The Favoured Child Read online

  ‘Yes!’ Richard said, his face intent.

  ‘As fast as she could, she drove towards the village to find your papa! And your mama was a very good horsewoman. She certainly drove fast!’

  ‘Yes,’ Richard said. We both knew this story as well as Mama.

  ‘She snatched you up and ran into the vicar’s parlour. And there, on the desk, your papa took a sharp knife and cut open your little throat, and took my crochet hook and pulled out the bell so that you could breathe!’

  Richard and I sighed with satisfaction at the end of the story. But my mama was not looking at us. She was looking over Richard’s mop of damp curls into the red embers of the fire as if she could see the vicar’s parlour in the red caverns of the logs, and the man with steady hands who had the courage to cut open a baby’s throat to save his life. ‘It was the most wonderful thing I had ever seen,’ she said. ‘Even more of a miracle than birth – in a way.’

  ‘And did you feed the poor?’ I asked.

  The closed look came over her face at once, and I could have bitten off my tongue in vexation at having interrupted her when she was, so rarely, telling us of how things had been.

  ‘No,’ she said slowly. ‘Not very well. It was a hard year for Acre that year.’

  ‘And was that the year of the riot and the fire?’ I pressed her. ‘Because they were poor?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said shortly. ‘But that was all long ago, and besides, you two should be getting ready for bed.’

  ‘I don’t care about the bad past,’ Richard said, butting his head into her shoulder. ‘Will you tell me about the day I was born?’

  ‘In bed I will,’ Mama said firmly, and pulled his nightgown over his head. ‘But I’ll put Julia to bed first.’

  I smiled at her. I loved Richard so well I did not even have to make an effort to put him first. ‘I’ll wait,’ I said.

  My love for him served us all well. It kept the peace in that cramped little household. I watched his love for my mama, and hers for him, and I never worried if she had a preference. Her love warmed us both equally – she could have had ten children and we would all have felt equally precious. I don’t think I was envious for any moment in our childhood up till the time when he was eleven and started lessons with Dr Pearce in his well-stocked library. I had asked Mama if I could go too, and when she said there was not enough money to teach us both, I remember that I scowled.

  ‘It is not possible, Julia,’ she said. ‘I know how much you love learning, and indeed, my dear, you are so bright and clever that I wish I had learned Latin so that I could have helped you to teach yourself. But it is just an amusement for ladies. For gentlemen, for Richard, it is essential.’

  ‘He doesn’t even want an education, Mama! All he wants is a music master and to be taught how to sing!’ I started, but the sight of her frown silenced me.

  ‘All the more credit to him for being prepared to go,’ she said gently. ‘And if he is prepared to go over his work with you in the evening, you may well learn a lot that way. But you must not tease him to teach you, Julia. John is sending money from his salary for Richard’s education, not yours.’

  In the event I did very well. Richard was generous with his homework and shared it with me. When he came home with his books – old primers once used by Dr Pearce – he let me stand at his elbow in respectful silence while he tried to puzzle out the verbs and declensions.

  ‘What a bother it is,’ he would say impatiently and push the book towards me. ‘Here, Julia, see if you can make head or tail of this. I have to translate it somehow and I cannot make out what they’re saying.’

  Trembling with excitement I would take the book and turn to the back for the translated words and scribble them down in any order.

  ‘Here, let me see,’ Richard would say, repossessing his goods with brutal suddenness. ‘I think I know what to do now.’ And then he would complete the sentence in triumph and we would beam at each other with mutual congratulation.

  Mama was glad to see us content, to see the different treatment of us so well resolved. She tried very hard to treat us fairly, to treat us alike. But she could not help favouring Richard, because he needed so much more. He took the best cuts of meat and the largest helpings, because he was growing so fast and was always hungry. He had new clothes; Mama could always cut down and turn her gowns for me, but she could not tailor jackets, so Richard’s clothes were made new. He had new boots more often as he grew quicker, and then he had proper schooling. If I had loved him any less, if I had not tried to be as good as a sister to him, I think I would have envied him. But I only ever begrudged him one thing for more than a moment, the only thing he ever had which I desired, which I could not help desiring: Scheherazade.

