I tried to speak, but I could only make a sound like a little whimper. ‘Richard!’ I said imploringly.
‘Yes?’ he answered. He sounded distracted, as if he could ill spare the time for my interruption when he was trying to think what would become of me now that I was ruined.
‘We were betrothed,’ I said very softly. People walking past on the street turned to look at us, a handsome youth and a pretty girl holding tight to his arm and looking up into his face like a despairing beggar. Richard saw their glances and smoothly moved us on, tucking my cold hand under his elbow.
‘We were,’ he agreed, ‘but I thought you had been betrothed to someone else. The last word you gave me on the matter was that you wished to marry no one, that you wanted us to be brother and sister. I had the impression, Julia, I must say, that you were not enthusiastic about our marriage.’
‘I was not,’ I said honestly. ‘I am not.’ It was like a nightmare, it was worse than a nightmare. I could hardly walk down the street, my knees were so weak with horror at this conversation. I could hardly believe Richard was triumphant over me and I was a supplicant being tormented. ‘But this alters everything, Richard.’
‘Yes,’ he said, and not even he could conceal the relish in his voice. ‘It does indeed.’
Then, all at once, I had taken my fill. ‘Don’t tease me, Richard,’ I said blankly. ‘This is no jest for me. If you will not own the child, if you refuse to marry me, you should tell me clearly. You must tell me now.’
The determination in my voice stopped him, and he looked at me narrowly, measuring my will against his own. ‘What would you do?’ he asked curiously.
‘I should tell Mama,’ I said, dredging up courage from the very soles of my shoes. ‘I should tell Mama, and I should tell Uncle John. I should tell them that I might be shamed, but I should still be the part heir to Wideacre. We have been talking in the village about sharing out the land and running the estate as a joint venture of villagers and Laceys. If I could not be one of the Quality, if I could not be a lady, then I should give my share of the land outright to Acre. I should give it to them as a gift. I should take one of the better cottages in Acre and live there alone, and raise my child there. I know no one would visit me, and I know I would be ruined. But I still have friends among the poor people of Acre, and many of them were born a few months after a wedding, and some of them out of wedlock. Even if society and all my family close their doors to me, I should still have Wideacre.’
He nodded, slowly, and I could see his eyes flicking along the grey roofs and the pale skyline, as if he were trying to calculate something at speed. He did not know whether to believe me or not. He looked down at me and he saw my set face, and knew that I was determined. He believed that I could do such a thing.
Then I saw his eyes warm and he turned his most lovable smile towards me. Oh, my darling Julia,’ he said sweetly, ‘what a silly girl you are! I have loved you all my life, quite adored you! Of course you will not be shamed in that way. I will marry you. I would never dream of not being your husband. And you will have a son, my son, and he will be the heir, the sole heir to Wideacre!’
I gave a little gasp, and the courage which had been holding me steady and upright while we spoke suddenly deserted me and I felt weepy with relief. ‘Yes,’ I said.
Richard’s smile was sweet as a May morning. ‘We must plan,’ he said in a businesslike manner. ‘When will he be born? At the end of January?’
I paused. I had not thought of the birth of the child at all. All I had thought of was the distress it would cause my mama, and the shock to Uncle John, and the shame for me. But to hear Richard speak so confidently of the boy that would be born, that would be the next squire for Wideacre, made my spirits suddenly rise for the first time since I had conceived. The child would be a Wideacre baby as Richard and I had been. The child would be raised on Wideacre under the wide sweet skies of my home. And she – for I was certain that the baby was a girl – she would be my little daughter, and I would teach her about the land and how to farm it, and she might be the one to give the land back to the people that worked it.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I am nearly two months into my time.’
Richard nodded. ‘When does it start to show?’ he asked.
I frowned. Oh, I so wish Clary was alive!’ I said in sudden longing for her common sense and for her wealth of knowledge. ‘I am trying to remember from seeing Clary’s mother, and the other women. I think it starts showing about the third month. But, Richard, I want to be married at once. I have to be married before it starts to show!’
