The Favoured Child Read online

  I could think of no answer; I turned around to check that Ted and Matthew were still there. ‘Catch me!’ I squealed like a stuck pig and just toppled backwards off the wall towards them.

  We went down in a tumbled heap on to the hard ground with the two of them taking the weight of my fall. They jumped up, but I was laughing so much I could not move.

  ‘What was it? What was it?’ Clary asked, smiling already at my helpless gales.

  ‘It was Dr Pearce!’ I said. ‘Right below me. He looked up…and he said…“Miss Lacey. What on earth are you doing?”‘

  Clary gave a great wail of laughter and fell into Matthew’s arms. Ted put out a hand and pulled me to my feet, his brown round face contorted. The smaller children dropped down where they stood and howled with irrepressible mirth.

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ I said, wiping my streaming eyes. ‘I’ve got to go. I’ve got to go in the front garden gate and up the path.’

  That set us off again even worse than before, and we staggered like a band of drunkards around to the lane.

  ‘Don’t come with me,’ I begged. ‘I must stop laughing.’

  Clary nodded, still chuckling. ‘Come down to Acre again soon,’ she said. Her dirty face was streaked with the tears she had shed, and she still held her sides. ‘We could really use you in the gang. Great thief you are, Julia Lacey.’

  I nodded, still unable to speak, and then turned towards the vicar’s front gate. Half-way up the path to the pretty house I stopped and drew in a deep breath. I did not know Dr Pearce well, and I did not think I would face anything worse than a scolding. But I did not want to disgrace myself utterly by bursting out laughing on the doorstep.

  A hoot from behind me told me that Clary was watching, but I did not look around. I tapped on the door and the vicar’s housekeeper, Miss Green, opened it. She dipped a curtsy and held it wide, and I stepped into the hall, back into the world where I belonged.

  Dr Pearce came out of the library with Richard and nodded to me as if it were the first time he had seen me that morning.

  ‘Hello, Miss Lacey,’ he said pleasantly. ‘Come to walk home with your cousin? We are just finished.’

  For a moment I gaped at him, then I took my cue. Dr Pearce was not a man to seek difficulties. If he could turn a blind eye to them, then he would do so. He really did not want to know what I was doing sitting on his high garden wall with my coat torn and my face muddy and the naughty children of Acre catcalling encouragement from the lane below.

  I curtsied demurely. ‘Yes, Dr Pearce,’ I said. I held Richard’s books while he pulled on his coat and hat, and we went back outside and home for dinner.

  The children had gone, vanished like idle fox-cubs at the sound of a strange footstep. The weather had changed from the sunny morning. There were thick clouds piled all over the sky. Richard and I started at a jog-trot for home, speeded by a warning scud of rain on our backs.

  ‘Did you see Mrs Green?’ Richard asked breathlessly.

  ‘No,’ I said. I was having trouble keeping up for I was tired from my run with the village children and bruised from the fight with Clary and the fall from Dr Pearce’s wall.

  ‘Why not?’ Richard demanded. His blue eyes were bright. As soon as I had stepped over the vicar’s threshold, he had seen the scratch on my face and my tangled hair. He knew something had happened, but he would not ask me directly.

  ‘Tell you later,’ I puffed. I had no breath for a long explanation and I wanted time to think about exactly what I would tell Richard. I had a feeling, which I could not have explained, but which I thought was right, that I did not want to tell Richard the strange stories they had invented in the village about his mama. They might distress him. And I was sure, though I could not have said why, that I did not want to tell him of this newly woven fable of a favoured child, the one who was the true heir.

  Richard heard the hesitation in my voice and skidded to a sudden stop and grabbed me by the arm so I swung around to face him. The rain stung my right cheek, but we were a little sheltered by the trees which overhung on the Wideacre side of Acre lane. In the field behind me the wind whistled and the rain sliced down on the self-seeded wheat and brambles.

  ‘Tell me now,’ he said.

  I heard the warning note in his voice and I stood, uncomplaining, in the rain and told him of the walk to the wood and the fight with Clary and the truce we seemed to have made. I told him every single word spoken except Clary’s story about Beatrice. Richard’s stillness warned me that I had better sound thorough; and I was. I also omitted the taunt that I fought his battles for him. I did not tell him that Matthew had spat at the mention of his name. And I said nothing about scrumping the apples.

  Richard heard me out, although the rain was making his hair curly with the damp so that he looked more like a fallen cherub than ever. ‘Well done, Julia!’ he said warmly when I had finished. ‘You are a brave girl. I am glad that you are not afraid of Acre any more. You were quite right to tackle the children. Now you will not be afraid to come with me when I go to have my lessons.’

  I glowed under his approval.

  ‘I never minded them,’ he said carelessly, ‘but I am glad you have got over your fear.’

  He let my arm go and turned to walk on. I hesitated only for a moment. One part of me wanted to correct him, the anxious proud voice in me which wanted to say, ‘But wait, Richard, you were afraid. I tackled the children for you.’ Then I thought of my grandmama’s warning that a lady’s place is second place, and I smiled a little secret smile, kept my peace and strode alongside him. Then the storm came down on our heads and we broke into a run and splashed up the drive in the milky puddles and dived in the back door, calling for towels and clean clothes. We were greeted by a scolding from Mrs Gough for tracking mud all over her clean kitchen floor.

  4

  That was the start of a friendship for me – my friendship with Clary Dench – which did so much to reconcile me to my task of becoming a young lady of Quality. Not because Clary knew my world, or cared anything for its arcane restrictions, but because with her I had an escape and a hiding-place from the standards of my mama and from the discipline I had imposed on myself by my determination to be a good daughter and, in the future, a good wife.

  With Clary I could be myself. I loved her despite the differences in our lives, despite the fight at our first meeting and our regular quarrels thereafter. We forged an unquestioning friendship, in that we took enormous pleasure in each other’s company without ever wondering why we liked each other so much. I just found that it suited me very well to go every morning to the vicarage with Richard, to leave him there for his lessons and then to meet Clary and spend an hour or two of my leisured empty days with her.

  We often walked together, past the mill down to the Fenny. Old Mrs Green always had a smile for me now, and sometimes I would beg a twist of tea in a piece of paper from the Dower House larder, and Clary and I would go and sit by the tiny fire in the huge fireplace while Mrs Green made tea and told our fortunes in the tea-leaves. It was all a game – I think she had no real skill. She was copying what the gypsies did when they pitched their wagons on the common land for winter and came around to the houses, selling little wooden toys and whittled flowers, and offering to tell fortunes.

  When the weather was good, Clary and I would walk on the common, or down to the Fenny. During the long hot summertime we would strip down to our shifts and bathe in the deeper pools of the river. Neither of us could swim properly, but if Clary held my chin above water-level with one brown hand over my mouth to keep the water out, I could kick along for a few yards before sinking inelegantly in splashes and gales of laughter.

  Clary was better. Within the week she could splash from one side of the pool to the other, and she even learned to plunge underwater and swim for half the length before coming up gasping, hair streaming. ‘I must have been born with a caul!’ she said. ‘I shan’t never drown at any rate.’

  I was lazing in the s