Philippa Gregory - The Complete Wideacre Trilogy - Wideacre, The Favoured Child, Meridon

Papa and I avoided the worst of the fuss. In any case, there were the long days we had to spend on the open downland pastures collecting the sheep to separate lambs from ewes for slaughter. Harry, too, remained secluded in library or parlour choosing books to take to school with him, and scanning his newly purchased Latin and Greek grammars.

‘You cannot want to go, Harry!’ I said incredulously.

‘Whyever not?’ he said, frowning at the breeze that had blown in with me as I flung open the library door.

‘To leave Wideacre!’ I said and then stopped. Once again Harry’s world of words defeated me. If he did not know that nothing outside Wideacre could match the smell of Wideacre’s summer wind, or that a handful of Wideacre earth was worth an acre of any other land, then I had no way to tell him. We did not see the same sights.

We did not speak the same language. We did not share even the similarity of family resemblance. Harry took after my father in colouring, with his bright blond curls and his wide blue, honest eyes. From Mama he had inherited her delicate bone structure and the sweetness of her smile. Her smiles were rare enough, but Harry was a merry-faced golden cherub. All the petting and indulgence he had from Mama had been unable to spoil his sunny nature – and his smiling good looks reflected his sweet and loving spirit.

Beside him I was a throwback to our Norman ancestors and the founders of the line. Foxy-coloured, like those greedy and dangerous men who came in the train of the Norman conqueror and took one look at the lovely land of Wideacre and fought and cheated and lied until they got it. From those ancestors I had my chestnut hair, but my hazel-green eyes were all my own. No portrait in the gallery showed a set of eyes slantingly placed above high cheekbones like mine.

‘She’s a changeling,’ Mama once said in despair.

‘She’s her own pattern,’ my blond papa said consolingly. ‘Maybe she’ll grow into good looks.’

But Harry’s golden curls could not last for ever. His head was cropped for his first wig as part of the preparation for school. Mama wept as the radiant springs fell all around him on the floor, but Harry’s eyes were bright with excitement and pride as Papa’s own wigmaker fitted a little bob-tailed wig on his head – as shorn as a lamb. Mama wept for his curls; she wept as she packed his linen; she wept as she packed a great box of sweetmeats to sustain her baby in the hard outside world. The week before his departure, she was in one continual flood of tears, which even Harry thought wearisome, and Papa and I found pressing business on the far side of the estate from breakfast to dinner.

When he finally departed – like a young lord in the family carriage with his bags strapped on the back, two outriders and Papa himself riding alongside for company for the first stage – Mama shut herself in her parlour for the afternoon. To my credit, I managed a few tears and I took good care to tell no one they were not for Harry’s departure. My father had bought me my first grown-up mount to console me for the loss of my brother. She was an exquisite mare, Bella, with a coat the colour of my own chestnut hair, a black mane and tail and a stripe like starlight down her nose. But I would not be allowed to try her paces till Papa came home, and he would be gone overnight. My tears flowed easily enough, but they were all for me and white-nosed Bella. Once Harry turned the corner of the drive and was out of sight, I scarcely thought of him again.

Not so Mama. She spent long solitary hours in her front parlour fiddling with little pieces of sewing, sorting embroidery silks or tapestry wool into the ranges of shades; arranging flowers picked for her by me or one of the gardeners, or tinkling little tunes on the piano – absorbed by the little time-wasting tedious skills of a lady’s life. But, unconsciously, the little tune would stop and her hands would fall into her lap, and she would gaze out of the window to the gentle shoulder of the green downs, seeing their rippled loveliness, yet all the time seeing the bright face of Harry, her only son. Then she would sigh, very softly, and drop her head to her work, or take up the tune again.

The sunlight, so joyous in the garden and in the woods, seemed to beat cruelly on the pretty pastel colours of the ladies’ parlour. It bleached the pink out of the carpets and the gold out of Mama’s hair, and the lines into her face. While she faded in pale silence indoors, my father and I rode over the length and breadth of Wideacre land, chatting to the tenant farmers, checking the progress of their crops against those we farmed ourselves, watching the flow of the River Fenny over our turning millwheel, until it seemed that the whole world was ours and I might take a proprietary interest in every living thing that – one way or another – belonged to us.

Not a baby was born in our village but I knew of it and generally the child took one of our names: Harold or Harry for my father and brother, Beatrice for my mama and me. When one of our tenants died, we concerned ourselves in the packing and the leaving of their family, if they were going, or the succession of the oldest son and the co-operation of his brothers if they were staying. My father and I knew every blade of grass on our lands, from the weeds on the lazy Dells’ farm (they would be looking for a new tenancy when their lease ran out) to the white-painted fence posts on the spick-and-span Home Farm we farmed ourselves.

Small wonder I was a little empress riding over our land on our horses, with Father – the greatest landlord for a hundred miles around – riding before me and nodding to our people who dropped a curtsy or pulled their forelocks as we passed.

Poor Harry missed all this. Not for him the pleasure of seeing our land under every daily light and in every season. The ploughed fields ringed with white hoarfrost and crunchy as fudge, or the swaying corn in the beating heat of summer. While I rode like a lord at a lord’s side, Harry moped at school and sent sorrowful letters home to his mother, who replied in pale blue ink blotted with tears of sympathy.

His first year was miserable with longing for his mama and her quiet sunny parlour. The boys all belonged to gangs with fierce tribal loyalties, and little Harry was bullied and tormented by every child an inch taller or a month older. Not until his second year brought a new batch of victims into the arena did Harry’s life improve. His third school year meant the dizzy heights of being nearly a big boy, and his cherub-like brightness and his undimmed sweetness brought him petting as well as occasional cruelty. More and more often, when he came home for the holidays, his great trunk was crammed with comfits and cakes given him by older boys.

‘Harry is so popular,’ Mama said proudly.

Each holiday, too, he would tell me tales of the courage and dash of his gang leader. How every term they would plan a campaign in the war against the apprentice lads of the town. How they marched from the school gates to spring upon the lads in glorious, epic battles. And how the hero of the day was always Staveley, Lord Staveley’s youngest son, who gathered around himself the strongest, the meanest and the prettiest of all the boys in the school.

Harry’s new-found zest for school could only widen the gulf between us. He had caught the schoolboy’s tone of arrogance like a galloping infection and, apart from boring me to tears about the demigod Staveley, scarcely deigned to speak to me at all. Towards Papa he was always polite, but his unconcealed enthusiasm for his studies made Papa at first proud, and then irritated that Harry should so obviously prefer to spend his days in the library when the windows were open and the cuckoos calling to everyone to take a line and rod and try for some salmon.