The Favoured Child Read online

  It was not easy to smile and say farewell to the children and promise them that the hired coach would come for them at two o’clock prompt that afternoon, and that I would see them in a few weeks at Acre. I think I deceived them with my smiles. But not Marianne.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she said in an undertone as we left the parlour and walked across the wet cobbles.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Julie won’t go home and it upset me. I must get back to Mama. I’ll take a chair.’

  I moved towards the waiting chairmen, but James was at my elbow.

  ‘Julia…’ he said hesitantly.

  I waited in silence.

  ‘I hope you don’t think too badly of me,’ he said awkwardly. ‘It is true that men do go with such women, me among them. You’ve seen well enough how everything in our world goes to the highest bidder. It’s true for this too. Everything in this world is for sale. Even little girls.’ His eyes scanned my face. ‘You are disappointed in me,’ he said evenly.

  ‘Yes, I am!’ I said in a sudden rush of words. ‘I thought that you were different. I thought that you were not one of those who take and ill-treat the poor. There is no fair price for a woman’s body. There is no fair price for her ruin. You have helped to ruin girls. None of them will ever be able to go home – just like Julie. None of them will be able to marry – like her. I did not know how such things happened. I would not have dreamed that you would be part of it.’

  James smiled a wry smile. ‘I am no hero, Julia,’ he said gently. ‘I am an ordinary man, very ordinary, I dare say. You must not think too highly of me – or of anyone. I am no better than times allow.’

  ‘Well, you should be,’ I said fiercely. ‘I did not think you were a hero, but I did think you were special, very special. And now…’ I stopped. My voice was failing as my throat grew tighter with tears. ‘Everything is spoiled,’ I said like a little child.

  James put his arm around my waist and guided me towards the waiting chair. ‘Don’t say that,’ he said gently. ‘I do not believe you mean it, but it cuts me to the quick. I cannot tease you out of words like that, Julia. Don’t say such final things unless you mean them indeed.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what to think. I shall go home now and I shall write you a note this afternoon.’

  He bowed as formally to me as if we had been strangers, and then he turned to Marianne and guided her to his phaeton. She was chattering and laughing and I saw him make an effort to smile and guessed she was telling him that she was no longer visiting Dr Phillips. She waved as they went past my chair, but James just looked at me. He looked at me as if I were a ship sailing out of harbour and away from him.

  I drew the curtains on the window of the chair and put my head in my hands. I did not cry. I just sighed out my disappointment and my love and my longing into my gloved hands and wondered that the world we gentry had made to suit ourselves should sometimes give us so little joy.

  17

  I had asked for time to think; but then there was no time at all. When the chair brought me back to Gay Street, our own travelling coach was outside with the boot opened, and Mama’s trunks were being carried out. Inside the house, on the hall table, was Uncle John’s Malacca cane and grey round hat, and in Mama’s bedroom, sitting on her bed, was Uncle John himself.

  Mama was upright in bed, her wrapper on, her hair in a plait down her back, looking a thousand times better than when I had left her that morning.

  Uncle John had received two letters from me, one telling him that Mama was a little unwell and that I had called the doctor, and then another telling him that she was as yet no better.

  Of course I had to come,’ he said reasonably. ‘Do you two have any idea of the cost of a Bath physician? Celia, it is essential that you come home where I can treat you for free.’

  Mama chuckled ruefully, her voice a croaky shadow of its usual ripple. ‘We cannot go,’ she said. ‘Julia is in the middle of her season, and she has appointments with Dr Phillips.’

  John looked across the room at me. ‘I think she should stay,’ he said. ‘Could you stay with these friends of yours so that you can continue seeing Dr Phillips?’

  I rose from the chair at Mama’s bedside and went over to the window and twisted the cord for the curtains in my hand. ‘I have finished with Dr Phillips,’ I said. I shot a quick glance back at my mama. ‘I told him so this morning.’

  John stood up very tall at the mantelpiece, looking down at the logs burning in the grate. His face was in profile to me; I could not read it.

  ‘How is that?’ he asked softly. ‘Your mama wrote to me that he was doing you so much good.’

  I shook my head. ‘He was not,’ I said positively. ‘He could show me that there was no sense in what I see and hear – no sense at all. But he could not prove that it does not happen.’

  Uncle John nodded. ‘He could not prove that you do not experience it,’ he said fairly. ‘But, Julia, if you know that such a thing cannot happen, you have to accept that it is a delusion if you think it does happen.’

  ‘It is my mind!’ I said in a sudden spurt of defiance. ‘If I see things and hear things, I don’t see why I should permit anyone else to tell me different!’

  John’s face was grim. ‘You must not resist this, Julia,’ he said severely. ‘Your mama and I are agreed that if you cannot be cured of these delusions during this visit, then it would be better for you not to return to Wideacre but to stay in Dr Phillips’s house on your own, until you can improve your understanding.’

  I gasped and looked at my mama for help. She was sitting forward, her face as white as the lace trim on her sheets, but she met my eyes. ‘No, John,’ she said, her voice thin. ‘I know I said that on Wideacre, the day after the storm when I thought Julia quite overset. But I have seen her in Bath and seen her with people her own age now. She has told me how she found the missing children of Acre, and we saw how she cleared the cottages which would have been crushed or fired. I trust her. And I believe in her too. If she thinks Dr Phillips is doing her no good, then she need not see him.’

  ‘You feared that she inherited the Lacey oddness,’ John said in a low voice. ‘You feared Beatrice.’

  There was a sudden stillness in the room, as if the mere mention of her name would conjure her up, the witch of Wideacre, even to a Bath lodging-house.

  ‘Julia is my daughter, raised by me,’ Mama said steadily. The white colour of her face had changed and now she was ashen. ‘She is to come home with us.’

  ‘But your friend Miss Fortescue goes to him as well, does she not?’ John turned to me. ‘You can see that he is doing her good.’

  ‘He was not doing her good,’ I said. ‘And she has left him too. He made her feel that she was in the wrong. He made me feel I was wrong. He could cure me of the dreams and of the sight, but he could only do it by destroying me, changing me from my very self.’

  John was about to reply, but my mama raised herself a little in her bed. ‘I’ve never gone against your advice, John,’ she said, ‘but I do so now. I am sorry.’

  In two strides John was across the room and at her bedside, his arm around her shoulders to lower her back to her pillows. ‘It is I who should be sorry,’ he said. ‘I am quite wrong to tire you out with talking. I know well enough what it is to be sent away from one’s home with an accusation of madness. Forgive me, Celia. She is your daughter indeed and you have the final word on her upbringing.’ He looked over at me. ‘And you forgive me, Julia,’ he said. ‘I was only trying to do the best for you. Do you wish to come home with us? Or stay perhaps with your Bath friends?’

  ‘I’ll come home,’ I answered. I did not want to be thrust into the Denshams’ cheerful, noisy household, and I was uncertain about James now.

  ‘Well, we’ll leave it at that, then,’ Uncle John said pacifically. ‘Let us get your mama safe home and see how things are when you are there.’

  He put the disagreement behind him and smiled at me. ‘I ca