Philippa Gregory - The Favoured Child

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.’