The Favoured Child

by Philippa Gregory

  The next day he was up early again and saw me at the parlour window.

  Again I told him that I felt restless, that I wanted to be sitting in the window-seat watching Jenny light the fire, her routine disarranged by my capriciousness. Richard nodded as if he understood, and his smile was a gleam of white, with a little hint of mischief at the back.

  On the third day he was there when George rattled the doorknocker and I heard Stride cross the hall and open the door.

  There were letters for the household.

  There was a letter for me.

  Stride brought it in on the silver salver and Richard paused on his way to the door. ‘Who could be writing to you, Julia?’ he asked, interested.

  I flushed up to my forehead. ‘I think Sarah Collis, from Bath,’ I said. And the lie slid easily off my tongue, making me blush again.

  Richard’s eyes were very warm and confident.

  Open it, then,’ he said, and his voice was silky.

  I should have been warned by that special sweetness of tone, but the letter was thick in my hand and I could only think that it would have news of Ralph.

  ‘I’ll open it later,’ I said, getting up and going to the door.

  As I went past Richard, he caught my wrist and held me, rooted where I stood. I instinctively clutched the letter close to me and caught my breath. His face was not angry; it seemed there was nothing to fear. His smile was as sweet as a May morning.

  Open it here,’ he said. ‘Read your letter here. I know girls have secrets. I shall not ask to see it, for I am going out now. Sit and read it here, my love.’

  My eyes flashed to his face, for I was surprised at the endearment. He pressed me into the chair by the table and stood back, leaning against the wall, as I put my finger under the flap and broke the seal.

  I did not look carefully at the seal.

  There was no letter inside. There were eight pieces of torn paper and a torn envelope, a bulky package. I forgot Richard was watching and tipped the eight thick jagged scraps out on the table before me, and pieced them together.

  It was my writing on the envelope. It read: ‘James Fortescue, Esq.’

  I slumped against the back of my chair, and my heart pounded so fast I was afraid for the little child who lay quiet inside me and depended on my body for its safety. But this is a dangerous world for little children. It is a dangerous world for grown men. I gave a little moan of distress.

  My first thought was that James Fortescue had recognized my hand and had torn up the letter in a temper, and sent it back to me in spite.

  But then I hesitated, and I knew I did him a disservice. James would never be spiteful. James was always generous.

  I knew only one man who would post scraps of paper to me.

  I raised my grey eyes to Richard’s face, and saw his deep, dangerous resentment.

  ‘You wrote to another man,’ he said.

  I said nothing. My thumbs burned. I could hear a humming in my head. I could smell danger like smoke on the wind.

  ‘You wrote to another man. You thought to hide that letter from me,’ he said. His voice was soft and infinitely menacing. ‘I had to have Jimmy Dart arrested,’ he said. ‘I had been watching him a long while. I knew you would try and betray me. I was ready for your infidelity.’

  I gulped like a landed fish. ‘Richard…’ I said beseechingly.

  His eyes were like sapphires. He was my husband and my master. He was the squire, and he knew it. Oh, he knew it.

  ‘I won’t have it, Julia,’ he said simply.

  He could invent rules for Wideacre, for Acre, for me, until the world ended. Richard was the squire and he had the power of God.

  ‘I won’t have it,’ he said, and I knew his word was law. ‘You wanted to be married,’ he said, his voice exultant. ‘I did as you wished. Now we are married, and you will behave as a proper wife to me. You will not write to other men, and you most certainly will not discuss our business with them. There are means I can take to ensure you do not write to other men, or indeed to anyone.’

  He hesitated to see if I would complain. But I said nothing. The scraps of paper lying on the table told me mutely that I was defeated. I looked blankly at them and thought of the little letter inside them which I had hoped would save Ralph. I knew then that nothing could save me, but I had hoped to help Ralph away from the wreck which was Wideacre.

  ‘You must learn your place, Julia.’ Richard said softly.

  I bowed my head slavishly. I knew I must learn it indeed.

  From that moment I rebelled not at all. The Chichester accoucheur advised against any long walks, and the weather was bad, so that I looked for no help from the dripping beech trees or the sorrowful burble of the Fenny. I did not mind being confined at home.

