The Favoured Child (58 page)

Richard was due home before May Day and wrote that he would be in on the early-morning stage-coach. I had Misty saddled and rode up the lane towards the stop leading Prince to meet him.

The stage-coach sets down passengers for Acre at the corner where the lane meets the Chichester-London road, and I sat there on Misty’s back in the spring sunshine, waiting for it. It had been warm and dry the previous week, and the deep rutted tracks of the lane were dried out at last from the winter mud. I turned my face up to the sunshine and felt its warmth on my closed eyelids. Prince dropped his head to the fresh leaves of the hedge and cropped them, his bit jingling as he munched. In the distance I could hear the creaky rumble of the stage-coach and the chink of the harness. The road was hilly, and I could see the hats and shoulders of the roof-passengers rising and falling as the coach breasted the hills and sank into the hollows of the road. The horses were labouring as they came into sight towards the Acre corner, and when the guard saw me waiting, he blew his horn and shouted a ribald comment about a lucky passenger being met at Acre corner.

The coachman pulled his horses up and tipped his whip to me. I smiled and nodded and watched as they let down the steps and Richard came out of the coach, rubbing his eyes and yawning. They passed down his box and Richard humped it over towards me.

I bent down for his kiss and hugged him around the shoulders. Some wag on the roof of the stage-coach cheered, but many of the passengers were Midhurst people and knew me by sight and nudged him into silence.

‘What about my box?’ Richard asked. ‘It weighs a ton.’

‘Oxford fashions?’ I teased him.

‘Holiday reading,’ he said with a grimace. ‘My Greek is still supposed to be a disgrace. I’m bid to work with Dr Pearce through this holiday.’

‘You can leave it here,’ I said. Richard pushed it into the hedge behind the stage-coach. The Acre carter could collect it for us later in the day. ‘I thought you’d like a ride.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’ve been cooped up in that coach for half a lifetime.’

He swung into the saddle and we turned the horses’ heads for home. Richard made me laugh with sketches of his fellow passengers – the farmer’s wife who would insist on carrying a basket with a live hen in it on her lap, the country wench who giggled every time she caught Richard’s eye.

‘And how’s everything here?’ he asked. ‘Papa and Mama-Aunt all right? You?’

‘Yes,’ I said, nodding. ‘Everything is just the same. Mama is quite well again now, though she still gets a little tired. She and Uncle John have a ritual drive out for her health every afternoon in the gig like a pair of tenant farmers.’

‘Heard from Mr Fortescue?’ Richard asked with careful nonchalance.

I kept my eyes on the greening hedge. ‘Yes,’ I said. I could not keep the tenderness from my voice. ‘He writes to me every week and I reply when I have an address for him. He is back in Belgium at the moment, but he has been travelling around. His
father is importing lace and James is responsible for finding reliable suppliers.’

‘Any date for the wedding?’ Richard asked lightly.

‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘His papa’s lawyers and Uncle John’s man are drawing up the marriage contract to arrange the dowry and an allowance for me. We can hardly plan until we know when he will come home.’

Richard nodded. ‘It could be some time, then,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I said. I could not keep the longing out of my voice. ‘It sometimes seems like years and years. It should be this summer. We can announce our betrothal when he comes home.’

‘And the hall?’ Richard said. ‘The builders are working well? Are the roofbeams in place?’

‘Yes,’ I said reassuringly. ‘You would be the first to hear if anything had gone amiss. It is all working well. And the crop is just about showing in some fields already!’

‘And what are they doing here?’ Richard asked, pulling up Prince at a gateway. It was one of the new fruit fields where Uncle John had insisted that we should try raspberries. They looked a sorrowful little crop, row upon row of spindly canes with the tiniest green buds showing on each one. Down each narrow gangway between the rows were Acre women weeding, a rough piece of cloth beside each of them piled high with the bolting weeds of this damp warm spring. The lovely sun-warmed hollow was as sunny as in midsummer. I looked along the line of bent backs for Clary, but I could not see her. A cloud came over the sun and I shivered in the sudden chill. Richard and I pulled up at the gate and Ralph trotted over.

‘Good day,’ he said to us both and then spoke directly to me. ‘I started them weeding while the men finish the sowing today,’ he said with a note of pride in his voice. ‘They’ve never sown quicker, I don’t think.’ He tipped his hat carelessly to Richard. ‘Good morning,’ he said coolly.