The note of panic in my voice made Richard smile his cruel teasing smile. ‘Yes,’ he said gently. ‘I am sure you do. I don’t think I have ever seen you so afraid of anything, Julia.’
I could not retort. I looked up at him and I knew my mouth was trembling.
‘It is all right,’ he said, his voice silky with his happiness at seeing me in fear, at hearing me beg. ‘I shall make the arrangements. Now, stop looking so scared, Julia, we must go back for tea.’
The arrangements were easier than I had thought possible. Richard was given a few days’ leave by his tutor and claimed the right to escort us back to Sussex. Once we were home, Mama and Uncle John were tolerant when Richard asked if we might use the curricle and said he wanted to drive me to the coast. They did not expect us home until late, and they did not know what time we left, for we were away in the morning before they were stirring. We drove in the pale early light down the road to Portsmouth, Richard whistling and singing snatches of songs. I was as quiet as if I were going to my own funeral rather than to my wedding. The motion of the carriage made me queasy and tired, and after we had stopped for breakfast and changed the horses, I laid my head on Richard’s shoulder and dozed.
An odd sight we must have looked when we drove into the city. I felt I should have been looking about me at the noise and the bustle and the hurry of people. But I stared around dull-eyed and noticed nothing. I was on my way to my wedding and I felt nothing but dread, and when I glanced sideways at Richard, my heart sank.
The streets narrowed, and the sound of the wheels on the cobbles was deafening. The pavements were very crowded, and people continually stepped out into the road so Richard had to pull up the horses all the time.
We were due at the quayside, where there was a captain greedy enough and careless enough to sell us a licence to say that he had married us when on a voyage outside the limit of coastal waters, where his authority was legal.
Richard was following a hand-drawn map spread out on his knee. His friend Wrigley from Chichester had made it out for him and advised him as to the name of the captain. There were no secrets. One young man, living only a few miles from Wideacre, knew that we were to be married, and no doubt Richard told him why. There were no secrets and there was no escaping my shame.
He turned the curricle into a hotel yard and snapped orders at the ostlers: we would be gone two hours and the horses were to be ready for our return. Then he gave me his arm, casually, as one might pick up a valise, and took me down the road to the quayside.
The harbour was a forest of masts, with sailors, impossibly high, clinging to sails and to rigging and clamouring like an aviary full of swearing parrots. I shadowed Richard and clung to his arm.
‘How will we ever find the right ship?’ I asked; and I knew with a sudden dread that I was hoping we would not find the right ship and that we might go home. Even Mama’s heartbreak and my shame was better than this hopeless roaming around in a town I did not know with a man whose true character I was just coming to learn.
‘It’s there,’ Richard said. This expedition, which was weakening me with every step we took, was high adventure to Richard; his eyes were sparkling, he was looking around him with excitement. ‘There it is!’ he said triumphantly. ‘Now to find the captain.’
Richard pushed me ahead of him up a narrow gangplank, and I kept my eyes on my footing and tried not to notice that half a doze
n grubby faces had appeared over the side of the ship and were inspecting me and passing comment freely on my gown and my bonnet, and what we might want with their ship.
When we reached the deck, they had vanished, and Richard seemed to be deaf and blind to the discomfort of the situation.
‘Hey, there!’ he called confidently to one of the sailors who appeared, by his sprawling leisure, to be in charge of the crew who were slopping dirty water around the deck of the ship. ‘Where’s the captain?’
The man looked up from cleaning his nails with a long murderous knife, and eyed us carefully as if to consider whether or not we merited an answer. Richard put his hand in his coat pocket, and the chink of coins was a password. It struck me that Richard was very rich on this trip. Richard was very assured.
‘’Ee’s drunk again,’ the man said gloomily. He inspected us with open contempt. I flushed as he looked me up and down with disdain. He knew we were here for a secret marriage. He knew there was only one reason for a young girl of Quality to come to this dirty ship seeking out a drunken captain. He looked at me as though I were a wanton who might go with any man. I shrank back a little behind Richard’s shoulder, pulled my light cloak about my shoulders and turned up the collar to hide my face.
