The Favoured Child

23

I had counted on Richard staying at home for the whole of May. But he had a letter from his tutor to say that a Greek expert was prepared to offer him extra lessons before the summer term started, and he smiled ruefully at Mama at breakfast and said, ‘Mama-Aunt, it seems that I shall have to leave you and go back to Oxford. It is a hard apprenticeship my father has put me to.’

‘I’m sorry indeed,’ Uncle John said with a smile. ‘But think of the training for your moral character, Richard! I am sure it will do you nothing but good.’

‘I would rather have a weak moral character and the rest of my holiday on Wideacre,’ Richard said. ‘But my tutor is right. My Greek is shamefully weak, and I did not enjoy looking like a fool in front of the others last term. I suppose I shall have to do as I am bid and go back early.’

I held myself very still, but when Mama and Uncle John had left the breakfast table, I said, ‘Oh, Richard, I wish you did not have to go!’

He smiled at me. ‘I’ll be back soon,’ he said. ‘This is a short term, only a couple of months, though they may ask me to stay for extra tuition at the end of term too! I shall be back at harvesting, I hope, and able to help you then.’

‘It’s not the work,’ I said. ‘It’s the way everything is now.’ I could not make myself say Clary’s name, but I thought of her then as I did all the time. I did not know how I would be able to work on Wideacre without her. I felt as if I had known her all my life, as if she was Acre, as if in losing her I had lost my special sense of the village, my special place there.

Richard leaned back in his chair and folded his letter. ‘I’m afraid I cannot stay,’ he said agreeably. ‘My tutor is most insistent, Julia. But if the village is surly and your great friend Ralph Megson is of no use, I really think you should mention it to my papa. The estate can hardly work well without some discipline.’

‘No,’ I said quickly. ‘It’s not that, Richard. It’s the way everything seems suddenly to have gone wrong for all of us. I think it’s as bad for Acre as it is for us.’

Richard made a little grimace. ‘They’re a surly mob,’ he said. ‘And your great friend Ralph Megson is as big a villain as any of them. I tell you, Julia, you’ll get neither work nor respect out of them until you bring in the parish roundsman, and have them working at parish rates. It’s what I’d do. And if they didn’t work then, I’d bring in Irish labourers and have the whole crew of them thrown out of their houses and on to the parish,’ he said with a smile.

‘I know you’re joking, Richard,’ I said uncertainly. ‘But don’t. Acre is such a sad village these days.’

Richard shrugged. ‘So?’ he said. ‘They’ll get over it. All estates have their ups and downs. If it would mean anything to you, I’ll take the occasional Friday off and come home for the weekend. I’ll take Saint Monday too!’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I should like that. I will be lonely here . . .’ Without Clary, I thought. But I did not say it.

‘I’ll promise it to you, then,’ he said pleasantly. And he pushed his chair back and went towards the door. ‘Oh, Julia…’ he said from the doorway, seeming suddenly to think of it, ‘you will not hear from Mr Fortescue again.’

‘Mr Fortescue?’ I said blankly. ‘James Fortescue?’

‘Yes,’ Richard said. ‘I have returned the letters he sent you and informed him that the engagement, if you called it that, is at an end.’

‘You saw him?’ I asked blankly.

‘Oh, yes,’ said Richard. ‘At the start he would not take my word for it and he wanted to pester you himself. But when I told him that we were betrothed and that I was empowered to return his letters, he accepted your apologies. He sent you his best wishes.’

For a moment I said nothing. I could not absorb what Richard was saying. ‘James?’ I said uncertainly.

‘He wrote to you three days ago,’ Richard said. ‘As I was up early, I took the liberty of opening it for you. I did not want him upsetting you again. It was a brief note, just returning your letters to him, and telling you he is going abroad again. He does travel a lot, doesn’t he? I suppose it is for his father’s business. They are tradesmen, shopkeepers or something, are they not?’

‘He wrote to me?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ Richard said. ‘Oh, but it is too late for you to reply. He had no forwarding address. I suppose he goes scurrying around from shop to shop. He left today. He said he would be away for about six months.’

My mind was whirling. I forgot that James would have been within his rights to set aside our betrothal as soon as I told him of my shame. I could only think of him and our time together in Bath, his easy smile and his warm eyes, his fidelity to the children of Acre, his tenderness to my mama. And that time in the glove shop when he had sat with his arms folded and taught me to be a Lacey squire before the most fashionable modiste in the town.

