The Favoured Child Read online

  The ripples from our touching the water cleared and steadied, and I found I was gazing at the reflection of us, side by side. The dark water was kind to Ralph, and he did not look old enough to be my father. It hid the dark lines drawn by pain on either side of his mouth and the deep parallel furrows between his eyebrows. In the shifting sunlight which filtered through the budding leaves over our heads he looked not old and not young, but timeless; as ageless as one of the trees around us, as the earth they were rooted in.

  I thought of the legend about the Culler in the village, that he was one of the dark gods of the earth who had taken Beatrice away to the heart of the land, and I gave a little shudder and felt suddenly icy down my spine as I realized I was alone in the darkest part of the Wideacre woods with a killer.

  Ralph turned his head at the almost imperceptible movement and gave me a long unsmiling stare. ‘Look at yourself,’ he said in a whisper, as if he knew what I had been thinking.

  I turned my gaze back to the waters and saw my own face. I knew at once why John had turned pale to see me and why Ralph had stared at me that day in the village.

  I had never seen Beatrice’s picture, nor heard a description of her, other than that her hair was chestnut red and her eyes hazel, almost green. But I had seen her face in the mirror of the dream and I had seen her smile in my mirror. Robbed of colour by the darkness of the pool, so my light hair and grey eyes were all one shadowy tone, I knew I was as like to her as a daughter. My eyes were not set at such a slant as Beatrice’s and my chin was not as determined as the one of the woman who had ruled this land. But seeing my reflection in that pool, alongside the reflection of her lover, no one could have said whether it was her or me.

  ‘You have no call to fear me,’ Ralph said, speaking to my reflection in the water, his face gentle. ‘I am not likely to forget that she is dead. I am not likely to forget that you are quite another lovely girl – however much you resemble her. And I am not a man to be haunted by ghosts.’

  We were silent for a few minutes.

  ‘Hands cold?’ he asked. I nodded. ‘Now, without making a ripple, without disturbing the water, you move your hands under the bank. Make your hand straight, like the fish itself.’ Ralph drew his hands in towards the bank and spread out his arms, questing with blind fingertips under the water. ‘I have one,’ he said with quiet satisfaction. ‘Do you stay still now.’

  I froze obediently and saw Ralph’s face darken with concentration.

  ‘You stroke his belly,’ he said, the words hardly louder than a breath. ‘You softly, softly run a finger down his belly. He likes that, it makes him all sleepy, all dreamy, all unawares. Then, when you feel him growing heavier and come into your hand, you snatch him with two ringers under his gills and flick him out!’

  As he spoke, Ralph suddenly twitched and flung on to the bank between us a silver, slithering, gasping fish. I flinched back in instinctive fright and Ralph laughed aloud at my face. He took a stone from the bank and knocked the trout on the head, impartially, accurately, and then the thing was still except for a little twitch along the spine.

  ‘It’s still alive,’ I said uneasily.

  ‘Nay,’ Ralph said gently. ‘It is twitching from habit. It’s dead right enough.’

  I regarded the smooth speckled scales with awe.

  ‘Next time you will do it,’ Ralph promised. ‘I should have let you try your luck with this one. But it is so long since I last poached that I could not resist the temptation when I felt him hiding under the bank like that.’

  I smiled and nodded; but I understood not at all.

  ‘Would you like to try your luck again?’ Ralph invited. ‘Or should you be home?’

  ‘I have to be home at three for dinner,’ I said.

  Ralph rolled on his back and squinted up at the sun through the criss-crossing branches. ‘You’ve half an hour,’ he said with certainty.

  ‘Uncle John will be late anyway,’ I said idly. ‘He went to Chichester to see the lawyers again. He really does want to turn over the farmland to Acre, you know.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Ralph. ‘I know he does. It’s what the future holds that worries me.’

  ‘I thought you would be pleased,’ I said shyly. ‘I thought you would see this as a great chance for Acre. Not just to get free of the poverty, but to be free of the power of the squires for ever.’

  Ralph gave me a quick little smile. ‘But it doesn’t work like that, does it?’ he said gently. ‘Acre is not an island. Acre men and women have to leave the village to earn wages, and have to come home again. I can’t see anyone persuading them that their wages should be paid into a common fund! So the brightest and the best of the young people will try to leave the village and work outside where they earn good rates and keep all their money. Then there’s the gentry…’ He paused.

  ‘They’re not all bad,’ I said.

  He smiled at me again. ‘Nay,’ he said. ‘Even the worst of them can be likeable enough rogues. But they have the power. If Acre was successful, they’d use that power against the village, I’ve no doubt of that. They’d find a statute on the books which said it was illegal. Or if they had no law, they’d pass one in a hurry. You cannot defeat the whole country by making one little place right.’

  ‘It could be a start,’ I said earnestly. I rolled around and lay on my front, hands under my chin so that our heads were close. ‘If it worked here, perhaps people would try it elsewhere.’

  ‘Aye,’ Ralph said. ‘And even if it worked for a short time, it would be good to say we tried it, and good to know why it failed. If the gentry came against it, that would be a lesson worth showing to the people who come after us with their own hopes and their ideas.’ He sighed heavily. ‘I’m torn,’ he said frankly. ‘I know in my heart it won’t work. It depends for its success on the whim of the squire. Unless the land was bought outright by the village and owned in law by them, then it depends on the will of the squire to keep going. So the power of the Laceys over Acre is unbroken. And I could trust no single person with that much power. It is as natural to abuse power as it is to breathe. That is true for every man and every woman. And if you are reared to having power, and in a class which is used to it, and in a country which permits you – nay! encourages you – to abuse the power you have, you’re corrupt! You cannot help it.’

  ‘Do you think I am corrupted?’ I asked in a small voice.

  Ralph had been staring up at the branches above us, and he turned his head to look at me with a smile. Of course,’ he said gently, stating an obvious fact. ‘I’m not abusing you. But you come from the Quality and you are used to controlling everyone who is poorer than yourself. Put you in the hall, with a child to think of, and perhaps a couple of bad harvests and money getting tight, and I think you would do what anyone would do – you’d look to how you could make more money. And then you’d see Acre, and the people taking a share of the profits that you consider your own from the land you have claimed as your own for generations. I don’t think you’re evil, but I don’t think you’re a saint either. John has high ideas about what people can and cannot do. But I’d not trust even him if he lost his fortune and was poor and anxious.’

  ‘Will you not do it, then?’ I asked.

  I was so sorry – sorry for Uncle John who had such high hopes of what we could do in Acre, and sorry for Acre that it should not be a place where the tradition of cruelty to the poor could be pushed back, even if it was in just this one little place. And very anxious for myself, for if Ralph Megson would not manage Wideacre, then I thought that John and Mama would insist that it must be sold.

  Ralph sat up and gave a little laugh with no humour in it. ‘I’ll do it,’ he said. ‘I destroyed the power of the Laceys over the land and I have a duty to try and make something better. I always knew that it was easier to pull down than to build, and this is going to teach me that lesson in the hardest way.

  ‘I’ll do it if I can. And if I fail, if we fail, then I shall have the great pleasure of