The Favoured Child Read online

  They farmed sheep there in great flocks, and for much of the way the road was unfenced; the white-faced sheep had learned to scurry out of the way of the stage-coach when the guard blew on his horn. Even here the mania for wheat was gripping the farmers, and I saw many fields which had been newly cut from the free long sheep-runs and fenced and ploughed, ready for spring sowing.

  I liked the drive and watching the scenery. I liked listening to Jem spinning yarns about us to the ostlers in the coaching inns. And I enjoyed listening to Mama promising me the treats I should have in Bath.

  But it was no good, and I could not make it good. I felt I was in disgrace. I felt I was on trial. When Mama glanced anxiously at me when I woke from a half-dreaming sleep, my head against the soft squabs of the coach, I flushed for fear that I might have spoken aloud, for fear that she might have seen my eyelids flutter in my sleep, for fear that she thought that I had been dreaming again.

  We shared a bedchamber for the night we stopped on the road in a coaching inn just before Salisbury. I woke in the night with Mama’s hand gentle on my shoulder and her face grave under her nightcap.

  ‘What is it?’ I said, still bemused from sleep and from a dream I had had of being a little girl again on Wideacre, playing with a lad as dark-haired as Richard and with a smile as roguish.

  ‘You were dreaming,’ she said low. ‘And you spoke in your sleep. You said, “Ralph.”‘

  I raised myself up on one arm and stretched out a hand to her. ‘It does not matter, Mama,’ I said earnestly. ‘I was thinking of the apple trees, of something I had to say to Mr Megson. That was all.’

  She nodded. ‘I am sorry to have woken you, then,’ she said tentatively. ‘John said…’ she hesitated. ‘John said that perhaps it would be better if you did not sleep and have your…your dreams, for a little while. He thinks they overtax your imagination.’

  I nodded; I kept my eyes down. ‘It does not matter, Mama,’ I said again, and I knew I sounded surly.

  ‘No,’ she said softly. She went to her travelling bag and brought out the little bottle of medicine which I had come both to love and to dread. ‘Perhaps you should take some of this,’ she said.

  I sighed, resigned, rubbing the sleep from my eyes. I swallowed the medicine to please her and waited for the familiar dreamy sense of unreality to overtake me. They were robbing me of my dreams, of my very being. They were dissolving the strange unpredictable part of me in the golden syrup so I lost my clear bright dream-given wisdom, and learned instead of a dozy unreality.

  ‘G’night,’ I said, the drug clogging my speech. Mama kissed me on the forehead as I lay down, and crossed back to her own bed and slipped between the covers.

  ‘Goodnight again,’ she said sweetly; and then, under her breath so I could hardly hear her, she added, ‘God bless you and keep you safe.’

  She had booked us some lodgings in Gay Street, Bath. ‘It was just being built when my mama married Lord Havering and we came to Havering Hall,’ she told me as we rattled along the last few miles on the high road over the hills towards the city. ‘I dare say I shall be completely lost. We used to live near to the baths for my own papa to take the water and to bathe. Even when I was a little girl, the whole place was changing almost every day, it seemed. Since then they have built street after street.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. I was looking from the carriage window down the hill. The broad river, a little faster and deeper than usual from the winter rains, was spilling over its banks into the water-meadows. The willow trees stood in water, their sparse branches reflected and the grey sky above them. The Fenny would be in flood too, I thought.

  ‘Richard would love to see the buildings,’ Mama said. ‘We must ask him and John to come and visit us, at least for a few days, as soon as we are settled and you have seen Dr Phillips.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said again.

  ‘And the shops are certain to be wonderful,’ Mama said. She was leaning forward on her seat to look ahead down the road. Even in my drug-given stupidity, I could not help but smile at her eagerness. The carriage brakes went on as we turned down a steep hill and Mama gasped at the view. The city was a sea of gold like some new Jerusalem set down on a plain of sunshine. The abbey in the middle dominated the town, with its tall tower reaching up to touch the very floor of heaven; and gathered all around it like square pats of dairy butter were the houses in the lemon-rind paleness of the Bath stone.