‘James,’ I said. It was as though I were summoning a ghost, not just his ghost, but also the ghost of the girl I had been when I rode like Beatrice, when I threw back my head and laughed, when I walked as if all the land around me for twenty miles in any direction was my own.

‘It was a pleasant flirtation, I dare say,’ Richard said coolly. ‘But it is ended now.’

‘James,’ I said again. Then my wits sharpened and I looked at Richard’s open cherubic face. ‘You met him,’ I accused. ‘When he was coming to meet me. You stopped him on the road.’

‘Of course,’ Richard said. He was smiling as at some amusing secret. ‘Of course I did, Julia. I met him with your letters in my pocket. You are such a silly little thing to try and hide them under the loose floorboard in your room. Surely you knew that it was the first place I would look. You have always hidden your treasures there, ever since we were little children. As soon as I saw them there, I knew that they were not really hidden at all. You wanted me to find them. So I took them, and read them, and gave them back to him, as a gentleman would do.’

‘You took his letters,’ I said. There was an anger building inside me, I could taste the heat of it on my tongue. ‘You had no right to take them.’

‘No right?’ Richard said. ‘No right?’ He shut the dining-room door with a sharp snap and strode back into the room and grabbed me by the upper arms, pulling me up to my feet. He stared down into my face, his colour rising with his temper.

‘You dare tell me I have no right!’ he exclaimed. ‘When you went to Bath betrothed to me and flirted like a coquette with a shopman! Have you forgotten what you wrote in your ridiculous little journal – oh, yes! I read that too! I knew you wanted me to read it. You wrote it just to make me jealous. You wrote it so that I would know how improperly you had behaved. I read it and it made me sick. You made me feel physically sick, thinking of you holding hands with him, and kissing him and promising him your share of Wideacre and then coming home and kissing me in front of all of Acre in the middle of a ploughing field, like the village slut you are! That I have no right, when I found you in the sunshine and you lay on your back and spread your legs and smiled at me!’

My throat was tightening. ‘It wasn’t like that,’ I said unsteadily.

Richard gave me a shake so my head nodded. ‘I have every right,’ he said harshly. ‘You put his letters there so that I might find them. You wrote the journal for me to read. I know you did, you know you did. You were hoping to make me jealous. You plotted with him against me, to take your share of the estate away from me. But you are such a hot little whore that you could not help yourself. Not in the field at the ploughing, not in the summer-house at the maying. You lay back and smiled. You put your arms around me. You stuck your tongue in my mouth, you dirty little whore. I didn’t even know that women kissed like that until you did it. That disgusts me! And then you ran off to Midhurst to meet your other lover to say, “Oh, James, I am sorry. But can we still be married?”‘ Richard had adopted a falsetto whine. ‘What were you going to say? “Oh, James, I didn’t mean to do it. I thought I was Beatrice!” or “Oh, James, I was thinking of you!”‘ He flung me away from him and I stumbled against the table.

‘It wasn’t like that. . .’ I tried to say.

‘I am sure you wish it wasn’t!’ Richard said harshly. ‘But you tell one lie after another, Julia. I don’t think you even know what the truth is any more.’

‘I love him,’ I said. I drew a deep breath of the stuffy air of the room, thick with breakfast smells and raw anger. I was shaking; but I clung to the edge of the table, and to that one certainty. ‘I love him,’ I said again. ‘And I did not want to lie with you.’

Richard took a quick stride back to me and grabbed my arm. He marched me towards the door and flung it open. ‘You tell them, then,’ he hissed. ‘You tell your mama and your Uncle John that you are betrothed to him, and that you want them to get him back, to write to his family and get the marriage put on again. If this is the truth and you are prepared to swear it, you tell them it all. You tell them that you lay with me but that you did not want to. You tell them that I forced you.’ His voice grew louder. ‘Tell them that I am a rapist!’ he said.

I shot a frightened glance around the hall, wondering if my mama was in her parlour, where she would be certain to hear. ‘Tell your mama I am a rapist!’ he said again, his anger making his voice louder and louder. ‘Tell my papa! And then send to Grandpapa Havering and tell him! And he will have me taken to court, and I will be hanged like a sheep-stealer. Hanged so that you can satisfy your lust with one man and marry another! If that is the truth, then you tell them. Tell them now. Otherwise we shall always know that you are a liar.’

‘No!’ I said. ‘No, Richard. No, Richard. No.’ I put both hands out to him and drew him back into the dining-room. He resisted only slightly. I shut the door behind him and tried to speak, though I was shaking so much I could hardly stand. ‘Please don’t say such things, Richard,’ I begged him. ‘You know I would not betray you. You know I would not tell them.’

