The Favoured Child

27

In the morning there was business to be done. Richard went down to Acre to tell Ralph Megson what had happened, and to instruct him to announce the deaths in Acre.

While he was out, I went into my mama’s room. It was a hot summer morning and someone had half opened the sash window, but the curtains were drawn. Every room in the house would be in shadow for this week. In sudden impatience with the conventions of grief I pulled the curtains back and the sunlight and the warmth spilled into the room, making the rose and blue pattern on the carpet suddenly bright.

I gazed carefully around the room as if I were trying to print it on to my memory, as though I could keep the people I loved by clinging to their objects. I felt somehow my mama was still here. Her ghost, like the faint light smell of lilies which she always wore, seemed to linger. Her hairbrush had a few fair hairs tangled in the bristles; there was water in the ewer beside the basin; her nightgown was folded up at the foot of the bed.

The room looked as if she had just stepped out for a moment. I could even see the dent in the cushions of her stool at her dressing-table. She must have sat there to pin her bonnet before she left with John.

It was a pretty room. When I was a little girl, its only pleasant feature was the view of the tossing green trees of Wideacre Park, and the familiar clear smell of flowers. But since John had come home, the room had been carpeted and furnished with the light white and gold furniture which Mama loved. A crystal bowl of roses stood in the fireplace, her silver-backed mirror, brush and comb stood on the neat dressing-table, reflected in the winged mirror above. I peered superstitiously at the mirror. I could not believe that I would not see her face there. I would never see that beloved face again.

I went across the room and looked out of the window. I shut my eyes and pressed my forehead to the cold glass. The summertime smells of Wideacre wafted in around me and stirred the curtains at my side. Everything was warm and green and growing. I could not believe that among all this life my mama lay still and cold.

I would not believe it. I screwed my eyes up tighter and then turned and opened them to look into the room. I was certain that she would be there, sitting on the little stool before the mirror, or nipping a wilted flower from the vase. I willed her to be there with all my strength. I could not believe that she, who had been there so constantly and so reliably for all my childhood, should suddenly and so unexpectedly be gone.

‘Mama!’ I whispered into the silence of the room.

There was no reply.

She had gone indeed, and I was alone.

I left her room with the curtains blowing and the window open. I went downstairs to the parlour. I stumbled against the table in the sudden gloom and I crossed the window and threw back the curtains.

The maid had not been in here to clean and tidy. She had drawn the curtains but left the room as it had been when my lie split our world, and killed my childhood, and broke my mama’s heart. The chair to which I had clung for support was still askew. The seat where John had wearily dropped was still at the fireside. Around my mama’s chair, in a shower of gold, like wedding-day rose petals, were the little flowers she had cut from the front of her gown while she sat with her head down and learned her daughter was a whore.

I dropped on my knees on the hearth rug and started to pick them up, like some lost Ophelia in a travelling theatre. When my hand was full, I held out my silk apron like a country girl and heaped them in it. Every scrap of material I meticulously gathered, until I had them all. Then I took them, as carefully as new-laid pheasant’s eggs, held in my apron, up the stairs to my room.

I wrapped them in soft white tissue-paper, and I laid them in my top drawer. Even they smelled very faintly of lilies.

I clung to the chest of drawers and wept as though my heart would break.

Their funerals were to be on Saturday, the fourth day after the harvest when I had reaped the Wideacre corn and Lacey ruin in one sunny afternoon. My Grandmama Havering had arranged that there would be an announcement of our private marriage in the newspapers on the following Monday. Richard thought that Ralph should be told before the newspaper announcement, and I agreed.

I agreed in silence with a nod. I felt weary to my very heart with the quiet wordless mourning for my mama. It was doubtless foolish, but I believed that I would never be happy again. Perhaps I was wrong not to seek comfort from my grandmama, or from our vicar, or even from Richard, but I felt that I should never find comfort. No one would ever again mother me, now that my mama was gone.

So, for the first time in many months, I did not think about Wideacre, nor what Acre might be thinking or doing. When Richard told me that he had ordered Ralph to come to the Dower House that evening, I nodded as though I did not much care.

Ralph came in, stepping carefully across the polished hall as if he did not want to wake a sleeping invalid. But though my mama lay in the house, nothing would waken her again. Her coffin was upstairs in the pretty room which smelled of lilies. The lid was nailed down already; I could not even kiss her goodbye on her cold cheek, for they told me she had been too badly injured.

