The Favoured Child Read online

  I clattered my dish of tea on the tray and put out both hands to Richard in alarm. ‘Not for ever!’ I exclaimed. ‘Not for ever, Richard!’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘just for a couple of months. Your mama wants you to take the waters, and my papa wants you to see a doctor who is a friend of his, and your grandmama wants you affianced. They think a couple of months in Bath should do all that.’

  I looked at him carefully. He was smiling, but it was a tight mean smile. He was angry with me and trying not to show it.

  ‘And you,’ I asked breathlessly, ‘what did you say?’

  ‘I said nothing,’ he said. ‘There was little I needed to say. I have my own opinions as to what you were doing, and I shall keep them.’

  ‘I shan’t go,’ I said.

  ‘It’s quite decided,’ Richard said blithely. ‘You’ll go with your mama, and the two of you will stay at some dreary lodging-house. I should think it’s fearfully slow. You’re to leave as soon as they confirm the booking of the rooms and as soon as my papa has ordered horses for the journey. You’ll see this friend of his, a specialist. They trained together at Edinburgh, but since that time this doctor has specialized in particular complaints.’ His look at me was radiant. ‘Don’t you want to know what complaints those are?’ he asked.

  I hesitated. Some streak of self-preservation in my head warned me that I did not want to know what they were. But I felt as weary and defeated as if that dream had been a promise of my future. ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘Insanity in young ladies,’ Richard said sweetly. ‘He specializes in young ladies who have gone off their heads. And he is the one you are to see in Bath. For they all think you are mad. They think you are off your clever little head.’

  My plate clattered to the floor as I reached out for his hand. ‘No, Richard,’ I choked. ‘I will not go. They are wrong, you know they are wrong.’

  He twisted away from my grasp. ‘That’s not all,’ he said. ‘Until you leave, you are not to go into Acre at all.’

  I gaped at him. ‘Am I in disgrace?’ I asked. ‘Are they angry with me for what happened in Acre?’

  ‘They say they are afraid for you,’ Richard said smugly. ‘It’s to be given out that you are unwell. But they all believe that you are going mad.’

  I put one hand on the wooden headboard of my bed, and the other hand to my cheek to steady myself. ‘This is nonsense,’ I said weakly. ‘I have always had dreams. This was just a dream like the others. It was a seeing. Everyone knows about seeings.’

  ‘Dirty old gypsies have seeings,’ Richard said cruelly. ‘Young ladies do not. Unless they are going mad. You have always tried to resemble my mama, Beatrice; they all say that in the end she went mad. Now they are saying it is a family madness. That you are going mad too.’

  The room swam around me. ‘No, Richard,’ I said steadily. ‘It is not like that. You know it is not like that.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Richard said swiftly. ‘I used to think I knew you, but ever since my papa came home, you have been trying to be his favourite. Ralph Megson arrived in the village and you have tried to make yourself first with him, and first with Acre. Just because you are friends with those stupid little peasants, you are queening it around the whole time trying to play the squire. I get sent to my lessons, but you roam around as you please. Then as soon as I have to leave for Oxford, you are down there all the time, making up to Megson and pretending to work the land as if you were my mama come again. Now you see what comes of it! Much good it has done you! You plotted to make it seem as if you are the favoured child and now no one believes you; they just think you are crazy.’

  ‘I am not!’ I said, suddenly angry, fighting through the soporific haze of the drug and through my sense of fatigue and defeat. I threw back the bedcovers and started to rise. ‘I have the sight,’ I said defiantly. ‘And it meant I was able to save the village from the falling spire and from the fire. I did not plan to do it. I did not plot. I was drawn down there and I could not help myself. It was Beatrice. It was a seeing.’

  He put hard hands on my shoulders and pinned me, seated, to the bed. ‘There are no such things,’ he hissed, his face black with fury. ‘There are no such things as seeings. Beatrice is dead, and what you just said proves that we are all right and you are mad. You are going mad, Julia, and we will have to put you in a madhouse; and you will never live in the new Wideacre Hall, and you will never be the favoured child in Acre.’

  I put up my hands to hold his wrists and silence him. But nothing would stop him.

  ‘You are going mad, and they will send you to Bath, and your mama will take you to see a doctor, and he will know at once that all these dreams and these seeings and these singings in your head are because you are mad, and getting madder every day.’

  I screamed.

  I took my hands from holding him and punched him hard, punched at his body and screamed at him.

  At once he thrust me face down into the pillow and held me there, half stifled, with all his force while I writhed and struggled and tried to push myself up. When I lay limp, he relaxed his grip and turned my face around towards him.

  ‘Better be quiet,’ he said, and his whisper was infinitely sweet. ‘If they hear you screaming, or think that you are getting violent, it would make it so much worse.’ He smiled at me, untroubled, his face alight with joy. ‘You look mad,’ he said sweetly. ‘And you were screaming just then, quite out of control. You were violent with me, you attacked me, and now you are crying. Anyone who saw you would be certain that you have to be put in a madhouse. Better stay quiet, Julia.’ He stroked my hair from my hot forehead in a terrifying parody of care. ‘There, there,’ he said.

  I shuddered under his touch.

  He lifted my bare feet from the floor and tucked them under the bed covers again and smoothed the sheet under my chin. ‘Lie still,’ he whispered softly, his mouth very close to my ear. ‘Lie still. Your grandmama is still downstairs, and you would not want her to hear you screaming, would you? Little pet of the family.’

  I lay frozen. I did not even move when he kissed me softly on the cheek, gently, as if he loved me. Then he turned his back on me and trod light-footed to the door and shut it behind him.

  I lay where he had left me, staring blankly at the ceiling, my cheeks wet with cooling tears, with the start of a secret panic building inside me.

  It was like a nightmare, the next few days. Every sweet smile of my mama’s, every time Uncle John looked at me and asked how I was feeling was a confirmation of what Richard had said: they thought I was going mad. I knew my face was strained and my eyes wary. I tried so hard to act normally, to seem like an ordinary girl, but every day my behaviour grew odder and odder.

  The weather tormented me, for the wind and the rain had blown away into half a dozen cold sharp days with a frost in the morning and a bright red sun in the afternoon. Misty in her stable ate oats and grew restless, and yet they would not let me ride. I hardly dared glance out of the window for fear that Mama should see some wildness in my face which would appear abnormal. I was afraid even to sit on a stool at her feet and gaze into the log fire in case Uncle John should say gently, ‘What are you thinking, Julia?’

  His eyes were on me all the time and when I looked idly into the flames, he watched my rapt face. I was under observation.

  Misty was restless in the loose box of the Dower House, for Ralph had brought her back the very next day, loaded with little presents from the children of Acre. They had made me chains of little paper flowers, they had made me a bouquet of twigs with tiny buds as a promise of spring and they had collected farthings and walked to Midhurst to buy me a box of sweetmeats. But Ralph had not been allowed to see me. They had told him, they had told all the callers from Acre, that I was resting and would be leaving for Bath within the week.

  My place on the land was taken by Richard.

  Every day he ordered Prince out of the stables and rode to Acre to consult with Ralph on what should be done that d