‘You dare not,’ he replied instantly. ‘You know it is a lie and you don’t have the courage to say it aloud.’

‘It is not, it is not,’ I said. I could feel the tears in my eyes and on my cheeks, but I was not crying.

‘You desired me and you lay with me,’ Richard said coldly. ‘Any denial of that is a lie.’

I bowed my head; my tears were falling so fast they were spotting the silk of my morning gown.

He gave me a shake. ‘Isn’t it?’ he insisted.

‘Yes,’ I said, utterly defeated.

‘You can marry no other man now,’ Richard said.

I nodded.

‘Don’t forget that,’ he said softly.

I nodded again.

‘James Fortescue is gone,’ he said firmly. ‘Gone, and you will never see him again. There is no gentleman in the world now who will marry you. I have taken your virginity and you are my whore. You belong to me.’

I said not one word in contradiction. Then he pressed a gentle kiss on the top of my bowed head and let himself out of the room, and went quietly up the stairs to his bedroom to pack his books and clothes for Oxford.

Almost as soon as Richard had gone, I started to feel unwell. We had a spell of fine weather which brought the new hedges on so fast that they were bushy and impenetrable. All the trees in Wideacre Park were sweet-smelling with new leaves. The grass in the paddock was suddenly so bright it hurt my eyes, and Sea Mist danced on the springing verges at the side of the track to Acre as if the fresh grass tickled her hooves. I sat heavily on her, without nerves, but without pleasure. My hand was quite well and I could hold her steady. But I had lost my love of riding. I rode her now as a job of work, to get from one end of the estate to another. And I had to ride her, because I had to work. Uncle John advised it and Mama supported him. They both thought me too pale and too nervous indoors. They both thought that working on the land would help me regain my cheerfulness.

It did not.

We had to weed and weed in the hayfields, trying to clear the thick wicked roots of burdock and dandelion to give the grass a chance to grow, and we had to keep the cornfields clear as well. Acre’s return to work happened all in a rush, and I rode out every day to check the progress in the fields, to see the sheep and the fattening lambs and to look at the broadening cows whose bellies were as lumpish and as rounded as the swallows’ nests stuck on the narrow beams of the barns.

Clary Dench was not forgotten in Acre. Nothing is ever forgotten in Acre. But with the land growing so green and so strong, the sun so hot and the clean wind blowing across the top of the downs, bringing with it day after day of warm weather, no one could keep a surly face and no one blamed me for failing to seek my friend among the shades with my sight.

Ralph Megson had not forgotten. His manner to me was changed; he retreated behind a wall of formality, which was worse, far worse, than his blazing rages. Though we worked side by side on the land, organizing the teams and checking the livestock and the crops, he never so much as smiled at me. And when I once reached out and touched his hand to show him something, he wordlessly withdrew his hand from under mine. His anger was too deep and too silent for any apology of mine; and I had no voice and no courage to broach a topic with Ralph. I did as he bid me on the land like a cipher. I sat at home with my mama like a girl content to have four walls around her. All my rebelliousness, all my keen Lacey courage seemed to have failed me, incongruously, in a season of wealth and growth and confidence.

We were in the very prime of a Wideacre early summer. The sky was full of birds, and the woods around Wideacre were twittery with their excitement. Of all the springs and summers I had seen on Wideacre, I had never before had one where you could almost see the grass growing as you looked. The men at the hall were working all hours, and they even stayed late as the evenings grew lighter, so the hall seemed to be growing as sweetly and as naturally as everything else on the land.

Mama announced that she would have a garden to match the beautiful new house, and tied on a chip bonnet with determination and set three gardeners to work to weed and prune and tidy the garden and uproot the saplings and the encroaching woodland.

The warmer weather suited Uncle John, and he took to riding down to Acre on Prince, who went gently and sweetly with him. He took his regular clinic for the children, but found fewer and fewer patients.

‘I shall write a monograph on preventive medicine,’ he said to Mama as they took coffee together in the back garden one morning. ‘I really am amazed at the effect of good food on the health of the Acre children. It has cured them not only of hunger-related complaints, but also of diseases which I would have thought came from quite different causes.’

Mama nodded. ‘It’s surprising how much brighter the babies are when they are carried to full term and born of well-fed mothers,’ she said. ‘But also, John, there are few villages where they have a resident physician working for nothing!’

