The Favoured Child

25

I had been right that sad afternoon in the curricle, driving home. I had been right to think that I had to put my head down like a shire horse dragging a harrow through mud which was too thick. I could almost feel a weight of guilt around my neck and I bowed under it, and leaned against it, and tugged and tugged it with me through every warm summery day.

‘Julia, you are getting quite round-shouldered,’ Mama said in surprise from the parlour window as she watched me cutting roses in the garden outside. ‘Do try to stand up, my dear, and don’t look so grim. Is anything wrong?’

‘No, Mama,’ I said. I obediently straightened my shoulders and raised my chin, but I knew that I would forget and slouch forward again. I had the weight of an illegitimate child in my belly; I had a cart-load of guilt on my shoulders. I could not help but lean against it, like a man walking into a wind blowing against him.

The wind was blowing against me all the last weeks of June and the first weeks of July while I waited for Richard to come home and thought about what would happen when we told them.

Uncle John and my mama conspired to leave me alone. They saw that my health was better. The sickness had passed and I was eating properly again, but they were worried at the lines around my mouth and the scowl I wore on my forehead all the time, like a mark of Cain.

I could not look at my darling mama without wondering how the news would affect her. And I found I was longing for her to be angry with me – really furiously enraged. The thing I dreaded most of all was for her to look at me with stricken eyes and blame herself. I had to push the thought of her distress away from me every day of that summer. If I had thought of Mama breaking her heart for me, I could not have gone on.

And I had to go on.

The wheat was ripening well on Acre and we had to ready the work-teams and the carts for harvesting. Even farms which have been harvesting for years find the preparation and the harvest a struggle, and we were all beginners on Wideacre. It is a struggle against the weather: the wheat has to ripen and then it has to be cut and stored at once. It is not like hay, which can survive a drenching and then dry off. Once wheat is cut, it has to be inside.

It is a struggle of organization: the men and the equipment and the gleaners and the wagons all have to be arranged before you start. It is a struggle of business: you have to decide how much of the crop to sell, the straw and the grain, how much to keep for your own use. You have to decide what price to charge: whether to sell as soon as you have harvested in a poor market or to keep the grain back until there is a shortage and prices are rising. And then you have to decide whether to profiteer on the backs of hungry people and refuse to sell at the proper rates, at the traditional rates, to let the price rise and rise and rise until people are starved.

That decision was an easy one on Wideacre. Never again would Acre people go hungry with a good crop in the field and full barns. But Ralph, Uncle John and I were agreed that a proportion of the crop should be sent out of the county and sold in the London markets for the best price it could command. And Ralph thought we would be in no danger of protest from the poor if they saw we were serving the local market first.

Only once in that warm sun-drenched time while I waited for Richard to come home and tell my mama was I directly challenged. It was Ralph Megson who spoke to me. It would be Ralph. I was not forgiven by him, though he was my friend, and always would be my friend. He had seen my face getting bleaker and the rings under my eyes getting as dark as bruises.

I had been in the carriage to Chichester to order a batch of sickles for harvesting. Ned in Acre had no time to make them with all the other work waiting for him outside his forge. I asked Jem to take me down to Acre so that I might leave a note for Ralph to tell him they would be delivered in the next week.

When we got to his cottage, he was sitting on the stone step by his front door, smoking a pipe in the sunshine. He smiled when he saw me and did not rise, but waited for me to come up his garden path and sit beside him.

‘Feel that sun,’ he said luxuriously. ‘The only thing I regret about coming home to Wideacre is that we do not have enough sunshine. I was out by the sugar islands for a time, Julia. It gets so hot there you cannot work out in the heat. I used to stretch out like a baking adder on the common and sleep all the day long in the sunshine.’

I sat primly beside him, and saw him smile and shut his eyes and turn his face up to the light. The sun did not warm me, though my skin grew hot. It felt like the blood which was feeding my little girl was a poison for my own flesh. Every time I smiled, or saw a growing leaf, or a playing child, or laughed at some jest, the poison took a grip on me and made me faint to think that soon, very soon, I should have to tell my mama that I was with child and shamefully married in secret to my cousin.

‘What ails you?’ Ralph said softly. ‘You’ve been as white as skimmed milk for days and as sour as lemons. It is not like you, Julia.’

‘Nothing,’ I said through my teeth.