I tried not to think of that.

‘I am sorry, Julia,’ Ralph said. He took my hand in his and smiled down at me; his dark eyes were very gentle.

‘Thank you,’ I said awkwardly.

‘She wouldn’t have been in pain, you know,’ he said softly. ‘I have seen men shot at close range. She would have died at once.’

I flashed a look up at him. ‘You are sure?’ I asked. ‘You are not just saying that to make me feel better?’

Ralph shook his head. ‘Nay,’ he said. ‘I’d not lie to you on such a subject. She would not have had a lot of pain. Nor John.’

Richard interrupted us. ‘Will you come to the library, Mr Megson? You and I have business to discuss.’

Ralph nodded and stepped back for me to precede them into the room.

‘Julia need not trouble herself with this,’ Richard said smoothly. ‘She can sit in the parlour.’

Ralph was suddenly still, as wary as a hare in bracken. ‘Miss Lacey should be present,’ he said. ‘She is joint heir.’

‘Not any longer,’ Richard said. He smiled at Ralph and their eyes locked. ‘I don’t do business in the hall,’ Richard said coolly. ‘Will you come into the library, Mr Megson?’

‘After you, Julia,’ Ralph said firmly. Even in the numb haze I noted that he used my Christian name and I heard his appeal to me to stand firm for Acre.

I glanced at Richard. He gave me a quick frown which should have warned me to stay out of this struggle between him and Ralph. But Ralph was my friend, and Acre was my village. However weary I might be, however ill with mourning, they had a call on me.

‘I’ll come in,’ I said, and walked past Richard into the library and sat at the side of the table. Richard took the seat at the head, where Uncle John had always sat, and Ralph sat opposite me, facing the bookcases. The window behind Richard was open; outside a thrush was singing loudly.

‘We have some news which may surprise you,’ Richard said sweetly. ‘Miss Lacey and I are married. We were married privately some months ago. And Miss Lacey’ – he broke off and smiled—‘I should say, Mrs MacAndrew, is expecting our child.’

Ralph gave me a hard look. ‘You are pregnant?’ he said baldly.

I nodded.

‘And married?’ he said.

No one corrected his inversion of Richard’s statement. We all knew that Ralph assumed I had married because I was pregnant, and not even Richard had the gall to brazen it out.

‘Yes,’ I said through sour lips.

Ralph dropped his dark head in his hands for a moment. ‘Oh, Julia!’ he said sorrowfully. ‘I wish you had come to me.’

Richard let that indiscretion go. ‘As Julia’s husband, I am now the squire and the sole owner of Wideacre,’ he said. ‘I called you in, Mr Megson, to ask you to convey the news to the village. There will be an announcement in the newspapers on Monday. I think since we are in mourning, that there should be no celebrations in Acre.’

Ralph scowled very darkly. ‘No, indeed,’ he said dourly. ‘There will be no celebrations that you have married Miss Lacey and made yourself the new squire.’

Richard nodded, and let that go too. ‘I shall inherit the MacAndrew fortune, I do not doubt,’ he said, ‘and, of course, I have total control over my wife’s fortune too. I plan no immediate changes, Mr Megson. You may tell them that in Acre. I am satisfied thus far with how the estate is being run.’

‘You’ve not seen the wills,’ Ralph said. ‘It may be that there are guardians set over the two of you.’

‘I’ve not seen them,’ Richard conceded, ‘but I believe that guardianship is invested in either Julia’s mama or my papa. There was no provision for them dying together.’

Ralph did not even look shaken. He looked sullen. ‘I’ll tell the village,’ he said ungraciously. ‘Was there anything else?’

Richard hesitated. ‘The grain,’ he said negligently. ‘I take it you have made arrangements for its sale?’

Ralph shot a swift look at me. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We are reserving a portion of it for sale locally. Another portion goes to Midhurst market, and the remainder of the crop to the London market later in the year.’

‘I think not,’ Richard said. His voice was like silk and his blue eyes were shining. ‘I think we should send the whole crop out of the county, to the London market. That is where the profits are. Wideacre has to be farmed as a profitable business, you understand, Mr Megson.’

Ralph measured him with a dark level look. ‘Yes, I think I understand,’ he said. ‘I won’t speak of this further tonight. But I am afraid you can do nothing about the wheat. The agreements have already been made.’

