The Favoured Child (36 page)

The fire took long effective strides down the street, and every house it touched bloomed red. Acre was wrecked.

I woke then, shuddering with a cold sweat, and with my bedclothes on the floor. It was early, it was too early to rise. It was only just dawn. It had been the noise of the high wind which had given me the dream, the high wind and the sound of the rain on my window-pane. A fearful dream. A most frightful dream.

I shivered as if I had really been out there in the storm, and leaned out of my bed and heaved my blankets back on to the bed. I burrowed down in them like a chilled and frightened child.

I dozed at once.

At once I was standing on the corner of grass outside the churchyard and I was in the dream again. I looked around again and saw the lightning split the spire in two. I heard the great boom of thunder, and saw the spire toppling sideways to crash down on to the Tyackes’ cottage, and I cried out for Ted and his mother, and my voice made no sound in the silent storm.

I could feel myself tossing in my bed to be free of the dream, and I could feel it holding me like a torturer in a merciless grip; and I had to watch it, all over again: the fire, the burning child, the end of Acre.

Then it stopped, and I felt my half-waking body shudder and sob, and turn over once again for sleep.

And then it started again.

I was outside the churchyard on the patch of ground they called Miss Beatrice’s Corner.

I dreamed that dream over and over again like a trapped ferret which runs up and down its cage on a treadmill which no one but it can see.

‘Miss Julia?’ said Jenny, standing by my bedside with my hot chocolate in her hand. ‘Are you ill?’ I gaped up at her.

Oh, Jenny, I’m so glad you woke me!’ I exclaimed. ‘I have
had such a nightmare you wouldn’t believe! And I dreamed it over and over!’

I sat up in bed and pushed the hair from my forehead. It was lank and damp as if I had been tossing on my pillow and sweating all night.

‘Did you dream true?’ she asked. She turned her back to me and went to tend the fire. ‘If you dream over and over, ‘tis said to be a message,’ she threw over her shoulder. ‘Was there a message, Miss Julia?’

Her hand was on the coal-scuttle, and I saw her fingers. They were clasped in the age-old sign against witchcraft: thumb between the first and second finger, to make the one-handed sign of the cross to ward off the devil and his sisters. The sign, her words, the dream, all came together and I lost my wits indeed.

‘Yes,’ I said. And it was not my voice which spoke. ‘I must dress and go to Acre,’ I said, and my tongue felt heavy in my mouth.

She shot one frightened look at me, but I did not mind her. ‘It’s raining…’ she said weakly.

‘It will be worse than rain if I do not go,’ I said, and I slid out of bed and did not feel the floorboards cold and hard beneath my bare feet. She held out my linen to me and I did not feel it chill against my skin. I let her pull my laces tight and I did not breathe in against the constriction. She held out my riding habit to me in silence and I wordlessly stepped into it. Then she dipped a curtsy and whirled from the room while I twisted my hair into a knot and pinned my hat.

She would tell Jem I needed Misty, I knew. And sure enough, when I walked hazy-eyed into the stable yard, he was holding her reins and waiting for me.

‘Jenny’s a fool,’ he said abruptly. ‘What are you doing up this early without notice to your ma?’

I looked at him without seeing him. ‘I have to go to Acre,’ I said. ‘There is danger for them in the village.’

Jem scowled in anger. ‘I don’t believe in none of that,’ he said truculently. ‘What are you doing in the village, Miss Julia?’

TU see Ralph,’ I said.

At once Jem looked relieved and put his hand out to throw me up into the saddle. ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘Ralph Megson’ll know what’s best.’

Misty stood as still as a statue, her coat darkening with the drenching rain. I felt a trickle of water dripping from my hat and going down my back but I did not shiver. I clicked to her and she went smooth-paced out of the stable yard into the mire of the drive. It was heavy going, but she managed a canter out of the drive and down the lane towards Acre. And all the time, though my body moved with the horse, my mind was enmeshed in the dream. AU I could see was the spire splitting like an axed stake.

Ralph was awake and out of his bed. I could see his silhouette before the firelight in the front room. He turned his head at the sound of the hoofbeats, came to his front door and opened it to look out.

‘Julia!’ he said in surprise. ‘What’s the matter?’

I stayed on horseback looking down on him, and I knew that I had the face of a madwoman. A face without expression, a face blank with fear at a horror which no one but me could see.