‘And few where the school dame is a baronet’s widow!’ John said, smiling back at her, ‘and quite the most exquisite relic I have ever seen.’

Mama burst out laughing. ‘Not a relic, John! What an absolutely hideous word! It makes me sound about a hundred!’

‘Well, I feel very aged and settled,’ John said comfortably. ‘I think everyone in Acre is going to be extraordinarily healthy and live for one hundred and twenty years. And I shall be the first to make a hundred and fifty.’

‘And what is your prescription for longevity?’ Mama asked him with a smile. She passed him the plate of Mrs Gough’s lightest cheese scones.

‘Coffee and scones at noon,’ John said. ? leisurely walk up to the hall at two. A thumping great big dinner at three, and an evening of songs in the parlour from you later on.’

‘It shall be as you order, Doctor,’ Mama said with mock deference. ‘The patient is a most important man, you know.’

‘A most blessed one, anyway,’ said Uncle John, and he leaned across from his chair to hers and kissed her gently on the cheek.

So it was a good season for everyone on Wideacre that year, except for Ralph, who was sad and silent, and except for me. The dreadful trembling which had shaken me for days after my fall had ceased, and I had even stopped crying without cause. But now I felt sick all the time. Whether I was riding or walking or resting, I felt all the time on the verge of sickness. It was worse in the morning when I could hardly bear to sit up in bed, because I knew the room would revolve before my eyes and I would feel nearly ready to retch. I asked my maid to bring me tea rather than chocolate in the morning, and I ate hardly any breakfast. By noon I could generally count on feeling better, but even as I rode up to the downs or along the drive to the hall, I knew something was wrong with me.

‘Still not hungry, darling?’ Mama said to me at breakfast when I had turned with a grimace from some medium-rare beef on the sideboard. The heart of it was pinky-red and it repelled me as if I were one of John’s Indian brahmins.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I have just lost my appetite these last few days.’

Uncle John’s eyes were sharp upon me. ‘Any fever?’ he said, ‘or do you have a headache, Julia?’

‘No,’ I said, curbing my impatience. ‘I’m just not hungry this morning.’

‘Perhaps John would have a look at you after breakfast,’ Mama said. ‘You are so pale since that fall of yours, my dear.’

I gave my lower lip a swift little nip. ‘I am quite well,’ I said, ‘and I should hate to be “looked at,” Mama, so please don’t fuss.’

Uncle John, with his instinctive tact, said no more. After breakfast, when I was out in the hall tying on my hat and looking at my white face in the mirror, he stopped Mama from coming towards me, and said softly, ‘Leave her be, Celia. She cannot be seriously ill and riding every day as she does. If it is a reaction to the fall, it will right itself in a day or so, or she will come to you about it.’

That very day the weather changed and became cloudy and cooler. I was able to say at dinner that an east wind always made me irritable, and in the days that followed I continued to blame the weather. While the apple blossom went from pink to white and then snowed down upon the grass, we had week after week of low cloud and a glaring sky. The sky felt heavy, weighing down on the land. It was not grey, or dark, but bright, so bright I had to squint to look down the lane.

The lane itself blazed white and green; the gypsy’s lace on the verges was as thick as whipped cream, and the hawthorn flowers rose above them in clusters of whiteness like snowdrifts on the shiny-green hedges. The air was filled with the heavy scent of the summer flowers and weeds. The new cloverfields were purple with flowers and loud with the noise of addicted bees. On the common the bluebells were as thick as sea mist and on the downs the lower slopes were yellow with cowslips, and the air smelled of honey.

The chestnut trees flowered and then dropped their petals, and still the heavy clouds lay unmoving. The men from Acre stripped down to breeches to weed in the cornfields, but there was no sun, so their bodies stayed oddly white, like chalk men out of the chalk land. Sitting at the parlour window, listening to Mama play the pianoforte, I could not catch even a breath of wind. The sky sat on the hills of the downs like a cloth over a bowl of dough set out to rise. Under the soft lid, in the steamy heat, the grass grew and turned pale. The cream roses in the garden at the hall bloomed like an ominous reminder of the bowl of cream roses in my dream, and down the lane their lesser cousins, the dogroses, spotted the banks and the hedges, all as pale as fever patients against the vivid greenness of the bright patchwork counterpane of the Wideacre fields.

