it.’ He patted the inner jacket of his coat. ‘I brought half a crown in case you had no money with you, Julia.’ He handed it to Jimmy. ‘Bread,’ he said. ‘And milk, especially for Rosie. No gin this morning.’

Jimmy grinned; Nat’s eyes were fixed on the coin.

‘We’ll be back this afternoon,’ I said. I picked up the gloves, wrapped them in the clean cloth, and turned for the half-window and the rickety plank.

The smell of the street was almost sweet after the fetid darkness of the tiny room. The crowd which had followed us had dispersed. James and I exchanged one look and then set off down the mire of the lane to where his phaeton and’ groom and horses were waiting at the fish market.

‘Where first?’ James asked as he helped me into my seat and his groom swung up behind us. ? good lodging-house, or Mrs Williams’s hat-and-glove shop?’

‘Lodgings first,’ I said. ‘I’d like it to be somewhere near here, so it is not too strange for them.’

‘We passed a little inn on this road,’ James said. ‘It looked all right, and it should only be for a few nights.’

He turned the phaeton in a sharp curve and drove us back to it.

‘Will you hold the reins while I ask if they have rooms?’ he said, and he passed the reins to me and went inside.

The sun came out, and it was warm on the box of the phaeton. I looked down at my gloved hands. They were trembling. I was trembling with anger. I was angry at the poverty of that miserable room and at the knowledge that there were rooms like that in every house down that filthy lane, and many and many filthy lanes in this pretty city. I was angry that every exquisite shawl, every embroidered glove had been made by young girls losing their eyesight bent over their work in dirty rooms.

James came out smiling. ‘That’s done,’ he said; but then he paused at the black expression on my face. ‘What is it?’ he asked. ‘You look like a thundercloud.’

‘It’s the children,’ I said. ‘Acre’s children. I am so angry at how they have been treated that I can scarcely speak.’

James nodded. ‘If you had not recognized Jimmy Dart, he would have been a linkboy all his life, unless someone bigger than him fought him for his torch. And that poor little foursome would have been there for ever.’ He paused. ‘Just as well for them that you have the sight,’ he said, and clicked to the horses and we moved off.

Mrs Williams’s shop was in Milsom Street. James pulled up outside the elegant facade with the white and gold swinging sign and waited for me to dismount from the carriage.

‘You’re coming in to speak to her?’ I asked.

‘I thought you would do it,’ he said. I could see some private smile behind his eyes, but his face was serious.

I remembered Airs Williams from when Mama and I had been in her shop. She was an imposing woman, tall, with iron-grey hair and a sharp hard face. When we had decided not to buy her gloves, she had raised one eyebrow as if at some private derogatory thought, and gestured to the serving lady to pack the boxes away. There was always a lady customer or two in the shop taking tea or coffee; there was always a lady in the fitting rooms with a couple of sempstresses taking measurements. And there was a light muslin curtain across the doorway to the workshop at the back where the girls would stop talking and listen when a customer came in.

My heart sank. ‘Please do it, James,’ I said. ‘I’ll come in with you, but I cannot speak to her. I could not stand it if she made a scene.’

‘All right,’ he said equably and nodded to his groom to go to the horses’ heads.

The silver bell over the door tinkled as we went in, and one of the serving ladies came forward with a shallow smile which widened when she recognized James.

‘Mr Fortescue!’ she exclaimed. ‘How delightful! And Miss…Miss Lacey! I shall call Mrs Williams; she would want to serve you herself.’ She twitched back the muslin curtain to the workshop and called sharply to one of the girls. ‘Clarinda! Fetch Mrs Williams, please. Tell her that Mr Fortescue and Miss Lacey are here.’

She left the curtain open and I knew the sewing girls were all staring at me. I had on my oldest pelisse over my plainest gown, for I had not wanted to look too fine visiting Jimmy. Now I flushed scarlet at looking so shabby in this opulent blue-carpeted shop. I knew without glancing down that the hem of my gown was wet and muddy, and I feared very much that the smell of the dirty lane behind the Fish Quay was hanging about me.

A lady I did not know was sitting in the corner of the shop on one of the gilt and white chairs with her daughter. She raised her lorgnette and inspected me, from the top of my plainest bonnet down to my filthy boots, and then she leaned towards her daughter and whispered something behind her gloved hand, and they both laughed.

Mrs Williams came in through a side door, wreathed in smiles. ‘Mr Fortescue! What a pleasure. How is Mrs Fortescue? And your sisters? Please give them my compliments.’

James bowed.

‘And Miss Lacey!’ she said, glancing at me and managing to take in the muddy footprints I had left on the thick blue carpet. ‘How nice to see you again. What can I do for you today?’