‘Not with child, are you?’ Ralph asked casually. He had kept his eyes tight shut and his face turned up to the sun so he did not see me flush scarlet. He was keeping his eyes shut so I could talk freely.

‘No,’ I said.

‘If you were,’ he said as if the matter were of little interest, ‘if you were, there would be no need to go rushing off to marry, nor confess to your mama or Uncle John. There are ways of getting rid of a child before your belly gets fat, if you catch it in time.’

‘Are there?’ I asked.

‘Aye,’ Ralph said. ‘If it was a little lass who was a friend of mine, I’d take her up near where the gypsies camp on the common, and see an old woman who is wise in these things. I could ride up there this very afternoon if you like, Julia.’

‘No,’ I said. My voice sounded dreary. ‘There is no need.’

Ralph opened his eyes and looked sharply at me, ‘I’m glad to hear it,’ he said frankly. ‘I was certain it was that which was pulling you so.’ He shut his eyes again like a blind fortune-teller and leaned his head back against the honey-coloured sandstone of his cottage wall.

‘A girl constrained into a betrothal is not bound by it, you know,’ he said to no one in particular. ‘And a lass who loses her virginity is not bound to marry the man. Even carriage folk. They’ll tell you that a young lady who loses her virginity would be better off dead. They’ll tell you that every young lady who wears white at the altar is a virgin. But that’s not true, you know.’

I said nothing. Ralph still did not look at me.

‘So if you’ve been romping with your cousin up on the downs, you’re not bound to him,’ he said to the sunlight on his eyelids. ‘You could refuse him and marry another man tomorrow and no one would know. Anyone who did know would only be Acre folk, and they’d not think the worse of you for it’. He paused. ‘And no husband you brought here would ever hear any gossip from us,’ he said.

I got to my feet. Ralph opened his eyes and shaded them with his hand, for I stood against the bright sky. My face was in deep shadow.

‘Thank you, Ralph,’ I said formally. ‘I know what you have been saying, but I have no need of any help which you could give me.’

Ralph made a little dismissive gesture with his hands. ‘I am yours to command,’ he said ironically. ‘Excuse me for not getting up.’

I smiled at that; despite my cold darkness I smiled at his flowery courtesy and his idleness. I turned on my heel and went out of that humming flowering summery garden and drove up to the Dower House where my mama was singing at the pianoforte, not knowing that in a few days I was going to walk into the peaceful home she and John had so painstakingly made and break her heart.

The wheat was ripe before Richard was due to come home.

I was glad. Even in the depths of my despairing sorrow I could be glad that we might get this first Wideacre crop safely gathered in and threshed and stored before I was forced to let loose the storm on our heads and before Uncle John and I could no longer talk of farming.

The weather had got sultry again, and when I met Ralph down at the mill, he spoke of letting the wheat go another few days so that the storm might pass. ‘Funny sky,’ he said, squinting up at the thick-bellied white clouds and the sun shining so hot on them, but not breaking through.

‘It feels as if there should be a storm,’ I said, ‘but it was like this at haymaking and the weather never broke properly then.’

‘If I was at sea, I should run for a port,’ Ralph said. He was looking towards the horizon where there was a yellow tinge to the sky over the top of the downs.

‘How long can the wheat wait before we cut it?’ I asked.

‘It can’t,’ he said with finality. ‘We have to start tomorrow unless the storm actually breaks tonight. We cannot tell how long the sickle gangs will take; the old men are badly out of practice and the young ones have never reaped in a gang before. Some of them have even had to go to their fathers to learn how to use a sickle. We can’t waste time waiting for bad weather which may not come. We’ll start tomorrow.’

‘I’ll tell John,’ I said and turned to my horse which was tethered in the mill yard.

‘Aye,’ said Ralph. ‘And you’ll be down to the common field yourself in the morning, won’t you, Julia? Everyone would want you to be there.’

‘I wouldn’t miss it for a fortune,’ I assured him with a smile. ‘It’s my first harvest too, you know.’

I smiled at him, but my face felt stiff. It was the golden time of the year, but I was in shadow. The wheat was ripening, but I felt like ice. I rode home like one of Richard’s childhood lead soldiers on a lead horse. My heart felt like lead too.

We dined early and I went to bed early, with Mama and Uncle John wishing me a good day’s harvesting tomorrow and promising to visit me in the field with my dinner in a box.