  I no longer got up early for the post. On some days I did not feel like getting up at all. I lay in Mama’s bed in Mama’s bedroom, for Richard had insisted that I make the change to the best bedroom in the house, and I watched the grey ceiling turning pale with dawn, and yellow with the midday light, and some days I watched it growing dark again with twilight and never moved the whole day.

  No one disturbed me. No one troubled me any more with the news of Acre. I heard nothing of Ralph. I knew nothing about the land. I lay like a whale beached on some desolate shore and I did not stir.

  The greatest effort I made was to rise and get down to the parlour in time for Richard’s return to dinner so that he would not come to my room. Even then I could not be troubled to ring for candles but sat in firelight, watching the flames flicker, and I would wonder what would become of me when the waiting time was over, and whether this feeling of floating, of drowning, would ever end at all.

  ‘Sitting in darkness?’ Richard demanded. The parlour door had opened so quietly that his voice made me jump and made my heart thud with nervousness.

  ‘I must have dozed off by the fire!’ I exclaimed. ‘How very dark it is!’

  ‘They say there’s a storm coming,’ he said.

  He came towards the fire and pulled up his riding jacket so he could warm the seat of his fawn breeches. I was sitting in Mama’s favourite low chair and he towered above me. His riding and his work had broadened him. He was breathtakingly handsome, with eyes as blue and as careless as a child’s, and that dark curly hair as soft and bouncy as a lamb’s fleece.

  ‘I met Dr Pearce in the lane,’ Richard said. He leaned over me and pulled the bell for them to bring candles. ‘He had a young curate friend with him. I asked them both to dinner.’

  ‘Today?’ I asked languidly. Mrs Gough had a menu for the week, but she would welcome the opportunity to exert herself to please Richard.

  ‘Yes,’ said Richard. ‘They said they’d come at about four o’clock and we could have a game of whist afterwards.’

  I glanced at the clock over the mantelpiece. It said ten past three. ‘I’ll tell Mrs Gough,’ I said. Richard put a careless hand down to me and hauled me out of my chair. ‘And then I’d better change,’ I said.

  ‘Do,’ he said. ‘I’m tired of seeing you in that dull black gown all the time. And the fatter you get the worse it looks.’

  I checked on my way to the door. It must have been my condition and the fact that I had just woken, but the hardness in his voice made tears start in my eyes. With Mama gone, and Ralph gone, I could not bear it if Richard was in a mood to bully me.

  ‘Oh, Richard,’ I said reproachfully. ‘I am not fat, it is just the shape of the baby. It is just a large baby.’

  Richard stood astride in front of the fireplace. The flickering flames made his shadow leap, large as a giant, on the wall behind me. ‘Well, you look damned fat to me,’ he said cruelly. ‘Run and see Mrs Gough and then put on a proper evening gown, and wear some jewellery to set it off. We’re dining at home, after all, and Dr Pearce won’t mind.’

  ‘I don’t really have any jewellery,’ I said in a low voice. I was thinking of Mama’s rose-pearl necklace which the highwayman had taken. She t
old me that she would leave it to me in her will. And now she was dead, and the necklace was probably in some horrid little shop pawned for drink, and I would never see it, or my mama, ever again.

  ‘Wear that nice shiny watered silk anyway,’ Richard commanded. TU come up to your room when I’m washed and changed.’

  I nodded, as humble as a drudge, and slipped out of the room. I spoke to Mrs Gough and saw her explode into a frenzy of activity. By the way she clattered the pans I knew she would produce a dinner fit for a table of princes, but in the meantime the kitchen was an unsafe territory.

  I went upstairs and called Jenny to help me wash. I missed my hot baths, but since my belly had grown so broad it was impossible for me to fit into the tub. Now I stood upright while Jenny tipped water down over my shoulders and let it cascade off the bump of my belly into the hip-bath.

  ‘You surely have your dates wrong, Miss Julia,’ she said. ‘Such a big child as it is. It surely will be soon.’

