The Favoured Child Read online

  ‘Let’s walk,’ I said, and we stepped out into the stars and I pulled the scarlet-lined hood of my new cape up over my head.

  I had one hand tucked inside the furry recesses of my muff, and James Fortescue had the other under his arm, warm against his cloak. It was a brilliant night, as bright as only a winter night can be. The stars were as thick as meadow flowers across a purple-black sky, and the moon had that hazy halo which always means frost. Our footsteps clattered on the paving stones and we walked uphill from the Assembly Rooms with an easy, even pace, close together to get through the throng of dancers coming out and calling goodnight to each other. The chairmen shouted for people crossing the road to make way for them, and a linkboy ran up to us with a torch in his hand and said to James, ‘Light your way, sir?’

  ‘Starlight is enough tonight,’ James said gently, and he reached inside his cape seeking a coin.

  I was looking at the lad’s feet. He had shoes, but they were gone at the soles, tied on with rags. Above the ragged tongue of leather his bare ankles were blue with cold, scarred with old flea-bites. His breeches stopped between knee and calf – a dirty pair of rags which had once been velvet. His jacket was a man’s coat folded over and over at the cuffs so that his skinny wrists showed and his hands were free. He was one of the scum of Bath that float on the rising tide of wealth in the city. He was one of the many that survive on a little luck, a little thieving and a little beggary. I had seen poverty in Acre, but country poverty is nothing compared to the degradation that the poor suffered in this most elegant of towns. One might throw a penny into an outstretched bowl at the market, or give to a special collection in church, but it was possible to spend all one’s days among the wealthy and the beautiful and to see no hardship at all. The city councillors kept it well hidden, fearing to shock their wealthy patrons. And we – the ones with the money and the leisure and the Christian compassion – we liked the streets to be clean and clear of paupers.

  ‘Here you are,’ James said kindly and the little lad looked up at him and smiled. He must have been about fourteen, but he was so slight and so thin that he looked younger. But there was something about his face which struck me, that square forehead and the deep-set eyes.

  As I stared at him, the singing noise of Wideacre fell upon me like a waterfall and drowned out the street sounds and the street sights. All I could see was his pale peaked face and all I could hear was a voice saying, ‘Take him home! Take him home!’ in a tone of such longing and grief that you would have thought it was his mother calling for him.

  ‘I am going to take you home,’ I said, making it sound like the most simple thing in the world. ‘I am going to take you home.’

  His sharp face turned up towards me, yellowy pale in the light from the torch. ‘To Acre?’ he asked.

  And then I knew him for one of the lost children of Acre who had been taken for the mills in the north and never returned. ‘Yes,’ I said, and I smiled at him, though I could have wept. ‘Yes,’ I said again. ‘I am Julia Lacey. It is all coming right in Acre now, and there will be work for you if you will let me send you home. I am Clary Dench’s friend, and Matthew Merry’s, and Ted Tyacke’s. They are all working for wages in Acre now, and Ralph Megson has come home and is managing the estate.’

  He thrust his torch at James and grabbed both my hands in his bare dirty grip. ‘Is that right?’ he said urgently. ‘Are they working in the village again? Can I really get home? Won’t they send me back here if I go home?’

  ‘No,’ I said firmly. ‘I am part heir to the estate. I am Julia Lacey, and what I say is done in Wideacre. There will be work for you, and I shall pay for your journey home. I shall write ahead and tell them that you are coming, and there will be a place for you to live and a job for you to do. I can promise you that, and I do promise it.’

  He shook both my hands at once then as if we might suddenly dance together in the cold streets of night-time Bath. ‘I can hardly believe it!’ he said, and he was grinning and shaking my hands, and tossing his head as if to try to wake from a dream of good luck. ‘I can’t believe I should meet you like this!’

  ‘How did you recognize him?’ James asked quietly.

  I turned towards him. I had quite forgotten he was there. He had thrust the torch in a bracket on the railings and was leaning against them, watching the two of us. ‘I don’t know. I just guessed, I suppose,’ I said with the lie I had learned from Dr Phillips who had taught me to disbelieve my own senses. Then I hesitated. I had trusted James Fortescue with the truth about my dreams and my seeings. ‘No, that’s not true,’ I said simply. ‘It was the sight. I knew I had to take him home; but I did not know why. I did not know who he was. But now I come to look at him, he does look Sussex-bred to me.’

  ‘I’m Jimmy Dart,’ he said. ‘My ma was in service at Havering Hall and when she got big with me, they sent her away. She stayed in Acre and worked for Wideacre. But when I was five or six, she run off, and they took me on the parish. They put me in the workhouse. When Mr Blithe came around for paupers, they sent me and the others. We worked for him in his mill. Cruel work that was. Then he could get no more cotton and he shut the mill and we all had to leave. They wouldn’t take us on the parish, because we hadn’t been born and bred there, and they wouldn’t take us back on Wideacre. Julie heard that paupers could get into Bath, but we had no money for the journey. It was winter an’ all. Cold, and we had no shoes. We walked. A long walk, and little Sally died on the way. Just curled up in a field and wouldn’t walk no more. We stayed with her till she was cold and stiff and then we left her. Didn’t know what else we could do. Julie cried then. She said it was the last time she ever would cry. Then we got to Bath, and I had a fight with a boy and won it, so I got his torch.’

  ‘He gave it to you?’ I asked.

  ‘I killed him,’ Jimmy said, off-handedly. ‘In the fight. I choked him. It wasn’t much, he was only a little boy. But I got his torch, so I could start earning us money. I’ve done it for a long time now.’

  I put a hand out to steady myself on the railings. ‘You killed him?’ I asked faintly.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We got the place where he used to sleep as well after that. We stay there now.’

  I said nothing. Jimmy looked me over in the silence, taking in the handsome pelisse with the rich gold fringe and the fur muff.

  ‘You couldn’t give me a penny, could you?’ he asked. ‘Then I could buy some gin for Julie. She’d like that. It’s better than bread for us if we can buy gin.’

  I was about to say no, that I could not bear them to buy gin, that they should have food and clothing and a passage to Wideacre, but that they must not drink gin, never drink again. But James Fortescue stepped forward and put a hand under my elbow. ‘Yes, you shall have some money at once,’ he said gently. ‘Is this Julie from Wideacre too?’

  Oh, aye,’ Jimmy said, watching the movement of James’s hand in his pocket, and watching him bring out a shilling glinting as bright as a knife in the moonlight. ‘We stayed together, us Wideacre paupers. Not little Sal who died, and not George who threw himself in the river last winter when he was drunk, but the rest of us live down by the Fish Quay.’

  James handed over the shilling. ‘Would the rest of them like to go home?’ he asked. ‘To Wideacre, if it could be arranged?’

  A smile spread over Jimmy’s face like the sun rising over the downs. Oh, aye,’ he said, ‘I reckon they would.’

  ‘I’ll come and see you all,’ I said with sudden decision. Whatever they had done, however they now lived, they were Acre children who should have been raised on Acre. The little girl who had died in the field and the youth who had jumped into the river were in cold water and hard earth far from their homes. And that was the fault of the Laceys. The Laceys, and the squires, and the world which works the way we like it, with very many poor people, and very few rich. ‘I’ll come and see you, and I’ll write to Acre tonight,’ I promised.

  ‘You’ll never find it on your own