Their eyes locked, like a pair of stags in battle. Richard was the master of Wideacre and Ralph was his agent. But Ralph would always be stronger, and it was Richard who looked away. ‘We’ll see,’ he said sulkily. ‘But do as I order, and tell Acre, Mr Megson.’

Of course,’ Ralph said. He waited for a moment, and when Richard said nothing more, he pushed back his chair and went to the door. Richard lounged in the carver chair and watched him go, but I rose and went across the hall with him.

He said nothing.

I had expected a word from him, a word of blame, of disappointment, of condemnation of me as another Lacey woman who had been a fool and had betrayed the land. But I had nothing from him except a hard black look which was somehow full of pity. Then his hand was on the door and he was gone.

He had left. He had left me alone, alone with Richard.

I went slowly back to the library, twisting a fringe on my shawl. Richard had pushed his chair back from the table and tipped it on its back legs, balancing his weight with his booted feet against the table’s edge.

‘Megson all right?’ he demanded.

‘Yes,’ I said. I went to the window. The sun was going down behind the trees, out of sight. It had tinged the sky above the wood into cream and grey and rose. I leaned my aching head against the cool thick glass of the window and stood in silence.

‘I shall ride up to the hall tomorrow and see how the work is going,’ Richard said, ‘and on Monday I shall ask the foreman how quickly it could be completed if we doubled the workers. We shall move in there as soon as possible.’

‘Richard . . .’ I said. I turned towards him so I could see if he really was as calm and confident as he seemed. ‘Richard, we must talk. You cannot truly think that we can live together at the hall!’

His face was as untroubled as a good child’s. ‘Why not?’ he demanded.

I spread my hands out in a vague gesture and then brought them up to cradle my cheeks. ‘Richard!’ I said. ‘What John told us about our true parents alters everything.’

Richard was blank. ‘Why?’ he asked.

I leaned back against the window. It seemed to me that the world had gone mad all around me and that I had to hold on to my little corner of it or be engulfed.

‘We are brother and sister!’ I said as if he needed me to tell him. ‘Our marriage is invalid. And our child . . .’ I broke off. I could not say the word ‘incest’ and think of my poor little baby, so safe inside me, but so endangered by the madness of this outside world. ‘We will have to get the marriage annulled as John and Mama were going to do,’ I said. ‘Then we will have to live apart. I shall have to bear the shame of the baby somehow. I suppose you will have to live in London or somewhere.’

Richard was as calm as the summer sky. He looked at me with tolerant sympathy, as distant from my confusion and pain as the early-evening stars. ‘Oh, no,’ he said sweetly, ‘it’s not going to be like that at all.’

I looked blankly at him and waited.

‘Our marriage is already public knowledge,’ he said. ‘We have acknowledged each other, and I have acknowledged my child. We cannot withdraw from that.’

My hands went out to him again, in a weak imploring gesture. ‘Richard…’ I said uncertainly.

‘We shall live here,’ he said. ‘And when the hall is built, we shall move into it. I shall take the name of Lacey, which we now know I have as much right to claim as you. We shall be Squire Richard Lacey, and his lady.’ He smiled at me. ‘It sounds well,’ he said equably.

‘Richard, we cannot!’ I exclaimed. The sense I had had of an insane world in which my lovely mama could be killed and I could find myself pregnant by my brother was slipping away from me. Coated with Richard’s silky tones, the mad mess which was my life sounded utterly reasonable. ‘We cannot!’ I said again.

Richard’s chair rocked him gently as he bent and flexed his knees. ‘Why not?’ he demanded. In a sudden movement he dropped the chair down to stand four-square and turned in his seat to see me better. ‘We have announced our marriage; you are pregnant with my child,’ he said evenly. ‘We both know who it was permitted the conception, who it was insisted on the marriage. I agreed to it, to oblige you. I’m not now going to change tack because of a sudden whim of yours.’

I put my hands to my temples. Richard’s view of the world and mine seemed so utterly different. I could not believe we had both been in the room when John had spoken of us with loathing as incestuous bastards who had repeated our parents’ black offence. ‘I cannot think!’ I exclaimed in the whirl of confusion.

Richard stood up and came to me and pulled my hands from my face. ‘Be calm,’ he said firmly. ‘It is your condition which makes you so confused. Be calm, and trust me. I know what I am doing.’