  We rattled over the bridge and at once Jem on the box checked the horses and brought them to a nervous walk. The streets were impossibly crowded, and I did not see how we should find our way through at all. Everywhere there were sedan chairs, Bath chairs, swaying perilously as sweating brawny chairmen trotted like mad pedlars, one in front, one behind. Many of the chairs had the curtains drawn, but in one or two I caught a glimpse of blankets and towels and a pale white face, and in another a red-faced dandy snoring. There were street-sellers shouting and link-boys and crossing-sweepers jostling at the roadside. There were pedlars spreading their packs out on the pavements, and a tooth-drawer with a stool and a bloodstained apron. And in the doorways were beggars with bitter ingratiating smiles and scabby hands held out, and little children on their knees flushed rosy red with some disease of the skin.

  ‘This is just the outskirts,’ Mama said excusingly. ‘Every city has its poorer quarters, Julia. Even Chichester.’

  ‘I know,’ I said, and I leaned back inside the carriage, for there were two drunk men reeling across the cobbled road towards us, and I did not want them to see me and start calling names.

  The wagon ahead of us, which had been blocking the road, started up, so Jem could move the horses forward. I heard him yell, ‘Thank ’ee gents’ to a couple of chairmen who had been giving him directions for our street, and I smiled to hear the Sussex drawl raised loud above the noise of the city.

  ‘Gracious,’ said Mama. ‘I had forgotten how noisy it was!’

  I nodded, and she stared from her window and I from mine, like a pair of milkmaids seeing a city for the first time.

  The noise and the confusion on the roads eased a little as we turned away from the centre of the town, but we went no faster. The carriage creaked against the hill.

  ‘This is a fearful slope for horses,’ I said to Mama. She had her guidebook out on her lap.

  ‘Hardly anyone uses a carriage,’ she said. ‘I think this is Gay Street. We must find number twelve.’

  The carriage-wheels slid and bumped on the cobbles, and I heard Jem curse the horses, and then we came to a standstill and the postboy came around and opened the door and set the steps down.

  ‘Thank you,’ Mama said and smiled at him and waited while he ran up the steps to the house and banged on the knocker. The door opened at once and our landlady, Mrs Gibson, was there to greet us. She swept Mama a deep curtsy and bobbed to me, exclaimed over the length of our journey and the coldness of the day and swept us into the parlour, where the table was laid for tea and the kettle just set to boil.

  We had taken only one parlour, a dining-room and two bedrooms in the house. Mama had the large bedroom at the front of the house, but I thought I had done better with the smaller room which looked out over some gardens down the valley. ‘At least I can see some trees when I wake in the morning,’ I said. But I said it softly so that Mama should not hear.

  Jem would have lodgings at the stables where the carriage was to be kept. There was no room for him in the house. Mama had not even brought Jenny Hodgett to wait on her. Instead we would have Mrs Gibson’s maid. Her name was Meg and she brought us two letters for Mama into the parlour while we were having our tea, with an air so gracious and condescending that I nearly rose to my feet to curtsy to her.

  Mama smiled at me when the door closed behind her. ‘Town polish, Julia,’ she said. ‘We have just been patronized by a maidservant. We must certainly go to the dressmaker’s tomorrow!’

  I smiled back, but my eyes were on Mama’s letters. One bore a heavy red seal and I thought
it would be from the doctor Uncle John wished me to see.

  I was right.

  ‘Dr Phillips will call this evening,’ Mama said. ‘Good. That will give us time to unpack at least.’ She glanced across at me. ‘Cheer up, my darling,’ she said. ‘He is certain to be pleasant, for John knew him at university and liked him. And he may take one look at you and say – as I think – that no one should work as hard on the land as you have been doing. And he will say that it is all my fault, and that to make it up to you I must take you to a great many balls and parties and not home until midsummer!’

  I managed a smile. TU unpack for you, Mama,’ I said. ‘What dress will you wear this evening?’

