The Favoured Child

by Philippa Gregory

  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 co
uld 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.

  26

  We cut that last field in a rush. The clouds were gathering for one of those fast August storms which sometimes come in such heat that there is no rain, but just the crackle of the lightning over the land and the warning rumble of thunder.

  But even if this one field had been drenched, we would still have had a harvest which was the envy of the county. The fields had been well rested in the years when Wideacre had gone to the bad, and no place in England had a better work-force.

  ‘You’ve reason to be proud,’ Uncle John had told Ralph and me in the morning of the last day as the sickles were unloaded from the cart and the reapers fell into line. ‘No one in the country has harvested faster than Wideacre this season, and that with raw workers. They’ll be talking again of Wideacre as they did in the old days as a place where magic can happen.’

  Ralph nodded, not troubling to conceal his satisfaction.

  ‘It proves that it can work our way, the new way,’ Uncle John said. ‘That’s especially important this summer. With the news from France as it is.’

  ‘Bad?’ Ralph asked, cocking an eyebrow at him.

  ‘They’re going to put the king on trial,’ John said briefly. ‘My guess is that they’ll find him guilty and execute him. It’ll be a black day for liberty when that happens for it’s the end of the French experiment with freedom.’

  Ralph smoothed the blade of a sickle with a careful hand. ‘Not the end,’ he said confidently. ‘They have to be rid of their rulers. There’s no permanent future without being rid of them, and that parcel of parasites would never have gone of their own free will. They’d have plotted, they’d have led armies back into France armed by other monarchs and financed by other parasites. It’s as I’ve always thought here: you can make some little improvements with the blessing of the landlords, but if you want to make a change which will last, the whole landlord class has to go.’

  ‘You won’t do it with that!’ Uncle John said, pointing to the sickle. ‘No, Mr Megson, you go too far. If it cannot be done by consent and by reason, then it cannot be done at all. You’ll never get the right decision by force.’

  Ralph smiled his dark slow smile. ‘You plough before you sow,’ he said. ‘I think the French are just breaking the ground. Here on Wideacre we are not done yet either, not in my lifetime, nor maybe in Miss Julia’s neither; but Acre people have learned they can plan and work without a landlord. And one day, perhaps many years from now, we will learn in this country that nothing matters more than the well-being of the poorest, humblest person.’

  ‘I’m a radical, not a revolutionary!’ Uncle John protested.

  Ralph nodded. ‘You are what you can be,’ he said as if he were consoling John for some failure of will. ‘No landlord could be a revolutionary in his heart. He’d have to have mixed motives. You’re the most honourable landlord I’ve ever known – if that’s any comfort to you . . . He broke off with a smile. ‘And I’m the worst bailiff!’

  ‘You grow a good crop,’ I said pacifically.

  ‘Aye,’ Ralph acknowledged, and then turned to John again. ‘You’ll come back to see the crop taken in?’ he asked. ‘And you and Lady Lacey will come down to the mill this evening for the harvest dinner?’

  ‘We’ll see the wheat taken in, but we’ll not come down to the mill,’ Uncle John said. He was on horseback and he leaned forward and brushed Prince’s mane over to one side, avoiding Ralph’s gaze. ‘Lady Lacey wouldn’t like to come down to the mill,’ he said with difficulty. ‘You wouldn’t know, Mr Megson. The Wideacre riot really started at the harvest supper. We both have bad memories of it . . .’ He paused awkwardly and glanced at Ralph.

  He nodded. Of course,’ he said easily. ‘Let it be the young generation, then. The future belongs to them. Miss Julia shall represent you, and there will be few people there who will remember that other harvest home.’

  ‘Master Richard too!’ John said. I jumped at his name and John smiled at me. ‘I’ve not had a chance to speak to you, Julia, but I had a letter from Richard this morning. He said he’d be coming on the stage today. He’ll certainly be here in time for the harvest supper.’

  I felt my face flush and I smiled, but my heart sank. Once Richard was home, I could no longer delay telling John and Mama. Today might be the last day I could work and be respected on the land, and tonight would be the last night for many weary evenings that I would be able to ride home and see my mama’s face light up as I came in the room.