‘We have to clear the cottages on the north side of the lane,’ I said. It was hard to speak. I could scarce move my tongue or my lips. ‘The church spire is going to be struck by lightning and it will fall on the Tyackes’ cottage, and on the Brewers’ and the Clays’. Then there will be a fire. It will wipe out Acre,’ I said, my voice very low. ‘We have to clear them out of those three cottages and then we have to make a fire-break.’

Ralph stared at me. He opened his mouth to speak, and then he stopped. He strode out into the rain and glared at me, trying to read my mind in my face. ‘Julia?’ he asked.

‘It is true,’ I said. ‘I have dreamed it over and over all night. I
know
it is true, Ralph. And if you will not help me, then I will order them out on my own.’

‘Wait,’ he said, and turned back into his house, leaving me like a wet marble statue on a wet marble horse in the rain.

I meant to wait. Who in Acre ever disobeyed an order of
Ralph’s? But as soon as his back was turned on me, I touched my heel against Misty’s side and rode back up the lane towards the church.

I did not dare stand where I had stood in the dream. I feared that would make the thunder bellow and the lightning come down upon us. I could not remember from the dream what time of day it had been. I did not know how long we had to save Acre, to keep the Carter girl from burning, to keep the dreadful weight of the broken spire off the fragile roof above Ted and his mother, but I knew we did not have long.

The sky had been grey in the dream and I could not tell if it was a stormy dawn or stormy noontide; but the little girl had been in her nightshift, and the Carters were early risers.

I slid from the saddle and tied Misty to the vicarage gate – the south side of the street – and then I ran up the front path to Ted Tyacke’s cottage, hammered on his door and stepped back so he could see me.

‘Julia! What is it?’

‘Come down, Ted,’ was all I said. And I waited for my old playmate in the rain by his cottage door.

He had pulled on his breeches and a jerkin but was still barefoot. ‘Come in,’ he said, and took my hand to draw me into the cottage out of the rain. I shied back like a frightened horse and took one scared look over my shoulder at the church spire beside the cottage.

‘No!’ I said.

He saw the fright on my face and that scared him. It made him listen to me as I told him I had dreamed I saw his home crushed and Acre fired. Then he turned his head and called to his mother, and went indoors and pulled on his boots. ‘I believe you,’ he said briefly. ‘We’ll get our things out into the lane. Go and wake the others.’

I turned back to the lane and Ralph Megson was there, waiting beside my horse, his dark face inscrutable, his greying hair spiky with the wet. ‘What now?’ he asked as though he had nothing to say in the matter.

‘We must wake the village,’ I said. ‘The first three cottages will be wrecked, but if we pull down the next two – the Smiths’ and the Coopers’ – then that can be a fire-break. We can fight the fire there.’

Ralph nodded.

‘Will you ring the church bell?’ he inquired.

‘Oh, yes!’ I said. I had not thought of it before. ‘Yes!’ But then I stopped dead at the thought of going into the church with the storm coming nearer. And as I hesitated, there was a dull rumble of thunder at the head of the downs and the sky darkened.

I gave a little sob. ‘I don’t dare,’ I said.

Ralph folded his arms. ‘Your dream,’ he said coldly. ‘Your sight. If you think you have seen aright, then you must do it.’ And he turned his back on me to loosen Misty’s girth as if I were paying a social call to Acre and as if there were not a thunderstorm at our heels and the rain pouring down on our heads.

‘Ralph…’ I said. It was the first time I had ever deliberately used his first name.

He turned, and his smile was as old as the land. ‘If you are the favoured child, then you are in the right,’ he said softly. ‘Prove yourself, Julia.’

I gasped and whirled on my heel and ran up the couple of steps to the lich-gate and flung it open. I was inside the church porch before I had time to think of it, before I had time to be afraid; and I had the furry bell-pull in my hand before I took breath. I dropped my weight on it and gritted my teeth when there was no sound. The wheel-mounted bell had moved, but not enough for the clapper to strike. I took my feet off the ground and swung like a playing child, and then I heard the deep loud tolling of the bell and tugged it down and dropped my weight on it for half a dozen times before I left off and went back outside.

