The Favoured Child (15 page)

Opposite the newel post in the shadows of the wall was a gilt
mirror, and I turned from the stairs to face it. But it was not my reflection in the dark glass. It was not my childish round-faced prettiness, my light hair, my grey eyes. It was the face of a stranger, a woman I had never met in my waking life. Yet I knew her face as well as I knew my own; for in the dream that vivid chestnut hair and those slanty green eyes were my features, and her vague half-mad look was mine. I stared at the reflection of the stranger, which was my face, for long unblinking moments, and then I dropped my eyes with a secret sly smile.

Beneath the mirror was a mahogany table. I placed my palm upon it and felt the coolness of the wood warming under my touch. There was a silver bowl on the table, filled with drooping cream roses, heavy headed, looking down at their own reflections in the polished surface. I brushed one flower with the tip of a careless finger and it shed its petals in a swift flurry like a creamy snowdrift. In my head I heard a voice – a voice just like my mama’s but in a tone I had never heard from her – saying, ‘You are a wrecker, Beatrice.’ Her voice was full of disdain.

Further up the hall was a great china bowl of potpourri and I stood beside it and dipped my hand in to feel the papery rose petals, the spiky lavender seeds, and bent to smell the sweet dried hay scent. The lighter petals and the dust spilled over the floor as I carelessly took a handful to sniff. It did not matter. Soon nothing would ever matter again.

A storm had been rumbling in the distance and now it was louder, rolling back over the head of the downs and coming close over the woods to this house. I thought of the two children, the little girl and the baby boy, fleeing from this house in a carriage with the rain drumming on the roof and the horses in a panic of fear at the storm. I knew they would be safe. They were on my land, and they were the bone of my bone and they were my blood. They would inherit Wideacre, and one of them would surely learn to hear the heartbeat of the land. One of them would make the magic of the harvest as I once did. One of them would be the favoured child.

The wallpaper was soft underneath my fingertips, rich. The
velvet drapes at the window of the parlour were as silky soft as the fleece of a new-born lamb. The thick glass in the windows was icy cold from the rain pouring down outside. I leaned my forehead against its coolness and smiled.

The house was filled with silence. I could hear the parlour clock tick with a light metallic tick…tick…tick. In the hall the grandfather clock had a deeper wooden tone, tock…tock…tock. And I could hear another sound. There was the deep rumble of the storm but that noise did not alarm me. Above that rumble there was another sound, a new sound. I was listening carefully for it, as sharp-eared as a rat in a dark hole.

It was the sound of many feet, bare feet, on the drive, coming to the house. I could hear it before it was more than a distant shuffle, because I was expecting to hear it. I had been waiting for it. I knew this dream; and I knew what happened next. I could not stop it. I could not halt it. There was no escape for me. For what was coming for me was my destiny. What was coming for me was rough justice. What was coming for me was the village I had tried to destroy and the man I had attacked. For I was Beatrice. Beatrice Lacey of Wideacre Hall, with a wild smile on my lips, staring into the storm-drenched darkness. I was Beatrice, waiting in the darkened house. I was Beatrice and I was alone at Wideacre, waiting for the men who were coming from Acre led by a god who was half-man and half-horse, who would ride up the oak stairs, leaving hoofprints of fire, and take me away to the secret world of his own.

I awoke in terror, but with a feeling also of mad elation, as though the world were ending, but ending by my will. The excitement and the fear drained from me as I looked around my room, and my real life – plain ordinary Julia Lacey’s life – came back to me. I was no copper-headed witch. I was plain ordinary Julia Lacey in her patched nightgown in her cold room.

I turned and lay on my back and looked up at the ceiling, which was pale yellow in the spring dawn. The dream faded from me, and the richness of the colours and the delight of the textures went with it. It was a dream, it was nothing but a
dream. But it left me longing to know the woman who had been Beatrice, longing to know her life and her death. And it left me confused, and somehow dissatisfied with this little house and my quiet pleasures and my bending to Richard’s will and to Mama’s gentle rule. It left me with a feeling that the woman who was Beatrice would never have tolerated the indoors life which I was teaching myself to enjoy. She would have snapped her fingers at it, insisted on having her own horse and ridden out every day. She would not have let her inheritance go to rack and ruin – she would have borrowed money to plant the fields, to buy stock. And her skill and determination and her magic would have made it work.