I had said I was perfectly well to Uncle John and Mama, but I had lied. I was not; I felt nauseous and tired. One morning, getting to my feet too swiftly from bending over a map in the library, I had stumbled with dizziness and was afraid I would faint. I was not hungry at mealtimes, but found I was tempted to Mrs Gough’s jars of bottled fruits and dried plums in the kitchen. My face was thinner and paler; my eyes, when I looked in the mirror, were hazy and fey. I was headachy and weary too, and for days at a time I made excuses and avoided riding out.

‘Come out for a drive,’ Mama said invitingly to me one morning. ‘It is not half so hot and humid this morning. Take me out in the gig and show me the hayfields. Mr Megson told me that they are nearly ready for cutting.’

I nodded and languidly went for my hat and gloves, but I saw the glance between Mama and Uncle John and his approving nod to her.

Mama was right, the weather had lifted. The feeling of the air being too thick to breathe had gone, and the light on the downs was clear and bright rather than too vivid. I clicked to the horse and we bowled down the road to Acre, the bit jingling with the brisk trot. The shadows of the trees flicked over us and the wind of our brisk passing blew in my face and brought some colour to my cheeks. The hay field I wanted to see was on the far side of Acre, and as we drove through the village, I twirled my whip in greeting to a couple of women working in their front gardens and waved to Ned Smith who was unloading charcoal in his yard.

A hayfield ready for cutting is a sea of palest green, knee-high, studded and scattered with blazes of colour: the scarlet of poppies, the deep blue of cornflowers, the pastel pinks and mauve and white of Lady’s smock, all growing spindly and tall up to the sunlight, pushing their bright faces through the grass. On the borders of the field the banks were bright with flowers: sweet-smelling clumps of cowslips, starry dogroses with their pale-pink faces and mustard-yellow stamens. And breathing over it all was the perfume of the wild bean flowers, sprawling over the hawthorn hedges and twining up the hazel and elder bushes.

‘It’ll be ready in three, four days of this weather,’ Miller Green said cheerily to me as we drew up alongside the lower meadow, where he leaned on the gate and smoked his pipe. I sniffed discreetly at the blue smoke. Tobacco. Miller Green had been smoking hawthorn leaves when he struggled to survive in a silent mill with no corn to grind. Now there were wages coming in, and he could buy his pinch of tobacco again.

‘It looks nearly ready,’ I agreed.

‘It’s the wheat I’m wanting,’ he said with longing. ‘I’ve been to the common field every day to see it. It’s a good crop, tall and strong, and thick as nettles on a dung heap!’

‘Good,’ I said. I got down from the gig so I could stand on the lower bar of the gate and scan the field to see if it was indeed near ready for cutting.

‘Thanks to you, Miss Julia,’ said the old man with a sly smile on his face.

‘Nonsense,’ I said evenly, but without heat. ‘You know that is nonsense, Miller Green. It’s a good crop because it was good-quality seed, thickly sown with the weather to suit it. Anything else is old wives’ nonsense.’

‘Aye,’ he said, accepting the reproof without caring, ‘but widely believed, Miss Julia. They all say in the village that you have the Lacey knack of making the wheat grow. It’s a good crop, and you get the credit.’

I shrugged and turned my gaze back to the rippling sea of green. ‘As you will,’ I said easily. ‘Is Mrs Green well, and your sons?’

‘Aye,’ he said, satisfied. ‘We’re all well. All of Acre is well. I can scarce remember such a spring and a summer.’

I nodded in farewell and went back to the gig where my mama sat under her grey silk parasol.

‘Is it ready?’ she asked. ‘It still looks very green to me.’

‘Three or four days,’ I said. ‘I’ll just drive down to the common to look at the wheatfield, and then we’ll go home.’

‘Certainly,’ she said, and waved her gloved hand at Miller Green, while I clicked to the horse and we turned down the track that leads to the common field.

The field was like a miracle to me. I was Wideacre bred, but I had never seen a wheatfield growing on Wideacre. Yet here it was before me, and the land and the village restored in one season’s work by the combination of Uncle John’s money, Ralph’s authority, my name and the irresistible magic of the Wideacre soil, which I believed would grow orchids and palm trees if one planted them.

The crop was a foot, even eighteen inches high, the kernels of the wheat, green and sweet and small, encased tightly in the blade like tiny peas in a pod. The field was huge; I could still remember how it had been, with the heather and the bracken encroaching on the margins and straggly weeds and tall armies of purple loosestrife and rose-bay willow-herb growing alongside and starving the self-sown crop. Now the drudgery of the weeding had won us a wide sweep of field, properly fenced and clean at the rims and green as green, with all the shrubs and bracken pulled clear. Beside it was the orchard I had planted on that cold grey day, the trees standing tall, and little green berries of apples showing the crop we would have. The wheatfield was a world of waving smoothness, green speckled with flowers and the bright blaze of poppies and misty-blue cornflowers.