I let my hands stay in his comforting grip and I scanned his face.

‘You have no one else but me now, Julia,’ he said. ‘Don’t forget that you have no one else but me. You have to trust me. You can hardly manage on your own.’

I took half a step towards him. I felt so very, very lonely. I leaned my forehead against his shoulder. After the icy touch of the glass his velvet jacket was warm, and I could smell the russet scent of his skin and curly hair.

Oh, Richard,’ I said forlornly. His arm came around my waist and he stroked my back as one would comfort a sick animal.

It was as if the world were a dangerous sea and Richard and I

had been wrecked in the storms. All we could do now was to

cling to each other and hope to stay afloat.

I carried on floating.

I floated through the funerals when we laid the two of them in the Lacey vault. There was some muddle over the burial and they were placed side by side. I was glad of that. In the corner of my floating mind I was glad that they were close together in their death, that their dust would mingle. Grandmama gave a luncheon after the funeral and I received the condolences of the county, standing between her and Richard, speaking to people and hearing them speak as if we were all soundless fish, floating in a deep silky sea.

Only one voice rang clear in the week which followed: Rosie Dench’s. She came with a package, not to the front door of the Dower House, but to the kitchen door. Stride showed her into the parlour where I sat, idly looking out. I was looking down the road as though I were waiting to see Mama and John rounding the corner in the gig, light-hearted after a drive.

‘I didn’t know what to do with them,’ Rosie said abruptly. ‘They were made for you, Miss Julia. Wideacre gloves for you. Whoever your choice is.’

I turned back to the room. I could scarcely understand her. And then I remembered. Rosie had promised me some gloves. Gloves for my wedding day, for my wedding to James.

She held out the package awkwardly. I tried to smile, but found I could not. I unfolded the wrapping-paper.

They were the most beautiful gloves I had ever seen. Every inch of them glowed with colour. Wideacre colours – the colours of a Wideacre harvest. The background was pale, like the sky at dawn before the sun makes it rosy, to match a cream or a white gown, as my wedding gown should have been. On the back of each glove was a golden sheaf of wheat – yellow and gold – and a handful of wheatfield flowers: the scarlet poppies I love and deep-blue larkspur. Before the sheaf of wheat were crossed a sickle and a hook, as a reminder that wheat is not cut of its own accord. The gloves were longer than I usually wore them – Rosie might be an Acre field-girl now, but she would never lose her eye for fashion – and trimmed with a line of pale gold.

‘Rosie, thank you,’ I said. ‘You have a very great talent. If these were in paint rather than in silk, people would say you were an artist.’

She ducked her head at that, and beamed. ‘I hope you’ll be happy,’ she said doubtfully. ‘I hope it was right to bring these.’

‘I’m very grateful,’ I said. ‘I won’t be able to wear them while I’m in mourning, but I shall keep them safe and next year, next spring, I shall wear them with my very best dresses.’

She bobbed a curtsy and turned to go. It felt strange that after all that had passed between us there was so little to say. But Rosie could not tell me her true thoughts about my choice of a husband; and I was dead inside and could speak my heart to no one.

‘We writes to him,’ she said suddenly, turning in the doorway. ‘He asked us to write to him from time to time, to tell him that we are well, all of us, the Bath children.’

I nodded. I knew she meant James.

‘Can I give him a message from you?’ Rosie asked. ‘If there was anything you needed to tell him, that wasn’t proper for you to write yourself, I could tell him.’ She stopped.

I shook my head. I could see again the little coffee-room of the coaching inn and hear the rattle of the wheels on the cobbles as James did not come, and did not come, and did not come.

‘No,’ I said dully. ‘Mr Fortescue and I are no longer friends. And I am now a married woman.’

Rosie nodded, but her eyes were puzzled. ‘Goodbye, Miss Julia,’ she said. ‘We’ll see you in the village, won’t we?’

‘Yes,’ I said. But I did not sound sure. ‘I will come when I feel better,’ I said. I spoke as if I never expected to feel any better. That was true.

I could not weep.

I could not mourn.

I felt I was floating. And there was nothing to do but to carry on floating, and try to get through one day after another and try to forget that each one of these days added up to week after week after week.

In the third week after the funeral my grandmama proposed a tea-party, to present me to the county as a married woman. I shook my head and said I did not want to go.

