The Favoured Child (35 page)

I was working: in Acre, ordering repairs to cottages too long neglected; on the downs overseeing the planting of hedges and the building of fences to control the sheep; on the common, watching the coppices for the cutting and letting them collect
firewood; and, mostly, in the fields. Wherever I was, crossing my fingers behind my back for luck as I made a decision, Ralph Megson was there too.

I could not have said what he was to me. Sometimes he was like a father, sometimes he was like a lover, sometimes he was like a teacher. All the time he was a friend. And as the days went past, and the November days got shorter and colder and more and more miserable for outdoors work, we became less like pupil and teacher and more like partners.

He met me on the bridge over the Fenny one day at the start of December. I had stopped Misty to watch the river swirling under the stone arches, and Ralph had strolled up the lane from Acre.

‘You look warm,’ he said.

I nodded. I had a new riding habit, as purple as a plum, made from thick wool. I had it buttoned tight around my neck, for the day was damp and there was the smell of slushy snow on the air.

‘Sheep all right?’ Ralph asked. He knew I had been up to check them that morning.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But I think Giles Shepherd is getting too old. He is ill again and his son Jimmy is too small to take over. Besides, Mama wants him in school.’

Ralph nodded. ‘I know,’ he said briefly. ‘There’s no one else who knows about sheep in the village. We’ll have to think about maybes hiring a shepherd for a season or two after Christmas. He could work with a couple of the village lads and teach them how it’s done.’

‘Mama would know which boys,’ I said. ‘But Jimmy does love the sheep. He’d be an obvious choice. His best friend is Simon. Perhaps they could work on the sheep together.’

Ralph nodded then clutched at my arm. ‘Look!’ he said. ‘Grilse! Coming upstream!’

I bent over and stared at the water. Very slowly, as if very weary, a female salmon was swimming heavily in the water. She had made the long journey up river from the sea, leaping over the dams for mill ponds, beating her way up against the current. She was heavy with eggs, and all the little salmon which hatched
from the eggs would leave the Fenny, returning when they were grown.

‘I love salmon,’ Ralph said emphatically. ‘Miss Julia, you must excuse me for the day. I shall follow her, and when she has spawned I shall net her. And you will forgive me.’

‘I will indeed,’ I said, smiling at the absorbed face. ‘And you may send a couple of salmon steaks up to the Dower House and Mrs Gough will cook them for your dinner if you will dine with us.’

‘Aye,’ Ralph said absently. ‘Honoured.’ And he put two fingers in his mouth and let out a piercing whistle.

At once two of the little boys of Acre came running to him, and Ralph told them to watch the salmon and follow her wherever she went without molesting her, while he fetched his horse. Without another word to me he went as fast as his rolling stride could carry him, back to his cottage for his horse and his net.

Later that day three plump salmon steaks were carried to the back door by Little ‘Un, who presented Mr Megson’s compliments in a bashful whisper. That night for dinner we had salmon pie with a pale brown crust of pastry on top and a creamy white sauce inside.

‘Will we have a Christmas party this year?’ Mr Megson asked Mama. ‘I could set one in train in the village. You’d be cramped here.’

‘I’d like us to do something here at the Dower House,’ she said. ‘You organize a party in the village for Christmas; but we will have at least the children here later, perhaps at Twelfth Night. I must write and ask Dr MacAndrew what he would wish.’

‘Does he know when he is coming home?’ Ralph Megson asked, passing Mama a bowl of crystallized fruits.

‘Not yet,’ she replied. ‘The business of the MacAndrew Company is complex, and no one knows as much about India as John. Do you need him here?’

‘Not at all,’ he said, smiling at me. ‘He left behind a very competent deputy.’

Mama smiled. ‘I believe so,’ she said. ‘I cannot get a word of sense out of her unless it concerns something which grows on Wideacre or eats a Wideacre crop. I don’t believe she has opened a book or played a tune in months.’

I nodded my head. It was true.

‘She’s a Lacey,’ Ralph said softly. ‘She takes after her papa.’

‘After Harry?’ My mother’s eyes were suddenly sharp on Ralph’s face. ‘Do you think she resembles Harry?’