  She was Richard’s horse – the horse we had both been promised off and on since we were children by my Grandpapa Havering, that feckless charming rogue who breezed into the county half a dozen times a year on a repairing lease from London. On one of his visits, in June, when I was twelve and Richard eleven, he finally got around to honouring his promise. I first learned of it when he sent a message to my mama. She opened it in the parlour while I sat at her feet, my head leaning against her knees, idly gazing out of the window at the tossing trees which crowd so close around the little sandstone box of a house, waiting for Richard to come home from his lessons. Mama broke the seal on the note and then paused. ‘What is that singing?’ she asked Stride.

  He cleared his throat, embarrassed. ‘It’s Master Richard,’ he said. ‘He came in by the kitchen door, and Mrs Gough stopped him and asked him for a song. She loves to hear him sing.’

  Mama nodded and listened in silence. The clear pure arc of sound swept unstoppably through the house. Richard was singing an Italian song – one he had despaired of teaching me to play aright – but I had guessed at an English version of the words for him, and he was singing them. His high sweet voice had a more tremulous tone than usual: ‘If there is ever a favourite – then let it be me,’ came the chorus. And then more quietly, more entreatingly, to the cruel gods who are never just to needy mortals: ‘If there is ever a favourite – oh, let it be me!’

  Stride, Mama and I were as still as statues until the last echo of the last note had died, then Stride recollected the dinner table not yet laid and left the room, closing the door behind him.

  ‘It is a great gift,’ Mama said. ‘Richard is fortunate.’

  ‘Does Uncle John realize how good Richard is?’ I asked. ‘If he really understood, surely he would find the money from somewhere for Richard to have a music master?’

  Mama shook her head and spread out the note on her knee. ‘Music is a luxury we cannot afford, my darling. Richard has to enter the university and obtain the degree he will need to make his way in the world. That must come before the polishing of an amateur gift.’

  ‘If he could give concerts, he could earn enough money so that Uncle John could come home,’ I said stoutly.

  Mama smiled. ‘If everyone was as readily pleased as you and I and Mrs Gough, we would be wealthy in no time,’ she said. ‘But Richard would need a long training before he could give a concert. And neither his papa nor I would wish it. Singing in the parlour is one thing, Julia, but no gentleman would ever go on a stage.’

  I paused. I wanted to pursue the matter further. ‘He could sing in church,’ I suggested. ‘He could train with a choir.’

  My mama dropped her sewing in her lap and put her hand down to my head and turned my cheek so that I looked up and met her eyes. ‘Listen, Julia,’ she said earnestly, ‘I love him dearly and so do you. But we should not let our affections blind us to nature. Richard has a lovely voice, but he plays at music as if it were a toy. He is skilled in drawing, but he takes it up and puts it down as a hobby. He is like his uncle, your own papa, who had many fine talents but lacked the greatest gift of concentration. Richard would never work and struggle and strive in the way that a great musician has to do. Richard likes things to be easy for him. Of the two of
you, it is you who works hardest at music – you practise longer hours than he does so that you can accompany him. If Richard had the dedication of a true musician, he would sing all the time – not when it suits him.’

  I scanned her face, considering what she had said, and hearing also an old judgement made years ago on my papa, the man who liked to play at farming while his sister ran the land.

  Then the door opened and Richard came in, his eyes bright blue and his cheeks rosy with the praise he had received in the kitchen. ‘Did you hear me singing even in here?’ he asked. ‘Stride said you did. Yet the kitchen door and the baize door were tight shut. Fancy!’

  ‘Yes, we did,’ Mama said and she smiled kindly at his bright face. ‘It was lovely singing, Richard, I should like to hear it again after dinner. But now go and wash your hands, my darling, while I read this note from Julia’s grandpapa.’

  We went from the room together, and not until dinner did she tell us what the note said, and then it was the last thing we expected.