I sighed. I knew I was not like that. I was too loving and obedient to my mama to overrule her, or even to challenge what she said. And I was too much Richard’s faithful betrothed to think an independent thought. It seemed I had been set in a mould before I had time to make a choice. I was a docile, ordinary young lady and I must take my little enjoyments indoors and with proper decorum.

But then I suddenly remembered what day it was, and I forgot my passing irritation with my life. Today was not a plain ordinary day at all. It was the day of my sixteenth birthday. The dream slid away from me and I jumped out of bed and pattered to the window to see what sort of day it was. I wrapped myself in a shawl and waited for my morning chocolate and for the day to begin.

I expected some changes. But I had expected slight, trivial, delightful changes. I thought that the most exciting things would be Mama coming to my room after breakfast, with her tortoise-shell hairbrushes and a box full of pins, and seating me before my little spotted looking-glass and pinning up my hair. My thick ripple of light-brown hair was to be pinned up for ever. And my skirts were to be longer. I was to be a young lady. In so far as Mama could do it – with no money, and no London season, and no ball – I was Out.

Richard banged at the door. ‘Am I allowed to watch?’ he called.

‘Certainly not,’ Mama said, her mouth full of hairpins. ‘You may wait in the parlour in awed silence until we are ready.’

‘I don’t want Julia to look all different,’ he said mutinously.

‘She is going to look like a lady and not like a hoyden,’ Mama said firmly. ‘Now, go away, Richard!’

We heard the clatter of his boots as he went downstairs, and I met my mama’s eyes in the mirror and smiled.

‘I can’t do it very well,’ she said apologetically. ‘You should really have it cut properly. But hairdressers are very dear, I’m afraid. I so wish that you could have had a party and we could have gone to the Assembly Rooms. But there is little point waiting. You are sixteen, and it has to be now, with just me as your dresser and dinner this afternoon as your coming-out ball.’

I nodded, not minding, impressed already with the changes she was making. Mama had swept up my thick mass of hair and was coiling it like a fat snake round and round and pinning it skilfully on my head. On either side of my face she parted the hair and trimmed it shorter, twisting it with her fingers into soft waves. She was intent upon my hair and did not look into the mirror to see the overall effect until she had her pins firmly in place. Then she looked up to see me and the smile faded from her face and she was suddenly pale.

‘What is it?’ I demanded. I was smiling; I thought myself at the very pinnacle of style.

Mama swallowed. ‘It is nothing,’ she said. She smiled, but she did not seem happy. ‘It is that you are suddenly so grown-up,’ she said. She dropped a kiss on the top of my head.

‘When I was a girl, hair was worn powdered. But I think it is prettier left in its natural fairness,’ she said. ‘Especially in the summer when it goes lighter and you are quite fair.’ She gathered up her brushes and pins and swept from the room as if she were in a hurry to leave. I watched her abrupt departure, puzzled; but then I looked back at my mirror.

I knew at once whom she had seen.

She had seen Beatrice.

I looked like the face in the dream. The plaits I usually wore
had hidden the clear lines of my profile, had blurred the shape of my face. Now, with my hair swept up and the teasing little waves around my face, you could see my high cheek-bones and the odd little slant to my eyes which I had inherited – as clear as a voice calling across a generation – from my aunt. My face was still round, distressingly chubby, I thought. I smiled an experimental smile at myself in the glass. In a few years’ time I could count on being pretty. But if I became beautiful, it would be Beatrice’s clear loveliness shining through.

Perhaps it should have troubled me, but I was just sixteen and I wanted, more than anything else in the world, to be a pretty girl. If I had inherited the notorious beauty of Beatrice, then my delight in that outweighed my fear of the woman in the dream. I smiled again at my reflection.

I did not look so very much like the woman in the dream, I thought. I did not want to think of the dream today. Today I wanted everything to be joyful and normal and ordinary. I did not want to be a haunted Lacey heir reaching adulthood. I wanted to be Julia, finally old enough to wear her hair up, and with a very good chance of a pair of silver-backed hairbrushes of her very own wrapped in pretty paper by her place at dinner that afternoon.

