The Favoured Child Read online

  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.

  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.

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