The Favoured Child Read online

  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