‘Julia! Aren’t you done yet?’ Richard called from the foot of the stairs. ‘If you don’t hurry and come, we won’t get to Havering Hall and back again in time for dinner!’

‘Coming!’ I called back, and I looked once more at myself in the mirror and ran from the room, banging the door behind me and clattering down the uncarpeted stairs.

I had hoped that Richard would fall back on his heels at the change in my appearance. I was young enough and silly enough and vain enough to think that he might think me pretty, perhaps even beautiful. But he just grinned when he saw me. ‘Very smart,’ he said. ‘Very grown-up. I s’pose you’re too grown-up now to run through the wood to Havering and we’ll have to walk around by the road?’

I grinned back and lost my disappointment in my relief that
nothing had changed between us. ‘No,’ I said. ‘We can go through the woods. But if my hair falls down, you’ll have to pin it up before we go in to Grandmama, Richard, for I’ve not learned how to do it yet.’

‘No worse than tying knots, I suppose,’ Richard said, and we stepped out of the front door into a spring day of sunlight as bright as peach wine.

Wideacre glowed like a gift for me. It had rained overnight and the buds on the trees and the grassy banks were glittering with raindrops. The hedges were pale green with buds as if someone had thrown a gauze veil over the black twigs and branches. Pale strips of clouds lay on the horizon and the sweet wind of Wideacre blew in my face, saying welcome from the land to a Lacey. To my left the downs reared up, up to the pale sky, streaked with chalk scree and covered in the sweet green colour of chalk-grown grass. And ahead of us, like a wall of tree-trunks, were the thick woods of Wideacre Park.

Without another word Richard and I turned up the drive towards Wideacre Hall and then plunged into the woods following the little track which would take us to Havering.

The Fenny was in spate, flooded with the winter rain and the bubbling little chalk springs from the downs. As we walked beside it, we said nothing, listening to it singing over the stones which glowed golden in the depths. Bits of wood, twigs and last year’s brown leaves tumbled over and over in the current. We paused for a moment to toss in some bracken fronds and watch them whirl away down river, past the Greens’ idle mill, over the weir, past Acre, southwards to the sea.

The bridge we used was a felled tree. Once there was a path clearly marked across it, for people from Acre used to walk this way and take the short cut over the tree-bridge to Wideacre Hall. But it had been many years since the poor of Acre would seek out a Lacey, and few people went to the hall after it was burned, except Richard and me and the Lacey ghosts. The path was overgrown and I had to pull my gown away from brambles and burrs as we walked. Mama had let down the hem for me, and I
saw, as she had warned me, that I might not always relish the change.

‘Wait, Richard,’ I said impatiently. ‘I’m going to hitch it up.’

Richard chuckled and held my coat out of my way as I kilted up my skirt. ‘You’re a hoyden,’ he said, smiling. ‘Not a young lady at all.’

‘I
am
a young lady,’ I said grimly, and my picture of Beatrice was bright in my mind. ‘But I cannot always be a perfect young lady on Wideacre.’

I walked easier after that, and we balanced our way across the slippery tree-trunk, holding on to the branches without mishap. Then it was a stroll down a grassy ride to the Havering estate, where Grandmama congratulated me on my new hairstyle and was generous enough to overlook that my newly lengthened gown was very muddy around the hem. We stayed for a dish of tea and then Grandmama ordered the carriage out to take us home.

‘We can walk, Lady Havering,’ Richard said courteously.

She smiled. ‘My granddaughter is a young lady today,’ she said. ‘I think she should certainly ride home in a carriage.’

So we arrived home in fine style in the shabby carriage with the faded crest on the door, and Mama waved to us from the parlour window and hastened out on to the front step.

‘My second carriage visitor today!’ she said, and her eyes were shining. ‘We have a guest for dinner! You two, upstairs at once and change. I won’t have you in my parlour in all your dirt. Hurry now!’ And she whisked back into the parlour with a ripple of laughter as if she were a young girl, refusing to respond to our bemused faces, running from our questions.

Richard turned at once for the kitchen. The place was in chaos. The fire was burning fiercely, and Mrs Gough’s white cap was askew and she was alarmingly red in the face.

‘Who is here?’ Richard demanded. ‘Mrs Gough, who is the extra place at dinner?’