The sky had darkened even in that short time and its ominous yellowy tinge made the faces of the people in the lane look white. They had gathered around Ralph, but I saw him nod towards me and I knew he had refused them an explanation. I came down
the church path and paused at the head of the steps where they could see me.

‘I had a dream,’ I said awkwardly. I could hear my voice was thin, girlish, without authority. I sounded silly; it needed only one laugh, only one quick jest and they would go back to their houses cursing the vanity of a girl who would drag them out of warm beds into the rain because she had a nightmare.

‘Listen to me!’ I said desperately. ‘I dreamed there was a storm and the church was struck and the spire fell down that way.’ I made a chopping gesture with my hand towards Ted’s cottage. ‘It crushed the three cottages, and then they caught fire. The fire spread down the row.’

I paused. Ned Smith, his face blurred with sleep, rubbed his hands across his face. ‘Are you saying you dreamed true?’ he demanded.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I am sure.’

‘We must pull down two cottages, the two after the Clays’,’ I said. ‘That’s the Coopers’ cottage…and yours, Ned Smith.’

His face darkened, and there was a murmur from the crowd. ‘Pull down my cottage for a fire-break for a fire which has not happened?’ he demanded.

I looked around for Ralph. He was at the back of the crowd beside my horse. He was not going to help me. Ted was there, and Matthew Merry; Clary was running up the lane, her skirts held high out of the mud, her legs bare. But none of them could help me; not even those three, my best friends, could help me. I feared I could not do it on my own. I waited for a moment. There was nothing I could say.

And then, like the answer to a prayer, I heard the high sweet singing over the noise of the wind and the rain and the rumble of thunder ringing on the downs.

‘Yes,’ I said, and there was something in my voice which would not be contradicted. ‘Yes. I
know
it is necessary. I would not order it if I did not know.’

There was a sigh, like the wind before a rainstorm, which ran
through all the older ones when they heard me speak thus. And I knew it was because they recognized my voice. Her voice.

‘I am Beatrice’s heir,’ I said, calling on her name recklessly, regardless of what it would cost me come the time I wanted to be an indoor girl again. ‘I am the favoured child. I have the sight. Pull down the houses.’

They moved then, they moved as if we were all in a dream, as if we were all as mad as one another, and they went into the cottages which were to be pulled down, and into the cottages which would be crushed, and carried out the furniture and stacked it in the street. They made a chain of people and passed the bedding and dry goods hand to hand into the Smiths’ loose boxes; and then Ned Smith took his bill hook and his axe and started ripping the thatch off his house and throwing it down in the street, and the other men climbed up with hatchets to hack the rafters out.

The vicarage door opened, and I saw Dr Pearce, his face white, his wig askew, tying the cord of his dressing-gown as he ran down the garden path to the gate where my horse was tied.

‘Are you mad?’ he demanded. ‘Have you all gone quite mad? Julia! What are you…’ His hand was on the latch and he would have come out into the lane, but Ralph put a hand down on the top of the gate and held it shut. ‘Away, Vicar,’ he said softly. ‘This is not for you.’

They had wavered at the sound of Dr Pearce’s voice. The voice of the real world, the world where seeings could not happen, that voice called to them from a well-kept garden. But Acre had been steeped in madness and magic for years, and they carried on, wrecking their own houses, tearing a great gap in the village street.

‘What are they doing?’ Dr Pearce demanded of Ralph. ‘What do they think they are doing?’

‘Get you inside, Vicar,’ Ralph said gently, ‘and watch.’

Dr Pearce looked blankly at Ralph, and then at me. I tried to smile at him, to find some words to say, but I knew my face was tranced, mad. ‘Go!’ I said to him. And it was not me speaking. ‘Don’t stop us. We have little time.’

Dr Pearce looked again at Ralph barring his gate, as moveable as a block of granite in a chalk landscape, and then he turned and went back into his house. I saw the curtains of his study flutter and I knew he was watching.

The storm was growing nearer, and I was starting to feel afraid. The thunder was louder and the sky had grown darker just in the short time since I had been on the church steps. They were working fast now. The Smiths’ cottage was down – just the walls left standing – and the dry floorboards and the tinder-box rafters were piled higgledy-piggledy in the yard of the forge. The next-door cottage, belonging to the Coopers, was half down. At least the roof was off, and then I heard a dull rumble of thunder and a crack of lightning so loud that I thought it directly overhead.