I hesitated and glanced towards James. His eyes were on me. I felt a sense of utter relief that it would be his voice which would carry to the girls sewing in the back room, and his words which would be carried to every drawing-room in Bath by the elegant lady who had laughed at my muddy petticoat. AU I had to do was to stand a little behind him and nod my assent as he returned the gloves.

‘Miss Lacey has some business with you,’ he said politely. He turned to me and put his hand in the small of my back and gave me a hard little shove forward. Then he stepped back and left me facing Mrs Williams, who raised her eyebrows as the smile slowly left her face.

The serving lady returned to the little desk which served as a counter, and another came from the fitting rooms with the elegant lady’s other daughter, looking very fine in a walking dress. The seated lady raised a hand to her daughter to warn her to be silent. The whole shop waited to hear what my business might be.

‘I have come to return these,’ I said baldly in a small voice, and I thrust the package of half-finished work towards her.

Mrs Williams gave a puzzled frown and handed it to her assistant; the task of unwrapping it was clearly too menial for her.

The woman opened the parcel and held up a glove for her to see. Mrs Williams looked at me, her face blank, and waited for an explanation.

‘I am sorry,’ I said, ‘but the girl who was doing the sewing is ill and should not work any more. I have brought the gloves back.’

‘How very kind,’ said Mrs Williams, icy.

‘She comes from the village on my estate,’ I said, my voice trembling a little. I could feel that the girls in the workroom had laid down their work and gathered in the doorway to stare at me with unfriendly bright eyes. ‘I am making arrangements for her to go home to the country. She will not be able to work for you again.’

Mrs Williams inclined her head. ‘Unfortunately, she is in debt to these premises,’ she said, as smooth as silk. ‘Unfortunately, I had trusted her with some valuable work which I had to return to be redone. I insist on the highest of standards because my customers are of the highest of the Quality. Unfortunately, I cannot release her from her contract with me until she has repaid her debt.’

‘How much?’ I said.

Mrs Williams sighed as if I were causing a great deal of trouble, and the young lady in the walking dress giggled aloud. Her mama glanced at her and put up a hand to hide her own smile.

‘Mrs Foster?’ Mrs Williams asked languidly.

The serving lady reached into a great drawer in the desk and drew out a ledger. With deliberate slowness she turned over one page and then another. ‘The name of the young person?’ she asked me.

‘Rosie Dench,’ I said.

Mrs Williams looked at the seated lady and her two daughters. ‘My dear Lady Querry, I do apologize for this. I generally see applicants for work at the tradesmen’s entrance, and by appointment only. Miss Lacey has chosen to come in at the customers’ door, during shop hours. I would hate to delay you for this rather complicated inquiry. Is there anything else I can do for you?’

‘We should like to see some shawls,’ said Lady Querry. Mrs Williams nodded to the other serving lady and she brought out a box of fine embroidered shawls. I knew that Lady Querry and her daughters were merely delaying their departure to see my discomfort. I looked around for James. He had taken a seat by the door and was waiting for me, arms folded. He looked as if he had nothing to do with me at all. I shot him a look which was a clear plea for him to help me, but he just smiled politely at me as if we had agreed that he would simply drive me to the shop for my own private business.

‘Dench owes sixty-four shillings,’ Mrs Foster said languidly. ‘And if she is returning these gloves as spoiled, that will be, I suppose, eight pounds and four shillings.’

‘Spoiled!’ I exclaimed. ‘They are beautifully sewn, and all but finished!’

‘Unfinished work is called “spoiled”,’ Mrs Foster said, not raising her eyes from the ledger. ‘It is very hard, Miss Lacey, to persuade flighty young girls to complete work they have undertaken. We have to have a system of fines to encourage them in habits of self-discipline and responsibility. I hope you are certain that you are doing the right thing in encouraging Dench to throw up her work in this way.’

I gasped, and looked around for James. He was watching his horses out of the window. Lady Querry’s daughters were smothering their giggles, bending low over the box of shawls.

‘I hardly think this is the time or the place,’ Mrs Williams said grandly. ‘Tone matters so much to me. I really cannot be dunned in my own premises, Miss Lacey! Forgive me, but may I ask you to send Dench around to the tradesmen’s entrance with the money for her debt, or with the finished gloves? She is late with them already.’

There was a ripple of laughter from the sewing girls in the back room.

‘Was there anything you wished to purchase, Miss Lacey?’ Mrs Williams asked smoothly.

When I said nothing, for I was speechless with rage and frozen with shame at the way I was being treated, she nodded at Mrs Foster, who shut the ledger and glided past me with her nose in the air and opened the door for me to leave.

I could feel my face burning. Lady Querry and her two daughters had abandoned all pretence of looking at shawls and were openly staring at me. James had risen to his feet, ready to leave with me without saying a word. I took two steps, and then I spun around on my heel.