‘I don’t expect you to enjoy it,’ my grandmama said tartly. ‘I expect you to keep your head up and to answer when you are spoken to, and to remember that I am doing this to save your reputation for the sake of your mama, my daughter.’

So I did as I was bid and floated through the afternoon. With my grandmama in the room no one would tease me about the precise details of the marriage. They might speak slyly behind their gloved hands when I was not there, but no gossip would harm me while I had Grandmama’s protection.

When I was lucky I felt that I was floating. Sometimes, when I was alone in my bed at night, I would think that I was not afloat at all, but sinking, drowning, and too foolish to call for help. At the heart of the nightmare of those vague days was my worry that I could not be sure whether I was floating towards a safe harbour, with Richard’s love a reality which I should trust, and my grandmama’s protection around me, or whether I was sinking slowly into a slime of sin and trouble, ensnared by my own confusion and tricked by everyone around me.

It was Ralph who said it.

‘He caught you, then,’ he said to me. I was driving to Havering Hall to see Grandmama, and Ralph hailed the carriage in the lane as I turned out of the drive. He had taken a load of Wideacre wheat to Midhurst market and was following the empty wagons slowly home on his black horse.

I pulled down the glass of the window as he reined in alongside. ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I said steadily. It was pointless to encourage Ralph to speak of Richard as an enemy. We both had to learn to know our master; and Richard was the squire now.

Ralph puffed out his cheeks in impatience. ‘He took you, he trapped you into marriage,’ he said. ‘Now he has Wideacre and no controls over his will, not even parents to protect you, or to protect Acre. All that stands between him and Acre is you and me. And you sit up there in your damned carriage and tell me you don’t know what I mean!’

I felt my world shaking, but I said nothing.

‘I’m selling wheat in Midhurst as fast as I can,’ Ralph said, jerking a thumb at the empty wagons lumbering past us. ‘I won’t have Wideacre corn sent out of the county while there are poor families who need it at the proper rate. Not while I am manager here.’

‘What about the wheat for Acre?’ I asked softly.

Ralph gleamed. ‘I’ve hidden it,’ he said briefly. ‘They can buy it in their penn’orths throughout the year. But young Richard won’t find it.’

‘It’s not at the mill?’ I asked.

Ralph’s face darkened again. ‘I’ll not tell you where,’ he said. ‘You’re his wife now. You could be obliged to tell him. I’ll keep it safe, never fear. There’ll be no hunger in Acre this winter, even if the devil himself was squire.’

I nodded. ‘I am sorry, Ralph,’ I said.

‘You’ll be sorrier yet,’ he said bleakly. ‘When’s the baby due?’

‘At the end of January,’ I said.

‘The hardest time of the year,’ Ralph said. There was a silence. ‘The hardest,’ he said. ‘You should have come with me to the gypsies that day, Julia.’

I said nothing. It was useless to say anything.

‘Could we get the marriage annulled on some legal grounds?’ Ralph inquired, his voice as soft as a conspirator’s. ‘Are you sure it was properly witnessed and all, Julia? You were both minors, remember.’

I thought of my mama and John driving to London to get the marriage annulled and the black secret reason that they had carried with them, the seventeen-year-old secret of the evil lusts of Beatrice and Harry her brother. But those two were my parents, and it was now my secret. I did not have the strength to fight Richard through the courts of the land declaring our marriage invalid. Besides, I needed the marriage as badly as he did.

‘No,’ I said steadily. ‘There is nothing I am able to tell you which could make the marriage invalid.’

Ralph’s face under his tricorne hat was black with gloom.

‘Remember I’m your friend,’ he said dourly. ‘You know where to find me if you need me, and anyone in Acre would stand with you. If you need help, you know where to come.’

I nodded. There was a hot mist in my eyes and I could not see him. ‘Thank you,’ I said softly. ‘But I always knew there would come a time when you would not be able to help me, nor I you.’

Ralph put his head on one side, apparently listening for something which I alone could hear. ‘Bad time coming for us both?’ he asked very low.

I shrugged my shoulders helplessly. ‘I have not the sight for it,’ I said. ‘If I could see as well as they believe in Acre, I’d not be here now. It would all be different – for all of us.’