  The thought of seeing Richard did not make me feel safe either. I feared that today was my last day of freedom, the last day I would be free to work on the land with the people I knew and loved. My husband and master was coming closer and closer to my home, which he would call his home, and the land which I had planted would yield for him. The heat of the day felt oppressive and threatening to me, and I gave a little shudder.

  ‘To work, then,’ Ralph said, and gave his clear whistle to the reaper team, which fell into line, with the gleaners behind. ‘You wait and watch here, Miss Julia. I’ll get down to the mill to see all’s ready and check the space in the barns.’

  Uncle John tipped his hat to us both and called, ‘Good harvesting!’ to the field and trotted home. I cast a wary eye at the stormy sky, and one at the field, the last field to be cut, the field at the top of the downs.

  I should have been proud, I should have been happy, but the baby was growing in my belly, and the only way out I had seen was itself a trap for my undoing. I had known that when this harvest was done, Richard would be home and the trap would be sprung.

  All day we worked until the field was shaven like a man’s blond head ready for a wig. All over the field were the little islands of stooks, crooked no longer. Even Sally Miles had learned to tie a straight stook. By the time the dinner break had come there was only a swathe left uncut, the width of two reapers.

  I sat in the stubble with them and gave the children their sugared almonds. Mrs Gough had packed me the usual feast, but, although my sickness was gone, I was too apprehensive to eat. I was afraid, but I did not know what I feared. I gave away the dainty little meat pie and I shared the sweet pastries. I drank greedily from the glass-stoppered bottle of lemonade, but it did not ease my throbbing head or cool me.

  When we had eaten, we leaned back against the bank and looked at the rest of the field. There was no hurry to cut the last swathe, for I thought the weather would hold, but I was nervous, and for some reason I felt disinclined to call them back to work or to face the fact that the harvest was done, and my girlhood cut down as surely as the corn.

  But without my bidding two or three of the men went out into the field and started stacking the stooks.

  ‘They’re eager to work,’ I said to Sally Miles, who sat near by.

  ‘Nay,’ she said with a smiling drawl. ‘That’s play they’re after. There’s a game, an old reapers’ game. They make a corn dolly atop the heap of the last stooks and throw the sickles at it. The one whose sickle pierces it wins the luck of the harvest.’

  I nodded and tried to smile, my eyes half shut against the glare of the white sky.

  ‘The dolly’s made in a semblance of the favourite of the harvest,’ said Sally. ‘Maybe it’ll be you, Miss Julia. My grandma makes them. She remembers the skill, but there are others who are learning from her now.’

  I glanced over. Old Mrs Miles was tying the last knot on a little corn dolly. I caught a glimpse of th
e grey ribbon from my riding habit and nodded at the little conspiracy. Then I got to my feet and one of the lads helped me into the saddle. I had heard hoofbeats coming up the track and I wanted to meet Richard away from the bright inquisitive eyes of the harvest field.

  I rode a little way down the lane, and then I saw him trotting up towards me, his curly mop of black curls bare to the sun. When he saw me, he broke into a sunny blue-eyed smile. ‘Julia!’ he said in open-faced delight, and pulled his horse up beside me so he could reach over and take my chin in one careless hand and plant a kiss on my mouth.

  I let him kiss me, but I did not respond. ‘I have been worried,’ I said abruptly.

  He patted my shoulder in an absent-minded way. ‘Not now,’ he said. ‘Your mama and my papa are following in the gig. They wanted to see the last of the corn coming in. Mr Megson is coming behind with the wagons.’

  I nodded and pinned a smile of greeting on my face as Mama and Uncle John came up the hill. Mama was hanging on to the side of the gig as it jolted up the narrow path, the fringe on her parasol dancing as the gig swayed and rocked.

  ‘All done?’ Uncle John demanded jubilantly as soon as they were in earshot. ‘All done, Squire Julia?’

  ‘All done, except for the reapers’ games,’ I said, trying to make my voice as delighted as his.

  I could never hide anything from my mama. Her eyes were on my face and I knew she noted that I was pale, and that I had deep circles around my eyes from the strain and the worry of this summer, which seemed to go on and on and never give me a moment to rest.

  ‘Are you feeling unwell?’ she asked quietly as the gig went on to the gate and I reined back Sea Mist to ride alongside her.

  ‘Just tired,’ I said. ‘The heat makes me weary, and the glare off the field hurts my eyes.’