  ‘No,’ I said. I could hardly have my dates wrong with that May Day morning in my mind. ‘It will not be born for another two months at least,’ I said. ‘It is due at the end of January. I have all of December to get through yet.’

  She shook out the black silk gown and helped fasten the buttons at the back. It was rather grand for a dinner party at home with no one invited but the vicar and his friend, but I might as well wear it as Richard had requested. I would not have another chance. No one else visited us in the evenings, and Richard and I never went out to dinner. The roads were so bad, the nights were so dark, and everyone in the county knew that I was pregnant after a marriage which had been announced almost as the baby started to show. I was not disgraced – my grandmama had seen to that – but we certainly were not the most sought-after couple in the county.

  That would be remedied when the spring came and we could drive out and around visiting, when the baby was born, and when our great new house was roofed and nearly ready. I had learned enough in Bath to know that no one would ignore us when the estate grew more profitable and we moved into the big house and employed dozens of servants and went to London for the season. I thought for a moment then of what that season would be like with Richard at my side, without my mama to help me, without my girlhood friends to greet me.

  Without James.

  I shrugged. There was an ache in my heart, a steady constant ache in my heart. I was in mourning for my mama. I was in mourning for the death of my girlhood and the loss of the only man I would ever love. I was happy to wear black, and if I wanted to wear my black evening dress, it would have to be at home. It might as well be tonight.

  ‘Lovely,’ said Jenny. ‘Just lovely, this dress, Miss Julia.’

  I turned and looked at myself in the glass. The deep lustre of the watered silk made my face look shadowed and remote. The folds spread evenly across the front of the high waist concealed the pushing weight of my belly. The only indication of my pregnancy was my plumper breasts, which were pressed into two rounded half-moons at the square neck of the bodice.

  I stepped closer to the mirror and looked at myself curiously.

  I saw again the girl who had been called the prettiest girl in Bath. In my sadness for my mama, and my loneliness, in my mistrust of my body which had so betrayed me with its fertility, I had forgotten that I was a beautiful girl. But in this hard autumn I had become a beautiful woman.

  The curves of my breasts were a sensual promise; even the shifting sliding hints of the prow of my belly were a proof of sweet fertility. The dark mysterious silk accentuated the slimness of my back and the creaminess of my skin, and put shadows in my grey eyes. I smiled at my reflection in genuine surprise. The fine clear lines of my cheek-bones, the lilting upturned corners of my mouth were familiar, but the shadows in the eyes were new, and it was these which had transformed me from a promising girl into a beautiful and desirable woman.

  ‘You do pay dressing,’ Jenny said. ‘Shall I do your hair?’

  ‘Yes, please,’ I said, and I sat down at my mama’s dressing-table and watched my face in the glass as she brushed out my light curling hair in long sweeps from the top of my head down almost to my waist, and then started to pile it up in gentle folds.

  Behind her, in the darkness of the room, reflected in the glass, I saw the door open and Richard come in. He did not realize I had seen him, for he was watching Jenny carefully brushing and lifting one swath of thick hair after another. There was an expression on his face which made me give a little shiver, although the room was warm. I wondered, even as the hairs all down the nape of my neck lifted in a shuddery life of their own, what imaginary shadow had crossed my mind.

  He moved, and Jenny jumped and gave a little squeak. ‘Oh! I beg your pardon, sir, I did not know you had come in!’

  I heard a note in her voice I had never heard before, and I said nothing for a moment while I considered it. Then I recognized that slightly too quick speech, that slightly too high pitch. She was afraid of Richard. The whole household, the village and the estate were afraid of Richard. And I – his wife, his dependant -I was afraid of him too.

  He smiled. ‘You can go now, Jenny, if your mistress is finished with you.’

  I nodded my head, not turning from my place before the mirror, and Jenny bobbed a curtsy with her hand held to her neck in an odd gesture, strangely protective of her throat. Then she took herself out of the room. Richard walked towards me and stood behind me, where Jenny had stood brushing my hair. I met his eyes in the mirror, and I wondered what he wanted of me.

