Philippa Gregory - The Favoured Child

By this time everyone who had been drinking in the Bush was outside staring, of course. All the women were at their doorways, and all the children were out in the lane, their mouths agape.

There was no noise inside the cottage, there were no raised voices. Only a few minutes passed before Ralph came out, pulling on his brown jacket, with the gentleman walking very close at his shoulder. Ralph had glanced around at the faces and hesitated, as if he would say something, but then the gentleman tapped his shoulder with his cane – a bit impertinent, Bobby Miles had thought. Ralph had shrugged off the touch, given a little smile to Acre and climbed awkwardly on his wooden legs into the carriage.

‘He smiled?’ I asked Jenny, for it mattered a great deal to me.

‘Bobby said so,’ she confirmed. ‘He said he gave the little grin he has when something has gone badly wrong on the land, and he says, “Damnation,” but does not blame anybody. Begging your pardon, Miss Julia,’ she added.

I nodded. ‘But what can they have taken him for? I demanded.

She looked at me forlornly as if it was her own lover which had gone. ‘Don’t you know , Miss Julia?’ she asked.

I gazed at her blankly. I had a dreadful cold frightened feeling that I did know. I shook my head in denial.

‘He was a rioter,’ she said, ‘when he was young. He led a gang in Kent, and a riot in Portsmouth. Nobody was ever hurt,’ she said swiftly. ‘It was just to get a fair price, Miss Julia. You know how they used to have riots for a fair price.’

I nodded. I knew.

‘And then he went to be a smuggler,’ she said softly. ‘He was pressed as a sailor too.’ She hesitated and looked at me. ‘Then he went against the gentry for a while,’ she said. ‘They called him the Culler.’

‘I knew of that,’ I said. ‘He told me himself.’

Jenny’s head was down, and she took one glancing sideways look at me. ‘No one in Acre would ever have betrayed him, not if we’d been burned alive,’ she said passionately. ‘Miss Julia, who can have called out the Chichester magistrate to take him in like that? Do you know?’

My hands were as cold as ice.

I knew.

‘What will become of him?’ I asked, my voice very low.

‘They’re certain to be able to prove at least some of the riots against him,’ she said.

I nodded. There were not many black-haired cripples riding horses in riots. ‘But they could not prove he came against the Laceys,’ I said as if my loyalty were with him, as if it were not my family he had attacked, as if it were not my own blood-mother he had killed.

‘No,’ said Jenny. She had her apron up to mop her eyes. ‘But just one witness from the other riots will be enough to finish him,’ she said with a little wail. ‘They’ll hang him for sure, Miss Julia!’

‘My God,’ I said. Jenny sobbed noisily into her pinny, and I sat in my chair with my hand on my belly, feeling the little comforting movement of the baby for which Richard longed as the next squire.

If he was indeed the next squire, he should not have waiting for him this inheritance of hatred and suspicion, and of fear. I could give my baby little indeed when I gave him Wideacre, but I could give him the chance to live on the land without the blood on his head of the best man in the village.

I looked at Jenny with sudden determination. ‘I won’t have it!’ I said. ‘I won’t have Ralph Megson hanged now for something he did years ago. I won’t have him hanged when everyone knows that he did the right thing, the thing that anyone would do if their family and friends were starving. He rid Acre of that generation of Laceys and there is no one who does not think that Beatrice was in the wrong and earned that riot. I won’t have Ralph Megson hanged.’

Jenny looked at me. She was in two minds about me. I had held command in Acre and she remembered the days when I was the only heir on the land, and I could call out a ploughing team. But when she looked at me now, she saw a young woman with her belly curving with motherhood. She saw a young wife, newly married, with a husband whom men feared. She saw a girl trapped into marriage and stripped of her wealth. I was no longer a figure of power.

‘How can you stop it?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know yet,’ I said. ‘I’ll think of something. I’ll think of some way. I’ll go out for a walk down the drive to the hall and I’ll think of something.’

She bobbed a curtsy and held the door for me, and I went out to take the air and to think. But though I walked all the way to the hall and watched the work there for a while, and though I walked all the way home again, no plan came to me.

When I went to bed that night, I knew that Ralph would see the wide yellow harvest moon criss-crossed with the bars across his window. I thought of his face turned up to the light, and his faint rueful smile as he faced the likelihood of his death. I tossed on the pillows all night until I heard the cocks crowing at dawn. I did not sleep at all.

And while I was thinking, while I was walking and walking, like a ghost up and down the drive to the hall, walking with faster and faster strides as if my urgency could make a plan come into my head, the Chichester magistrates transferred the case to Winchester, because they feared a riot if Ralph was tried so near to his home. And the Winchester magistrates, no braver than their Chichester colleagues, transferred the case to London, where they said he could be kept more secure while witnesses were found who had seen riots of twenty years ago.

I knew he would need a lawyer, and I knew a London lawyer would cost a great deal of money. I had been poor all my childhood; I had worn shoes which were too tight as my feet grew, I had patched my gowns, I had done without gloves. But I never knew myself to be poor until I looked out of the window at the rich autumn colours of my trees on my land, and knew I had no money to help Ralph.

I could have asked Richard for some, but I knew he would guess why I needed it, and I knew he would refuse. I went to my grandmama.

‘Two hundred pounds!’ she repeated in amazement. ‘Julia, whatever can you need two hundred pounds for?’

I stumbled, trying to explain, but as soon as she understood it was men’s business she frowned. ‘You are no longer in control of Wideacre,’ she said. ‘And your former manager’s concerns are not yours. Have you asked Richard if he would pay for the man’s defence?’

‘No,’ I said quietly.

‘I dare say you have your reasons for that,’ she said, and there was a world of understanding in her voice. ‘But if you cannot ask your husband for a sum of money, it is unlikely you will be able to obtain it anywhere else, Julia. If I had it, I would give it to you. But my own fortune is tied up and his lordship does not provide me with that sort of sum as pin-money.’

She paused, and I saw her swallow her pride like a lump in her throat. ‘I have only twenty-five pounds’ pin-money a quarter,’ she said, her voice very low. ‘I have spent this quarter’s allowance, and I have no savings.’

I nodded. I was blinking hard, for there were tears in my eyes. ‘How do married women get money if their husbands will not give them enough?’ I demanded. I had some vague idea of loans, or of jewellers who would buy a trinket.

Grandma looked at me as if I were a little child once more and she was teaching me how to hold my fish-knife. ‘If their husbands do not provide for them, they have no money,’ she said blankly. Of course, a wife is dependent upon her husband’s goodwill.’

I looked at her as if I were a fool who could not understand plain English. I was seventeen years old and I still had not learned that I had no rights in the world. I had no money of my own and I had no land. Everything around me, the water I drank, the food I ate, belonged to Richard, for in marrying him I had made it over to him entire. And whether I wanted three halfpence of what I had once called my own, or whether I wanted two hundred pounds, I had to apply to him. And he could refuse me.