Oh, it’s so lovely,’ I exclaimed involuntarily. I handed the reins to Mama in a sort of dream and slid down from the gig and went through the gate to stand amid the wheat in the field in its promise of green. ‘It’s so lovely,’ I said to myself, and lifted my skirts clear of the growing shoots and skirted the field to see the crop from another angle.

In my head I could hear the sweet singing noise which sometimes came to me on Wideacre, or when I was missing it. And the feel of the earth under my shoes was like a guarantee of happiness. In the days since Clary’s death and my own confusion I had lost my joy in the land. I had lost my ears to hear the singing, and I had lost my delight in the smell and feel of the place. Now, like a waterfall tumbling full upon me, it was coming back to me. Careless of my gown, I knelt down in the earth and sniffed at the crop as if it were a bouquet of flowers. It had the lightest aroma, like grass, but a little sweeter. Then I picked a stem and looked at the sound seeds which would grow and grow and ripen until we could cut it and thresh it, and grind it and bake bread with it, so that no one in Acre need ever go hungry again.

I put the seed in my mouth and nibbled at it like a ravenous harvest mouse. It was hard, not sweet yet. But when I bit on the stalk, I could taste the sap inside the stem, and I turned back to the gig with it in my mouth.

Oh, Julia,’ Mama sighed with a faint smile. ‘Do take that bit of grass out of your mouth. You look like an absolute natural.’

I whipped it out with a little jump. ‘I am sorry, Mama, I was in an utter daydream. The field is so wonderful.’

She smiled ruefully. ‘When Beatrice was a girl, she was just the same,’ she said. ‘She loved the land rather like you do, I think. And they used to say all sorts of things about her ability to make the land grow.’

I climbed back into the gig. ‘They say it about me too,’ I said, rather pleased. ‘I know it is nonsense, Mama, but it is a rather nice idea that the land grows well for the Laceys.’

She gave a little sigh. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I know you like that thought. I suppose I am not country born and bred, and so the passion for a field is never one that I feel. But your papa loved his land very well too.’

I gave one last lingering look at the common field and turned the gig for home. ‘It should be ready for harvesting by August,’ I said.

Oh, good,’ Mama said, ‘for Richard is hoping to come home in time to see it.’ She paused. ‘What has gone wrong between you and James, my darling?’ she asked tentatively. ‘I have been waiting and waiting for you to take me into your confidence. You have not had a letter from James for nearly three weeks, and yet he should have come home to England by now. I did not want to press you, especially with you seeming unwell, but you should tell me.’

My face fell at once, and the easy magic of the land deserted me. Mama saw the change. I searched my mind to find a lie I could offer her, to delay the announcement which I would have to make – that James and I would never marry.

‘I cannot say, Mama,’ I said softly. ‘It is private.’ I could feel the familiar easy tears coming and the choking feeling in my throat.

She nodded, her eyes on my face. ‘His mama wrote to me,’ she said. ‘She wrote that James had decided suddenly to go abroad again, and that he had told her that the betrothal would not be made. That the two of you had agreed that you would not suit. That it was a mutually agreed decision.’

I nodded. ‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Yet you are not happy,’ she suggested.

‘No, Mama,’ I said quietly.

She said nothing for a moment and I set the pony to walk forward. We climbed the little slope away from the common field and went slowly down the lane, the sunshine dappling the track ahead of us and the shadows sliding up and over her parasol.

She took a breath, and I saw her hands tighten on the handle of the parasol. ‘Julia,’ she said firmly, ‘I am your mama and it is my duty to know these things. You must tell me why you and James are no longer planning marriage.’

I touched the reins and the pony stopped. I knew I would have to betray James, just as my fear of the sight had made me betray Clary and Matthew and my cowardice had made me betray my duty to the whole of Acre. ‘I discovered that he was unchaste,’ I said softly. ‘He has been with a woman.’

Mama drew in her breath sharply. ‘I see,’ she said. She put out her hand and touched mine. ‘I think you are right,’ she said. ‘But the world we live in is a hard one, Julia. I believe most young men have a woman friend before they are married. As long as they are true to their wives after marriage, there are few people who think badly of them.’