There was an awkward silence. Ralph’s dislike of Richard was almost tangible on the warm air. Richard flushed and I spoke quickly to mask the silence. ‘Then let’s hope it grows at record
speed too,’ I said. ‘The village always used to take a holiday after the sowing was done, did it not?’

‘Aye,’ Ralph said. ‘I’ve reminded Dr MacAndrew that they’ll want to keep the maying in the old way. They tell me they’d like you to be the Queen of the May if you’d go out on the hills to bring the spring in with them tomorrow at dawn.’

‘I will!’ I said. ‘Clary spoke to me about it.’ Then I paused as my training as a Bath young lady struck me, and I glanced at Ralph and asked him, ‘It
is
all right, isn’t it, Ralph? I mean, it’s not fearfully improper or anything?’

Ralph’s face looked as if he had bitten on a lemon rind. ‘Don’t ask me!’ he said curtly. ‘You know I know nothing about it. Ask your mama about these things, and take her advice.’

‘She does not know the traditions of Acre,’ I challenged him. ‘You’re the one who knows Acre. I’m asking you if it is all right for me to go.’

Ralph looked at me, wearied of the whole question. ‘I should not pass on an invitation if I did not think it was all right,’ he said carefully. ‘You will come to no harm out on the downs at daybreak with all the young people of Acre village. You will pass your time until the sun comes up in picking hawthorn branches and tying ribbons to them. Then they will crown you with a circlet of flowers, mount you on a white horse, if they can find one – perhaps you would lend them your mare – and then you will ride down to Acre and bring in the spring. For three days after – for Dr MacAndrew does not think we can afford a week of idleness, and neither do I – you can be the queen of any revels they devise, or not, as you wish. There is nothing proper or improper about it – as far as I can see. But don’t ask me about ladylike behaviour, Miss Julia, for I am but a poor working man.’ This last was said with an absolutely grave face and with a tone so ironic that I wondered Richard could not hear the insult behind it.

‘Tell them to come for me before daybreak, then,’ I said. ‘And tell them they can take my mare from the stables as soon as I have done with her today.’

Ralph nodded. ‘And you, Master Richard, will you be going up to the top of the downs to welcome the spring?’ he asked.

Richard nodded. ‘I shall go,’ he said. ‘All that you describe sounds very pleasant, but I’m sure Lady Lacey would feel happier if I was there with Miss Julia.’

Ralph nodded, his eyes on the ground. He would not even look at Richard, and he had no friendly smile for me with Richard by my side. ‘I am sure,’ he said, and then he wheeled his horse around and trotted back into the field as if he had wasted too much time already.

Richard was wrong about Mama. She had no reservations about my bringing in the spring with Acre at all.

Oh, heavens, Richard,’ she said. ‘If I wanted Julia to behave like a proper young lady, I should have to kidnap her and lock her up in Bath! She has been riding out on the land unaccompanied ever since you went off to Oxford. John insists she will take no hurt, and I trust to her own common sense – and the fact that she is so well loved.’

Richard nodded. ‘It still seems most unconventional to me,’ he said. We were taking tea after dinner, and Richard stood with his back to the fire, a dish of tea in his hand. I saw Mama and Uncle John exchange a smiling glance to see Richard so masterful at the fireplace.

‘It is unconventional,’ Uncle John agreed. ‘But James Fortescue has no objection, and Wideacre has a tradition of eccentric women. At the moment Julia is the key to Acre and I have to use her. No one but Julia and Mr Megson carry any weight with Acre folk, and while we are dragging them back to work, it has to be Julia and Mr Megson in the traces.’

Richard gave a little bow. ‘I am sure your judgement could not be wrong, sir,’ he said. ‘But all the same, I shall be glad to escort Julia to this daybreak merrymaking.’

‘For tuppence I’d come too!’ Uncle John said. ‘I love these traditions. When I was a lad in Edinburgh, it was an Easter custom to roll hard-boiled eggs down Arthur’s Seat – a great hill
on the outskirts of the town. You would roll it, without touching it with your hands, all the way down to the bottom and then crack it and eat it.’

‘Really!’ said Mama, instantly diverted. ‘Did all your family go? Your brothers and sisters too?’

