The Favoured Child Read online

  I cried out when Uncle John told me, his face grim with the news Richard brought back to the Dower House. My mama was by my side at once with more hartshorn and water.

  ‘Drink this, my darling,’ she said, and I drank it, obedient as a little child, with my eyes fixed on John’s face, seeking the merciful numbness of the drug.

  ‘What can have happened?’ I asked, grief and sleep clogging my tongue.

  ‘She was strangled,’ he replied bluntly. Mama’s hand flew out to stop him, but he shook his head. ‘She has to know, Celia,’ he said. ‘She has to know what is happening in Acre. Richard is talking to the village youths and girls. No one can think what could have happened. She had been quarrelling with her betrothed. They think in Acre that she meant to jilt him.’

  ‘No,’ I said swiftly. ‘It could not be Matthew Merry. He has the sweetest temper, and he has loved Clary ever since they were children. He could not have hurt her.’

  ‘The lad who had the fainting fits?’ Mama asked. Her eyes went to John’s face. ‘He used to faint, and when he came to his senses, he had no memory of himself or what he had done,’ she said, her voice low.

  Uncle John nodded.

  ‘He never did anything bad when he had his fits,’ I said suddenly. ‘Don’t look like that, Uncle John. He just had a weak head and sometimes he used to faint. He was the sweetest boy and he is a dear young man. He could not hurt a fly, let alone Clary! They were quarrelling, yes, but that does not mean he would hurt her. He adored her!’

  Uncle John nodded. ‘He knew where to find her,’ he said quietly, ‘and they found him holding her body and weeping. It looks very black against him.’

  ‘No,’ I said positively. ‘It could not be. He would never hurt Clary. He would kill himself first.’ I broke off then, for I was afraid I would start weeping again. No one in the Dower House knew Clary and Matthew well but me. Mama and Uncle John might be kind, but they had not played with the Acre children under the Wideacre trees. They did not know that those two had been plighted lovers since they were little children, that Matthew would have died rather than hurt Clary and that this quarrel must have pained them both.

  ‘Perhaps Lord Havering can make something of it all,’ Uncle John said. ‘He is the nearest Justice of the Peace. Richard has gone to speak with him.’

  I nodded. The truth of what had happened was only now starting to come clear to me. ‘And Clary is dead,’ I said slowly. ‘Would she have been in much pain?’

  I saw Mama’s quick gesture to John again, but he answered me steadily and told me the truth. ‘Only for brief moments,’ he said. ‘The killer strangled her with his hands. But she would not have been in pain or fear for long, Julia. She would have lost consciousness very swiftly.’

  I nodded. I could hear the words, but I could not speak, for a rising wave of nausea was threatening to choke me. I could see in my mind Clary’s bright pretty face and the tears in her eyes when she said Matthew had broken her heart and she promised she would meet me at the dancing.

  ‘I can’t bear it!’ I said on a half-sob. ‘On Wideacre!’

  Then Uncle John took one arm, and Mama the other, and they helped me up the stairs to my bedroom. He poured me a measure of laudanum and Mama held my hand until my tight grip on her loosened and I started falling into sleep.

  ‘Mama!’ I suddenly called out, on the very edge of panic as I slid into sleep. ‘Mama!’

  For in that second between sleeping and wakefulness I thought that I was Clary running for my life through the woods of Wideacre, and behind me was the man who was coming to kill me. Coming to kill me because I had seen something so dreadful that he had no choice but to kill me. I had seen that decision in his eyes, and I knew that if I did not rim faster than I had ever run in my life, he would catch me and throw me down to the ground and put his gentry-soft hands around my throat and tighten them until I could breathe no more. And in the dream I was Clary, running as if the devil himself were on her heels. But I was also myself. And I was as afraid as Clary.

  I was more afraid, because I knew that when he caught her and she turned around and felt his hands at her throat and saw his face…then I would know who he was.

  22

  Matthew Merry had been the butt of the village since he stammered his first words. In the hard years he had done badly for food, since his only protector was his grandmother, old Mrs Merry. While her word was law with the older village people, she carried little weight with the younger ones who could not remember the time when she had been the most skilled midwife and layer-out in the county.

  He was easily frightened. Protected only by his grandma, he had been bullied from babyhood. I think that was why Clary first treated him so sweetly. He made her feel motherly and she shielded him from the others in that hard little wolf-pack which she ruled.

  When he found her dead, he lost all his shy cleverness, which she had seen first and which Ralph had encouraged. The confidence he had drawn from the men who praised his poems deserted him at once and he behaved like the idiot they called him. They found him with her sodden body held tight in his arms, rocking at the river’s edge, crying her name over and over again. The tears were pouring down his cheeks so much that his face was as wet as dear, dead Clary’s.

  Richard and Lord Havering’s man took him abruptly by an arm on each side and he made no effort to resist. They took him away from where he had found her, just above the weir by the mill-pond, where the body had stuck. He called her name louder as they led him away, but when they took him up in the Havering carriage with the coat of arms in the door, he fell silent and did nothing but weep. They made him sit on the floor, because he was so wet and grimy from the river. He did not object.

  Then they questioned him. Where had he been that morning? When had he last seen her? As he was afraid, his stammer got worse. Richard blamed the stammer upon a guilty conscience; and all Matthew could do was to weep and say her name, over and over again. He could say no other word at all.

  My grandpapa, Lord Havering, was not unkind, but he was brisk, impatient with the common people, familiar with lies and deceptions and accustomed to liars and criminals from Acre village. Richard had brought him an open-and-shut case, and all he needed to hear was young Matthew’s confession. He did not shout at Matthew or offer him clemency if he would own up to his crime. He just mended his quill and looked at Matthew with cold eyes. And Matthew, heartbroken, and with the memory of an angry parting with Clary on his conscience – and knowing full well that Clary would only have been walking alone by the Fenny because she was struggling with their quarrel in her mind-stammered like an idiot and wept in his fright. Finally he flung himself down on the floor and said, ‘It is my fault. It is my fault. It is my f-f-fault.’

  That was as good as a confession of guilt, and his lordship called his clerk and had it written out fair. Young Matthew, blind and numb with grief, put his name to it, perhaps thinking to end this miserable interrogation so that he could go home and grieve for her in peace.

  But they did not let him go. The clerk had two constables with him and they bundled him into their own carriage, a horrid affair with no windows and no door-handles on the inside. They took him to Chichester gaol and they threw him in with the self-confessed murderers and rapists to await sentencing at the quarter sessions.

  And Richard rode home under a sickle moon humming the tune Matthew had sung with the others when we had brought the spring to Wideacre only the day before.

  I was still asleep and I did not wake until the next morning when a great shout from downstairs woke me. It sounded like Ralph’s voice, but I could not believe that Ralph could have raised his voice in my mama’s house. I glanced at the window. It was late, nearly ten o’clock. Mama must have given orders that they should leave me asleep. For a moment I could not think why, and then my heart sank as I remembered that Clary was dead, killed by a stranger, and that there had been a murderer in the woods of Wideacre, that my wrist was broken in a fall from my horse and