The Favoured Child (34 page)

‘No,’ Richard said as if he wanted to forget as quickly as he could those moments of abject fear. ‘It doesn’t matter at all.’

‘Would you like to go home?’ I asked. I glanced at the sun and reckoned it was nearing half past two.

‘In a minute,’ Richard said. ‘What should we do about the sheep?’

‘I’ll open the doors and let them out into the field,’ I said, getting to my feet. ‘I’ll check them as they come out and Giles Shepherd can look at them properly when he is well again.’

‘I’ll close the gate for you,’ Richard said. He went to fetch the horses and I saw him glance back nervously at me. I stayed still so that he would know that I would not release the sheep until I saw he was through the gate with it closed safe behind him. Prince stood rock-steady while Richard untied his reins, but Sea Mist threw up her head and sidled. He led the two horses through the gate and then closed it behind him. Only when he had swung into the saddle and nodded towards me did I move towards the barn.

In the gloom inside I saw the whiteness of the faces which turned to me. For a moment I felt a flash of the terror which had made it possible for them to herd Richard, the terror which every animal feels at being trapped or outnumbered.

‘No,’ I said again; and behind my own certainty was a line of power and knowledge which I knew came from the Laceys. I threw my head up like proud, red-headed Beatrice herself with her natural arrogance. ‘Certainly not,’ I said to the flock firmly, and dragged back the hurdle just wide enough to let one through at a time.

They dithered, but the sight of the downland turf was too much for them, and the old tup dipped his head and went quickly past me. Then the others scuttered after him until there was only one foolish one left, too afraid to go forward and nervous at being on her own. I opened the hurdle wide and shied an old turnip at her bobbing rump as she dashed past me. I was glad I hit her. I had been scared too.

‘AH done,’ I said cheerfully to Richard as I climbed over the
gate. He led Sea Mist up alongside so I could step from the gate into the stirrup.

‘I hate sheep,’ Richard said lightly. ‘I shall tell my papa that I will never make a shepherd and that I don’t propose to try. I shall tell him I won’t supervise that flock. I’d rather concentrate on building the hall anyway. And there’s enough work to do there, Lord knows!’

‘Is there?’ I said, and we turned the horses and our minds away from the barn and the flock of sheep. ‘How near are you to finding the stone the architect wants to use?’

‘I think it will have to be Bath stone,’ Richard said. ‘The stone they can quarry here is much too soft, he thinks. I was hoping we could get some a little closer to home because of the cost of transport. Indeed, I am sure we can. But the design of the house does call for that yellow sandstone.’

‘I love the colour when it’s new,’ I said. ‘Can he use much of the old stone of the hall?’

‘That’s the other problem,’ Richard said. ‘I am trying to persuade him to follow the outlines of the hall as much as possible to save labour, so we don’t have to dig new cellars and foundations, and to reuse the stones and incorporate the walls which are still standing. But, of course, he wants to start from scratch.’

I nodded, and when the track broadened I brought Sea Mist up beside Prince and let Richard talk about the hall all the way home. We never mentioned the flock left on the lower slopes of the downs. Richard took a few moments alone with his papa before dinner to tell him that he would not work with livestock.

Uncle John – a town-bred man, and the son of a line of traders – did not think it odd. The sheep and the little herd of dairy cows became my responsibility from that day onwards. Someone had to do the work. Mama had her school, Uncle John had the health of the village and the business side of the estate, Ralph Megson supervised everything on the land, Richard took charge of the hall and I was out every day looking at the animals, and the fields, and the crops. I was busy, and weary…and very much a Lacey on her land.

Richard did not deal with livestock.

Richard did not deal with the land and the crops.

Richard did not deal with the tenants, and the copy-holders, and the cottagers and the labourers and the intricate details of land ownership and land sharing on Wideacre.

Richard’s great love, his great project, was his work on the hall. And Mama and I, and even Uncle John, had to accept that he knew more and more about the rebuilding of our home every day. Only Richard had the love – almost a passion – to pursue the right colour of stone through twenty quarries until he found one he thought fit.