Ralph Megson nodded. I think only I would have known he was lying, and I knew why. He was trying to protect Mama and me from the whispers of the village which were growing into a chorus – the whispers which said that I was not just as like to Beatrice as two peas in a pod, but that I
was
Beatrice, that Beatrice the golden girl had come back to them to make the village good and the land grow again.

‘They talk in the village of her being a Lacey girl like Beatrice,’ he said, ‘but to my mind it is her father she resembles the most. And they tell me that when he inherited, at much the same age as Miss Julia, he was Wideacre-mad for many seasons.’

The tension around Mama’s brown eyes softened as if Ralph had given her a draught of poppies. ‘Indeed, yes,’ she said. ‘Harry was out on the land almost every day the summer before we were married. D’you know, Mr Megson, I had almost forgot! Everyone remembers Beatrice running the estate, but for a couple of years it was all Harry.’

Stride brought in the port, and Mama and I rose to leave Mr Megson with the decanter, but he stayed us with a gesture.

‘Please don’t leave me in solitary state,’ he said. ‘I am a working man, Lady Lacey, and I never drink port. May we have a glass of ratafia together – before I have to go home?’

So Ralph Megson, a labouring man, sat in our dining-room and laughed with me, and smiled at my mama, and went home under a clear sky with a cold wintry moon to light his way.

He took with him a secret, the open secret which everyone knew, which they whispered in Acre: every day I grew more and more like Beatrice, the last Lacey girl on the land. Every day I
resembled her more closely, every day they heard her clear voice giving orders, they heard her laughter when someone joked with me. Out of respect to Mama and to me, no one spoke of it directly. But the whole village knew – in their credulous benighted imaginations – that Beatrice had come back to them.

That I was her.

I could not learn to laugh at it.

Often and often I heard the singing in my ears which meant that Beatrice was coming to me, and I would give an order, or answer a question, and have that strange dreamy sensation of having been in that field, waited by that gate before. And then the old man or old woman to whom I was talking would nod and smile at me and say softly, ‘Welcome, child, welcome,’ and I knew that they had been there with Beatrice, and that I had just spoken her words.

It made me shiver; even in the brightest wintry sunshine it would make me shiver when they looked at me and spoke to me thus. But I would shake my head, like a puppy coming out of a river, and say, ‘No! No! It is me! Julia Lacey! Don’t think of anyone else.’

And they would smile at me with their eyes bright with knowledge, with no sense at all that what they thought they saw, what they thought they knew, was quite impossible.

Christmas was quiet by old Wideacre standards, but Uncle John was home from London, and Richard home from Oxford, and that made Mama happy, and me happy. So Ralph held a Christmas party in the village and Mama planned a Twelfth Night party for her schoolchildren in the stable yard of the Dower House.

The old fiddle-player of Acre had died long since, and we feared there would be no dancing. But on Boxing Day Richard came in and said that Jem had told him the gypsies on the common would play in return for their supper and a shilling, so the children of Acre could have their little dance after all.

All we had to worry about on the eve of Twelfth Night was
that the starry sky would stay clear for a sunny day so that the children could eat and dance and romp in the yard.

We need not have worried. Uncle John’s greeting to Mama in the morning when she came downstairs was a joyous, ‘Good morning! The sun is smiling on the righteous and you have a wonderful day for your party!’

We breakfasted late, for Mama and I went down to the kitchen to prepare and bake tray after tray of sweetmeats for the party. Just as Stride was clearing away the plates, we heard the scrape of a violin and the sharp clear whistle of a wooden flute and we ran to the window to see the gypsies playing an introductory jig for us, just for us, on the front lawn of the house.

‘Oh! They’re very good!’ cried Mama, her feet tapping, and then she laughed aloud as Richard caught her around the waist and galloped her round the breakfast table, the china rattling and Mama’s silk skirts sweeping perilously close to the coffee-pots.

‘Not in here!’ she cried, breaking away. ‘Richard! You are a gypsy yourself! If you must dance, take Julia outside and dance on the lawn. There is not room in here to shuffle a minuet, let alone one of your gallops!’

Richard laughed and we opened the front door and tumbled out to dance on the lawn to gypsy music while Mrs Gough, Jenny, Stride and Jem laid the tables in the stable yard and the children from Acre lined up along the garden wall to wave and smile at us.