I had a feeling, an idea I could not have put in words, that there was some kind of omen for the future in that disdainful stare. I was to become the property of one man, but any man could look at me as he wished. I was a free woman no longer; and well might I shrink back behind Richard, for he was my protector. I would no longer command respect in my own right.
‘We’ll see him,’ Richard said. He did not notice my embarrassment, or he did not think it sufficiently important to check the man’s insolent gaze. The man shrugged, caring neither way, and then pointed rudely past us to a door. ‘Straight dahn there,’ he said, his accent sounding strange to my ears, which were accustomed to the gentle lilt of the Sussex voice.
Richard started for the companion-way, and I caught him up. ‘Richard,’ I said, staying him as he was about to descend. ‘If he is drunk, perhaps he cannot. . . Perhaps we should…Richard, wait!’ I said.
Richard set his feet either side of the ladder and slid skilfully down to the bottom. ‘Come down,’ he commanded me.
I hesitated. The crew on deck had stopped their work and were openly staring, and the man with the knife was watching me, expressionless. Even the sailors in the rigging were staring down at me. I gathered my skirts around me. Gripping the ladder in my hands, I clambered down till I was at Richard’s side.
The stench hit me like a physical blow. It was a smell compounded of vomit from a thousand seasick voyages, of old sweat, of injury and fear, of gunpowder and filthy clothes, of mouldy food and gangrene. I gagged and fumbled for my handkerchief and put it over my mouth, inhaling the smell of clean linen and eau-de-Cologne.
Richard looked at me, his expression hidden in the shadows of the ill-lit corridor. ‘What is it now?’ he demanded impatiently.
‘We cannot do it like this, Richard,’ I said urgently. ‘It is awful! There must be another way we can do this. We cannot be married here in this dirty place. It…it smells, Richard.’
He gave a quick exclamation under his breath and then he turned towards me and took hold of my arms, just above the elbows, in a grip so hard that I would have cried out had my fear of the place not been greater than the hurt.
‘Look here,’ Richard said savagely, ‘you wanted us to be lovers. You lay back on the floor and smiled. You put your arms around my neck. You said no but meant yes. You came home on horseback with Jem and held out your arms to me. If you had been unwilling, you would have struggled more. There is no such thing as rape, everyone knows that. You were willing, you could have stopped me, but you did not want to stop me. And when Jem found you, you told him that you had fallen from Misty. If you had been raped, you would have said so. You were willing. You were willing because you are a whore. And it is generous-very generous – of me to marry you.’
I gaped at him. His hard grip on my arms was nothing to the pain I felt under my ribs. Every time he said, ‘You’, the word was like a knife which made a little stab into my heart.
He was telling a partial truth, and in any case I was quite incapable of spotting an unjust accusation now. I had blamed myself from the moment I had realized what was happening on the floor of the summer-house. And a woman is always the one at fault. If I had been a true lady, if I had been truly pure, then Richard would not have done it. I had lost my virginity and that was enough to ruin me in everyone’s eyes – and in my own.
‘I am prepared to marry you,’ Richard said fiercely, ‘but it is a favour I am doing you. I could just as well let you face Mama and John on your own, Julia. And if I told them that it was you that tempted me, you who insisted on us being lovers, I should think the shame would kill your mama.’
The torch in the bracket on the wall jumped and flickered in a draught which swept down the companion-way. In the sudden ripple of light I saw Richard’s face. He was smiling in the way he used to smile when he had trapped me in our childhood games. I remembered once he had called me up to a loft in a deserted barn by one of the derelict cornfields. ‘There is a barn owl’s nest,’ he had called. He had insisted that I climb the rickety ladder up to see it. I could not see what he was looking at, though he pointed to a dark hole in the wall close to a beam. Then, while I was straining to see, he had suddenly given me a push which caught me off balance and knocked me into the wall, and had run for the ladder. He was down it in a flash and had thrown it to the floor. When I peered over the edge to the floor twenty feet below, he was smiling. ‘I think you are stuck,’ he had said then.