‘It is darker than the usual sandstone,’ he explained to Uncle John and Ralph Megson and me in the library one morning when we had gathered to take a decision about planting soft-fruit crops. ‘It will blend with the old stone of the hall. The architect wanted it all new, and the builder too. But I am sure that I am doing the right thing in choosing this stone, even though it is so far to transport it. We will need half as much by using the old stone. And I like the idea of the hall being rebuilt from the ruins.’ Ralph Megson cocked an eyebrow at that, but kept his head bent low over the plans of the hall spread before us on the table. ‘I cannot spare many men,’ he said briefly. ‘They have not the skills. They could only do day labouring for you.’

Richard nodded. ‘I have spoken to the architect and we think it best to bring in experienced building labourers,’ he said. ‘They can be housed in Midhurst and come out daily in a wagon. D’you think that will cause any unrest in Acre?’

Ralph puffed out his cheeks and looked hard at John. ‘These men are on wages, I take it? No profit-sharing scheme for them?’

Uncle John met Ralph’s ironic gaze steadily. ‘I do not need to argue the fall of the Bastille here,’ he said. ‘They are on fair rates. After all, we are bringing in a ploughing and sowing gang this autumn to sow the wheat. They will be on day wages too. I see no reason why Acre should object.’

‘As long as we make a profit which is better than day wages, no,’ Ralph said.

‘Well, that is my intention,’ Uncle John said. ‘Mr Megson, will you oblige me by looking at this map…’ and he covered up Richard’s plan of the hall with a map of the fields of Wideacre coloured in different shades to denote the different crops. Richard and I exchanged a rueful smile. No one cared for the hall as much as Richard. ‘My intention is to have a thoroughly balanced farming estate,’ Uncle John said. ‘Whatever weather the climate produces should suit one crop. I should like us to grow a wide variety.’

‘All fruit needs sunshine,’ Ralph observed, looking at the swaths of fields coloured green to show fruit crops.

‘Yes, indeed,’ Uncle John replied. ‘But it can tolerate rain, and they are developing strains of fruit which are more and more hardy. There is a great market out there in the growing towns. I want Wideacre fruit to go to Chichester, to Portsmouth, even to London.’

Ralph nodded. ‘I think you see the future aright,’ he said briefly. ‘There will be more and more people in the cities and they will need to be fed. But if there is any chance of a war against France, the price of bread will go sky-high. Wheat is a good crop in wartime.’

Uncle John nodded. ‘What of Acre?’ he said. ‘How would they feel about a large corn crop?’

There was a silence in the sunny room. You could almost smell the smoke of old riots.

Then Ralph smiled. ‘Why not?’ he said wryly. ‘No one in Acre was ever against a reasonable profit. No one in Acre was ever against the export of food. No bread riot ever took place except with hungry people seeing their food sent away.’

‘You make riots sound reasonable,’ Richard said. His voice was level, encouraging. ‘Have you had personal experience of such affrays?’

‘I’ve seen bread riots,’ Ralph said. The slight sideways smile he shot at me told me well enough that he had never been a neutral observer. ‘I’ve never seen one that was not, in its own way, orderly.’

‘An orderly riot?’ Uncle John queried. But John had been raised in Edinburgh and had lived the past fourteen years in India.

‘Yes,’ Ralph said simply, ‘it’s generally the women anyway, so it is not as if it was fighting men or trouble-makers. I saw one in Portsmouth, where they surrounded a bread shop where the baker was selling light-weight loaves for the full price. They took the door off the front of the shop and sat on the baker while someone called for a Justice of the Peace. He looked at the weights the baker had been using. They were underweight, for he had shaved them off. The magistrate reweighed every loaf in the shop and sold them to the women at the proper price. Then they got off the baker’s fat belly and left him. He was unhurt, and his shop was not damaged, except that the door was off the frame, and he had cash in his cash-box.’

Uncle John was puzzled, but Richard and I were smiling. ‘The Justice of the Peace agreed with the rioters?’ John asked incredulously.

Ralph shrugged and smiled. ‘He believed in the old ways too. No one likes a cheating tradesman, no one likes bread-hoarders. And the women were pleasant respectable women, but, oh, my, they were angry! I’d have given them half the shop if they had so much as looked at me!’

‘They did look at you, though, didn’t they, Mr Megson?’ I asked slyly. ‘What were you doing there?’