  She told me she would wear her pink brocade and I set it out for her, and asked Meg if she would be so good, if it was no trouble, if she would not object, could she please press the petticoat which was creased, and then I dressed myself in a new cream velvet gown, which reminded me of my riding habit left hanging up in the cupboard at home. I went down to sit in the parlour and wait for the doctor who was going to cure me of feeling at home in my place, who was going to stop me sleeping as I have always slept, who was going to make me into a proper young lady at last.

  He was not as bad as I had feared, but I disliked him on sight. He was a tall rounded man with a pink baby-face under a bulky white wig, soft white hands that fluttered as he spoke, bulbous blue eyes, and behind them a sharpness. He talked to Mama; but he was watching me. He had heard from John about the dream, and he had been told about the night the church spire fell.

  ‘Wationalism,’ he said to Mama; and I had to turn my head aside and bite my lip not to laugh. ‘Weason. In the old days we could fear magic and spells and possession. But now we know the mind has its own wules and weasons. If we learn them – and we can map them like a new countwy – if we learn them, then we can be as we want to be.’ He turned and smiled at me. ‘Would you like to keep your dweams, Miss Lacey? Or would you like to be an ordinary young lady?’

  I hesitated. I felt I should be betraying Wideacre, and the Lacey inheritance, and my very self if I answered him as they wanted me to do. ‘I do not want to grieve my mama and my friends,’ I said slowly. ‘But I cannot want to grow strange to the land which is my family home. And the dreams have been a part of me for as long as I can remember. I cannot think how I could be myself and not sometimes dream.’

  He nodded. ‘You will cling to them for a while,’ he said. ‘The mind has little twicks and habits. But I shall fwee you fwom them.’

  He turned back to Mama and brought out a little diary and noted times and days that I should go to his house and see him. Mama was to be with me, but he would sit and talk to me and I should tell him all my dreams and my seeings, and in time-perhaps in quite a short time – we should see why these aberrations had come upon me.

  I sat very still and listened to this stranger planning with my mama to change me. And the confusion and unhappiness which had been inside me throughout the long journey, and the hurried leave-taking, slid away from me as I knew that the doctor was wrong, and Mama was wrong, and Uncle John was wrong, and Richard was wrong. They were all wrong, and the dreams and the seeings were right.

  And there was nothing wrong with me.

  I felt my shoulders go back and my head come up, and I smiled at the doctor and promised to be prompt at his house in the morning; and as I smiled I sensed all the familiar strength-the strength which I sometimes named as Lacey strength, Beatrice strength – come back to me, and I looked him in his pale-blue eyes and thought to myself: you and I are enemies while you try to change me, for I will not change.

  But I made him a pretty curtsy, and then I kissed Mama on the cheek like a dutiful daughter, and I went up the stairs to bed as if I were indeed an invalid, as if I did indeed need to be made well.

  Dr Phillips’s house was one of the great palaces of Bath in Royal Crescent, so we walked up the hill from our lodgings. I gasped at the top, and it was not from the steepness of the hill: the crescent was magnificent. It was a sweep of gold looking out over a frosty-grey garden, as regular as a platoon of marching soldiers, as graceful as the drape of a golden curtain. Mama knocked at the door, and it was opened by a footman, very grave in a dark-green livery, who stood back to admit us into the sombre hall. I had not liked the look of Dr Phillips; and in his own house, with the smell of his new leather chairs and the scent of his shop-bought pot-pourri, I could not help feeling uneasy.

  ‘Mama,’ I said as softly as a child, and she took her hand from her muff and held mine as if I were an infant at the tooth-drawer.

  The footman held the door open and we were about to go in when a young lady, around my age, came down the stairs. Her eyes were red, perhaps from crying, and she was as pale and as thin as a wraith. I paused and looked at her; I stared. She stopped on the stairs and I saw her look me over, inspect, price and date the Chichester bonnet with the old feather in it, the pelisse and the gown. Then her eyes came to my face and she gave me a little rueful smile as if we were both in some scrape together.

