The Favoured Child

by Philippa Gregory

  The ripples from our touching the water cleared and steadied, and I found I was gazing at the reflection of us, side by side. The dark water was kind to Ralph, and he did not look old enough to be my father. It hid the dark lines drawn by pain on either side of his mouth and the deep parallel furrows between his eyebrows. In the shifting sunlight which filtered through the budding leaves over our heads he looked not old and not young, but timeless; as ageless as one of the trees around us, as the earth they were rooted in.

  I thought of the legend about the Culler in the village, that he was one of the dark gods of the earth who had taken Beatrice away to the heart of the land, and I gave a little shudder and felt suddenly icy down my spine as I realized I was alone in the darkest part of the Wideacre woods with a killer.

  Ralph turned his head at the almost imperceptible movement and gave me a long unsmiling stare. ‘Look at yourself,’ he said in a whisper, as if he knew what I had been thinking.

  I turned my gaze back to the waters and saw my own face. I knew at once why John had turned pale to see me and why Ralph had stared at me that day in the village.

  I had never seen Beatrice’s picture, nor heard a description of her, other than that her hair was chestnut red and her eyes hazel, almost green. But I had seen her face in the mirror of the dream and I had seen her smile in my mirror. Robbed of colour by the darkness of the pool, so my light hair and grey eyes were all one shadowy tone, I knew I was as like to her as a daughter. My eyes were not set at such a slant as Beatrice’s and my chin was not as determined as the one of the woman who had ruled this land. But seeing my reflection in that pool, alongside the reflection of her lover, no one could have said whether it was her or me.

  ‘You have no call to fear me,’ Ralph said, speaking to my reflection in the water, his face gentle. ‘I am not likely to forget that she is dead. I am not likely to forget that you are quite another lovely girl – however much you resemble her. And I am not a man to be haunted by ghosts.’

  We were silent for a few minutes.

  ‘Hands cold?’ he asked. I nodded. ‘Now, without making a ripple, without disturbing the water, you move your hands under the bank. Make your hand straight, like the fish itself.’ Ralph drew his hands in towards the bank and spread out his arms, questing with blind fingertips under the water. ‘I have one,’ he said with quiet satisfaction. ‘Do you stay still now.’

  I froze obediently and saw Ralph’s face darken with concentration.

  ‘You stroke his belly,’ he said, the words hardly louder than a breath. ‘You softly, softly run a finger down his belly. He likes that, it makes him all sleepy, all dreamy, all unawares. Then, when you feel him growing heavier and come into your hand, you snatch him with two ringers under his gills and flick him out!’

  As he spoke, Ralph suddenly twitched and flung on to the bank between us a silver, slithering, gasping fish. I flinched back in instinctive fright and Ralph laughed aloud at my face. He took a stone from the bank and knocked the trout on the head, impartially, accurately, and then the thing was still except for a little twitch along the spine.

  ‘It’s still alive,’ I said uneasily.

  ‘Nay,’ Ralph said gently. ‘It is twitching from habit. It’s dead right enough.’

  I regarded the smooth speckled scales with awe.

  ‘Next time you will do it,’ Ralph promised. ‘I should have let you try your luck with this one. But it is so long since I last poached that I could not resist the temptation when I felt him hiding under the bank like that.’

  I smiled and nodded; but I understood not at all.

  ‘Would you like to try your luck again?’ Ralph invited. ‘Or should you be home?’

  ‘I have to be home at three for dinner,’ I said.

  Ralph rolled on his back and squinted up at the sun through the criss-crossing branches. ‘You’ve half an hour,’ he said with certainty.

  ‘Uncle John will be late anyway,’ I said idly. ‘He went to Chichester to see the lawyers again. He really does want to turn over the farmland to Acre, you know.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Ralph. ‘I know he does. It’s what the future holds that worries me.’

  ‘I thought you would be pleased,’ I said shyly. ‘I thought you would see this as a great chance for Acre. Not just to get free of the poverty, but to be free of the power of the squires for ever.’

