The Favoured Child Read online

  ‘Scheherazade?’ I said uncertainly. And then I looked over the stable door.

  She was lying on the straw. For a moment I thought she must be ill, for she scrabbled with her forelegs like a foal trying to rise when she saw me. But then my eyes adjusted to the gloom and I saw the blood on the straw. The silly thing had cut herself.

  ‘Oh, Scheherazade!’ I said reproachfully, and I flung open the door and bent under the pole which slides across the entrance. She scrabbled again, pulling her front half up, but her back legs seemed useless. I realized her injury was serious. Her straw was fouled with urine from where she had lain and it was all red, horribly red, in the bright morning light. She must have been bleeding steadily for most of the night. Her beautiful streaming copper tail was all matted with dried blood. Then she heaved herself up again and I caught sight of her wounds. At the side of each back leg was a clean smooth slash.

  She looked as if she had been cut with a knife.

  I gazed around wildly, looking for a sharp metal feeding bucket, a mislaid ploughshare, something which could have caused two matched injuries. She looked exactly as if she had been cut with a knife. Two neat small cuts, each severing the proud line of tendons on each leg.

  She looked as if she had been cut by a knife.

  She had been cut with a knife.

  Someone had come into this stable and cut Richard’s most beautiful horse with a knife, so that he would never be able to ride her again.

  I was dry-eyed; but I gave a great shuddering sob to see her so injured. Then I went, slowly, lagging, back to the house. Someone would have to tell Richard that his horse, his most lovely horse, was quite lame. And I loved Richard so dearly that even in my own grief and horror I knew it had to be no one but me.

  Dench had done it.

  Richard said it at once. ‘It was Dench.’

  Dench who knew that life was unfair.

  I could not understand how a man who had spent all his life caring for horses could do such a thing to such a flawless animal. But Mama, her face white and pinched, said that poverty did strange and dreadful things to the minds of the poor and filled men with hatred.

  He had been hanging around the stables last night, as Richard said. He had a grievance against the Haverings and against us. He had cursed us in our very own kitchen. Even I had to agree that he was a bitter man.

  Mama sent Jem with a message to Ned Smith in Acre, and he came to the bloodstained stables and said that the tendons would not heal and she would never be able to flex her feet again. She would be lame for ever.

  ‘Best kill her, your la’ship,’ he said, standing awkwardly in the hall, his dirty boots making prints on the shiny floorboards.

  ‘No!’ Richard said suddenly, too quick for thought. ‘No! She should not be killed. I know she is lamed, but she should not be killed!’

  Ned’s broad dark face was flinty as he turned to Richard. ‘She’s good for nothing,’ he said, his voice hard. ‘She’s a working animal, not a pet. If you can’t ride her, then you’d best not keep her. Since she’s ruined, she’s better off dead.’

  ‘No!’ Richard said again, an edge of panic in his voice. ‘I don’t want that! She’s my horse. I have a right to decide whether she lives or dies.’

  Mama shook her head gently and took Richard by his sound arm and led him towards the parlour. ‘The smith is right, Richard,’ she said softly, and she nodded at Ned over her shoulder. ‘She will have to be put down.’

  She took Richard into the parlour, but I stayed standing in the hall. Ned the smith gave me one dark glance. ‘I’m sorry, Miss Julia,’ he said gently.

  ‘She’s not my horse,’ I said miserably. ‘I only rode her the once.’

  ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘But I know you loved her well. She was a bonny horse.’

  He went, clumsy in his big boots, towards the front door and hefted the mallet he had left outside. He went to her loose box, where she lay like a new-born weak foal in the straw, and he killed her with a great blow from the mallet between her trusting brown eyes, and some men from Acre came and loaded the big awkward body on a cart and drove her away.

  ‘What will they do with her?’ I asked. I was in the parlour window-seat and could not drag myself from the window. It seemed I had to see the heavily laden cart rocking down the lane. I had to see the awkward body and the legs sticking out.

  Mama’s face was grim. ‘In that village, I dare say they will eat her,’ she said, loathing in her voice.

  I gave a cry of horror and turned away. Then I went in silence from the parlour, up to my room, to lie on my bed and gaze blankly at the ceiling. I would have gone to Richard, but I knew he wanted to be alone. He was in the library, sitting in the empty room, in the only chair in the room. Sitting with his back to the window which overlooks the yard and the empty stable so that he could not see Jem mucking-out the empty stall and washing it down.

  But in Acre there was no sign of Dench.

  Ned said so when he came to the back door to wash his hands and get his pay. I supposed that proved his guilt, but I still could not understand it. Ned told Mrs Gough that Dench had disappeared once he heard that the horse was to be killed.

  ‘He knew where the blame ’ud fall,’ he said.

  ‘Well, who else would have done it?’ asked Mrs Gough, truculently. ‘No one else in all the county has a grievance against that blessed boy. It’s fair broke his heart. And where’ll he get another horse from? I don’t know! He can’t be a gentleman without a horse to ride, can he?’

  ‘Can’t be a gentleman if he can’t stay on!’ Ned said, irritated.

  ‘Now, get you out of my kitchen!’ said Mrs Gough, her brittle temper snapping. ‘You and your spiteful tongue. Get you back to Acre with the rest of ’em. Trouble-makers every one of you! Rick-burners! Horse-maimers!’

  And Ned turned away with a sour smile and went back to the village which my grandpapa had called a village of outlaws – just one and a half miles down the lane from where we lived, lonely in the woods.

  Grandpapa Havering swore out loud before us all when he finally came home and Mama told him the whole story. Then he turned kindly to Richard and promised him that as soon as Richard’s arm was strong again, he would have another horse. Another horse for his very own.

  But Richard was inconsolable. He smiled and thanked my grandpapa, but he said quietly that he did not want another horse, just yet. Not for a while anyway. ‘I don’t think we could ever replace her,’ he said.

  The grown-ups shook their heads and agreed with him. And my heart ached for the lovely Scheherazade and for the wonderful ride I had, that once, with her.

  But most of all I ached for Richard’s loss; that the horse he loved was dead.

  Grandpapa posted bills offering a reward for Dench’s capture. Injuring an animal is a capital offence, and Dench could have been transported or, more likely, hanged. But no one came forward to betray him, and his family in Acre had not heard from him.

  ‘I’d trust their word!’ said Grandpapa scathingly. ‘Really, m’dear, the sooner your precious John Mac Andrew comes home and sets that village to rights, the happier I’ll be. A gentleman can scarcely sleep in his bed o’ nights with that murdering crew in Acre.’

  Mama nodded, her head down for shame that Acre, our village, should be such a place. And I sensed that she did not want Grandpapa to inveigh against the village with me there, listening. The village where the miller’s wife would not turn out her men for a son of Beatrice Lacey’s. There was a deep old enmity between Acre and the Laceys, and Mama would not tell me of it.

  I could see all the signs. Mama would not visit in the village. She took every opportunity she could to go to church in Chichester, not to our parish church in Acre. Our boots were made in Midhurst, and the Acre cobbler was idle. Our laundry went to Lavington. It all came down to that odd phrase of the blacksmith’s – that Beatrice had gone bad.

  Richard knew of the tension in the village. And Richard spoke of it openly. ‘Th