He nodded grimly, and then he wheeled his horse around. I had seen him ride from me once when he was in a rage and watched him tear down the drive with the mud flying up from his horse’s hooves. This time he shambled into the village at walking pace. I watched him go before I pulled the cord to drive on. He rode with a slack bridle; his collar was turned up and his shoulders were as hunched as if he were riding in pouring rain.

I was driving to my grandmama’s, for I no longer rode. My pregnancy was showing, and modesty and convention alike would keep me from Sea Mist and in a carriage until the birth. I hoped very much for a dry autumn and a mild winter. The lane was impassable when it got too wet, and if I was not allowed to ride, I should have to stay inside the Dower House for the last long three months of my pregnancy, with no visitors, with no company…except Richard.

I was wearing an old black gown of Mama’s, hastily adapted for me. My grandmama had called her dressmaker from Chichester to come to Havering and take my measurements, and guess at my likely increase in size, so that I could have some new black gowns ready for the autumn and winter.

I stood still, until I was weary with standing, while she kneeled at my feet and pinned one fold after another. She had a mouthful of pins between her lips, but she was able, by years of practice, to tell my grandmama all the Chichester gossip without dropping one. I watched this, fascinated for a time, but then I grew tired. Grandmama broke into the flow of news when she saw my white face and said abruptly, ‘That will do! Julia, you must sit down for a rest.’

So she took my measurements as I sat and then took her leave, promising that the gowns would be ready within the week.

‘Are you tired?’ Grandmama asked me, and at the kindness in her voice I felt my eyes fill with tears.

‘Very tired,’ I said piteously. ‘And, Grandmama, I do miss Mama so much. It is so lonely at home without her!’

She nodded. ‘You were very close, you two,’ she said softly. ‘It’s quite rare to see so much love between a grown girl and her mama. She was very proud of you, you know, Julia. She would not want you to be sad.’

I put the back of my hand to my mouth to bottle up the sobs. I tried to blink back the hot tears which were ready to flow down my cheeks. My grandmama’s consoling words helped me not at all, for I knew my mama had been mistaken in me, and that she had died knowing her mistake. She had not loved me when she had cut her dress into ribbons; she had not felt proud of me then. She had known me for what I was – a sensualist like my natural mother, Beatrice. She had hated Beatrice, and I was sure that at the very moment of her death she must have hated me.

‘Is Richard kind to you?’ my grandmama asked. ‘The two of you are so very young to live alone together!’

‘Yes,’ I said. I said nothing more.

‘He is not impatient with you?’ she asked. ‘When the two of you were children, your mama always used to fear that he bullied you.’

‘He does not bully me,’ I said steadily.

‘And I trust he is . . .’ Grandmama broke off and glanced down at her gown, black like mine, mourning like me. ‘He is not . . . insistent?’ she asked. ‘Insistent about your marital duties? At a time like this you would be best sleeping in your own bed.’

I nodded. ‘I do, Grandmama,’ I said.

She nodded. ‘Forgive me,’ she said. ‘You are a married woman now, and it is the business of your husband and yourself. No business of mine.’

I nodded. Once again we had come to the place where even my powerful grandmama would not support me. Once the door of the Dower House had closed behind me, I was Richard’s own. No one could come between the two of us. He owned me as surely as he now owned the land I had once called mine, my land, my horse, my little box of trinkets, my gowns, even my own body. All of them belonged to Richard, because I had once said, ‘I do’ in the rocking cabin of a dirty little boat.

Acre, and Sea Mist and I might all suffer under his ownership, and there was nothing anyone could do about it.

There was nothing I could do about it.

Richard and Ralph clashed almost daily. I heard about it when I drove into Acre. I heard about it from Grandmama, who had heard it from Lord Havering, who had been present when Richard had told Ralph that he wanted a gamekeeper on the estate and Ralph had said that he would not work with one. I heard about it from the kitchenmaid, who told me that Mr Megson and my husband had shouted at each other in the middle of Acre about whether old Mrs Merry should be evicted or not. ‘Terrible scene, it was,’ she said in awe.

Ralph had won the gamekeeper question by default, but it was still a victory. He had told Richard that he could not find a man from Acre who would do the job, which was true enough. They knew already, in the way the poorest of the poor sense things early, that the Wideacre experiment had ended almost as soon as it had begun, and that they should rue the day that they went back to work for a Lacey.

