The Favoured Child Read online

  ‘I shall be glad to have you back in the parlour!’ she said lovingly. ‘Now Richard is home, he can go out and help Mr Megson. I won’t have you fading before my eyes, little Julia. You were the toast of the season last year; I won’t be robbed of my social triumph next winter.’

  I smiled, but I knew very well that next winter there would be no triumph for either of us, but much ill-hidden shame. Next winter I should be near my time and, instead of chaperoning me at my London debut, Mama would see her grandchild, conceived out of wedlock and born too early.

  ‘What are the men doing?’ John asked.

  I glanced around. They were standing at a distance from the heap of stooks, aiming and carefully tossing their sickles. The little corn dolly was perched at the top and I saw my ribbon flutter in the breeze as one of the sickles whistled past it. Instead of smiling at the compliment, I felt a deep unease and a cold finger of fear down my neck that made me shudder in the hot afternoon sun. The anxiety which had been with me all these months seemed to be building into some sort of a crisis.

  ‘Don’t wait if you find it too hot, Mama,’ I said suddenly.

  I wanted her away from the field, though I could not have said why. I wanted her away from the reapers playing their odd ritual game. I wanted her away from this last fruiting of the Wideacre harvest. I feared her seeing the ripeness of the wheat growing at my bidding and somehow knowing that I too was fertile, that the seed inside me was growing too.

  ‘Go for a little walk down to the beech coppice,’ I said invitingly. ‘It’s so cool down there. Don’t wait here. We’ll be some time before we pack up.’

  ‘Yes, we could,’ she said agreeably and looked to John.

  He did not look at her; he was watching the men throwing their sickles. ‘Very skilful,’ he said to Richard.

  In a sudden spasm of impatience I wanted them all away, wanted them clear of the field, my field, before the games ended, before anyone brought the doll closer, before anyone gave her to me. I wanted the little gig and my innocent mama away from this field. I felt ill with the certainty that something, a terrible revealing something, was about to happen.

  I searched my mind for some way to persuade John to drive on, but he was intent on the sickles glinting in the glare as they were thrown. I glanced to Richard for help, but he had dismounted and was sitting idly on the top bar of the gate. Though he felt my eyes on him, he did not care enough for me to sense my anxiety. Ralph was coming up the hill; I could hear him swearing at the shire horses pulling the wagons. But he was not close enough to help me.

  I could feel my anxiety building up to panic as if I were in a coffin of crystal with a glass lid coming down on me. And even if I screamed aloud for help, no one would hear and no one would know that I needed aid. The fragile shell of the lie which hid me from my mama, and from my Uncle John was about to tumble down about my ears, and no skill of mine would ever mend the shattered pieces. I knew that the truth was coming for me in this bright field. I could not even tell which way the cracks were running, but I could hear the structure of my life creaking and beginning to shift.

  There was a shout as Jimmy Dart’s sickle caught the doll and he leaped up the pile to pull his sickle down. He ran to me with the doll still impaled on the point of the blade so he did not see what he was bringing me. No one in the field saw what it was, and I took it from the proferred blade with some thought of hiding it. My fingers were wary of the sharp edge, and Jimmy held the blade carefully still for me, beaming with his pride. I gazed at it, uncomprehending.

  Then I turned scarlet with shame in a blush so deep that even the field and the sky seemed to look rosy red. But then the heat suddenly left my face and left me icy and white as I faced the truth, a clean honest truth which would smash the shell of lies at last.

  The straw dolly had a face made of the head of a stalk of corn, and my pale-grey bow had been tied around her body to signify it was meant to be me. Her little arms were tied stalks, sticking out sideways, and her legs were two seed heads. Her belly was huge, unmistakably swollen, made of seed heads tied tightly together. She was pregnant, she was bursting with the fertility of Wideacre. She was massively, grotesquely made. She was meant to be a pregnant woman. She was meant to be me.

  At the look on my face John rapped out my name and held out his hand to me in imperious demand. Scarcely knowing what I was doing, I handed the dolly to him, past my mama, who sat, still as stone, on the seat of the gig while the evil little thing was passed across her, under her blank brown gaze.

  ‘Julia .. .’ she said. It sounded like she had never said my name before and was trying out a new word. ‘Julia.’

  John dropped the doll on the floor of the gig between his feet and put his boot down on its fat middle to hold it still.

  ‘Go home at once,’ he said to Richard and me. ‘At once.’

  He backed and turned the gig in a skilled manoeuvre and whirled Mama away from the field before I could glimpse more than her face, so deathly pale that I feared she might faint and fall from the gig. Her parasol lurched, she was whiter than the grey satin. She slumped against John and did not hold to the rocking gig. She looked like a broken doll herself; and John drove her down the hill as if he were rushing a mortally wounded person home to die in her own bed.

  I gathered the reins into one cold fist and clicked to Sea Mist to follow them. Richard dropped from the gate like a sleep-walker and heaved himself into the saddle. He pulled his horse over beside mine and we started, shoulder to shoulder, down the track in an illusion of unity.

  Ralph had the wagon for the stooks pulled over to one side. ‘What’s happened?’ he demanded urgently. ‘Julia! What’s happened in the field?’

  ‘They know,’ I said. My lips could scarcely move, they were so cold and numb.

  Ralph took in my blank face and Richard’s fearful scowl and dropped back.

  ‘Shall I come with you?’ he offered.

  ‘No,’ I said, and I rode past him without another word. To tell the truth, I did not see him.

  In the field the reapers stood, sickles dangling in their hands, left without orders, left without a word. Once again the ground had cracked beneath the Laceys and once again Acre village, and the livelihood of Acre, would go tumbling into the crevasse. I glanced back at Jimmy Dart, his sickle still upraised where he had held it out to me, frozen like a statue, his blue eyes puzzled, his broad young face uncomprehending, a little afraid.

  I did not blame him, the Bath linkboy I had brought safely home. I did not blame old Mrs Miles, whom I had saved from a pitiful death in the poor house. Jimmy Dart had played the game in the old way, and won. He had not known what he was bringing to me. I truly believed that old Mrs Miles had made the dolly with her fingers and with old magic – no thought in her mind at all. She liked me, she would not have injured me. The truth of my pregnancy had come out in her craft. And I knew – from the way I shuddered when I first saw the corn dolly – that it was not the first time that the old magic had welled up, like an unstoppable spring, on Lacey land.

  Sea Mist jinked at a fledgling blackbird fluttering in the hedge, and I checked her with instinctive skill, but I felt my grip on the reins was weak and I feared I would drop them.

  I knew I was going home to face the end of my girlhood and the loss of the love of my mama. But I felt some dread, almost a superstitious fear, as if there might be something still worse to come. I was shocked and I was afraid, but a still greater dread, like a pair of black dogs, stalked and circled me all the way as I rode home and then tossed the reins to Jem in silence in the stable yard. When I walked up the garden path, it seemed to me that they lay like couchant black lions on the lawn.

  John was waiting for us in the parlour, standing by the mantelpiece; Mama was seated in her usual chair at the fireside. Out of habit she had a piece of work in her hands, some broderie anglaise; and she held her little silver scissors ready to snip out the pattern. For one moment everything seemed the same as it had always bee