I knew I would have to betray James’s private conversation with me and smirch his character. I could feel the tears gathering behind my eyes. ‘It was not one woman friend, Mama,’ I said, and my voice was a thread as thin as the rope which hanged Judas. ‘He consorts with common women, he visits their houses. I could not be sure he would cease to do so.’

‘James Fortescue?’ Mama said in utter incredulity. And I loved her so dearly then, for disbelieving me, even though I had to convince her.

‘One of the Acre children,’ I said awkwardly. ‘You never heard about her. She was called Julie – named after me, I suppose. She had become a…a fallen woman. She called it street-trading.’ I took a little breath. ‘She recognized him, Mama. He did not deny it.’

My mama gasped. She was a lady who had lived a sheltered life, a childhood in the best part of Bath, a womanhood on the isolated estate of Wideacre. She had never been to a place like Fish Quay Lane. She had never seen a woman like Julie. And she would never have understood, as I did, that someone can be driven one way by their desires, and another way by their duty. For my mama, duty and desire took one path. For the rest of us true-bred Laceys, life was hopelessly contradictory.

‘I see,’ she said inadequately. ‘I am very sorry, my darling. But do remember that you are young, and there are many young men who you will meet, and one of them you will love. I shall not trouble you now to tell me more, my darling.’

I nodded. ‘I would rather not,’ I said.

She touched my hand again, and I clicked to the pony and we moved forward.

As soon as we were home, Mama sent me to lie down and rest, and she went herself to find John. He was in the library working, and Mama went in, leaving the door open behind her. With a heaviness in my heart I crept downstairs so that I could listen to their conversation. I was a liar, and now I had become an eavesdropper too.

John’s tone was reasonable. ‘I can’t agree with you, Celia,’ he said firmly. ‘This is an excuse of delicacy. All young men seek experience, and the general belief is that they are better husbands for it.’

This is not “experience”,’ my mama replied. Her voice was a little higher than usual. She was distressed. ‘I do not know exactly what you mean by that, John, nor do I wish to know. Julia tells me that Mr Fortescue has consorted with prostitutes, and that she cannot be certain that this would cease on marriage. That seems to me ample reason for breaking the friendship.’

‘Prostitutes?’ John’s voice was suddenly sharp. ‘Are you sure?’

‘I am merely telling you what Julia told me,’ Mama said with dignity. ‘I did not press her on it. Apparently one of the lost Acre children had become a prostitute – the one who refused to come home. She recognized him.’

‘This is a good deal more serious,’ John said. ‘I was thinking of perhaps an older married lady. I would be very anxious indeed if Julia’s betrothed used bagnios and suchlike.’

‘I fail to see the difference,’ Mama said impatiently. I heard her heels click on the polished floorboards. ‘It is still unchastity.’

John’s voice was warm, and I could tell he was smiling at her. ‘Morally, you are right, Celia,’ he said. ‘But speaking as a doctor.’ He paused. ‘There is a stew-pot of disease among the street women,’ he said. ‘Many of them are fatal, none of them curable. If James Fortescue has been with prostitutes, we should thank God that Julia learned of it in time.’

‘Oh,’ Mama said blankly.

‘You would not know,’ John said gently. ‘And I am content that neither you nor Julia will ever know how those women, and infected men, can suffer. But the diseases are easily caught and easily passed on. If James Fortescue habitually goes with such women, the engagement should certainly be ended.’

Mama was silent for a moment. ‘I shall take her away, then,’ she said, ‘for a few days. She shall come with me to Oxford when I visit Richard.’

Uncle John replied, but I had heard enough. I stole up the stairs in my stockinged feet and listened no more. I rang my bell and asked for water to be set on to boil for a bath. I felt utterly dirty. I could not dine with my beloved mama and my dear Uncle John until I had scrubbed myself all over.

‘So I am to lose you two gadabouts again, am I?’ Uncle John said in an injured tone later at dinner. ‘I can see that I have made a rod for my own back and Julia will be all around the country, leaving me to manage her beastly estate.’

The cheerfulness was a little forced, but I appreciated that neither of them wished to tax me further. I tried to smile, but I was fighting back another attack of sickness, with a large portion of Wideacre trout cooked in cream and wine sauce before me. The flesh was as pink as rose petals, the sauce shiny and yellow as butter with rich Wideacre milk. I could hardly bear to sit at the table with the smell of it, and I knew I could not eat it.