  Ralph gave me a quick little smile. ‘But it doesn’t work like that, does it?’ he said gently. ‘Acre is not an island. Acre men and women have to leave the village to earn wages, and have to come home again. I can’t see anyone persuading them that their wages should be paid into a common fund! So the brightest and the best of the young people will try to leave the village and work outside where they earn good rates and keep all their money. Then there’s the gentry…’ He paused.

  ‘They’re not all bad,’ I said.

  He smiled at me again. ‘Nay,’ he said. ‘Even the worst of them can be likeable enough rogues. But they have the power. If Acre was successful, they’d use that power against the village, I’ve no doubt of that. They’d find a statute on the books which said it was illegal. Or if they had no law, they’d pass one in a hurry. You cannot defeat the whole country by making one little place right.’

  ‘It could be a start,’ I said earnestly. I rolled around and lay on my front, hands under my chin so that our heads were close. ‘If it worked here, perhaps people would try it elsewhere.’

  ‘Aye,’ Ralph said. ‘And even if it worked for a short time, it would be good to say we tried it, and good to know why it failed. If the gentry came against it, that would be a lesson worth showing to the people who come after us with their own hopes and their ideas.’ He sighed heavily. ‘I’m torn,’ he said frankly. ‘I know in my heart it won’t work. It depends for its success on the whim of the squire. Unless the land was bought outright by the village and owned in law by them, then it depends on the will of the squire to keep going. So the power of the Laceys over Acre is unbroken. And I could trust no single person with that much power. It is as natural to abuse power as it is to breathe. That is true for every man and every woman. And if you are reared to having power, and in a class which is used to it, and in a country which permits you – nay! encourages you – to abuse the power you have, you’re corrupt! You cannot help it.’

  ‘Do you think I am corrupted?’ I asked in a small voice.

  Ralph had been staring up at the branches above us, and he turned his head to look at me with a smile. Of course,’ he said gently, stating an obvious fact. ‘I’m not abusing you. But you come from the Quality and you are used to controlling everyone who is poorer than yourself. Put you in the hall, with a child to think of, and perhaps a couple of bad harvests and money getting tight, and I think you would do what anyone would do – you’d look to how you could make more money. And then you’d see Acre, and the people taking a share of the profits that you consider your own from the land you have claimed as your own for generations. I don’t think you’re evil, but I don’t think you’re a saint either. John has high ideas about what people can and cannot do. But I’d not trust even him if he lost his fortune and was poor and anxious.’

  ‘Will you not do it, then?’ I asked.

  I was so sorry – sorry for Uncle John who had such high hopes of what we could do in Acre, and sorry for Acre that it should not be a place where the tradition of cruelty to the poor could be pushed back, even if it was in just this one little place. And very anxious for myself, for if Ralph Megson would not manage Wideacre, then I thought that John and Mama would insist that it must be sold.

  Ralph sat up and gave a little laugh with no humour in it. ‘I’ll do it,’ he said. ‘I destroyed the power of the Laceys over the land and I have a duty to try and make something better. I always knew that it was easier to pull down than to build, and this is going to teach me that lesson in the hardest way.

  ‘I’ll do it if I can. And if I fail, if we fail, then I shall have the great pleasure of
being able to say that I was right!’

  I sat up and threw an arm around his shoulders and hugged him in my delight. Oh, yes!’ I said. ‘But it will not fail. You think all the squires are bad, but Richard would keep to a bargain with Acre, and John will be there, and you know I would! And you will be here to make it work, and it will be good!’

  Ralph smiled at my enthusiasm and slid an arm around my waist to hold me to him, but his face was still set. ‘Nothing else I can do,’ he said, ‘but I’m just leading them out into the dark again.’

  A kingfisher, like a spark of blue, arrowed up the little rill which goes to the Fenny from this pool and dived into a hole in the bank. We were still and it did not notice us for a moment, but sat on the edge of the hole, looking at us with dark bright eyes. Then it dipped its head and launched off down the little stream again, so close to the water that you could see the reflection, turquoise on the surface of the stream.