  ‘I have had a note from Havering,’ she said while Stride served the thin soup. ‘Lord Havering writes that he has a horse which might suit the two of you.’

  Richard’s head jerked up from his plate, his eyes bright on her face. She smiled at him. ‘I said we would all go over tomorrow so that you could try its paces,’ she said. ‘You may ride in your ordinary boots, Richard.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Richard. ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘But we have no habit for you, Julia,’ Mama said, turning to me. ‘I dare say you would have liked to learn, but I cannot see how to contrive it.’

  ‘It is all right, Mama,’ I said, my voice strained. ‘It doesn’t matter. Richard wants to ride so much more than I do. He can learn now, and perhaps I will learn later.’

  I had a warm smile from my mama for that little piece of generosity, but Richard scarcely noticed it.

  ‘Is it a mare or a gelding, Aunt Celia?’ he asked. ‘Did Lord Havering say how old it is?’

  ‘No,’ my mother laughed. ‘I know no more than I have told you. You will have to wait until tomorrow. But I do know that my step-papa is a great judge of horses. I think you may be certain that it is a good animal.’

  ‘Yes,’ Richard nodded. ‘I’ll wager it’s a mare.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Mama said and nodded to Stride to clear the dishes, and then she turned to me and asked me what I had been doing in the afternoon while she had been writing her letters.

  While I spoke, I could see Richard fidgeting like a cur with fleas, and all through dinner he could scarce sit still. I was not at all surprised when he drew me aside while Mama went to take tea in the parlour and said, ‘Julia, I cannot wait until tomorrow. I have to go and see the horse now. Come with me! We can be back by supper-time.’

  ‘Mama said…’ I started.

  ‘Mama said…’ he echoed cruelly. ‘I am going, are you going to come too? Or stay at home?’

  I went. It was a pattern I could not break, like a phrase of music which you hum even when you do not know you are singing. When Richard called to me, I went. I always went.

  ‘We should tell Mama,’ I said, hanging back. ‘She may ask for me.’

  ‘Tell her what you like,’ Richard said carelessly, shrugging on his jacket and heading for the door to the kitchen.

  ‘Wait for me!’ I said, but the door was already swinging and I only paused to catch up a shawl and run after him.

  Stride was sitting at the kitchen table. He looked at Richard without approval. ‘Where do you think you’re going, Master Richard?’ he asked. The remains of his dinner were before him, a half-pint of small beer beside the plate. Mrs Gough had Mama’s tea-tray laid and a kettle on the boil.

  ‘We are taking the air,’ Richard said grandly. ‘There is no need to open the door for us.’ And he swept towards the door with as good an imitation of Grandpapa Havering’s arrogance as an eleven-year-old boy could manage.

  I followed in his wake and peeped a look at Stride as I went. He shook his head reprovingly at me, but he said nothing.

  Outside, I forgot I had ever hesitated. The magic of the land caught me. I could feel it take me; anyone watching my face could have seen it take me.

  My mama once commissioned an artist – a poor travelling painter – to make a sketch of us when I was just seven and Richard was six years old. She wanted a parlour picture: the two of us seated on a blue velvet sofa in the drawing-room of the Dower House, the only piece of respectable furniture in the only properly furnished room. I can imagine the picture she saw in her mind. The two little children wide-eyed and formal, seated side by side. And even at the age of seven, as a little girl, I should have liked to have pleased my mama by posing for a picture like that.

  But the painter was a man with seeing eyes, and before he made his sketch, he asked Richard and me to show him a little of the estate. He walked with us in the woods of Wideacre and he saw how we could move as silently as deer under the trees so that the birds stayed in the branches even when we passed directly beneath them. And he felt that we trod the land as a living thing. And he sensed that Richard and the land and I belonged together in some unbreakable triangle of need and love and longing.