‘Oh, aye,’ said Uncle John. ‘All of Edinburgh went. And the egg tasted better then, at dawn on Easter morning, than at any other time.’

‘I believe this expedition is just for the young men and women,’ Richard said quickly. ‘The girls wear white and the young men wear white favours.’

I could tell by Mama’s absorbed expression that she was trying to remember if I had a white gown and a white wrap against the chill. And I was right. When I went upstairs to bed that night, I found she had laid out her own white cashmere shawl on the bed for my use, with a bunch of white ribbons for Richard’s cockade and to tie around my branch when I brought the spring home.

I woke early and heard voices in the back garden outside my window. I jumped out of bed and pattered across the wooden floor. My feet were icy, and it was still dark. There were a couple of torches and, around them, perhaps ten or twelve of the young people from Acre, giggling and trying to start up a song. I pulled on my white gown and tied the white ribbon around my waist, without the help of a maid, for Jenny Hodgett was out with the merrymakers herself. Then I tossed the wrap over my shoulders and went up to tap on the door of Richard’s little garret bedroom.

He was ready, pulling on his boots, and I pinned the favour of white ribbons to his hat. Then we crept downstairs as quietly as we could so as not to wake the sleeping house. The kitchen was silent, lit by a warm red glow from the embers of the kitchen fire. A cat was sleeping in the fireplace, dusty from the ashes. Richard shot the iron bolts on the back door and we went out into the cold and the darkness.

The cedar tree was pitch black against the sky, the yellow
torches no brighter than candles in the darkness. The moon was a slim white sickle and the stars shone like little pinpricks of silver in the purple blackness of the sky. Someone from the back of the crowd hummed a note and they sang a song like one of the ploughing chants, a three-or four-note song, refined by centuries of singing. It was sung only once a year, sung only now, in the blue-black hour before dawn on the first morning of spring, and always sung for the Queen of the May, to call her to her duties as the girl who brings the spring to the land.

Richard closed the door behind us and I stood still on the doorstep in my pale dress and let the chant sweep over me. The air was as cold as spring water, but Mama’s wrap was warm and I held it tight around me. I felt magical, as though the great tree and the stars and the song and I were all part of some timeless powerful pattern which drew a continuous line down through the centuries and would go through me to the Laceys who came after me. Underneath the chant I could hear a drumbeat, a deep and solemn sound, and I knew there was no drum but my own thudding heart and the sound of the land itself.

The song finished and I gave a deep sigh; I looked at the bright faces of the young people from Acre who were ready to call me their friend and had wanted me to be the girl who brought in the spring.

Then we turned without speaking and I led the way out of the garden under the ghostly arch into the silent stable yard and out of the Dower House grounds, along the drive towards the footpath to the downs. I glanced up at the dark bulk of the house as we went past. Mama’s window was dark, and Uncle John’s. Everyone in the whole world was asleep except the young people in all the downland villages who would be walking quietly through the Sussex lanes and climbing up the dark grassy shoulders of the downs to see the sun rise pale over the land.

Richard walked beside me and I glanced at him and smiled. He took my chilled hand and slipped it in the pocket of his jacket and held it, and we walked hand-clasped in the centre of the crowd along the pale road towards Acre.

When we turned right up the bridle-way to the downs, there was room for no more than two abreast, and the others fell into line behind us, two by two, some girls walking side by side and some lads with each other, but mostly Acre was in pairs. The spring had been calling to them as insistently as it had been calling to me, and the young people of Acre were impatient to be courting.

We climbed up the little path, and my boots slid on the mud and I was glad of Richard’s firm grip. He did not say a word to me and I felt more and more dreamlike as we walked together under the great beech trees of the coppice with courting couples behind us and nothing but the sleeping land around us.

It was a long walk, for I was accustomed to ride, and I was surprised how breathless and slow I was in getting to the top. At the very head of the footpath was a fence to keep the sheep in, breached by a kissing gate. Richard stood back to let me go first and as I closed the gate to let myself out the other side, he put his hands on top of mine to hold me still, with the gate between us. I looked up wonderingly into his face and he bent his dark head slowly down to me. My lips parted and his mouth came down and gently, gently, kissed me, as soft as a moth to a candle-flame.