I fell asleep almost at once. Then I had a dream.

Where it came from, I do not know – perhaps Ralph’s reference to the gypsies, perhaps my memory of the gypsy who played for us last Christmas. I dreamed almost at once of a gypsy girl who sat at the front of a cart pulled by an old black horse, a horse as big as a hunter, well bred and ill suited to the work of pulling a tawdry painted cart. It was night and the weather was foul, and we were on some empty waste land, perhaps the common. In my dream she was holding a baby in her arms; the reins for the horse were slack on its back and her man was walking by its head. The pots on the side of the cart, the carved sticks for sale and the withe baskets holding clothes-pegs jiggled as the cart rocked on the uneven surface of the track. She went past me, soundless, and I turned to see her go. The rain scudded into my face and I could scarcely see her for the darkness and the driving rain. She had an old cape or a blanket over her shoulders and pulled up to cover her head, and the silhouette of her back was shapeless. One little lantern bobbed at the side of the cart; and it was going away from me.

Inside me, in a burning pain under my ribs, was a great wrench as I saw the cart go, and I called out something into the wind and knew, with despair, that she would not have heard me. I shrieked it again, but the wind was too loud and the rain too strong. I did not even know myself what it was that I had called.

I cried out in my sleep and the sound woke me. It was morning, it was the morning of my first Wideacre harvest, and the rain and the storm had been in my dream and not in real life. Yet I awoke with a sudden lurch of my stomach which felt like fear. As soon as I awoke I held my breath as if to listen, like a householder alerted in deepest sleep by the creak of a floorboard in a silent house. I lay quiet and listened to the fast thudding of my own heart.

My bedroom ceiling was grey-white, and when I raised myself in bed, I could see the sky still unbroken, with slabs of clouds overlying each other, conspiring to roof us in. Tight as slates they lay along the crest of the downs over the roof of the Dower House; although I knew the bright sun was behind them, I could scarcely believe I should ever feel hot sunlight again.

I gave a sigh as if I were not a young woman but an old lady, wearied with the heat of many summers, and I pulled the covers back and got slowly out of bed as if I were tired and defeated. The wooden floorboards were hard under my feet. The water in my ewer was cold. The sky outside the window was too bright and yet it was white, not blue. I splashed water on my face and felt my skin tighten. I dressed in my old grey riding habit, pulled my hair up on my head in a careless knot, crammed my hat on top and pinned it on. My eyes under the pale brim were dull and weary. Then I went down the stairs to the kitchen where Mrs Gough was up early, whisking eggs in a bowl.

She poured me a cup of coffee and I drank it standing by the back door, looking out over the back garden. I felt it scald my tongue, but it did not warm me. It was heavy with sugar, but did not taste sweet. I gave a little sigh. There are some days when nothing seems right, and this day was one of them. She gave me my breakfast in a kerchief, a pastry, a bread roll with butter and honey, a few slices of meat and a peach from Havering.

I went out to the stable; Jem had overslept and Sea Mist was not ready for me. I heaved her saddle out of the tack room and carried her bridle over my shoulder. I tacked her up on my own and hauled myself on to her high back from the mounting-block with no one to help me, and no friendly smile to wish me good harvesting as I trotted out of the yard and turned right down the drive for a canter over the common before I started the day’s work.

The field was lined with people when Sea Mist came trotting down the hill from the wild side of the common, Ralph among them at the gate, watching Miller Green hand out sickles from his cart.

‘Good morning, Miss Julia,’ he said courteously, and I said, ‘Good day’ to him and to all the people around him who smiled and called to me.

‘Miss Julia!’ a voice said at my horse’s head, and I looked down. It was one of the carter’s children, a thin, blue-eyed waif, eight years old.

‘There are no biscuits for you, Emily, until you have done a morning’s gleaning,’ I said with mock severity.

She giggled, showing a gap in her teeth and thrust a grimy fist in her mouth to stop the laughter. ‘Nay,’ she said, ‘but could I have a bit of ribbon off your gown, Miss Julia?’

I followed her eyes. The grey habit was well past its best, and when I had finished ripping out my hems walking through the stubble of this crop, I would order another. When it was new and smart, it had been trimmed with satin ribbon and little bows at the cuffs and around the hem. Despite Mama’s coercion and my occasional repairs, some of the bows had gone missing. The one on my right cuff was hanging by a thread.

