The Favoured Child Read online

  They farmed sheep there in great flocks, and for much of the way the road was unfenced; the white-faced sheep had learned to scurry out of the way of the stage-coach when the guard blew on his horn. Even here the mania for wheat was gripping the farmers, and I saw many fields which had been newly cut from the free long sheep-runs and fenced and ploughed, ready for spring sowing.

  I liked the drive and watching the scenery. I liked listening to Jem spinning yarns about us to the ostlers in the coaching inns. And I enjoyed listening to Mama promising me the treats I should have in Bath.

  But it was no good, and I could not make it good. I felt I was in disgrace. I felt I was on trial. When Mama glanced anxiously at me when I woke from a half-dreaming sleep, my head against the soft squabs of the coach, I flushed for fear that I might have spoken aloud, for fear that she might have seen my eyelids flutter in my sleep, for fear that she thought that I had been dreaming again.

  We shared a bedchamber for the night we stopped on the road in a coaching inn just before Salisbury. I woke in the night with Mama’s hand gentle on my shoulder and her face grave under her nightcap.

  ‘What is it?’ I said, still bemused from sleep and from a dream I had had of being a little girl again on Wideacre, playing with a lad as dark-haired as Richard and with a smile as roguish.

  ‘You were dreaming,’ she said low. ‘And you spoke in your sleep. You said, “Ralph.”‘

  I raised myself up on one arm and stretched out a hand to her. ‘It does not matter, Mama,’ I said earnestly. ‘I was thinking of the apple trees, of something I had to say to Mr Megson. That was all.’

  She nodded. ‘I am sorry to have woken you, then,’ she said tentatively. ‘John said…’ she hesitated. ‘John said that perhaps it would be better if you did not sleep and have your…your dreams, for a little while. He thinks they overtax your imagination.’

  I nodded; I kept my eyes down. ‘It does not matter, Mama,’ I said again, and I knew I sounded surly.

  ‘No,’ she said softly. She went to her travelling bag and brought out the little bottle of medicine which I had come both to love and to dread. ‘Perhaps you should take some of this,’ she said.

  I sighed, resigned, rubbing the sleep from my eyes. I swallowed the medicine to please her and waited for the familiar dreamy sense of unreality to overtake me. They were robbing me of my dreams, of my very being. They were dissolving the strange unpredictable part of me in the golden syrup so I lost my clear bright dream-given wisdom, and learned instead of a dozy unreality.

  ‘G’night,’ I said, the drug clogging my speech. Mama kissed me on the forehead as I lay down, and crossed back to her own bed and slipped between the covers.

  ‘Goodnight again,’ she said sweetly; and then, under her breath so I could hardly hear her, she added, ‘God bless you and keep you safe.’

  She had booked us some lodgings in Gay Street, Bath. ‘It was just being built when my mama married Lord Havering and we came to Havering Hall,’ she told me as we rattled along the last few miles on the high road over the hills towards the city. ‘I dare say I shall be completely lost. We used to live near to the baths for my own papa to take the water and to bathe. Even when I was a little girl, the whole place was changing almost every day, it seemed. Since then they have built street after street.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. I was looking from the carriage window down the hill. The broad river, a little faster and deeper than usual from the winter rains, was spilling over its banks into the water-meadows. The willow trees stood in water, their sparse branches reflected and the grey sky above them. The Fenny would be in flood too, I thought.

  ‘Richard would love to see the buildings,’ Mama said. ‘We must ask him and John to come and visit us, at least for a few days, as soon as we are settled and you have seen Dr Phillips.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said again.

  ‘And the shops are certain to be wonderful,’ Mama said. She was leaning forward on her seat to look ahead down the road. Even in my drug-given stupidity, I could not help but smile at her eagerness. The carriage brakes went on as we turned down a steep hill and Mama gasped at the view. The city was a sea of gold like some new Jerusalem set down on a plain of sunshine. The abbey in the middle dominated the town, with its tall tower reaching up to touch the very floor of heaven; and gathered all around it like square pats of dairy butter were the houses in the lemon-rind paleness of the Bath stone.

  We rattled over the bridge and at once Jem on the box checked the horses and brought them to a nervous walk. The streets were impossibly crowded, and I did not see how we should find our way through at all. Everywhere there were sedan chairs, Bath chairs, swaying perilously as sweating brawny chairmen trotted like mad pedlars, one in front, one behind. Many of the chairs had the curtains drawn, but in one or two I caught a glimpse of blankets and towels and a pale white face, and in another a red-faced dandy snoring. There were street-sellers shouting and link-boys and crossing-sweepers jostling at the roadside. There were pedlars spreading their packs out on the pavements, and a tooth-drawer with a stool and a bloodstained apron. And in the doorways were beggars with bitter ingratiating smiles and scabby hands held out, and little children on their knees flushed rosy red with some disease of the skin.

  ‘This is just the outskirts,’ Mama said excusingly. ‘Every city has its poorer quarters, Julia. Even Chichester.’

  ‘I know,’ I said, and I leaned back inside the carriage, for there were two drunk men reeling across the cobbled road towards us, and I did not want them to see me and start calling names.

  The wagon ahead of us, which had been blocking the road, started up, so Jem could move the horses forward. I heard him yell, ‘Thank ’ee gents’ to a couple of chairmen who had been giving him directions for our street, and I smiled to hear the Sussex drawl raised loud above the noise of the city.

  ‘Gracious,’ said Mama. ‘I had forgotten how noisy it was!’

  I nodded, and she stared from her window and I from mine, like a pair of milkmaids seeing a city for the first time.

  The noise and the confusion on the roads eased a little as we turned away from the centre of the town, but we went no faster. The carriage creaked against the hill.

  ‘This is a fearful slope for horses,’ I said to Mama. She had her guidebook out on her lap.

  ‘Hardly anyone uses a carriage,’ she said. ‘I think this is Gay Street. We must find number twelve.’

  The carriage-wheels slid and bumped on the cobbles, and I heard Jem curse the horses, and then we came to a standstill and the postboy came around and opened the door and set the steps down.

  ‘Thank you,’ Mama said and smiled at him and waited while he ran up the steps to the house and banged on the knocker. The door opened at once and our landlady, Mrs Gibson, was there to greet us. She swept Mama a deep curtsy and bobbed to me, exclaimed over the length of our journey and the coldness of the day and swept us into the parlour, where the table was laid for tea and the kettle just set to boil.

  We had taken only one parlour, a dining-room and two bedrooms in the house. Mama had the large bedroom at the front of the house, but I thought I had done better with the smaller room which looked out over some gardens down the valley. ‘At least I can see some trees when I wake in the morning,’ I said. But I said it softly so that Mama should not hear.

  Jem would have lodgings at the stables where the carriage was to be kept. There was no room for him in the house. Mama had not even brought Jenny Hodgett to wait on her. Instead we would have Mrs Gibson’s maid. Her name was Meg and she brought us two letters for Mama into the parlour while we were having our tea, with an air so gracious and condescending that I nearly rose to my feet to curtsy to her.

  Mama smiled at me when the door closed behind her. ‘Town polish, Julia,’ she said. ‘We have just been patronized by a maidservant. We must certainly go to the dressmaker’s tomorrow!’

  I smiled back, but my eyes were on Mama’s letters. One bore a heavy red seal and I thought