  Ralph’s eyes were on it and he stayed still so as not to disturb it. I was frozen too, but not for the benefit of a river bird. Ralph’s hand was warm on the thin muslin at my waist. My arm was still around his shoulders. Our sides were touching. I had embraced him in a moment of quick thoughtless delight, but now I found myself close to him, held by him. And with the dream, and the pleasure of the dream in my mind, I could not bring myself to move away, though I knew I must.

  Ralph dropped his hand, shook himself and glanced up at the sky. ‘You’d best go,’ he said. ‘You don’t want them to start wondering about you. Would you like the trout?’

  ‘You caught it,’ I said fairly, ‘you keep it.’

  ‘I caught it in a Lacey pool, on Lacey land, under a Lacey sky,’ Ralph said, ‘but I’m glad to have poached my dinner. Thank you.’

  He wrapped it carefully in a couple of dock leaves and stuffed it in his jacket pocket as I rose to my feet. My knees were shaking, but I did not want him to know that. My face burned again. He was a man old enough to be my father, and a working man. And I had thrown my arm around him, and then not had the sense to immediately withdraw.

  I stood to one side as he swung himself over to his wooden legs. He pulled down the breeches and smoothed them carefully over the angry skin of the stumps of his legs, and then he eased them into the wooden peg-legs. He grimaced, and there were small drops of sweat on his forehead by the time he had them on.

  ‘Are they very painful?’ I asked. From the glimpse I had, it looked as if they had been cauterized with boiling tar. Old wounds, but still red with the daily chafing of the wooden legs.

  ‘They’re the devil,’ Ralph said coolly. ‘But I am lucky to have survived at all.’

  I wanted to ask him how the accident had happened, but some prickle down my spine warned me to keep silent. And I simply stood and watched as he put his back to a tree-trunk and pushed against it until he was upright. It was not easy, and the lines in his face deepened when he had done.

  ‘You can bring me my horse,’ he said, and it was a concession to me rather than a request for help.

  I untied the mare he had hired from the Midhurst stables, and brought her over to him and then stood, awkward, at her head. I could not see how he would get into the saddle. She was not high – even I could have vaulted up – but I had sound legs, and ankles and knees to spring from. I held her head and waited.

  Ralph grasped the pommel and the crupper of the saddle and hauled himself up the horse until he was level with the saddle and half-way across it. He reared up, taking his weight on his hands, and swung one leg over. Then he smiled sweetly down at me as I stood at his horse’s head.

  ‘You’re easy with horses,’ he said, noting the casual way I stood beside her. ‘They tell me in the village you ride like Beatrice.’

  I shrugged, my face rueful at another similarity between me and the Wideacre witch.

  ‘I’m surprised you have no horse of your own,’ he said.

  ‘Uncle John went to buy us horses,’ I said. ‘One for Richard and a horse of my own for me.’ I could not hide the longing in my voice. ‘But there was nothing suitable at the Chichester fair, and so now it is all put off.’

  Ralph made a funny face, like you might make at a crying baby. TU see what I can do,’ he said; and that half-promise from Ralph was worth more than a contract written in blood from another man. ‘Thank you for my trout, Miss Lacey,’ he said, teasing me with my name.

  I went closer to the horse’s shoulder, pretending I wanted to pat her neck. In truth I wanted to be near him. He caught my hand as it stroked her shoulder and bent low. He kissed it, with a kiss as gentle as the brush of a little bird’s wing. ‘Good day,’ he said and his voice was warm, almost tender. ‘Good day.’

  He turned his horse’s head and was gone. The dappled shadow of the woods hid him at once. I could hear the chink of the bridle, but he was swiftly hidden, following the old path I thought was known only to Richard and me. I stood, dazed, by the pool, watching the flicker of light and shade on the brown surface; and then I brushed down my dress with meticulous care, retied my bonnet and headed for home.

  But I was not happy. Ralph might be at peace, with his hands cold from the river and a fresh trout in his pocket. But Ralph was a simple man, blessedly simple. He was content to have been Beatrice’s lover, and her murderer, and to have my eyes upon him; he could smile at my measured closeness. When I was with him, I could feel only delight. But when he rode away and left me alone I was uneasy.