‘We shan’t be long in Oxford,’ Mama said when I did not answer. ‘And I should think you would be glad to have the house to yourself for a while. You will be able to dine in the library with your maps all around you, and no one will scold you for smoking cigars and going to bed late.’

‘Oh, yes,’ Uncle John said with relish. ‘I shall have a feast of forbidden luxuries. And when you come home, you will have to launder the curtains and scrub the carpets, the place will be so well seasoned with tobacco.’

I could hardly hear the two of them, and I could scarcely see my unwanted plate before me. The table seemed to be rising and falling like an undulating wave.

‘Mama, please excuse me,’ I whispered. ‘I do not feel well.’ I rose to my feet and took myself somehow out of the room and went to the parlour, and I sank down on the hearthrug before the flower-filled grate and tipped my head back against the chair.

I had lied to Mama this dinner-time, and I was going to have to go on lying. I had told her there was nothing wrong with me, and that was not true. There was something wrong with me and anyone but a fool would have guessed it weeks before.

I was with child.

My cousin Richard had got me with child, and I was ruined indeed.

I needed no threats or promises now to bind me to him. I was absolutely ruined unless he married me, and I knew full well that I must go to him and tell him that we must be married at once.

It had taken me weeks to understand the cause of my nausea and dizziness, and even then I had clung to the foolish hope that I was sick because my monthly bleeding was late. When it did not come, and did not come, I started to know. And when everything on Wideacre seemed alive and fruitful, I knew I was fertile also.

Twice I had started to write to Richard, and two pages of hot-pressed notepaper had ended up in the fire. I knew that we were betrothed in his eyes, and since the day he left for Oxford, when he had held me in a hard hurting grip and told me that no gentleman would ever want me now, I had known that there was no love for me in the future. No love, no marriage and no children.

I had faced that sentence. Faced it and thought that I could tolerate it. But now I had to face something worse. I did not want to be Richard’s wife. I could not bear the thought of a clandestine marriage which would shame Mama, and shame me; or a marriage with her reluctant consent because she knew I was ruined. But I could see no other way. I had spent weeks trying to pretend that the morning in the summer-house had never happened. But it had happened; and the bravest thing I had ever had to do was to look my shame in the face and say, ‘I should be better off dead than shamed in this way’, and know that I would not die. Instead I would have to marry, and marry fast, or run the risk of showing a belly on me which would be obvious enough in the new slim gowns, and my mama would be within her rights to have me turned from her door and never to see me again.

She would be disgraced by a clandestine match – but such a thing could be hushed up and forgotten within a few years. There would be an early baby, but Wideacre was a tolerant place where the old ways were still known. There were few weddings celebrated in the village church at which the bride did not have a broad belly to carry before her, and a flood of banns were read over the few weeks after the May courting on the downs. I would be clinging to my reputation by the skin of my teeth in the world of the Quality with a secret marriage and an early baby. But among the common people of Wideacre, I would be nothing out of the ordinary.

I straightened up and looked at the fire. I would never see James Fortescue ever again, and I flushed suddenly hot at the thought that somebody would be bound to tell him that pretty Julia Lacey, who was the toast of the season last year in Bath and had been quite his favourite for a while, had dashed into marriage not a moment too soon. He would be glad at the narrowness of his escape when he heard that. He might tell the gossip who whispered my name that he had wellnigh married me himself! And they would shake their heads and wonder that such a pleasant young lady should be such a whore. I put my face in my hands at that and sat without another idea in my head for a little while.

Then I shrugged.

I could not help it.

I had made a mistake, a grievous and awful mistake, and I would have to live with it and take the consequences.

It could have been worse, I tried to tell myself, seeking for some courage inside me and finding little. At least I loved my cousin Richard. I had wanted to marry him when we were children. He had held my heart in his hands since we were children together. I might close my eyes in the blankest of horror that we had to be married in such a disgraceful way, but at the end of the day I would have the two constant loves in my life: Richard and Wideacre.

Mama would be grieved. Mama would be distressed but.. .

I gave up the attempt to pretend that it would be all right. I could find no courage in myself, and I was too honest to pretend that a shameful secret marriage and an early baby was anything but a catastrophe in my life. But a pregnancy without being able to own the father would be immeasurably worse. There was no way that I could tell Mama that I was with child. There was no way that I could tell Uncle John. But if Richard would take my part and tell the lies we would need to tell, I might yet come through. Richard was the only person I could trust with the truth. Richard was the only person I could go to for help. There was only one way before me that I could see and that way led me directly to Richard at Oxford.