Philippa Gregory - The Favoured Child

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.