  ‘I like that gown,’ he said. His fingers brushed my neck, the smooth sloping naked line from my shoulder up to the exposed lobe of my ear. I shivered at his touch and I could see in the mirror that the pupils of my eyes had enlarged, making my eyes darker.

  ‘I have brought something for you,’ Richard said softly. ‘Something I know you will like.’

  He smiled.

  I considered that smile, watching his face in the mirror which had once reflected my Mama. It was not the smile he used to hide his anger, so I should have nothing to fear. It was not the smile which was his genuine laughing smile. It was affectionate, tender. But there was some joke at the back of it which I thought I would not enjoy.

  I nodded warily.

  Richard lifted the flap of his pocket and delved in its depths. His jacket was black velvet, his linen cream lawn; the pocket flap was trimmed with black satin ribbon. I was watching his reflection in my mirror so carefully that I noticed how the sheen on the ribbon caught the light from the candles on either side of my mirror.

  ‘I hope you will like it,’ Richard said sweetly. His voice quavered on a little giggle of suppressed laughter. ‘Indeed,’ he said, his voice shaking, ‘I know you will like it!’

  My eyes flew to his reflected face in my mirror. His eyes were dancing with boyish merriment. Then I felt the cool touch of a necklace around my throat.

  The cool touch of rounded perfectly matched pearls.

  Rose pearls.

  Mama’s rose pearls.

  Mama’s rose pearls, which were taken by the highwayman who shot her and left her to die on the highway.

  I put my hand up to touch them as if to confirm that they were real. I could not believe they were real. I had not thought to see them ever again.

  ‘How well they suit you,’ Richard said pleasantly. There was a ripple of amusement under his voice. ‘How pretty you look in them, my dear.’

  My eyes met his, my grey level stare to his dancing blue twinkle.

  ‘Mama’s pearls,’ I said, prosaically.

  ‘Mama’s pearls,’ he confirmed. The joy never left his face. ‘Or, at any rate,’ he amended, ‘something very like them.’

  There was a noise of carriage-wheels outside as Dr Pearce and his friend arrived.

  ‘Early!’ Richard said, crossing to my window to look out. ‘Come then, Julia!’ He held out an imperative hand to me as I sat frozen at the glass.

  For a moment I thought I could
not move. I sat in silence and looked at Mama’s rose-pearl necklace and at the matching earrings which Richard had tossed down before me.

  ‘Oh, yes!’ he said, following my gaze. ‘Put the ear-rings on too! You can’t imagine the trouble I had getting them!’

  It was that nonchalant mention of his trouble in getting them that tipped me from my frozen crystal of disbelief into a well of horror which I recognized.

  At last I knew the horror for what it was: Richard’s murderous madness.

  Richard’s hand was held out to me, and Dr Pearce was knocking at the door. I was a woman entirely dependent on one man, that man my brother, seven months pregnant with his child, without a friend in the world who could help me stand against him.

  I knew him then as Clary’s murderer, the entrapper of Matthew Merry, the betrayer of Ralph Megson, the murderer of Jem the groom, of his own papa, John MacAndrew, and of my beloved mama.

  I looked at him as if I had never seen him before; but there was no fear on my face. I was beyond fear, in a pit of such horror that I could think nothing and say nothing.

  Mechanically I pushed the studs of the ear-rings through the little holes in my ear-lobes.

  They stung.

  Then I took Richard’s hand and went down the stairs with him to greet Dr Pearce and Mr Fowler, and sat at the foot of the table, with my husband at the head, while Stride served a dinner of which I could be proud.

  Afterwards we played cards, and Dr Pearce and I won. We took tea and then the two of them went home. Richard and I were alone in the parlour.

  ‘It’s good to have company,’ Richard said, yawning. ‘We spend too much time alone. It will make you dull, Julia. You were blooming tonight.’

  My hand was at my throat on the necklace. Richard glanced at it.

  ‘It’s remarkable how well those pearls set off your skin tones,’ he said. ‘They make you look like a bowl of warm cream.’

  He put out his hand to me to help me to my feet, and out of habit, before I could think what I was doing, I let him pull me up out of the chair and found myself standing close beside him on the hearthrug.