The Favoured Child Read online

  He was heavy. He was half on me, half beside me. The weight of the unborn child kept me pinned to the bed. He put his hand back on the great swelling of my belly and stroked down the slope when his devil-begotten child shifted uneasily as if it knew my fear.

  Oh, Julia,’ he said longingly, half to himself. ‘I had forgotten this. It is only this that saves your life tonight.’

  I tried to keep my face impassive.

  ‘I meant to strangle you,’ he said dreamily. ‘I am sick of your long face around the house. There are other women I could have here if you were gone. There are other girls I could marry. I wanted you because you had Wideacre, but now it is mine, and I want you no more.’

  The candle guttered, throwing menacing shadows on the ceiling above me. But nothing was more menacing than the shadow which was in my bed, which spoke such obscenities in such an intimate whisper.

  ‘I did love you once,’ he said as if he needed to reassure himself. ‘When we were very little children, before we knew who we were, or what we were to inherit. I think I loved you then.’ He broke off. He was talking to himself; it seemed he was in a dream of other times.

  ‘I loved Mama-Aunt too,’ he said. His voice was suddenly higher in pitch, childlike. I realized with an instinctual shudder that Richard had gone. He was back in the sunlight of his Wideacre childhood with an aunt who adored him and a cousin who would cross the world for him. The world where he had been the beloved little tyrant.

  ‘I loved Mama-Aunt so much,’ he said sweetly. A shadow crossed his face. ‘But you were always trying to be first in Acre,’ he said, cross as a petulant child. ‘Always trying to come between me and Mama-Aunt. You would push in where you were not wanted, Julia. And though I could forgive you if you were very, very sorry, I could not help but be so angry, so very angry, with the people you tried to take away from me . . . Are you listening to me, Julia?’ Richard said with quick irritation.

  I nodded, as obedient as a child in school. His grip had tightened on my mouth again. I feared I was going to retch at the smell of his hand against my teeth and gums, the odour of horse-sweat, cigar smoke, Hollands gin. And beneath it all the heart-wrenching smell of Richard, the cousin I had loved for so many years. So very many years.

  ‘I killed her,’ he said, speaking, at last, the unspeakable. ‘Your friend Clary. I tried and tried to be friends with her. I even tried pretending I was in love with her. She laughed in my face!’ His voice was shocked. ‘She said you were worth ten of me.’ He paused. ‘I knew I’d pay her out for that.’

  I watched him, and said nothing. His blue eyes had become hazy.

  ‘She saw us,’ he said, ‘when I raped you in the summer-house. I looked up and saw her. I think she was going to nm towards us, to help you. But she saw my face. She ran off as fast as she could towards Acre. I expect she thought to get help. I caught her at the Fenny,’ he said languidly. ‘I put my hand around her throat. She was like you, actually, because she was quite strong too. But do you know, she was so afraid, she hardly fought at all. She just choked and then her tongue and her eyes came out. Rather horrible. She looked so nasty I pushed her in the river and went home. I knew it would be all right for me. Everything always is all right for me.’

  He sighed quietly. ‘I killed your mama too,’ he said. A petulant expression crossed his face; I could see the droop of his disappointed mouth in the firelight. ‘She was running off with John. That was so horrible for her to do such a thing. She had joined with John against me. She sent me away as soon as he came home. I had thought she was a beautiful woman, a wonderful woman. A woman like an angel. But she was just a whore like all of them. Like you. As soon as my father came home, she was running after him like a bitch in heat. She forgot all about me. It was his idea to disinherit me, and she was going to do anything he wanted. She was going to overturn our marriage, and I would have been disinherited.’ He paused. His face became calm again, his words measured, judicious. ‘That was a very bad thing to do. You do not understand business, Julia, because you are just a woman, but that was a very meddlesome thing for Mama-Aunt to do.’ He paused again. ‘I am surprised she dreamed of it,’ he said simply, with grave respect. ‘She was, apart from that, such a feminine sort of woman.’

  I lay as still as stone. I could feel my heart beating and I knew that in a moment the sound would remind Richard that underneath him, in his power, was another woman who had forgotten her place, who had tried to meddle with the ownership of the land.

  ‘It hurt her, I am afraid,’ he said regretfully. I half closed my eyes. I had to hang on to some shred of myself, some remnant of sanity not to cry out, not to scream at these words, as Mama’s murderer lay on top of me and told me in his sweetest voice the horror that I had tried all these months to evade.

  ‘It hurt her,’ he said again. ‘I shot Jem at once, you know. And then, with the other pistol, I shot John through the window. He had opened the door and was coming out at me. Rather brave of him, really. He was trying to protect Mama-Aunt, I expect. The shot threw him back into the carriage, over her knees, actually. She screamed. I expect the blood frightened her. But she didn’t do anything.’ He hesitated. ‘Well, there was nothing she could do really,’ he said fairly. ‘I was reloading, but that doesn’t take long. Then I waited.’

  His hand was slack on my mouth again, his mad blue gaze dreamy in the candlelight. This time I could not have moved. I was frozen with horror and with a macabre fascination at his story.

  ‘I waited,’ he said. ‘Then I got off the horse and opened the carriage door. The carriage horses were grazing at the verge, quite unafraid, even though there had been two shots. Funny that. I let my horse go beside them. Well, they’re usually turned out in the field together. But it looked odd to see the three grazing off the hedge outside Haslemere with Jem dead on the box, and John dead in the carriage, and your mama so silent inside.

  ‘I wanted to know what she was doing. Just that. Nothing more than that, really,’ he said confidentially. ‘I opened the carriage door with one hand. She was holding John’s head in her lap. He had bled all over the carriage floor, and there was blood on her dress too. It made me so angry that she should spoil her dress with his blood. You know, Julia, it just made me so angry that she should be sitting with his dead head in her lap when I was in such trouble with you, and the baby, and the marriage, and Wideacre.’ He broke off with a little reminiscent smile.

  ‘She knew me at once!’ he said, pleased. ‘As soon as I opened the carriage door, she said, “Oh, Richard, what have you done!” And I said’ – Richard’s smile turned into a grin of delight as if he were coming to the enormously amusing conclusion of a tremendously funny story – ‘I said, “I’ve killed you all, Mama-Aunt!” And then I shot her! I shot her right in the face!’

  He laughed aloud, the happy laugh of the best-loved child of the household, and then he broke off in the middle of the peal of laughter to look down into my face. ‘You’re not laughing!’ he said, instantly suspicious. ‘You don’t think it’s funny.’

  He took his hand from my mouth and my lips were stiff from being pushed back for so long.

  ‘No,’ I said, pursing my lips down over my gums again. ‘I don’t find it very funny, Richard.’

  ‘It is funny,’ he said, madly insistent.

  And I saw then – as bright as a knife-blade in a lightning strike – what I had to do.

  I went for my death.

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ I said softly, provocatively. ‘I don’t think you did that. I don’t think you would dare do that!’

  ‘I did!’ said Richard. His voice was that of an aggravated child.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Not you! You like to do things in secret. I know you, Richard. You like dark woods where you strangled Clary. You like breaking the legs of a little hawk. You like night-time stables to cut the tendons of your horse. You’d never hold up a carriage in broad daylight. You’re a coward, Richard. And everyone always knew.’

  I was t