‘I was doing nothing,’ Ralph Megson said innocently. ‘I was just standing there, holding the door…and the chisel…and the hammer.’

Uncle John, Richard and I laughed out loud, and Ralph chuckled too.

‘Those days are over,’ Ralph Megson said, sounding regretful. ‘The days when the poor people could insist on a fair price in the local market. It took me some time to see it, but I know it now. That’s why I’ve no objection to Wideacre sowing corn and selling it at a profit. The only way the poor of England are going to be fed is if there is enough food in all the markets, and food being
moved around the country. The poor can no longer depend on their local produce, and they cannot control the movement of grain.’

Uncle John nodded. ‘With our profit-sharing scheme, we should sell surplus corn in London,’ he said. ‘Everyone would do better with the profits from a London sale than with cheap-priced corn in the Midhurst market.’

Ralph nodded. ‘You’d always need to keep enough back to feed Acre,’ he said, ‘but you could grow that on half a dozen fields, and Wideacre has the capacity for scores of fields.’

‘It’s not just Acre that should be fed,’ I said. ‘When our corn goes into Midhurst, it is bought by the poor from all around the area. The sensible thing would be to agree with other landowners that we should all supply the local market at a reasonable price, and then make what profits were possible with the surplus.’

‘A selling ring to benefit the poor!’ Ralph said with a chuckle in the back of his voice. ‘Miss Julia, you should be on the barricades. I have heard of selling rings to obtain the best price, but you are talking of one to make a fair price! A ring of producers to benefit the consumers! It would be a great novelty.’

‘And it might even work,’ Uncle John said thoughtfully. ‘You were not here, Mr Megson, when Julia’s papa, the squire, started his agricultural experiments and Beatrice ran the estate. During the good years Wideacre held sway in the whole county. Wideacre was much respected then and its example followed. If we could show that the estate was feeding the poor neighbours and all the workers
and
making a good commercial profit, there are many who would follow suit.’

‘And Wideacre showed that the other way, of chasing profit, did not work at all,’ I said.

Ralph smiled at my enthusiasm. ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘You are in the right, Miss Julia.’

‘I agree!’ Richard said surprisingly. The two men turned to look at him, but he was smiling at me. ‘The prosperity of Acre does not depend solely on profits,’ he said. ‘The prosperity of any estate depends on its good relationship with neighbours. Let
us sow large acres of corn and sell it at a fair price locally, and make what profits we can with the surplus. That’s fair.’

‘Done!’ said Uncle John as if we had shaken on a deal. ‘But I am still having a couple of fields for raspberries and strawberries.’

‘Aye,’ said Ralph dourly. ‘I know you are. And you may worry about how we will harvest them when they ripen at haymaking time.’

‘I shall harvest them!’ Richard said grandly. ‘For I will do anything rather than farm sheep!’

We all laughed at that, and Richard’s terror in that shadowy barn was hidden from everyone and half forgotten by me. It was generally known instead that young Master Richard could not be bothered with the stock. The stock was to be handled by Mr Megson or Miss Julia, and for this autumn Ralph would hire plough-boys and sowing gangs with their own gear and horses to plant Wideacre with wheat again.

N
o one expected Wideacre to show a profit that first season, but we had cut a good crop of hay – ‘Half flowers,’ Ralph said crossly – and that meant we could feed the sheep and the cows more cheaply through the winter. None of the fruit yielded that first year, of course, but we got the raspberry canes planted in straight smooth rows in the lower fields alongside the drive to Wideacre Hall. We planted the strawberries in a new field alongside the Fenny where we thought they would catch the sun and be sheltered from the wind which blows off the downs. My apple trees had taken and were growing straight and tall. They were spaced right too, which I thought something of a small miracle, so I took Ted Tyacke’s ironic congratulations at face value – and as no more than my due.

Richard was much away in the autumn, preparing for his entry to the University of Oxford after Christmas. Uncle John took him up to Oxford and left him there, coming back by London to advise the MacAndrew Company about the likely changes in India which would come from the French wars, so Mama and I had a few weeks alone together on the land, working like skivvies all day and meeting only at dinner.

Mama’s schoolchildren had progressed from their practical training and were starting to learn their letters; the parlour was littered every evening with brightly coloured paints and card which Mama used to cut out letter shapes.