They had lost their reputation as the notorious village, the village which had killed its squire, and they had earned county-wide praise for being the fastest team of reapers in the county. If the estate had been for sale, there would have been many, many buyers. Acre had been mastered, and anyone will buy a horse which has been well broken and learned its paces.

They had trusted the Laceys again. They had trusted the Lacey word. It was coincidence that we went back on our word as soon as the wheat was in the barn, on the very day that the harvest was completed, but poor people have little faith in coincidences. Those who still loved me said I was trapped by Richard. Others, who were older and bitter, said it was a skilful ploy by the Laceys to fool Acre once more. The village was back to work, and they had lost their free access to the fields, to the park and to the common, and all around the village were fences they themselves had erected. So the older, wiser ones scented a plot and smiled sourly, and doffed their hats to me with a knowing look in their eyes that recognized a clever victor.

They could not pull down all the fences, all at once. They had learned to hope and they had lost their anger. They could not move against us, they could only mutter and mouth curses against the name of Lacey. They had consulted the Chichester lawyers who drew up the contracts on the land and they had found, as Ralph had once predicted they would, that the law belongs to the landlords. They could not sue us for breach of contract with them, for we had not breached a contract. All we had promised to do was to share profits with them once the costs of running the estate had been subtracted. Richard made sure that the costs cut the Acre share down to a subsistence wage. All the other promises, about loans for seed and equipment and stock, were voluntary offers from the Laceys. They could be withdrawn. Acre needed no one to tell them that they had been withdrawn.

There was nothing they could do to bind the Laceys down as they were bound down. All they could do was to look surly and to start poaching. So no one from the village came forward for the job of Richard’s gamekeeper, and anyone who set foot on the estate looking for the work was quietly taken to one side by Ralph, or one of the other older men, and warned off. They always went.

It could have been worse for the village where I had once been loved, the village where I had talked of a land-sharing scheme, a share-cropping scheme. They still had rabbits and hares, and even pheasants and venison, and fish from the river. They also had a reliable supply of wheat.

‘Where are they buying their wheat?’ Richard asked me abruptly one morning at breakfast. The coffee-jug was before me, and I poured myself another cup while I thought what I should say. I was in the fifth month of my pregnancy and I found I had become slow and dreamy as I had grown heavier and broader.

‘I saw a great wagon of grain outside Miller Green’s, and when I asked him who it was for, he would not answer me,’ Richard said with irritation. ‘I am sure he was grinding it for the village. I don’t understand the returns Megson made from the Midhurst market. I wonder if Acre has hidden some wheat somewhere, to take them through the winter.’

I looked out of the dining-room window, past Richard’s head. The trees in the orchard were heavy with fruit, the blackbirds glutted on the windfalls. Through the open window I could sniff the cider-smell of rotting fruit. The branches were bowed to the ground with the crop. The apple trees I had planted were yielding too; Ralph had gangs out every day, picking and packing them for the Chichester fruit market. The land was rich. The Laceys were rich. Acre was dirt poor.

‘Where would they hide it, Julia?’ Richard demanded. ‘You know the estate as well as anyone. If you wanted to hide a couple of wagonloads of wheat where would you put it?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said carelessly. In truth I felt careless. I sipped the coffee and gazed out of the window at that green shoulder of the downs above the orchard. The beech coppice was changing colour already; the green was going and the strong brassy colour was shining through. The cedar tree in the garden was dark purple and the sky was very blue above it. I wondered if all wives have this longing to be elsewhere, a longing which is not even as clear as a wish for freedom or a dislike of one’s husband. It is just a vague, wordless sense that there should be something more, something more than being inside a window looking outwards for ever.

‘Are you listening to me, Julia?’ Richard was sharp. I dragged my eyes from the window and looked at him.

Of course,’ I said. ‘I do not know where I would hide a couple of wagonloads of corn on Wideacre. I do not know that anyone has done so.’

‘Would you be told if such a theft had taken place?’ Richard asked. ‘And if you knew,’ he continued sweetly, ‘would you keep it from me? Would you side with your precious Acre against me? I hope you would not, Julia. But I cannot be entirely sure.’

‘I would not, Richard,’ I said. I met his eyes without flinching. We had been living in the same house alone for some weeks and I had learned to lie to him. I might not always convince him, but he was often prepared to close his eyes to his uncertainty. Unusually for Richard, he was ready to let things go between us, and I still did not know why that should be.