‘No!’ I said fiercely, and as I spoke I felt my anger leap up in me, and I knew I had shed the discipline of being a pretty Bath miss. I was not a pretty young girl. I was the heir to the Laceys, I was a Lacey of Wideacre. And this arrogant woman had been ill-treating one of my people.

‘That is not how I do business,’ I said. ‘I have come to return these gloves to you, which I do not doubt you will get some other poor girl to finish and sell at a usurious price. And I have taken the trouble to come and see you to tell you that Rosie Dench will work for you no more. And if I had the power, no young girl would work for you again. You pay rates which barely keep a worker alive, and then you make them buy their materials from you, and fine them, and keep them in debt so they can work nowhere else. Rosie Dench is coughing blood in a dirty room, trying to sew gloves for you in half-darkness. So don’t tell me that tone is so important to you. You are no better than a madame in a bagnio!’

Lady Querry half screamed at the insult and Mrs Williams strode around from the desk to the door.

‘You had better go!’ she hissed.

‘I am going,’ I said. ‘And I am not coming back, and neither is Rosie Dench. And if I hear one word from you about calling Rosie a thief or about this ridiculous debt, I shall tell everyone that you are no better than a slave-driver. I shall tell them how Rosie was when I found her. And I shall tell them that you pay her five shillings for her most beautiful work, and how you sell the gloves for five pounds. And I will go on doing it until I have cost you far more than eight pounds and four shillings in lost custom. I shall go on doing it until you are ruined.’

I rounded on Lady Querry as she sat, mouth agape, drinking in every word. ‘And when you repeat this to all your friends, your ladyship,’ I said scathingly, ‘remember to tell them that their gloves and their stockings and their shawls are embroidered in filthy rooms by girls with consumption, and smallpox, and fevers. That the shifts which you buy to wear next to your skin have been touched, every inch of them, by girls with sores on their hands. That they are sold to you at a price which would make all those girls well, and well fed if they saw even half of it.’

I spun round then and marched to the carriage and climbed up on to the seat, still trembling with rage and my head still ringing with things I wanted to say. In my fury I saw James sweep a low bow to Lady Querry and even to Mrs Williams.

‘Good day, ladies,’ I heard him say pleasantly, and then he strolled out to the phaeton, and climbed on to the box and took up the reins.

I said nothing until he had turned left into George Street.

‘How could you just sit there?’ I said through my teeth. ‘You said you would speak to her, and you left it all to me. I felt an utter fool and they were all laughing at me and you did nothing, nothing! And then you said, “Good day” to them when we left. “Good day, ladies.” Ladies! How could you?’

James waited for a sedan chair to get out of the way before turning up the hill to Gay Street. ‘I wanted to see how you would do,’ he said. ‘I wanted to see how you would stand up to her.’

‘What?’ I shrieked.

‘I wanted to see how you are when you are being a squire,’ he said. He pulled the horse to a standstill and got down from the seat and came around to my side to help me down. I scrambled down on my own and pushed past him. If I could have knocked him down and walked over him, I would have done so. He seemed to me entirely part of the unfeeling Quality world who laughed like Lady Querry. I would never, never forgive him for saying, ‘Good day, ladies.’

I stormed up the steps and found I could scarcely see the door knocker for the tears of anger in my eyes. James reached over my shoulder and tapped at the door for me.

‘I wanted to ask you something,’ he said as we waited for Meg to come to the door.

I shot him one angry look which should have warned him that nothing he could say would draw a civil response from me ever again.

‘Will you marry me, Julia?’ he asked.

I could not believe my ears. ‘What did you say?’ I demanded.

‘I asked you to marry me,’ he repeated. I could hear from inside the house someone coming down the stairs to open the front door. I was still boiling with anger towards Lady Querry, towards Mrs Williams and her beastly shop and shopgirls and the whole unjust unequal cruelty of the Quality world. But more than anything else I was in a blind rage with James Fortescue, who had promised he would speak to Mrs Williams and then left me all alone to look a fool in front of the most fashionable modiste and the biggest gossip in Bath.

Meg opened the door, dipped a curtsy and held it for me.

I turned to face James and put out my hand to him. I was still trembling with anger and my hand shook. He took it and carried it to his lips. I could feel the warmth of his kiss through the glove. I could tell by his eyes that he was smiling.

‘Don’t be cross,’ he said, oblivious of Meg, blind to the people on the street who were watching us with curiosity. ‘Don’t be cross. I love you much too much to want to make you cross for long. I wanted to see how you would handle old Williams. And I wanted you to know that you could do it. Because you will have to handle Dr Phillips, and perhaps your uncle and your cousin. But I will promise to help you with them. And on that occasion I will not leave you all on your own. Will you marry me, Julia?’

I felt the anger flow away from me as if I had no temper at all, and I forgot that Meg was watching, and the people on the street. I put my other hand up to his face and cupped it around his cheek.

‘Yes,’ I said simply. ‘Yes, I will.’