  The old anxiety of the dream was coming back to me. The sweet humming of Wideacre now seemed more like a warning. I could not live in both worlds. I could not be the daughter my mama wanted and the tranced, passionate, careless girl of the Wideacre woods. I could not be both Quality and a girl who would throw her arm around a working man’s shoulders. I could not be freely myself and also be an indoor girl. I went home scowling against the bright sunlight. The thread of longing which had drawn me out into the woods like a golden skein pulled by a skilled spinner was now broken and crumpled. And it did not seem like gold, it seemed as if it were gilt. Muddy gilt, tangled; and all wrong.

  *

  Uncle John came home from Chichester after dinner, smiling but wan. ‘I think I have a compromise solution,’ he said.

  ‘Not now,’ Mama said firmly. ‘Now you must rest.’

  He laughed a little at her authoritative tone, but went wearily enough to the stairs. ‘I should like to see Mr Megson in the library before supper,’ he said to Richard, who stood in the hall with me and watched him slowly mounting the stairs, his knuckles white on the stair-rail.

  ‘Richard may go and tell him,’ Mama said. ‘But tell Mr Megson not to be later than nine, and explain that John may not talk all evening, Richard.’

  ‘Make sure he knows that I am an utter baby who has to be tucked up in bed by eleven o’clock!’ Uncle John said with a sidelong gleam at Mama. ‘And say that if he is in any doubts about me, he is to call in Dr Celia!’

  Mama chuckled at that, but her grip on Uncle John’s arm never wavered, and she led him upstairs without another word from him.

  Richard watched them go, and his expression was sour. ‘Do you want to come too?’ he asked.

  I shook my head. The wildness, the dreaminess, was gone from me. I wanted to be the girl behind the tea-urn at tea-time, the young lady of the house stitching in the parlour. The seedlings I had left so carelessly in the garden when I had run off were wilted, but might recover left in the cool and steeped with water. I wanted to sit in the front parlour and chat with Mama. I had a sudden distaste for the brightness of the sun outside the window, for the waves of sweet-smelling greenness and the summer heat. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Mama wants me at home. I’ll stay in.’

  Richard shot me a swift searching glance. ‘Not like you,’ he said, ‘not like you not to want to come down to Acre with me.’

  ‘No,’ I said languidly. I was so tired I did not even care for the hint of complaint in Richard’s voice. He surely could not imagine himself neglected. And if
he did, I should make it up to him another day. I simply could not face the walk down the dusty lane to Acre in the bright sunlight, and I did not want to see Ralph in that cramped little cottage with Becky Miles waiting on us, and Richard watching me.

  ‘I shall stay indoors this afternoon,’ I said again. The front parlour seemed like a refuge and I hoped the company of my mama would keep me safe from Beatrice and from the dreamy bliss I had known when I was Beatrice lying in Ralph’s arms.

  ‘All right,’ said Richard. ‘If you’ve developed a sudden liking for embroidery, I shan’t dissuade you. I’ll take tea with him if he asks me. I wonder if his goshawk has come yet.’

  ‘No, it hasn’t,’ I said, and could have bitten my tongue off with irritation at the slip. I knew, without being told, that Ralph would never have been out tickling for trout if his goshawk had just arrived, bumped and angry from the London stage.

  ‘How do you know?’ Richard demanded. He looked at me closely, and under his narrow scrutiny I felt my colour rise.

  ‘Mrs Gough told me,’ I said, grasping for the nearest lie. ‘She slept in Acre last night, with her sister. She said the London stage was delayed yesterday, so it can’t have come.’

  Richard nodded as if he believed me, but there was a shadow in his blue eyes which warned me that he doubted what I had said. He chose not to pursue it then. ‘Tell Mama-Aunt I shall be back for supper,’ he said.

  I nodded. He bent his head to kiss me on the lips at parting, but I turned my face away and his mouth touched my cheek instead. He drew back and looked at me curiously, but said nothing. He turned to the front door and I let him go.

  I went to the window-seat in the parlour and watched him jog down the drive, his gait less coltish now he had grown broader and his legs seemed less long. Then the parlour door opened and Mama came in.