‘Are you sure that Megson has said nothing to you?’ he demanded suddenly, as fast as a swooping falcon to my lie.

I shook my head, and half consciously put my hand on my swelling belly.

Richard’s face changed at once. ‘It does not matter! It does not matter!’ he said swiftly. ‘Don’t think about it, Julia I shall resolve the problem. Do not you trouble yourself with it. The Chichester accoucheur, Mr Saintly, said that of all things you must avoid worry. Don’t think about it any more.’

‘Don’t fuss, Richard,’ I said. He had risen from his place and come around the table to me. He was looking down at me and his face was filled with concern, but also with some eager hunger that I could not explain.

‘Are you thinking of me or the baby?’ I asked shrewdly.

‘Of you, of course,’ he said, but his eyes were on my swollen belly. ‘And the baby too, naturally. My son,’ he said, and his voice was full of longing. ‘My son, the next Lacey, the heir to Wideacre.’

‘What about the wheat, then?’ I asked, interrupting Richard’s meditation on the baby he was certain was a son. ‘Even if they have stolen a couple of wagons and hidden it, Richard, that is no more than they were promised by Uncle John and me. It would be difficult to find, and it would cause much bad feeling in Acre if you took it to market now. Surely the best thing to do is to leave things as they are. Acre will need a supply of winter corn, you know. And the price is going up all the time.’

Richard nodded absently. He reached out a gentle hand and touched my rounded belly. ‘Yes, yes,’ he said softly. ‘Don’t you trouble yourself with it, Julia. You just stay quiet and at peace, and concentrate on breeding a strong baby for the Wideacre cradle.’

‘I can’t be at peace if I think you are in conflict with Acre,’ I said. ‘I know the village seems quiet now, but remember Ralph Megson himself telling us about bread riots and corn riots. It need not always be violent and dangerous, Richard, but the poor believe they have a right to fair-priced wheat, sold and grown locally. I should hate Acre to try to take the law into its own hands.’

Richard nodded at that. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘and I know that he is still a bread rioter at heart.’

‘Maybe,’ I said, ‘but he would never go against the owners of the land unless he thought they were behaving wrongly. If he has taken some corn, it is to ensure that the contract John and I made with Acre is honoured by you.’

Richard’s face was dark. ‘Well, don’t think of it, Julia,’ he said. ‘I don’t want you worrying about it when you should be resting and making the baby strong.’

‘But I do worry about it,’ I said, and I thought myself very clever to use Richard’s passionate concern for our unborn child against his hardness of heart. ‘There is only one way I can stop worrying, Richard: if you stop giving me cause. Every time there is trouble in the village, I hear of it, and of course it distresses me. If you truly want to save me anxiety, you should take Mr Megson’s advice. I don’t think Uncle John ever went against him, and it was Mr Megson who got Acre back to work.’

Richard looked hard at me, and his eyes gleamed, but I thought I had a way to rule him and to help Acre. I was not cautioned.

‘You admire Megson very much, do you not?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Indeed I do. If you knew him better, Richard, if you had seen him this spring and summer, you would admire him too. He has done wonders with the estate. Uncle John always said that nothing could have happened without him. And the people of Acre love him and trust him, far more than they would ever love and trust one of us. I do wish you could learn to work with him, even if you cannot like him.’

Richard showed his white even teeth. ‘I like him well enough,’ he said. ‘And I am coming to understand him more and more. I shall ask him directly about the missing corn, Julia. And I shall act on what he says.’ The hard brightness left his face and he smoothed my belly again with a proprietory hand. ‘So do not upset yourself and upset my son,’ he said earnestly. ‘Promise me you will rest while I am out this afternoon.’

I did not much like being loved only as the bearer of the heir to Wideacre. And I did not like how Richard was so set on a son. There was some hint of something old and dangerous in the way he so longed for another heir for this land to which the Laceys had clung for so many years.

I hoped very much that the child would be a girl, and that she would be free of the land. I would have her love it as I loved it, as the sweetest best country that anyone could work, not as Richard loved it, with this dark passion for ownership.

I thought I had won my way and won Acre its winter wheat, and so I smiled at Richard and promised I would rest. I would rest quiet while he went out. I kept my promise and went to my bed, which is why I was asleep when the soldiers came for Ralph Megson.