  So he made his picture in the woods of Wideacre, and Mama had it framed and hung on the chimney-breast of the Dower House drawing-room. It showed me, just a little girl in a sprigged muslin dress tied with a blue sash, with my hat off and my hair tumbling down, seated beneath one of the great flowering chestnut trees of Wideacre. It was May and the tree was in bloom with thick candles of red flowers, and all around me were drifts of petals as scarlet as blood; the sunlight on my light-brown hair turned it golden. My cousin Richard was standing behind me, looking down on me, posed like a little hero, half an eye on the effect he was creating. But my eyes were hazy grey and I was looking out of the picture. Away, past the painter, out of the frame of the picture, out of the little world of childhood, away from the safety of our little home.

  Richard stood like a small cavalier for the picture, because he had the knack of being what people desired. Mama wanted a formal picture, and there Richard was, behind me, one little fist on his hip, his shoulders squared. Unlike him, I looked fey and wild and dreamy in the picture, because I was seated under a blood-red chestnut tree. Wideacre brought out the wildness in me and I could not help myself.

  I heard a humming in my head and I longed to be running free on the land. When I had to stay indoors with my sampler or read aloud to my mama, my book or my work would fall into my lap and I would rest my head against the cold glass of the window and look away. I looked away from my home, away from the little house, away from the penny-pinching shabby gentility and the worry, from the false appearances and the cut-down gowns. I looked away to Wideacre. And I wished that I could own and run the land.

  It distressed my mama. She saw it in me early on, and she tried with her love and her persevering gentle discipline to make me into a child in her own image. A child who could sit still, who could stay in clean clothes, who could sit in a small room without fretting for the smell of the South Downs’ wind in her face.

  She failed. When the ground was covered with the thin white of a hoar-frost, or when the spring winds were blowing, I could not stay indoors, I had to go. I had to go, but the fine lines of worry around my mama’s eyes made me pause.

  ‘I know you long to be out, Julia,’ she said to me gently. ‘But young ladies cannot always do exactly as they wish. There is your sampler, which you have not touched this week, and some darning to be done as well. You may have a little walk this afternoon.’

  ‘It is not a walk that I want, Mama,’ I replied, forced into words by the sound of birdsong, so temptingly close in the woods outside the closed window. ‘I need to be out there, out on the land. The spring is here and I have hardly seen it this year. I have only been in the garden and the woods. But there is the common, and the downs. I have not seen the bracken coming out, nor the spring flowers on the downs.’ Then I sto
pped, for I saw her looking at me oddly as if she could not understand me, looking at me sadly as if my love for my home somehow distressed her.

  ‘I know,’ she had said gently and put her hand on my skinny shoulder. ‘I know that you love the land. But it is a wasted love, Julia. You would do better to love God and love those that love you. Loving land brings little pleasure and can bring much pain.’

  I nodded, and tried to look obedient. I lowered my eyes so that she should not be hurt by my immediate contradiction of her good sense. I could no more help loving the land than I could help loving my cousin Richard. I could never be free of my love for them. I would never want to be free of my love for them.

  But I knew that my mama was right about wasted love! When I saw the cornfields of Wideacre self-seeded and the meadow-lands grown high since there was no stock to graze them and no haymaking, I knew then that a love for the land without money and good sense behind it was worthless love indeed. And when Richard tormented me to tears and back again, I felt that my love for him was wasted too, for it brought more pain than pleasure.

  But there was no other land but Wideacre.

  And there was no one else but Richard.

  So when Richard called me, I went. Even when I knew I should not. And he was so certain of this, so certain of my love for him, that he could trot down the drive without even troubling to look back, certain that he would hear my boots pattering along behind him.

  It was a long way to Havering Hall, even going cross-country and splashing through the Fenny at the boundary of the two estates. When we arrived at the stables, breathless and sweating from our run, Lord Havering was looking over his horses before going to his supper.

  ‘Good Lord,’ he said in his rich voice, warm as port, thick as cigar smoke. ‘Look what the wind has blown our way, Dench.’

  The Havering chief groom looked over the half-door of the loose box and smiled to see us. ‘Come to see the new mare?’ he asked Richard softly in his Sussex drawl.