The Favoured Child Read online

  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.

  ‘It is here!’ I called to Ralph, and I was utterly afraid.

  And Ralph – that creature of madness and bad weather-smiled at me as I knew he had smiled at Beatrice when he and the storm had come for her. ‘Well, they are ready,’ he said, and he might have been speaking of a field fit for sowing.

  I stepped down from the lich-gate and was going towards him, afraid of being too close to the church, when a sudden rumble of thunder, infinitely menacing, made me lose my footing and stagger to one side. I was on the patch of grass they called Miss Beatrice’s Corner and the rain was sheeting down on me like a river off a water-wheel. The thunder was right overhead in a bang like a thousand cannon, and I spun around and saw the lightning come down, an angel’s arrow, and split the church spire like a cleaver through a carrot. I screamed then, but in the storm and the thunder I made no noise, and, deafened by the thunder, in a silence as deep as the dream, I saw the spire topple and fall on to the three empty cottages and the cloud of dust grow from the rubble.

  It was not dust, it was smoke, heavy dull-red smoke, and then bright flames leaped and stretched out, seeking to swallow all of Acre. Misty threw up her head and shrieked in her terror, and Ralph had tight hold of her reins. I wanted to go to her, but I found I was on my knees in the soaking grass, trembling with fright and waiting for the horror of the burning child and the wreck of the village.

  The chain was handing buckets down the line towards the fire. They had thought of that -I had not. And they were soaking the ruins of the Smiths’ cottage and the Coopers’ cottage so that the greedy flames had nowhere to go but up into the grey sky, into the rain, and they grew more and more smoky and I choked in the smoke when the wind spun the clouds of grey around, and then I got to my feet and stumbled through the rain and the smoke towards Ralph. He spoke to me, but my head was full of the noise of the thunder, and my eyes were blinded by the lightning, and I heard nothing, nothing at all. I just put out my hands to him, and my knees buckled beneath me, and I went down before he was near enough to catch me.

  12

  ‘I don’t understand exactly what you are saying, Mr Megson.’ The voice was my mama’s, and it was the anxiety in her tone which pulled me from my sleep. I opened my eyes and leaned up on one elbow. I was not in my bedroom at home. I blinked at the pretty patterned wallpaper and the pale curtains at the window. The air smelled of smoke.

  ‘She came to my cottage and said she had a dream.’ Ralph was patient, reassuring. I had heard him use that tone with frightened animals, I had seen him still them with his voice.

  I looked around the room. It was the guest bedroom at the vicarage; I was lying on top of the counterpane, covered with a thick wool shawl, still dressed in my damp riding habit. Through the thin walls I could hear Mama as clearly as if we were in the same room.

  ‘It is not unusual,’ Ralph said gently. ‘She is a very sensitive and perceptive young woman.’

  ‘Are you saying she had some kind of premonition of the lightning strike?’ That was Uncle John’s voice. He had himself under tight control, but I knew he hated talk of anything outside an ordered universe. He was a logical man, my Uncle John.

  Ralph knew that too. ‘Why not?’ he asked easily. ‘Everyone knows that animals can sense a storm coming. Many a farmer will tell you of horses or stock breaking out of a stable before a storm and the stable catching fire. Miss Julia seems to have a gift to sense danger for Acre. That is special, but it is not unheard of.’

  There was silence from downstairs. I sat up in bed and put my hand to my head. I felt light-headed and dizzy, but filled with the most enormous elation. The Carter child had not been burned. The baby had not been left inside a blazing cottage. Ted Tyacke and his mother had not been buried under tons of rubble. Acre was safe.

  ‘It is the illness of that family.’ Uncle John sounded appalled. ‘Julia has the unbalanced nature of the Laceys. I have feared it, I have seen it coming. They bred too close and it has come out in her.’

  ‘No!’ I heard Mama exclaim. ‘She is my daughter. She is not bred badly. She has been overwrought and distressed. She has been worked too hard. It is our fault for not taking better care of her, John. It is not her fault, nor the fault of her family.’

  ‘She looked strange…’ Dr Pearce said, his voice very low. ‘For a moment I mistook her, I thought it was…’

  ‘No!’ my mama interrupted sharply. ‘Julia has been overworked. It is my fault, it is our fault. It has made her look pale and she has got thinner.’

  ‘Lady Lacey is right,’ came Ralph’s reassuring rumble. ‘And she is a special girl with special gifts. She sensed the thunder coming and she did the right thing. It is nothing more than ships’ captains do at sea every day.’

  I sat up in my bed and called out, ‘Mama!’

  At once the parlour door opened and I heard her run up the stairs. She came breathlessly into my room. ‘Oh, my darling!’ she said. ‘Awake at last! You were just like the Sleeping Beauty up here. But John insisted you should be left until you were ready to wake. What a fright you have given us all!’ Her smile was forced. ‘Do you have any pain? Do you feel all right now?’ she aske