The Favoured Child Read online

  ‘And now we will stop,’ he said gently, and I glanced up at the clock and saw an hour had gone by; it was midday, and the logs had burned low in the grate.

  My head ached.

  ‘The same time tomorrow,’ he said to Mama. ‘We have made gweat pwogwess today.’

  She nodded and went towards the door. I followed her as though I were walking in a dream – a new dream – one where I had talked out everything I knew and was left an ordinary girl indeed. The shell of what I had been.

  ‘Now what?’ Mama said with forced brightness as we found ourselves on the pavement outside the doctor’s house with a chill wind blowing and a smell of snow in the air. ‘We should go to the Assembly Rooms and see what the programme of events is for the week. And we must go to the Pump Room and taste the water and put our names in the book. And perhaps you would like to go to a bakery for a coffee – oh! and Julia! Bath buns! We must have some Bath buns!’

  ‘Please may I go home?’ I asked miserably. ‘I am sorry, Mama, but I have a pitiful headache. Please may I go home?’

  She took my arm at once and we walked back down Gay Street to our lodgings. My mama’s step beside me was lighter than my own. I thought then, as I wearily went up to the front door and up the stairs to my bedroom, that if this was how it felt to become well, I had rather a thousand times remain ill.

  Mama left me to sleep until dinner-time, but after we had eaten and my headache was quite gone, she insisted that we go out at once to shop, to see the sights and to put our names down in the Visitors’ Book so as to announce to the polite world that we had arrived.

  ‘I wish we knew someone,’ I said as we went into the Pump Room and hesitated in the doorway with three dozen strangers looking at us.

  ‘We will,’ Mama said cheerfully. ‘Bath is the most sociable place in the world. It always has been. We will have dozens of friends before the end of the week.’

  ‘There’s that girl!’ I said suddenly. ‘The girl we saw at the doctor’s!’

  She was sitting at a table, drinking a glass of the waters, among a group of young people. I looked for the brown-eyed man, but he was not with her. There were two other girls, one standing behind her chair and laughing with a young man, and one sitting beside her looking at plates in a fashion magazine. Two young men were looking over her shoulder and laughing at something. In the bright candlelight of the public room, with her friends around her, she seemed to look more frail and vulnerable than ever. As if she felt my eyes on her, she looked up, and recognized me. She rose from her seat and walked over towards us, shrugging her shawl on her shoulders. She dropped a curtsy to Mama and said, ‘How do you do? I am Marianne Fortescue. I think I saw you at Dr Phillips’s, did I not?’

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ Mama said. ‘I am Lady Lacey and this is my daughter, Julia.’

  ‘I have not seen you there before,’ Miss Fortescue said. She had a soft languid way of speaking, as though she were extremely tired. ‘I go to the doctor every morning now.’

  ‘I have to go every morning too,’ I said. ‘While we are staying in Bath, that is. We will go home in April.’

  She nodded. ‘Where is your home?’ she asked.

  ‘Sussex,’ I said. There was no singing in my head. I could have been saying an ordinary name. ? place called Wideacre, near Chichester,’ I said.

  She nodded. ‘We live in Clifton, near Bristol,’ she said, ‘so I drive over every day. My brother brought me today in his phaeton. I was quite sure he would overturn us. And I quite froze on the journey.’

  ‘Will you drive home this evening?’ Mama asked.

  ‘Oh, no,’ Miss Fortescue said. ‘There is a concert tonight which my brother especially wanted to hear. We stay tonight at my aunt’s house. Do you go to it?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mama, much to my surprise. ‘Perhaps we shall see you there.’

  Oh, good,’ said Miss Fortescue and curtsied once more to us and walked back to her group of friends. ‘Concert, Mama?’ I asked.

  She shot me a quick mischievous look. ‘You wanted friends in Bath, Julia,’ she said frankly. ‘You are on the way to having them. Miss Fortescue’s shawl alone would have cost two hundred pounds. I think her a perfectly suitable acquaintance for you!’

  ‘Very vulgar,’ I said. ‘I am surprised at you, Mama.’

  ‘Town polish,’ she said witheringly. ‘You would not understand, my Sussex milkmaid. Now we must put our names in the book and buy you a new gown for tonight.’

  Mama designed that evening as my formal introduction to Bath; and she showed me that I was indeed a Sussex milkmaid, for I did not know that it could be done so smoothly. Marianne Fortescue was there with her brother, whose name was James, and the two girls who had been with her in the Pump Room – her sister Charlotte and her cousin Emily. She was in the party of Emily’s mama, Mrs Densham, who lived in Bath and who remembered my Grandmama Havering from all those years ago. Somehow we joined their party, and I sat on the concert bench between Marianne and Emily; we went into supper with them and drank tea with them at Mrs Densham’s house when the concert finished early.

  Marianne ate nothing at the supper table; later she only drank a dish of tea and did not touch the little cakes or the savoury pastry. I saw her brother’s eyes on her, and then I saw him scowl at Emily when she said softly, ‘Marianne, please eat a little cake at least.’

  He interrupted them at once and complained that his tea was cold and had been standing too long. Between Emily’s protestations that the pot was fresh and had been properly heated too, whatever he might say, the moment when Marianne had blushed and then suddenly paled passed unnoticed by anyone except me.

  ‘I expect we shall meet at the doctor’s tomorrow,’ Marianne said to me as we stood at the head of the stairs waiting for my mama to say goodbye to Mrs Densham. ‘You will forgive me if I don’t speak to you then. I never feel very well after I have been with him, though I know he is an excellent man. I know he is doing me good.’

  ‘Quack,’ said James Fortescue so suddenly that I jumped. ‘Quack! Quack! Quack!’

  Marianne laughed aloud, the first time I had heard her laugh all evening, and she flushed pink and her eyes sparkled. ‘Don’t, James!’ she said. ‘And you should not say so! Miss Lacey will think you so rude!’

  ‘Quack! Quack!’ said James Fortescue, unrepentant and smiling at me. ‘Miss Lacey can make her own mind up. Just because he lives in a big house and has some of the smartest girls in Bath trailing in to cry on his sofa does not make him any less of a quack than if he was selling flour as medicine in Cheap Street!’

  Marianne shot an apologetic look at me. ‘My brother has a prejudice against him,’ she said. ‘Everyone I know speaks very highly of him…’

  ‘A pwejudice,’ James said outrageously. ? pwejudice indeed!’

  ‘Why do you see him?’ I asked shyly.

  Marianne glanced downwards. ‘I find it very hard to eat,’ she said as if she were confessing some secret vice. ‘It sounds very silly. I am very silly to have such a difficulty. Mama and Papa have become so concerned that they have sent me to a number of physicians.’

  James Fortescue grimaced. ‘I believe in none of this,’ he said frankly to me. ‘I like to take her, and I like to collect her, because everyone else thinks it an act of high tragedy that she started off eating little, and has gone on to eating less, and will no doubt eat more when she is hungry.’

  Marianne smiled at me, that odd smile of complicity. ‘Things never seem that simple when other people talk at you, do they?’ she asked. ‘What about you?’

  I flushed scarlet. ‘I have dreams,’ I said awkwardly. ‘Sometimes nightmares. And I had one dream which was…’ I broke off and looked around the brightly lit stairs, the chandelier sparkling above the stairwell, the bright silk wallpaper and the rich carpet. I could not tell this world about a world where thunder crashed and a church spire fell and I stood on the lichgate steps like some old warning prophet. ‘I have disturbing dreams,’ I said lamely.