The Favoured Child Read online

  ‘Want to walk her?’ Ralph offered. Richard nodded again. ‘Just take her down the track a little way,’ Ralph advised. ‘Get the feel of her on your hand.’

  Richard moved off delicately, trying to walk smoothly on the rutted sand.

  ‘No need to be too careful!’ Ralph called after him. ‘She’s used to my limping, and she’ll find you as smooth as a yacht in calm seas.’

  Richard walked a little faster, and we could see the hawk bobbing to keep her balance.

  Ralph smoothed Sea Mist’s neck and glanced up at me. ‘No trouble at home, after the sowing?’ he asked.

  I shook my head. ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Is he staying long?’ he asked, nodding his head to where Richard was turning and walking back to us.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘he’s leaving tomorrow.’

  ‘We are ploughing the common field tomorrow,’ Ralph said laconically.

  ‘I’ll be there,’ I said steadily.

  Richard came up to us, and I could tell, without knowing how, that the hawk was afraid. I felt a pricking in my thumbs, in the thumbs of both hands, as sharp as darning needles. The sensation was so acute and so sudden that I exclaimed and looked down at my riding gloves to see if I had gorse thorns stuck in the leather. Then I looked back at the hawk and saw her breast feathers tight. She was skinny with fright.

  As soon as she saw Ralph, she opened her wings and flung herself towards him. Richard had the leash tight and it jerked on her legs, catching her in mid-flight. In a second she was upside-down, spinning around on the leash, her wings flailing wildly in a panic to get herself upright again.

  ‘Steady,’ Ralph said quickly; he thrust Prince’s reins at me and took two rolling strides towards Richard.

  Richard’s face was murderous. He jerked at the hawk as if she were a doll on a piece of string, not a living creature at all. ‘Back to me!’ he shouted, and he snatched his hand up so she bounced helplessly at the end of the leash.

  Prince threw his head up and Misty pulled away, her ears flat against her head. I nearly lost my seat trying to hold the two restive horses.

  ‘Steady!’ Ralph shouted in a tone I had never heard him use before. He grabbed Richard’s arm and held it still, then he put his other hand under the twisting flailing bird and cradled her breast. Richard still had the leash tight in his hand so Ralph lifted her gently, as gently as if he were holding a fledgling, back to Richard’s glove.

  The second her feet were on it she bated again, directly towards Ralph, as in a panic to be with him and away from Richard. Ralph instinctively put his hands out to catch her and released Richard’s arm. Richard jerked hard on the leash, as he would have pulled a dog to heel, and we all heard a horrid crack, crack, like two twigs breaking.

  Misty reared up as if the ground had opened beneath her front hooves, and I tumbled from her back with a spinning thud which knocked the breath out of me. I ducked my head down and bunched up small in instinctive fright while she reared over me and wheeled away, then slowed and dipped her head to some fresh heather a few yards away. I had kept my hold on Prince’s reins, and he stood steady, though his eyes showed white.

  Ralph snatched the leash from Richard’s fist and looped it quickly around his own. Then he caught his bird, pinning her two wings to her side so she could flutter no more. He held her head into his jacket with one broad hand while he searched in his gamebag with the other. He brought out a little hood, intricately worked and made of exquisite soft leather, with a little crest of hen’s feathers on the top. He hooded her smoothly, pulling the hood tight with his teeth and hand on the leather thongs. Then he pulled out something like a stocking from the bottom of the bag and pulled it over her head so her wings were held to her side; he laid her in the bag, on top of the rabbit she had killed when she had been a proud free hawk and not a trussed bird.

  Only then, when she was safely hooded and muffled and lying soft in his bag, did he turn to look at me and ask, ‘All right, lass?’

  I nodded and got to my feet. We both stared at Richard who stood, guilty, in front of us.

  Ralph eyed him warily. ‘What ails you?’ he asked very low.

  Something in the way he said that made me cold.

  He was not asking Richard in the way a man with a beloved hawk just injured would speak. He was not shouting in hot anger. He was not even icy with rage. He asked Richard in a voice which put Richard at a distance so that Ralph could inspect him. He spoke as if Richard had some secret dangerous ailment which could infect us all. He stared at him as if he would see into his very soul.

  Richard was scarlet to his hairline. ‘I don’t know,’ he said awkwardly. ‘She flew off my wrist and I did not know what to do. I did not know what I was doing.’

  There was a desert of silence.

  ‘I am sorry, Mr Megson,’ Richard said. His voice had gathered strength and I saw him shoot a sideways glance at Ralph. ‘I would not have frightened your hawk for the world. I hope she is not hurt?’

  ‘You know full well that both her legs are broken,’ Ralph said evenly. ‘You heard them snap when you jerked on the leash. Why did you pull her like that?’

  ‘I did not!’ Richard said, blustering. ‘That is not so! She simply flew out and I held the leash to keep her safe!’

  ‘You did not,’ said Ralph, and his voice was like ice. ‘You jerked her back in a rage.’

  He hesitated, and he looked at Richard thoughtfully. ‘Many people have held her and she has never bated before,’ he said to himself. There was a long silence while Ralph thought something through. ‘Animals don’t like you, do they?’ he said.

  Richard said nothing. I reached out a hand to touch Prince’s thick neck, as if to reassure myself that the real world was still there. The voices in my head had grown in strength like a dozen, twenty people murmuring at me to be warned, to listen, to take care, to know real danger when I saw it. I felt hazed, almost snow-blinded. There was a buzzing in my head as if Beatrice were very near to me, somehow trying to summon me, a hard insistent calling. I should be listening to something, I should have ears to hear her message. The balls of both my thumbs were as sore as if they were bleeding from a hundred tiny pinpricks.

  I was distressed for the hawk and afraid of Ralph’s anger, and concerned for Richard.

  Ralph turned abruptly to me. ‘You have the sight, Julia,’ he challenged me. ‘You should know. What do you see when you look at Richard?’

  I turned my eyes to my cousin and he looked at me with his clear blue stare. The noise in my head was too loud for me to think of anything. I saw Richard, my beloved Richard, my coheir and the playmate of my childhood. And I saw as well some awful danger and fear and horror.

  ‘I can see nothing. Nothing,’ I said desperately. ‘I can hear nothing and see nothing. I do not have the sight as you think. I cannot see.’ I turned my head from Ralph and spoke to Richard. ‘I want to go home,’ I said, as pettish as a schoolgirl.

  Ralph limped over to where Sea Mist restlessly cropped the heather. As she saw him coming, she wheeled around and put her hindquarters to him as if she thought of kicking – Misty, who had never shown an ounce of spite in all the time we had known her.

  ‘Give over,’ Ralph said gruffly, and walked towards her and took her reins to lead her back to me. He threw me up into the saddle and said not a word more, not to Richard, not to me. We rode away in silence. He let us leave without a word. We left him standing before that little coppice with his gamebag on his back and his black dog lying at his feet. As we left him, I felt his eyes on my back and I felt him brooding, brooding, over the two of us, and watching us all the way home.

  20

  We rode home in silence, Richard and I. The accord we had formed after the quarrel on the downs had been broken by the odd, disturbing incident with Ralph’s goshawk. Mama and Uncle John were laughing at some private joke over dinner and did not notice that Richard and I were awkward and quiet. When it was my bedtime, I gave Richard my hand and said my farewell