  She came down the rest of the stairs and dipped a little curtsy to Mama and waited while the footman fetched her cape. ‘My brother is collecting me,’ she said to him. ‘I will wait in the library.’ The footman opened a door on the opposite side of the hall from the parlour, and I recollected my manners and followed Mama into the parlour. I glanced behind me and she was looking at me. She smiled at me again, that odd enigmatic smile, as if we had been naughty children and would have to take a brief punishment, well worth the petty sin. I smiled back, and then the door closed on her.

  ‘Did you see her gown?’ Mama asked at once. ‘Mechlin-lace trimming all over! And the cut of it! So slim for a walking gown. I saw that was how they were wearing them this season in the magazine, but I never dreamed it could look so elegant!’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Did you think she had been crying?’

  Mama went to the window. ‘Yes,’ she said with a little hesitation. ‘But Dr Phillips only deals with nervous disorders. She might well be distressed because she was unwell.’

  I thought of that rueful smile. ‘Perhaps she disagrees with the diagnosis,’ I said.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Mama said equably. Oh, my! What fine horses!’

  I went to her side and we peeped from the window, as furtive as a pair of Acre gossips. It was a smart phaeton with bright-yellow wheels, pulled by a pair of glossy chestnut horses, their coats gleaming, almost red. A gentleman was driving, and he pulled up outside the house and glanced towards the door. He was wearing a tricorne hat, tipped slightly back, and curly brown hair tied in a neat bow behind. He might have been handsome–I could not think of his looks because I was struck by the niceness of his face. He looked like a man you could trust with anything. He looked like a man incapable of a lie, or of meanness, or of an unkind word. He had a broad smiling face and brown eyes. He held the reins well, and he whistled towards the doorway, as cheeky as a stable lad.

  The door opened and the young lady came out.

  ‘Come on, Marianne!’ he said cheerfully. ‘I swear I cannot hold them! I’ll take you out to Coombe Down and back again in time for dinner. Mama said we may! But come quick!’

  And she picked up her skirts and clambered up into the phaeton and sat beside him, and I saw his arm go around her waist and he gave her a hard hug and a quick glance to see if she was upset.

  I rather wished I had a brother to collect me from my visit to the doctor and to watch my face and to whirl me away behind a pair of the best horses I had ever seen. But then the door opened and Mama and I went upstairs to Dr Phillips.

  He had left the large room very free of furniture. There was a fire in the grate and a comfortable chair before it, an embroidered fire-screen, an ormolu clock, a harpsichord in the corner and a heavy desk with writing-paper and an inkstand. He gestured Mama to a seat by the window beside a little table with magazines and a couple of novels. He directed me to a seat at the fireside and took a chair besid
e me, sitting at an angle so I could not see his face but he could watch me. I slid my hand into my reticule so that I could hold the little wooden owl, Ralph’s owl, tightly. And I waited for him to speak.

  ‘Tell me about the dweams,’ he said gently; and his inability to pronounce his r’s seemed no longer amusing but infinitely threatening. ‘When do you first wemember dweaming?’

  I was unwilling to speak, uneasy. But there was nothing I could do but answer him, and I had a resentful feeling that I would have to go on and on explaining until he knew what he thought he needed to know. And I had a little fear that he might be right – that he might be able to make me into a girl who cared most for clothes and dances and could not hear the beat of the land.

  I told him of the dream of being alone in the old hall at Wideacre. I told him it all: the sense of peace, the quietness of the empty house, knowing that the men were coming from Acre, and fearing their coming and yet wanting it; of the thunderstorm and the man on the black horse, and seeing lightning flash bright on the blade of a knife…

  ‘And then?’ he asked softly.

  I told him that was all I dreamed; but he asked for other dreams. So I told him how I sometimes dreamed that I was a little girl running wild on Wideacre. And I said that sometimes, without warning, I would see the land through her eyes, even though I was awake.

  ‘And who is the girl?’ he asked as if it were the most natural question in the world.

  ‘She is Beatrice,’ I answered stupidly, and I heard Mama’s sharp indrawn breath from the window-seat. The doctor spoke smoothly over the top of the gasp so that I should keep talking, keep talking, talking my most private truths out and out and out into the pretty room far away from my home.