They came in quick enough when I called them to the stable yard and cleared the table so that not a crumb was left. I saw that they did not grab at the food as if they were starving, and they did not tuck food into the waistbands of their clothes for hungry mouths at home. The immediate provision in Acre had been the start of a long plan of putting money and food into the village, and there was no starvation in this part of the downs any more. John nodded at Mama and I saw her smile in return as they both recognized that Acre was coming right at last.

It was well the sun shone that day, for that was the last we saw of it for some time. We had constant snow and ice, but worst of
all was the freezing fog which rolled up from the Fenny every night and morning and chilled the little house until the very sandstone walls seemed to hold the coldness and to ooze icy water like cold sweat. We had fires in every room and Mama marvelled that we had managed before with only one fire in the parlour and fires lit in the bedrooms only in the mornings.

The last weeks of January were no better, with gales which blew the fog away but set the house creaking like a ship at sea. In the nights we could hear slates clattering off the roof into the stable yard. The ground was frozen hard and there was no ploughing or planting possible until the freeze broke. The men did not even dig ditches. The only work they could do was cutting the hedgerows back, and that was a task which took some time.

So I had many hours sitting indoors and gazing blankly out of the Dower House windows at the freezing fog in the lane, and many evenings watching the firelight in the parlour. It seemed that whenever I was still and alone, whenever I had ears to listen, Beatrice was there.

And then one night I had a dream.

It started with that strange sweet singing which came in my ears sleeping or waking, warning me that Beatrice was near. I think I turned in my bed then, for I remember staring blankly at the ceiling of my room with wide-open eyes and seeing from the grey light of the ceiling that it was a cold dawn, and hearing the wind moan around the chimney-pots. It moaned like the ghost of someone just died, ill loved and locked out. I pulled the covers around my ears and buried my face deeper in the pillow to shut out the eerie calling.

And then I slept.

At once I dreamed I was in Acre, not the Acre of Beatrice’s day, with the front gardens bright with flowers, but Acre as it is now: walls newly lime-washed, roofs mended, and the front gardens a frigid mess of new-turned earth and dung ready for planting seeds. I was standing on the little patch of ground they called Miss Beatrice’s Corner, outside Acre church. The vicarage was in front of me, the tall spire of the church behind. And the wind
was blowing through my hair and tearing at my gown in utter silence, in deathly quiet, though the rain was sheeting down upon me, around me, and when I turned my face up to the thick sky, I felt it was raining through me. But I was not cold. I did not even feel wet.

I was afraid then, for I knew it was not an ordinary dream. And I knew I had to do something, but I did not know what it was.

I turned around to look at the church, and as I did so there was a deep heart-stopping roar of thunder, as if the very clouds were bumping together right overhead, and a crack like the spheres breaking as a shard of lightning came down and rammed a cross-bow bolt into the church spire.

It split it – as a good archer can split a wand. I watched in silence as the spire peeled apart like a shredded bough and leaned perilously outward. And fell – still in the dreamy absolute silence – towards the cottages. The pretty little cottage where Ted Tyacke and his mother lived, the Brewers’ one next door and the third cottage in the row, which belonged to the Clay family – all of them came under the grotesque shadow of the falling spire.

I opened my mouth to scream for them, to warn them; but no sound came. The tower fell upon them like the finger of a cruel god and crushed the houses into dust.

I stood in the rain, the silent rain, and watched.

At once the fire bloomed out of the ruins like some mad weed, too fast in the growing. It shot great fat greedy flames into the rain and hissed against the water like a nest of snakes. It leaped down the ruins, feeding on the thatch of the cottages and the light wood of the inside walls and floorboards. And I waited in silence, for I knew I could say nothing and do nothing as it ran riot down the thatched roofs of the row of cottages.

People tumbled screaming out into the street in the pouring rain, one of the Carter children with her nightgown afire. I saw them jump on her to try to smother the flames and I saw her mouth open to scream, but I could hear nothing. Her father tried to plunge back into the burning house, for one of the
children was left behind, and I saw his face, as naked as an anguished animal’s, when they held him back.