The Favoured Child Read online

  ‘Hold him,’ he said briefly to me, and he took Scheherazade’s reins from me. He knotted the break in her reins and pulled her saddle aright. He glanced at me and shortened the stirrups, Richard’s stirrups, by guess. Then he brought Scheherazade to me, where I was standing by the carriage horse’s head.

  ‘You’re to ride home,’ he said. ‘Stop at the mill on the way, see if there’s anyone there and tell ’em Richard had a fall and they’re to turn out and look for him. Stop at Acre and tell Ned the smith, he’ll know what to do. I’ll ride towards the Dower House along the bridle-track and see if he’s walking home or if he fell there.’

  I gaped at him. ‘I cannot ride,’ I said. ‘I told you! Richard never taught me!’

  Dench swore under his breath and motioned to me to put one foot up so he could heave me into the saddle like a stable lad. I went astride, my gown bunched around me, my ankles and even my calves exposed.

  ‘Course you can ride,’ Dench said. ‘You’re a Lacey.’

  He tossed the reins up to me and turned his back as if he need say no more and had no interest in watching for my safety. I sat as though frozen. But Scheherazade’s ears were forward and she felt solid beneath me. The ground was very far away, but I knew she was gentle, well mannered. I felt her at peace with me on her back, alert for my bidding. I leaned over and tugged my skirts down to cover my legs as well as I could, and then I straightened up and squeezed gently. Scheherazade moved forward with her smooth rolling walk back down the lane towards Acre. I felt completely at ease. I felt I had come home.

  And I knew how to ride her. I knew it as easily and as sweetly as I had known how to hold the reins to drive the carriage horse. It might have been that I had listened so intently to Richard’s lessons that I had learned to ride sitting on the fence. But when Scheherazade moved and I went with her, as smoothly as perfectly matched dancers, I knew it was something else. I came from a long line of famous horse riders, and to be on horseback in the Wideacre woods was my natural place. Driving a horse on Wideacre had been bliss indeed, but riding Scheherazade up a grassy track with the afternoon sun on my cheek was a most earthly paradise.

  Except that Richard…with a sudden gasp I remembered that Richard was missing, perhaps lying somewhere hurt. Without meaning to signal to the horse, I had tensed, and instantly obedient Scheherazade broke into a trot, a springy pace which nearly unseated me. I grabbed on to the pommel of the saddle and gritted my teeth as I banged up and down in the saddle, sliding hopelessly from one side to another and trying to right myself. I could remember Grandpapa bellowing to Richard to rise and sit with the trot, and I tried, without much hope, to rise in the stirrups and to sit down again. Almost at once I caught the rhythm. Scheherazade was long-legged and her pace steady. The awful teeth-rattling bumping stopped and I felt safe again. We were travelling fast, too, and were nearly at the gate to the mill, and I sat down in the saddle and gently tightened the reins. Scheherazade slowed at once, and stopped at the garden gate of the miller’s house.

  ‘Miller Green! Miller Green!’ I called, giving him his title, though he had ground no wheat in ten years, not since the night when the hall had been burned and looters had robbed the grain wagons stored in his yard.

  The door opened slowly. Old Mrs Green put her head out. ‘Not here,’ she said, surly. ‘They’re all at the fair, looking for work.’

  She had been a proud woman once, mistress of the mill with her own pew in the church. The loss of their livelihood had broken her spirit. Four big sons in the house and a husband to feed, and no money coming in from any of them. A river flowed past the garden to turn the mill wheel, but there was no wheat to grind. Not one of them had seen farm meat on the table for ten years, nor fresh fruit except the wild berries in season, nor white flour once they had scraped the millstone clean of dust.

  ‘There’s been an accident,’ I called to her. ‘My cousin Richard may be lying hurt in the woods, or on the common. When your men come home, will you send them out to look for Richard, Mrs Green?’

  She looked at me dully. ‘Miss Beatrice’s son?’ she asked me, and then she scowled. ‘Nay,’ she said with grim satisfaction. ‘I won’t do that. I wouldn’t send my men out to do a favour for the Laceys. Least of all when they come home tired after a day on the tramp looking for work, when there’s no work to be had.’

  I stared at her blankly, with growing fright. If Richard was injured, perhaps with broken bones, he should be found at once. If Mrs Green would not help, if Acre would not help, it might take hours to find him. Without thinking of anything except the desperate need to get help to Richard, I dropped down from Scheherazade’s high back and looped her reins over the gate. Mrs Green was old, stooped, and I was lanky and growing tall for my age. I went up to her and she was barely a head taller than me. She looked down into my child’s face and saw an unchildlike determination.

  ‘He may be Beatrice’s-son,’ I said, ‘but he’s my cousin. And I love him more than anything else in the world. Please help him.’

  Some of the hardness went out of her face when she saw me-not a Lacey on horseback, but a girl at her cottage door, white-faced, begging for aid.

  ‘Eh, well,’ she said resignedly. ‘They’ll be back within the hour. I dare say they’ll turn out for him then.’

  I felt my eyes suddenly fill with tears of relief. ‘Thank you,’ I said huskily. Then I turned and walked down the little path and used her tumbledown garden wall as a mounting block to reach Scheherazade’s saddle high above me. I trotted back down the track to Acre and I knew she was watching and that the incomprehensible hardness had gone from her face.

  Without thinking of it, I had been riding easily, confidently, and as we rounded the corner to Acre I sat down deeper in the saddle and let Scheherazade canter. We moved together, and I felt not a trace, not a flicker of fear, but only a delight in the rush of the wind and the thudding of her hooves and the sense of speed. We thundered up Acre lane like a regiment of cavalry, and I pulled her up at the smith’s yard with a yell of pure elation.

  ‘Ned Smith!’ I called, and he came out, throwing on his tattered apron, his thin face lit-up, hoping for work.

  ‘There’s no shoeing needed,’ I said quickly. ‘I am sorry. But there has been an accident, and Richard has come off his horse. John Dench is looking for him and he said you would help.’

  The smith pulled his apron off again and tossed it over the empty anvil by the cold forge. ‘Aye,’ he said dully. ‘Some of the men will come out if they’re promised a penny for it.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. Then I added awkwardly, ‘I am sorry there was no work for you today. I am sorry you heard the hooves and must have been hopeful. I am sorry we can pay no more than a penny a man.’

  That brought his eyes up to my face. ‘Why should you care?’ he demanded coldly.

  ‘I am a Lacey,’ I said; and then, challenged by his stare, I went on, ‘I know it is all wrong now, but we were squires here. It is all wrong for the Laceys, and for Acre too, and I am sorry.’

  His face warmed, but he did not smile. It was as though he had forgotten how to smile. ‘Eh,’ he sighed, like a man grieving. But then he was generous to me. ‘You were a babe in arms,’ he said. ‘No blame for you. I’ll get the men out for you, and we’ll find your cousin. Don’t fret.’ I nodded. ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  ‘Are you all right on that mare?’ he asked as he suddenly noticed me riding astride with shortened stirrups.

  I beamed at him. ‘Yes!’ I said triumphantly. ‘I have trotted and cantered. But I shall go carefully home.’

  ‘You ride like Miss Beatrice did,’ he said, half to himself. ‘And you have her smile too. For a moment, seeing you up there, smiling like that, it was like the old days, before she went bad.’

  ‘Before she went bad.’ I heard his words over again in my head, and they sounded like a spell which might make everything suddenly clear to me. ‘She went bad,’ I repeated aloud. ‘What do you mean? My Aunt Beatrice was never ba