‘Of course,’ I said kindly. I imagined the child had seen few pretty things in her childhood in Acre. I tugged at the bow until the thread snapped, and I held it out to her. Her white face lit up and she bobbed me a little curtsy – an unschooled copy of her mama’s careful downward sweep – and scurried back to the group of her friends who were gathered in the lee of the fence.

‘You supervise this field,’ Ralph said to me. ‘I want to take a Chichester hay merchant around the stacks. Will you be all right on your own?’

‘Yes,’ I said. I looked around at the men sharpening their sickles and the women rolling up their sleeves. ‘They hardly look unwilling!’

‘They can’t wait to cut it,’ Ralph said with satisfaction. ‘Your job is merely to stand by in case they have any problems. Anything you cannot resolve on your own, come to me. I shall be in the meadows by the Acre lane.’

I nodded and moved my horse out into the middle of the field.

They knew far better than I what they should be doing. Indeed, it seemed that my function was almost ceremonial. They arranged themselves in a line, each as carefully spaced as drilling guardsmen, and the reaper at the end nearest me looked up at me on top of my horse and said, ‘Wish us good harvesting, Miss Julia, and put some Wideacre magic into the wheat.’

I gave him a rueful grin. I might not like my role as the spring goddess, as the Queen of the May, as the local harvest deity, but it seemed I could not escape it.

‘Good harvesting,’ I called, loud enough for everyone in the field to hear, and I reflected that it mattered very little whether or not I felt foolish and self-conscious if two words from me could please them so much.

As if those words were a magic signal, they gripped the sickles and stepped into the waist-high crop and swung the blades in a great flashing rippling arc which said, ‘Swish, swish, swish’ into the standing corn, which fell before them like a regiment of Richard’s toy soldiers on an unsteady table. The sea of pale, feathery yellow collapsed into islands where the broken stalks piled up and were left behind as the row of reapers went in a long smooth line, wading into the crop, pushing it before them, for ever engulfed, for ever slicing, until they had reached the far end of the field and wiped their blades clean of the green blood of Wideacre.

They took a moment to turn around, straightening their backs and chuckling to each other about the weight of the sickles and the forgotten effort of swinging them. They worked steadily and smoothly, faster, I am sure, than they would ever have worked in the old days when the heaps of pale yellow meant profit for the Laceys but the same small wage for the labourer. Now they knew they would have a share in the wealth and they cut up to the very edge of the field, to the roots of the hedges.

The women and the other men coming behind gathered great armfuls of the crop and bound them roughly into stooks. It was new work for many of them. Acre had not touched corn since they burned down the barns fifteen years ago, and only a few of them had learned the skill as day labourers on neighbouring farms. Many of the stooks were lumpy or sloped to the left or the right, or tied too loose. I thought no one would take offence if I said they should be retied. Indeed, I had a rueful grin from Sally Miles, whose stooks were as slanted as a thatched roof.

The breakfast was almost a party, with the reapers sprawled among the fresh stubble and the women handing out food with hands wet from the stalks. The little children were all around me, and I blessed Mrs Gough for the little packet of sugared almonds I found in the bottom of the saddle-bag.

Then the men finished eating and dropped down to lie on their backs and gazed up at the sky, dozing and dreaming, and the women gathered into little groups to admire a nursing baby, or to make plaits and little baskets from the wheat.

Old Mrs Miles was the centre of one of the groups, showing the young women how to make corn dollies. ‘I wish you’d show your granddaughter how to tie stooks,’ I said, and was rewarded with a ripple of laughter from the women and a laughing scowl from Sally.

When that field was finished, we moved in a body to Three Gate Meadow, which Beatrice had turned over to corn and which now grew golden again.

And that was the Wideacre harvest.

Every day I rose early. Every day I came home late. Every day we cut field after field of pale shimmery wheat until I could see nothing but golden-green fields in my dreams. Even when I closed my eyes, I had that colour printed on my eyelids; it seemed I had forgotten darkness. Every day I rolled out of bed in the pearly shades of a heavy dawn, and dressed myself and went out in the chill, and found the people of Acre up betimes, and ready to go to work.

So we had a good harvest, fruitful, and quickly gathered, and before I had thought possible, we were up on the fields which fringed the downs and harvesting the last, the very last field of Wideacre. I could pride myself on a crop which would have delighted Beatrice herself.