‘I think you are stuck,’ he said now.
I looked at him and I was clear-sighted. I felt a breath of courage pass over me as fresh and as sweet as a wind on Wideacre. In the fetid cramped hold of a rotten ship, I felt my shoulders go back and my chin come up. I was not a silly whore taken in lust, I was a Lacey of Wideacre. I was my papa’s daughter and I was the heir and natural successor of Beatrice Lacey, the witch of Wideacre, who had made the land and wrecked the land to pave my way to the hall. After Beatrice, nobody in Sussex would ever think women were weak again. With the example of Beatrice before me – even Beatrice the land-killer, the wrecker – I could find some strength inside my young woman’s body and inside my loving, vulnerable mind.
I met Richard’s smiling gaze without flinching. ‘You are right,’ I said levelly. ‘I am stuck. So let us go into this nasty little room and see this drunken captain and get ourselves married. And then I shall have to go home, and later I shall have to tell my beloved mama and dear Uncle John. And I shall have to face their grief and disappointment in me. And I shall have to walk through the wreckage of their hopes for me. But I can walk through that wreckage,’ I said. ‘And it is true that I am still not afraid. Or when I am afraid, I do not stay afraid. And my fear does not disable me.’
Richard’s smile was wiped off his face and he was looking at me with something like respect. ‘Yes,’ he said softly, ‘I know you are not afraid, Julia. Even when you are scared about something, you always seem to find courage from somewhere to face it. I don’t know how you do it.’
‘I am a Lacey,’ I said grimly, and the very word seemed to bring the air of Wideacre into that close place. ‘Now, let’s go in, Richard, and get it over with.’
He raised his hand at my command and knocked at the door and went in. So, although he was partly lying when he said I was to blame for the conception of the child, it was certainly I who made the marriage. And I had an odd idea that the marriage would ruin me more than the rape had done.
It was horrid.
Of course it was horrid.
I had dreamed all my childhood, girlhood and womanhood of marrying under the great grey stone arch of Acre’s Gothic church, with the sun shining through the stained-glass window, making rainbow blocks of colour on my white gown, and Mama smiling in the
Lacey pew behind me.
When I was a girl, I had dreamed that Richard would be there with his hand warm in mine and his kisses on my lips when he had given me the ring. I had seen myself, in my conceited dream, in a flurry of white muslin or figured satin. I even knew the flowers I would have carried: Wideacre flowers, for not all my girlish dreams were obvious conventions culled from the journals. I had thought I would carry the wild flowers of Wideacre in a jumble of a bouquet, with scarlet poppies bright in the middle. I would have worn white moon-daisies and blue cornflowers in my hair.
I dare say I should have looked very foolish, and I am sure my grandmama, Lady Havering, would not have approved. I should hardly have set a mode with a bunch full of weeds in my hands and daisies around my head. So perhaps it hardly mattered that I could not be a beloved bride in the church of my home, surrounded by friends and with the good wishes of a village around me.
But nothing could have been worse than that filthy cabin, and the captain and the mumbled promises read in a croaky voice from his little prayer book. When he looked at me to ask for my response, the stale drink on his breath blew in my face. His cabin smelled of dirty clothes, and there was a plate with rancid chop bones on it tucked under the bunk.
But it was legal, and binding, and when he said, ‘I now pronounce thee man and wife’, we were as much married as if we had made our promises in a grand society wedding in Chichester Cathedral.
‘You may kiss the bride,’ he said, leering at Richard.
Richard dipped his lovely dark head down to me and I raised my face for his kiss. His lips were like ice, and mine were no warmer.
‘I thought we had to be married at sea,’ I said in a small voice.
‘I falsified the ship’s log,’ said the captain, his rotten teeth showing in his smile. ‘If anyone ever asks you, you were here this morning when we were off the Isle of Wight. A marriage for the two of you, and extra sea-time for the young officers in training!’ He gave a dirty smile at Richard. ‘Thought you’d be in a hurry to get the little lady home,’ he said insinuatingly.
The Favoured Child Page 54